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