THE BLITZ. WHO REALLY STARTED IT?
IN MEMORY OF
DRESDEN 14th FEBRUARY 1945. THE WORST SINGLE ATROCITY IN THE HISTORY
OF MANKIND – COURTESY OF BRITAIN AND AMERICA (AS
ALWAYS)
It
is one of the greatest triumphs of modern emotional engineering that, in spite
of the plain facts of the case which could never be disguised or even materially
distorted, the British public, throughout the Blitz Period (1940 - 1941),
remained convinced that the entire responsibility for their sufferings rested on
the German leaders.”
Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P
Veale
It may be
Inconvenient History but England rather than Germany initiated the murderous
slaughter of bombing civilians thus bringing about retaliation. Chamberlain
conceded that it was ‘Absolutely contrary to International law’.
“It began in
1940 and Churchill believed it held the secret of victory. He was convinced that
raids of sufficient intensity could destroy Germany’s morale, and so his War
Cabinet planned a campaign that
abandoned the accepted practice of attacking the enemy’s armed forces and,
instead made civilians the primary target. Night after night, RAF bombers in
ever increasing numbers struck throughout Germany, usually at working class housing, because
it was more densley packed.” –The Peoples’ War, Angus Calder. London,
Jonathan Cape, 1969.
"Hitler only undertook the bombing of
British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced
bombing German civilian targets.
Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach
with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones.
Retaliation
was certain if we carried the war into Germany. There was a reasonable possibility that
our capital and industrial centres would not have been attacked if we
had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany. We began to bomb
objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on
the British mainland. Because we
were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the
truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk
from giving our great decision of May,11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves." -
J.M Spaight., CB., CBE., Principle
Secretary to the Air Ministry, Bombing
Vindicated
"The attack on the Ruhr was therefore an informal
invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London. The primary purpose of these raids was
to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a similar character on
Britain. Such raids would arouse
intense indignation in Britain against Germany and so create a war psychosis
without which it would be impossible to carry on a modern war." - The Royal Air Force, 1939 - 1945, The Fight
at Odds.p.122. Dennis Richards, Her Majesty's Stationery
Office.
THE MOST UNCIVILISED FORM OF
WARFARE
The eminent British war historian and strategist, Captain
Sir. Basil Liddell Hart declared that through this strategy
victory had been achieved "through practising the most
uncivilised means of warfare that the world had known
since the Mongol invasions." The Evolution of Warfare. 1946, p.75:
"Was absolutely contrary to international law."
Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain: "The
inhabitants of Coventry (Liverpool), for example, continued to imagine
that their sufferings were due to the innate villainy of
Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision, splendid or otherwise, of the
British War Cabinet, was the decisive factor in the case." - F.J.P Veale. Advance to Barbarism,
P.169.
THE TERROR TARGETING OF WORKING CLASS
CIVILIANS
"I am in full agreement (of terror bombing). I am all for the bombing of working
class areas in German cities. I am
a Cromwellian - I believe in 'slaying in the name of the Lord!" Sir. Archibald Sinclair, Secretary for
Air.
WIVES AND
CHILDREN TARGETTED
"They (the
British Air Chiefs) argued that the desired result, of reducing German
industrial production, would be more readily achieved if the homes of the
workers in the factories were destroyed; if the workers were kept busy arranging
for the burial of their wives and children, output might reasonably be expected
to fall."
It was concentrated on working class houses because, as
Professor Lindemann maintained, “A higher percentage of bloodshed per ton of
explosives dropped could be expected from bombing houses built close together,
rather than by bombing higher class houses surrounded by gardens." Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P
Veale.
SO COWARDLY IT HAD TO BE
HIDDEN
"One of the most unhealthy features of the bombing
offensive was that the War Cabinet - and in particular the Secretary for Air,
Archibald Sinclair (now Lord Thurso), felt it necessary to repudiate publicly
the orders which they themselves had given to Bomber Command." R.H.S Crossman, MP. Sunday Telegraph,
Oct.1st,1961
PERSPECTIVES
During the war,
more bombs by weight were dropped on the city of Berlin than were released on
the whole of Great Britain during the entire war.
All German towns and cities above 50,000 population were
from 50% to 80% destroyed. Dresden,
an unprotected city, was incinerated with an estimated 135,000 civilian
inhabitants burned and buried in the ruins. Hamburg was totally destroyed and 70,000
civilians died in the most appalling circumstances whilst Cologne was likewise
turned into a moon-scape. As
Hamburg burned the winds feeding the three mile high flames reached twice
hurricane speed to exceed 150 miles per hour. Trees three feet in diameter on the
outskirts of the city, were sucked from the ground by the supernatural forces of
these winds and hurled miles into the city-inferno, as were vehicles, men,
women... and children.
Between 1940 and 1945, sixty-one German cities with a
total population of 25 million souls were destroyed of devastated in a bombing
campaign initiated by the British government. Destruction on this scale had no
other purpose than the indiscriminate mass murder of as many German people as
possible quite regardless of their civilian status. It led to retaliatory bombing resulting in 60,000 British dead
and 86,000 injured.
CHILDREN MACHINE-GUNNED
The strafing of columns of refugees by both American and
British fighter planes was par for the course: ".... it is said that these (zoo)
animals and terrified groups of refugees were machine-gunned as they tried to
escape across the Grosser Garten by low-flying planes and that many bodies
riddled by bullets were found later in this park." Der Tod von Dresden, Axel Rodenberger,
February, 25th, 1951. In
Dresden, "Even the huddled remnants of a children's' choir were machine-gunned
in a street bordering a park." David
Irving, The Destruction of Dresden.
"I think we shall live to rue the day we did this, and that it, (The
bombing of Dresden) will stand for all time as a blot on our escutcheon." Richard Stokes, M.P. "What we want to do in addition to the
horrors of fire is to bring the masonry crashing down on the Boche, to kill
Boche and to terrify Boche." 'Bomber'
Butch Harris, Sunday Times,
January, 10th, 1993.
THE FIRESTORM OF HAMBURG
“Its horror is
revealed in the howling and raging of the firestorms, the hellish noise of
exploding bombs and the death cries of martyred human beings as well as the big
silence after the raids. Speech is
impotent to portray the measure of the horror, which shook the people for ten
days and nights and the traces of which were written indelibly on the face of
the city and its inhabitants.
No flight of
imagination will ever succeed in measuring and describing the gruesome scenes of
horror in the many buried air shelters.
Posterity can only bow its head in honour of the fate of these innocents,
sacrificed by the murderous lust of a sadistic enemy...."The Police President of Hamburg. ˆ "Three-hundred
times as many people died in Hamburg during the ten-day blitz as died in
Coventry during the entire course of the war. "Not even Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
suffering the smashing blows of nuclear explosions, could match the utter hell
of Hamburg." Martin Caidin, The Night Hamburg
Died, Ballantyne
Books.
THE CHILDREN
"Of the children these dreadful nights, what can be
said? Their fright became horror
and then panic when their tiny minds became capable of grasping the fact that
their parents could no longer help them in their distress. They lost their reason and an
overwhelming terror took over.
Their world had become the shrieking centre of an erupting volcano from
which there could be no physical escape.
Nothing that hell offered could be feared
more.
By the hand of man they became creatures, human in form
but not in mind. Strangled noises
hissed from them as they staggered pitifully through the streets in which tar
and asphalt ran as streams. Some of
these tiny creatures ran several hundred feet. Others managed only twenty, maybe ten
feet. Their shoes caught fire and
then their feet. The lower parts of
their legs became flickering sticks of flame. Here were Joans of Arcs.... thousands of
them. All who had perished unjustly
on the fires of the Middle Ages were as nothing when compared with what was
happening that night.
The sounds of many were unintelligible and undoubtedly
many more called for their parents from whom they were parted by death or by
accident. They grasped their
tortured limbs, their tiny burning legs until they were no longer able to stand
or run. And then they would crash
to the ground where they would writhe in the bubbling tar until death released
them from their physical misery." Martin
Caidin.
DRESDEN
"The long
suppressed story of the worst massacre in the history of the world. The devastation of Dresden in February,
1945, was one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been
arraigned at Nuremberg if that court had not been perverted." Rt. Hon. Richard.H.S Crossman, M.P., Labour
Government Minister
AGAINST
INTERNATIONAL LAW PHOSPHOROUS
"Men, women and
children too, ran hysterically, falling and stumbling, getting up, tripping and
falling again, rolling over and over.
Most of them managed to regain their feet and made it to the water. But many of them never made it and were
left behind, their feet drumming in blinding pain on the overheated pavements
amidst the rubble, until there came one last convulsing shudder from the smoking
'thing' on the ground, and then no further movement." Martin Caidin, The Night Hamburg Died.
"Phosphorous burns were not infrequent." U.S Strategic Bombing Survey
ˆ "Phosphorous
was used "because of its demonstrated ability to depress the morale of the
Germans." Official British source ˆ
"Even the
senseless and highly culture-destroying terror acts, against for example, Lubeck
and Dresden, carried out by the Allied pilots, should have been investigated and
brought before a proper court of justice."
Major General H. Bratt, Royal
Swedish Army ˆ "A nation
which spreads over another a sheet of inevitably deadly gases or eradicates
entire cities from the earth by the explosion of atomic bombs, does not have the
right to judge anyone for war crimes; it has already committed the greatest
atrocity equal to no other atrocity; it has killed - amidst unspeakable torments
- hundreds of thousands of innocent people." Hon. Lydio Machado Bandeira de Mello,
Professor of Criminal Law; author of more than 40 works on law/philosophy
ˆ
"As for crimes against humanity, those
governments which ordered the destruction
of German cities, thereby destroying irreplaceable cultural values and
making burning torches out of women and children, should also have stood before
the bar of justice."
Hon Jaan Lattik.
Estonian statesman, diplomat and
historian