Allied Terror bombing of Germany

Interesting I never heard about that before.

Well maybe I am a bit too pessimistic what people can achive, but most revolutions or revolts in history weren´t lead by common people. Or at least had outside asistance....eg. French revolution contrary to popular believe were not common people.

But it must also be admitted that many "common" Germans are sheeple - to this day.

Napoleon clearly noted this and he said:

"There is no more good-natured, but also no more gullible people than the Germans. No lie can be conceived treacherous enough, the Germans believe it. They follow a slogan which was given to them, to act against their own countrymen, rather than the real enemies of their country."


Napoleon about the Germans.

In the background the peoples battle at Leipzig 1813, where Germans had to fight against Germans.

http://arminius1871.deviantart.com/art/Napoleon-about-the-Germans-482538535

 

In Japan the emperor was God. The peace negotiations demands made him a human being which was a big strike to the Japanese. In a way he was totally responsible for the call for war, as he made the order in the first place, but I guess the Allied did not want to bring chaos by putting him to military court.

 

Italy had a king that could (and ultimately did) remove Mussolini, Japan had an emperor that could (and ultimately did) overrule the military crique, the Germans had ..... Hitler.
Of course the Nazis were worried about popular support, police states are not police states because the rulers "like" spending money on police, but because terror tactics against the population are effective, they would rather be liked than feared but if they can't be liked they have to be feared. Absolute rulers do not like "police", they are usually worried the "police" may get too powerful to control, and usually "manage the risk" by having multiple organizations that keep each other in check.

Isolated episodes of civil disobedience mean practically nothing, it is a "normal" tactic by all governments to apparently give in when facing large protest they cannot crush without bloodshed. Then when the protest loses momentum, as all human things do but especially protest that, being non directly constructive, cannot be sustained for long as people get the feeling "we are going nowhere, they take back the lost ground (and usually the protest leaders, are either co-opted into the ruling crique as "consent gatherers" or discredited by propaganda (in "democracies" ) / quietly eliminated (in "authoritharian states").
People who have only experienced democracy tend to forget that democratic government is not the "norm", democracy is the exception and doesn't last long unless it manages to setup a stable set of "checks and balances" which is a very difficult thing to achieve.

It makes much more sense to consider democratic voters morally responsible for the actions of their governments than subjects of non democratic states, dictatorships will not usually go away without bloodshed (Franco was the exception to the rule) so the people are stuck between cooperation and civil war. The implications are ... a huge can of worms.

 

In Nazi Germany there was always the informant, somebody in the block or the area, and told about people who mentioned anything against the government or Hitler jokes to the secret police. or listened to the Allied radio. Or simply did not like somebody in the house. That person had enormous power to be honest as he could make people vanish.

 

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

 

There were differences in bombings. Some of them were targeting actual military targets, such as the bombings of non-German towns/cities. Some were meant only/primarily/also as terror bombings, such as many bombings of German cities. Terror bombings, as clearly admitted by some of the Allied leaders, are not legal.

Killing innocent civilians - and I'm not talking about the workers here - in purpose can not be reasoned with anything, not even with the Nazies. Every country is responsible for it's own war crimes.

Naturally the leaders of the winning countries are always honourable people - just like Stalin was...

 

Sources please.

 

My last reply to this Topic. I did read the whole Thread again. I admit that "Terror" might not be the right term for bombing german citys. That´s simply how my Grandmother called it.
Your View changes if you are on the receiving end of the bombings.
I would like to make sure everybody here knows that i am not a Nazi Guy or someone who doesn´t aprecciate the deliverance the Allies gave to my
Country.

Thanks

 

Indeed ; my Mother, living in London's East End, experienced the whole of the 'Blitz' from late1940 through to the final V2 incidents of 1945, so I wouldn't necessarily look to her for an unbiased opinion. She experienced these things - I didn't.

 

"The Prime Minister said that we hoped to shatter twenty German cities as we had shattered Cologne, Lubeck, Dusseldorf, and so on. More and more aeroplanes and bigger and bigger bombs. M. Stalin had heard of 2-ton bombs. We had now begun to use 4-ton bombs, and this would be continued throughout the winter. If need be, as the war went on, we hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city. " (Official transcript of the meeting at the Kremlin between Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin on Wednesday, August 12, 1942, at 7 P.M.)

"The destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany [is the goal]. ... It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories." -- "Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander in Chief, Bomber Commander, British Royal Air Force, October 25, 1943 quoted in Tami Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 220.

http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/war.crimes/World.war.2/Bombing.htm

This was the idea to bring Germany to its knees. Speer himself said after Hamburg´s destruction that " another city destroyed this wholly and we cannot continue war " or something like this.

 

E.g. Sir Arthur Harris. See my earlier posts.

Indeed. It's still terror bombing, directly targeting civilians.

 

Terror bombing is quite a harmless term, imo. We can find harsher words that still were true. But let´s leave it at that....

and .@ LWD: There are numerous sources which some of already are stated twice (eg. by me) in this thread. You can also read about the so called "Douhet doctrine". (which eg. the RAF adapted). This is the doctrine of command of the air and total war. The doctrine believed if every major city of the enemy is destroyed the population will stand up and raise against their leaders as the their houses and relatives were destroyed/killed.

 

NO : using the term "terror bombing" for the Allied air strategy in WWII is saying that the Allies did the same as the terrorists of Al Quaeda and Isis : the Allied air force crews were not terrorists .

 

The crews were not terrorists, this doctrine however is commonly known as terror bombing. However we can find worse words or better ones (eg. Douhet theory would be "nicer" word but doesn´t change the facts.)... didn´t even in the 1860s (Us civil war) Sherman (or Sheridan?) already mentioned the word "terror" for his strategy....not from the air of course

Edit: Whow, William T. Sherman is the master of total war (and other) quotes, read them here:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/william_tecumseh_sherman.html

Some examples relating to terror warfare:


-I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

- War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

- War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.

- If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.

And here a kinf od prohetic quote: (OT)

- There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.

 

It all depends which side you mean . For the Nazis : allied bomber crews = Terror Flieger .Resistants = Terroristen.

For the allied : allied bomber crews = Liberators . Resistants = Freedom fighters.


The term "Terrorflieger" was no longer acceptable in Germany after 1945, nor calling Resistants "terrorists" .

 

I'd have to agree here. The vocabulary is wrong. It was coined over 60 years ago and it is not appropriate. It was horrific, but not an act of terrorism, which the term "terror bombing" insinuates. Europe was in the grips of a long, arduous war.

Quoting Churchill is a tough sell. He was continuously trying to raise the morale of his countrymen. Of course he used the utter destruction of its enemy as a political springboard to tug at their heartstrings. He never is quoted as mentioning murdering civilians as a way to end the war.

 

Hmmm. Never thought of that.

 

The objectives were different – that makes essential difference. Dehousing paper reveals original objectives behind the strategic bombing of the Nazi Germany. Decisions have been made purely on military grounds, there is no trace of bad intentions at all. Britain had to make choice which weapons to develop and use to win the war. They have chosen legitimate weapons.

Dehousnig paper:

The following seems a simple method of estimating what we could do by bombing Germany

Careful analysis of the effects of raids on Birmingham, Hull and elsewhere have shown that, on the average, one ton of bombs dropped on a built-up area demolishes 20–40 dwellings and turns 100–200 people out of house and home.

We know from our experience that we can count on nearly fourteen operational sorties per bomber produced. The average lift of the bombers we are going to produce over the next fifteen months will be about 3 tons. It follows that each of these bombers will in its life-time drop about 40 tons of bombs. If these are dropped on built-up areas they will make 4000-8000 people homeless.
In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in fifty-eight towns of over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment, should be easy to find and hit. Our forecast output of heavy bombers (including Wellingtons) between now and the middle of 1943 is about 10,000. If even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on the built-up areas of these fifty-eight German towns the great majority of their inhabitants (about one-third of the German population) would be turned out of house and home.
Investigation seems to show that having one's home demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed. At Hull signs of strain were evident, though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished. On the above figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the fifty-eight principal German towns. There seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people.
Our calculation assumes, of course, that we really get one-half of our bombs into built-up areas. On the other hand, no account is taken of the large promised American production (6,000 heavy bombers in the period in question). Nor has regard been paid to the inevitable damage to factories, communications, etc,, in these towns and the damage by fire, probably accentuated by breakdown of public services.

 

That conveniently ignores, that destroying houses means killing also civilians at the same time.