Was Allied bombing of Germany Jan - April 1945 a war crime?

I am a civilian, and I work in the company "Flying Cargo Ltd.". As a reserve serviceman of the IDF I am a combat medic. I have nothing to do with the public relations department of the IDF.
More, I want to add, that IDF tries to decrease civil casualties among Palestinians for a very simple reason. Killing civilians does not give any tactical gains to the force, but it causes harm to the public relations of the country. I strongly doubt that the number of killed children provided by the Palestinians is accurate; I guess that it includes armed teenagers that were killed in the battles. Part of the suicide bombers were 16-17-year-old minors as well, and they are also included in the statistics. Many 14-16-year-old boys take part in battles while being armed with automatic weapons; if they want to play the adults' games then they should be ready to bear the consequences. But the kids are not so guilty; the people that gave them arms and sent them to the battlefield are.

Steve, Stiessd, might another thread, dedicated to the matter of Palestinian/Israeli treatment of civilians be a good idea? It certainly is an idea worth public discussion.

PM me if you want such a thread, or respond here, and I'll see what I can do to get it "Featured" if you either or both of you folks want to author it


timber

You are right, sorry.

This thread has morphed into something different from its original intention, it seems. Before we go back to the subject at hand, I just want to say one thing. If a 14 or 15 or 16 year old kid picks up a Kalishnikov in the cause of the PLO or decides he/she wants to be martyr, that adolscenet can hardly claim to be victim when fired upon. Even the teenager who throws rocks at an already nervous Israeli soldier is asking for it. At that moment, the soldier can't know whether it's a stone or a fragmentation grenadde coming at him.

Yeah, threads do that,MA! And you are absolutely correct in regard to engaging in hostile action with troops already engaged in hostile action; consequences may be expected.

As to this discussion, I believe the bombings were the result of warcrimes comitted by The Axis Powers, among which were continued failure to surrender a clearly lost war, thus causing their people and their infrastucture great and unnescessary harm. The object of the carpet bombing of cities was as much to remove The Enemy's Will to Resist as The Enemy's Capability to Resist. Some argument may be made that only one of those goals was effectively met untill the very end days of the war in either theater. If anything, The Japanese bear greater responsiblity for their own civilian casualties than do The Germans in many respects.


timber

I agree with everything you say, Timber. Yet I still can't help feeling that Dresden was a mistake. 'Mistake', however, is not a synonym for 'war crime.'

I too see Dresden questionable, particularly in regard to the length and severity of the campaign against that city. A tremendous amount of military resources were expended for gain which in no way justified the expenditure, fiscal or human. It was a bad move in that its intended effect was almost exclusively directed toward morale, which, while shaken, was unbowed.
The revulsion and horror focused on The Bomb during the Cold War owes much to the recent memory of entire metropolitan areas in conflagration. The concept of civilian destruction orders of magnitude beyond those of WWII was unacceptable. There is some question as to whether our current foes are at all inhibited by such considerations.

In today's "Civilized" wars, sufficient damage may be done to an enemy's Ability to Wage War as to effectively cripple that enemy with relatively inconsequential civilian casualties. The Badguys don't have the means to wage "Civilized War", whether or not they have incentive to do so.



timber

I started this thread, so I'm content to stick with it. (As my views about child killers of any nationality are unprintable, I will forego the opportunity of starting a new thread).

Now in the Dresden raid, a huge number of children died...er where was I? oh yes war crimes difficult isnt it?

I asked in my very first post if we (the allied victors) are capable/willing of objectively assessing a crime committed during war, and acknowledging that a crime is a crime even if we committed it.

The answer of course is no. That is one of the privileges afforded to victors.

Steve, I agree it is a war crime, but I differ in where I lay the guilt for the crime. Not in any "Blame the victim" sense, but rather finding sole fault to lie with the militarist leaders whose arrogance and disregard for their nations necessitated the severest consequences then assessible.

And, hey, this is a great thread, digressions and all ... thanks for starting it, and for staying with it.



timber

In his book 'Berlin - the Downfall', Antony Beevor has this to say about the Dresden raid:

"Geobbels apparantly shook with fury on hearing the news. He wanted to execute as many prisoners of war as the number of civilians killed in the attack. The idea appealed to Hitler. Such an extreme measure would tear up the Geneva Convention in the face of the Western Allies and force his own troops to fight to the end. But General Jodl, supported by Ribbentrop, Field Marshall Keitel and Grand Admiral Donitz finally pursuaded him that such an escalation of terror would turn out worse for Germany. Goebbels nevertheless extracted all he could from this 'terror attack'. Soldiers with relatives in the city were promised compassionate leave. Hans Dietrich Genscher remembers some of them returning from their visit. They were reluctant to talk about what they had seen."

Since I don't know, how long this article will be online, I've copied it here:



" Questioning The Reasons For Allied Air War
February 14, 2003


The aftermath: Dresden after the raids of Feb. 13-15, 1945.



With the publication of a new book, Germans are re-examining the horror brought by Allied planes during World War II. It is an issue that the city of Dresden knows too well.

The white postcard framed within a square of red bears a sign of death. "City gone," it says.

The message was written in the immediate aftermath of the Allied firebombing of the baroque city of Dresden, a series of air raids carried out from Feb. 13-15, 1945. Today, it is one of the surviving documents that help people remember one of the war's most controversial air attacks, directed at a city that had little military significance and served as sanctuary for thousands of refugees who had fled from the Soviet Red Army.

As they do each year, the city's residents held a series of services on Thursday to mark the start of a three-day bombing attack that showered fire on the city. It is not clear how many people died, partly because many victims were incinerated and their ashes mingled with the rubble. The official estimate is 35,000.

"You have to look at the fate of each individual so that afterward you don't simply talk of collateral damage," said Jens Herrmann at one of the Thursday services.

To help keep the memory of those victims alive, the bells of all churches in the city began to toll at 9:45 p.m., the time that the bombs began to fall.

Anniversary gains new meaning

This year's services had special significance for two reasons.

Hanging over Thursday's services was the growing threat of a new war. Even though this war would occur far from Dresden, the city's residents still expressed their dismay that this violence might kill more innocent people. "We, the survivors of the bombing raids, appeal to the world: Help prevent new suffering, new destruction and new death," a declaration said.

This year's anniversary also falls at a time when Germans have begun to re-examine the horrors that the Allied air war brought to their country. The new debate was started with last years's publication of a book called "The Fire - Germany and the Bombardment 1940-1945" by historian Jörg Friedrich.

"The bombardment of German towns and cities that went on for five years during World War II has no parallel in history," Friedrich wrote. "More than 1,000 cities and villages were bombed. Nearly a million tons of explosives were dropped on 30 million civilians -- mostly women, children and the elderly."

An estimated 635,000 civilians were killed and 130 German cities destroyed in the campaign.

Book focuses on suffering

But Friedrich's book goes beyond a recitation of numbers. Using such terms as "mass extermination," "gassed," and "crematoriums," Friedrich describes the suffering of the civilian population who were buried, burned and killed in the attacks with language more commonly used to describe the victims of German campaigns.

He also questions the strategy that led to this suffering. "The British did indeed have the option in 1944-45, a time when Germany was already on its knees, of stopping the senseless carpet bombing campaign," he said in a newspaper interview with the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.

The book's publication started a new examination around the country about the air war, its methods and its goals. The war became the subjects of cover stories in national magazines. "Crimes against the Germans?" the magazine GEO asked on its cover this month. "The taboo subject -- the air war."

The war also was the subject of a documentary on public television last month that showed children eating their meals amid the ruins, elderly residents hobbling over piles of rubble and row after row of bodies lying on streets. And Germany's leading opposition bloc in the German parliament is preparing to formally ask the coalition government how the country should mark the 60th anniversary of the raids around the country.

Critics dislike book's language

Friedrich's book stands in the center of the debate. It has also stood in the center of criticism -- at home and abroad.

German critics, for one, have taken issue with Friedrich's choice of words. In a review of the book that appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Hans-Ulrich Wehler wrote: "There is talk of a 'war of annihilation' being waged against the German cities and its residents, although this term was reserved for good reason in the past for the (Nazi) war of annihilation waged against the Jews and Slavs."

Expressing a criticism coming from historians, Wehler wrote: "The danger of Friedrich's book is that in its passion for the helpless victims of the Allied bombing war it could further the cult of victimization that is so widespread in the United States."

Abroad, the book has upset Britons. These critics point out in particular that Friedrich's narrative is lopsided, ignoring the fact that Nazi Germany was the first to launch air raids on civilians in Warsaw, Poland; Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Coventry, England; and London.

Thoughts of reconciliation

In defense of his work, Friedrich said he saw the book in a larger context. "The culture of reconciliation has expanded to the point that we can now accept the truth," he told the newspaper Die Welt.

In Dresden, that culture of reconciliation has been at work for years. One victim of the raids was a city landmark, the Frauenkirche, the baroque church that for 200 years stood as a monument of the Saxon capital's glory. The church is being rebuilt in an international effort.

Among the thousands of people who have joined the effort are the British who are providing a golden cross for the new dome. The cross was created by a London goldsmith with a special interest in Dresden: His father was a pilot in the air raids. "

Thanks for that article Walter. Its fairly clear to me that the Dresden raid at least was a criminal act. But it's easy to see this with the benefit of hindsight. Did Churchill and Arthur Harris consider the possibility of war crimes charges being brought against them when they ordered the raids?

Well steissd for a nobody who's never fired a gun in his life like you you sure think you know everything about WW2...

Dresden got what it deserved as did all of Germany.

While Germany's war production was at its height in 1945, producing more tanks and weapons then in all the other years from 1939-44, the troops found it exceedingly difficult to fight efficiently when they knew that the people they were fighting for, wives, kids, parents, and friends, were blowing up anyways.

Despair is the greatest enemy and those afflicted are little more then targets. The germans proved this in the end of the war.

The SS forming "brothers by fate", which were suicide bands, none of them would back down, and none did, few of them succeeded in doing more then dying, and few survived.

What seperated the less technological and less equipped American and Brittish troops?

Hope, they at least knew that if they died, their families were still safe. They knew that they were never going to get a letter saying that their wife and child had been killed by enemy bombing.

A hopeful spirit is stronger then a vengeful man.

My Grandpa didn't like that Dresden was bombed, but he at least knew that in war, it didn't matter, and no one was to blame but themselves.

"For he purposes not their deaths, when he purposes their services."

That quote from Shakespeare is a good one and works all ways...the deaths of anyone in war is never the fault of the enemy, or the soldier, it is only the fault of the person dying.

The only exceptional cases are when those people, are completely uninvolved, such as the Jews were.

However, the German populace were making weapons and were breeding future soldiers. There is no other way you can look at this, unless you are an Idealistic fool.

Oops.

So I'm a post-war-breeded soldier.
(Which actually is true, although I just was a conscript.)

Yes, Dresden deserved the deaths, especially the tenthousands of refugees, since they didn't want to be killed by the Russians.

fire bombing civilians is just one the bennies of winning a war and makes good film footage to show the foks back home.

5PofF,

Steisst served as an infantry officer with USSR military forces in Afghanistan. My understanding is that he was discharged for medical reasons, and managed to immigrate to Israel. Unable for health reasons to serve as a combat commander, Steisst now is a medic in the Israeli reserves. I'm pretty sure he has seen far more of war than most of us.

There is an unfortunate tendency for folks to judge the past by present conditions and values. It is important that we bear in mind the conditions and accepted values prevalent during the period under discussion. Were the Romans guilty of war crimes by salting the earth of Carthage, and enslaving the surviving population? Prior to the Nuremberg Trials many of the "crimes" that Nazi leaders were convicted of didn't exist in International Law. Modern technology made possible state murder on such a scale that the International Community was "forced" to impose new standards on what comprises "legitimate means of waging war". The horrors of the Nazi ideals "justified" for most of the world's community application of Ex Post Facto Law to individual Nazi leaders. The Nuremberg Trials, and the formation of an "effective" United Nations, had important ramifications to how we regard things today.

Prior to 1948-49, the destruction of enemy property and civilians was not a crime. Quite the contrary, many military strategists accepted the idea that destruction of the enemy population's moral and will to resist was a key to victory. The killing potential of fully automatic weapons, chemicals, and modern artillery had been amply demonstrated in the trenches of WWI. The casualty lists devastated European populations and leaders. If wars were to continue, the lethality of warfare had to be reduced. Strong pacifist movements developed in all of the advanced nations, and later contributed to the reluctance to militarily react to German aggression. The ultimate alternative to war is surrender, and probable extinction of one's group/culture. If we are unwilling to fight, then we will perish in the face of actual, or threatened violence.

The Butcher's Bill for the Great War also strongly influenced those who understood that pacifism is an ineffective response to aggression. One example is found in Churchill's preference for an attack against the "soft underbelly" because of his fear that direct attacks across the Channel would result in the same blood costs suffered in the Great War. Giulio Douhet in his The Command of the Air (1921) theorized that the massive use of air power against enemy populations would reduce the carnage of future wars by destroying the enemy's capacity to wage war. Douhet's ideas contributed to the development of blitzkrieg, and he was the father of strategic bombing. Until WWII, there was no opportunity to test the validity of Douhet's concepts. Can a war be won by air power alone? The initial results obtained during WWII were mixed. War production could be crippled, logistics disrupted, and the enemy's command, control, and communications system rendered less effective. On the other hand, enemy moral (both civilian and uniformed) was not adversely affected by strategic bombing. That is, German attacks against civilian centers did not destroy the British Will to continue the fight. Neither did the German populace rise to demand surrender after the much more effective air campaign waged by the Allies. In fact, there is some evidence to support the notion that bombing civilian targets actually stiffened resistence.

It has been argued that the relative failure of the WWII air campaigns to decisively turn the tide of battle was due to technical limitations. It took an enormous number of aircraft to deliver the bomb loads needed to "destroy" any target. The cost in money, men and machines, prevented the application of enough force to be decisive. Accuracy with the bombsights and unguided munitions of the day was notorious. Of thousands of bombs dropped in a single raid, only a few exploded effectively on target. Bomb Damage Assessment was, and remains, very problematical. How does one determine if an industrial plant is out of action for a significant amount of time A small bit of unseen shrapnel may totally disable a piece of artillary, but then again a tube thrown from it's carriage may be brought back on line with relative ease.

With the advent of nuclear weapons and "modern" delivery systems (ICBM and long-range bombers), proponents of air power were convinced that finally Douhet's dream could be fulfilled. The Strategic Air Command was America's ultimate defense against Soviet aggression, and the Cold War was on in earnest. The threat of nuclear annihilation kept the world from unrestricted warfare long enough for the industrial might of the West to bankrupt the flawed economic system of Communism.

There are still those who fervently believe that an air campaign, if strong and effectively enough applied, can achieve victory with little or no need for traditional forces. The smart munitions and advanced delivery systems used in recent operations have caught the imagination of many. Modern proponents of air power will point out that it is so effective that our enemies are forced to adoped terrorist tactics, rather than to stand against us force on force. Proponents of air superiority has many supporters who are unwilling to pay the blood-price that every military conflict must exact. Personally, I think over reliance on air power is dangerous and ultimately ineffective.

We have become a nation that believes in the tooth-fairy, and the essential goodness of our fellow man - even after he as demonstrated his willingness to kill thousands. Our enemies do not subscribe to the same Rules of Engagement that we do. The enemy has no compunction against the use of weapons of mass terror and destruction. We shudder to think that some civilians, or even enemy soldiers, might be injured or die as a result of our efforts to defend Americans and the Free World. The enemy believes, with some justification, that if we only see a line of what used to be called body bags, we will fold our tents and silently fade away. I believe that Saddam, and others of his ilk, are wrong about that, but it is that belief that encourages aggression. The enemy justifies their actions as the only means available for their culture to survive and triumph over the challenges presented by Western materialistic values.

Values accepted by most of the Western world since WWII make defense against a terrorist strategy very difficult. Notions about what is "right" were very much altered during the Cold War. The advent of Political Correctness during the 60's has had a profound impact on what Americans regard as acceptable war. We are criticized when a single "innocent" is killed during an operation against a terrorist cell with the blood of thousands on their hands. When we guide a missile onto a location where the enemy is plotting the destruction of our way of life. Is that murder? Of course, the enemy would make the same argument.

War is not a tea party, and the definition of what comprises war at the beginning of the 21st century is far different than what existed at the beginning of the 20th, the 19th, and countless other centuries far back into history. We need to see clearly, the nation and Western values are seriously under attack by a determined enemy who believes that he has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

5PoF --

You're certainly quick on the trigger, aren't you? Attacking Steissd as someone 'who has never fired a gun' without any knowledge of Steissd's background is a little presumptuous, don't you think?

By and large, I agree with the dictum that all's fair in love and war. By and large. But Walter HInteler's point about the refugees in Dresden is well taken. You see, at the time I was one of those refugees. I was not in Dresden at the time, true. I had been in Berlin until Jan. 1945 and at the time of the bombing was recovering from a bout of pneumonia in a town called Brúx, Checkoslovakia. I was six years old. We were fleeing from the Russians. We expected to be dodging Allied bombs, of course, along with trying to avoid the German forced labor recruiters. But the tragedy of Dresden was something very special, beyond the scope of traditional warfare.

I have added this personal note only so that you don't accuse me of speaking about something of which I know nothing. (I have also served in the US armed forces. Highest rank held: Captain.)

5PofF

I find it difficult to follow your reasoning. Suggest you get your thoughts into line if you want people to read your posts.

When faced wtih a difficult question such as "Were the Allied bombings of Germany justifiable based upon the circumstances and moral climate of the time?" I remember four simple letters,

W-W-H-D

What Would Hitler Do?

Hitler was responsible for the death of six million Jews. WWHD if given the resources to bomb his enemies civilian population to an even greater extent , or better yet drop an atomic bomb?

He would have fried us all, and laughed about it. Burning babies and barbequed women, all for the advance of the 3rd Riech.

The Allied fire bombings of Dresden, Munich, etc. may not have been pretty, they may seem extreme by todays standards, but desperate times called for desperate measures. The women and children that died could have given birth to or grown up to be perfect little aryan Wafen S.S. or Gestapo. For all the Allies knew at the time, total war was a neccesity.

Let's not judge our forefathers on their decisions in a time in which we did not live. Germany gave rise to the greatest villain of the 20th Century, perhaps the greatest villain of all time. They chose to give him power, and he ran with it. When faced with WWHD, the Allied command did what was neccessary to bring the war to an end ASAP and stop a madman from killing more people.

Lets face facts, the Allies were the good guys in this war. They may have acted harshly, but were faced with one of the greatest evils in history. The Allied commaners are certainly not war criminals by my point of view.