Following from my post here, which produced a lot of heated comments (including, I am sorry to say, a few from yours truly), and Perry’s ‘proportionality’ post yesterday, it might be worth taking a few minutes to read this long but worthwhile essay by Christopher Hitchens. Hitch writes about the Allied bombing offensive of the Second World War, the obliteration of cities like Dresden, Hamburg and the subsequent – and controversial – vilification of Bomber Command leader Arthur Harris. I will not try to summarise what Hitchens has to say, which revolves around a new book by English writer A.C. Grayling, but here is a bit towards the end to give some of the flavour:
However, if we are to be allowed alternative historical courses and speculations, there is a “moral” that Grayling overlooks. What if the RAF had been in good enough shape to inflict “terror” on Berlin in the fall of 1939? What if the United States had determined to strike the Imperial Japanese Navy first? What if the League of Nations had decided to stand by the Spanish Republic and Abyssinia, and had pounded Franco’s and Mussolini’s armies before they could get off the mark?
Those who oppose violence on principle are called pacifists. Those who oppose it until its use is too little and too late, or too much and too late, should be called casuists. Those who try to resist their own despotisms, and who appeal in vain to lazy democracies who are also among the potential victims, and who welcome the eventual arrival of the bombs and planes–I am thinking of some courageous Serbian and Iraqi democrats–should be called our allies now, and in Europe should have been our allies no later than 1933.
Moral crisis is the vile residue of moral cowardice, and Grayling has fully proved this without quite intending to do so. His book is a treatise, not on the dubiety of the retributive, but on the urgency and integrity of the “preemptive.”
On a personal note, it enrages me how the area bombing of German towns, for example, was denounced by people with the wisdom of hindsight, although it should be noted that the bombing was questioned at the time and not just by lily-livered peaceniks. As a son of an RAF navigator, I also have to recognise that in Britain, a country isolated in the early years of the war, having lost Singapore, Trobuk, fighting a terrible campaign to avoid starvation against U-boats, that the bombing of German towns and cities was seen as a vital way to hit back. Hitchens does not mention another very good reason: the bombing tied up hundreds of Luftwaffe aircraft that would otherwise have been deployed on the Eastern front, and forced the Nazis to tie up a lot of manpower and material to deal with air attacks.
Where does all this take us to what is going on in the Middle East now? To repeat a point made in my previous article, countries like Israel are entitled to do what is necessary to prevent their own extinction. For to be clear about this: Hizbollah and their backers want Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth. So it is only right that the country should do what is deemed necessary to prevent its destruction, even if that involves loss of civilian life. But I make no apologies for re-stating my revulsion at those who claim that there is “no such thing as an innocent civilian” in order to justify use of massive military force. There are plenty of good arguments for using massive force, however awful, but dehumanising millions of victims beforehand by claiming “Muslims are all alike,” or whatever, is not one of them.
There is no question that Britain was in a war for survival, however, let’s not kid ourselves please. The bombings of the British and German cities were designed to sap the will of the civilians and degrade trust and support in the government.
It didn’t work on either side.
There was certainly a strategic argument for Hiroshima, I’m personally less convinced by Nagasaki, by which stage intelligence was making it clear the Japanese were finished and were going to give up. But there was another message to be sent.
Many of the bomber command attaks later in the war were of dubious strategic value to the overall war effort but had other “benefits”, some Hitichens mentions, the larger being the effect of civilian rather than military distribution and manufacture. A population without food and clothing has more problems than a well fed one.
However, in both those scenarios there was a clear strategy for a clear strategic win over the nation state with whom we were waging war. There was no possibility for the key fanatics and supporters polarised by the fighting to move to another nation and continue. Likewise there was no credible 5th column at home.
This isn’t WW2, and we should stop behaving like it is. That includes the IDF.
Very interesting. I wrote on this earlier:
Why Israel Is Doing The Right Thing
I sometimes wonder if any of the Dresden handwringers have been to Dresden and seen the “devastation” first hand. I was there in the early nineties and like elsewhere in the former “Democratic Republic” WW2 bomb damage had not been cleared up so it was fairly easy to see the extent of the “devastation”.
I am not denying that there were horrific civilian casualties but rather than trying to perpetuate a Jenin-media style frenzy, one should consider for a moment that at the time of the bombing Dresden was a railway centre sending on trains full of unfortunates whose final destination was the death camps.
If one behaves like a barbarian and condones barbarity is it any wonder if one is treated in like manner.
I found this line in Hitchens interesting:
A similar message will eventually have to be sent to militant Islamists. They, too, suffer from a kind of natural superiority delusion – based in this case on absolute faith in their religion. The ideology is very much similar to that which prevailed in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (save, I suppose, that one can at least convert to Islam where he can’t exactly give up being born Jewish or Korean). Half-finshed or conditional victories aren’t going to cut it. It seems to me that if there’s a moral imperative involved in the Lebanon fight it’s that Israel scatter Hezbollah in the same way or worse that they did the PLO during the last Lebanon campaign. Minimizing civilian casualties should absolutely be done, but only to the extent that it doesn’t interfere with this ultimate goal. If the goal is not achieved, then such civilian casualties as have already been inflicted will, in some important sense, have been for nothing.
Millie,
one should consider for a moment that at the time of the bombing Dresden was a railway centre sending on trains full of unfortunates whose final destination was the death camps.
In Feb 1945? Not really. No. Now, if we’d hammered it in 1942/3 that might have made more of a difference.
Hell, while we are talking about pious handwringing perhaps we should have indulged in a little more expressive concern about what was being done when we knew about in 41/42, or for that matter, perhaps we should think about the people we handed over to Stalin to be murdered in 45/46.
By Feb 1945 the strategic value of Dresden was pretty limited. Feb 1944 would have been different.
The problem is that by the time we were indulging in 1000 bomber raids on Dresden.
The issue again, is that Germany was a nation state, you could beat and then control. Short of occupying and controlling and re-educating the entire Arab population of a dozen nations the WW2 solution isn’t going to work.
That is not entirely true. Its simplistic and probably wrong. Hiroshima and Nagasaki worked very well. That is when the japanese hierarchy finally saw that 1 aeroplane ´+ 1 bomb = 100 000 people. That equation meant they wern’t going to last very long. Over Germany the equations of thousands of bombers (while losing between 5% and 10% of them) killing only 10 000 at a time or so, meant that they could hold out for quite a while or even outlast the bomber force itself. By the time they got up to effective casuallty rates, (the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden) the war was all but won anyway, so the effect of a few more of those was discounted.
Of course the bombing effect on industry and overall economic degradation also was having a significant effect that has mostly been downplayed rather than anylised in depth. I fear historians tend to overlook the economic effects of war and look mainly at the thunder and shouting.
The People in Britain also tend to forget exactly how close run the Battle of Britain was. The only strategy the British had in that battle was: outendure the enemy. They played that card well and they were very fortunate at the time that the enemy had other plans to distract them.
Of course just scaring a population also worked very well in Spain causing them to vote a change of government. On a daily basis we have the Mohammedans threatening violence should we dare to excercise our dwindling freedom of speach and criticise their core superstitions, or even worse, mock them or draw cartoons. The will of the people and over “tolerant” governments to resist that threat of violence appears to be very weak indeed, and that just encourages the use and threat of violence. It does nothing to appease it.
Hezbollah are making similar calculations as the German hierarchy must have in the 2nd world war. Particularly since they are being supplied by Iran and Syria, they can last out a long time because Israel is not killing enough of them for them to ever think they will run out of superstitiously indoctrinated cannon fodder.
My big fear for Israel is that they are not doing enough, or thinking big enough. In 1967 and 1973 they were stopped from finishing the job they were on their way to doing by the credible threat that Russia would get directly involved. In the cold war days that was the brake limiting anyones ability to win the proxy wars outright. Right now that brake is not there so they should have a much freer hand if they have the courage to use it properly. Ultimately the regime in Syria has to be changed (and eventually Iran). Its either that or wipe out Hezbollah to a man. Anything less means Hezbollah wins, merely by remaining in existence, just as Britain won the Battle of Britain, merely by remaining to fight another day.
“the WW2 solution isn’t going to work….[with the Arabs]”
So, what is going to work ? Any ideas?
If not, maybe we try the WW2 solution anyway ? Who knows, it might work…. it’s worth giving it a try.
I’m afraid that although the strategic bombing campaign did damage the German economy, it did it at the cost of fully 25% of our war economy.
The resources poured into Bomber Command could not be spent fighting the Battle of the Atlantic, or preparing for the Second Front.
It is arguable that a Second Front could have been opened in 1943, after the end of the North Africa campaign. At that point, Hitler’s Westwall was largely a figment of his imagination. Instead, we got embroiled in the sideshow which was Italy, and D-Day was delayed by a year. It would have been nice if the western allies could have struck into Germany whilst the Russians were still in the Ukraine, we might have been able to save eastern Europe from 50 years of Communist tyranny, but it was not to be.
I am not saying the strategic bombing campaign had no effect on the German economy, just pointing out that it had a deeper effect on the British.
The main success of strategic bombing was the US campaign against German synthetic oil plants in 1944. They were able to do this because the P51 Mustang allowed their bombers to operate with low levels of losses. Combined with the loss of Romanian oil after August 1944, this hobbled the German economy, and would have led any rational government to sue for peace, the only problems being:
a) Germany lacked a rational government;
b) The allies were not offering peace, only unconditional surrender.
By late 1944/early 1945 Bomber Command had evolved so that it could destroy a small city with one raid, but by then the campaign had degenerated into working their way through a list of ever smaller German towns. There was no real pretense that they were attacking military/industrial targets, it was simply a campaign to destroy towns and cities. I’m not sure if it shortened the war by one day. Within two months of the allies crossing the Rhine in March 1945 the war was over. Without the huge resources spent on strategic bombing, that crossing might have happened months or even a year earlier.
Who knows, it might work…. it’s worth giving it a try.
So you propose mobalising the entire world to occupy the middle east for a few decades or longer? Start land wars in Iran, Syria and probably Saudi?
If we’d played Afganistan correctly and not gone into Iraq when we did that may well be a semi-credible play. Sadly, now we’re in a “you wouldn’t want to start from here” scenario with that.
There is a solution from WWII which would work with the sons of the desert…
So far the operation in Iraq, taking down a corrupt dictatorship sponsoring terrorism and all sorts of adventures and trying to replace it with a fledgeling democracy, is just about the only rational game plan right now. That coupled with persistence, endurance and the domino theory (It did work with the collapse of the Soviet Union)
So far all the critics of the Iraq war, or Israels actions have no real suggestion as to what to do about the wave of Mohammedan militancy with a potential for aquiring nuclear arms. Their best effort so far is “be nice to them and they might go away” and they will be saying that until Code Pink are wearing pink burquas.
The Allied bombing raids also tied down thousands of antiaircraft guns,the 88mm Flak gun was also the most potent anti-tank gun of WWII.These raids were a component of the Second Front,demanded by Stalin to take some pressure off the Red Army.
Daveon,The Camps ran until the end.
In fact, schedules at the camps were sped up at the end to kill as many Jews/Gypsies/homosexuals/dissidents as possible before the Allied Armies could come in and stop it.
The latest numbers I’ve seem have 5+ million German military deaths and 4+million civilians.
After WW2 with the strides in making hardened CCC nodes, effort was spent to make weapons more accurate. Part of this also was the realization that an increased Mega-ton nuke’s damage foot print does not increase linearly due to absorption of the shock wave over distance, in the atmosphere. The increased accuracy of ordanance, much heralded during Desert Storm 1, gave rise to parallels to ancient Hindu texts whih described armies battling in one field while the farmer worked nearby, unmolested.
However, we now face a new movement of uncomprimising evil. It’s leadership has decreed that if they die they win and if they win they win. As such, many Hezzie CCC nodes are distributed among their family homes and apartments.
I believe a new understanding of civilian deaths is evolving. Just as it is pretty much accepted that a mosque used as a military structure loses it’s protections, so too I believe a consensus is slowly evolving that civilians used against their will or willingly, to shield military targets, will be deemed necessary but regrettable collateral damage.
Italy can only be called a “sideshow” by comparison to Overloard. It was an eminently rational move at the moment, and it actually was an outstanding opportunity to strike into Germany. One crucial opportunity was lost in Gen. John P. Lucas’ failure to exploit the U.S. Fifth Army’s landing at Anzio while he had Kesselring by the balls in January of ’44.
Let’s not forget Fifteenth Air Force’s operations from Italy. If we’re going to take up the prospects of a “second front” — the air component of which simply cannot be reasonably ignored — then let’s include all of them.
All the way along, Churchill had been looking ahead, since at least Casablanca, to the furthest-reaching implications of southern European operations, to include amphibious landings in the Adriatic, and his fond hope of a “right hand stroke” on Vienna only became more important as he came to realize Stalin’s long-term goals in the whole affair.
He was always right, and Eastern Europe paid a horrible pirce, for generations, for Roosevelt’s utterly stupid indulgence of The Monster.
Properly done, Italy could — and should — have been The Big Deal.
Thanks, Joshua, for supporting my reference with the facts. My information comes from a family relative RCAF veteran who was one of the now reviled Bomber Harris boys and from the father of a close friend, an officer in Canada’s famous Royal 22nd regiment. who spent a great part of WW2 working with the French resistance. According to him the Germans speeded up their operations to cleanse Europe of its “undesirables” when they knew the war was clearly lost.
As for those agonisers about what to do with the ME, the answer is agnore it, get out of it ASAP, allow no immigration from there and North Africa and other Islamic couontries because these people are not only a lost cause but hopeless basket cases as well.
The whole forelock clutching deference to Islamic countries because of the oil is a crock. The world is full of oil and the oil producing Islamic countries are irrelevant. They contribute nothing but trouble and crime. Leave them to kill one another and leave us in peace.
Nice thought Millie, but totally unworkable…..
In the USA, we now have a new concern that those who facilitate illegal alien flow across our borders, and the corrupt failing business interests that bankroll them, are now trying to buy off sheriffs along the Mexican border to not impede their business interests.
The idea of a fortress Europe, North and South America is a dream that will never come true. Whether businesses, seditious minority groups or mindless “religious” or “civic” organisations, all will work tirelessly to underminie the effort. Best to kill the bastards where they live and let the consensus (painfully) slowly evolve that Islamo-facsism is illegitimate and let it die in it’s region of birth.
This issue has been skirted round and personally I find it disturbing that it even crossed your minds. Calling it “The WW2 Solution” is just as bad as the Nazis calling it “The Final Solution”. We all know what is being suggested and though it may well be a solution, it is not one which I find acceptable. Shame on you all.
All the way along, Churchill had been looking ahead, since at least Casablanca, to the furthest-reaching implications of southern European operations, to include amphibious landings in the Adriatic, and his fond hope of a “right hand stroke” on Vienna only became more important as he came to realize Stalin’s long-term goals in the whole affair.
He was always right, and Eastern Europe paid a horrible pirce, for generations, for Roosevelt’s utterly stupid indulgence of The Monster.
Properly done, Italy could — and should — have been The Big Deal.
I quite agree. Churchill had it in mind that Italy could be used as a base from which to stike into the Balkans, attacking Germany by the back door. This could have been done in 1943. However he could not convince the Americans of this strategy, and so the Italian campaign became largely meaningless.
The Allied bombing raids also tied down thousands of antiaircraft guns,the 88mm Flak gun was also the most potent anti-tank gun of WWII.These raids were a component of the Second Front,demanded by Stalin to take some pressure off the Red Army.
Indeed they did, but the point I was making was that the bomber offensive consumed more of our war economy that it destroyed of Germany’s.
My information comes from a family relative RCAF veteran who was one of the now reviled Bomber Harris boys
Only reviled by idiots. It should be remembered that the bomber campaign cost the lives of over 50,000 of our best and brightest.
Looking at WW2 in relation to current fighting is just silly. Nothing is even remotely similar.
As to WW2 strategy and/or tactics. The Allies knew they had much greater resources than the Axis. But not better technology – that was believed to be roughly equal.
The strategy adopted was to fight continously, day and night, on multiple fronts, no truces, no pause, no negotiation, trying any idea that seemed remotely useful. That was far more exhausting to the side with fewer resources.
The strategy made sense and worked. Conjecture about how WW2 should have been fought is just that – conjecture.
Oh! And I guess they shouldn’t have made any mistakes along the way.
Comparing the Israeli bombing to WWII bombing of cities is completly inappropriate. Israel is using precision attacks against military or strategic targets.
Israeli bombing is targted at Hezbulla and other Lebanese facilities to disrupt Hezbulla command, control, and communication, to kill enemy forces, to destroy military assets, to prevent resupply from Iran and Syria. The ground campaign is intended to remove Hezbulla from the border to prevent future incursions like the one that ignited the current hostilities.
This idea that Israel is targeting civilians is wrong and reflects either ignorance, bias, or propaganda. Israel is notifying civilians to evacuate towns to protect them from harm. It is Hezbullah that is sending unguided rockets at civilians – compare that to WWII bombing of cities.
Here is a map showing just how small an area Israel has bombed in Beirut:
http://vitalperspective.typepad.com/vital_perspective_clarity/2006/07/new_map_of_beir.html
“We all know what is being suggested and though it may well be a solution, it is not one which I find acceptable. Shame on you all.”
Well, mandrill, what’s *your* solution to the problem?
Because- like it or not- the nuclear option is being spoken of more and more.
And if Iran gets a nuke, they’ll most certainly use it against Israel.
The BBC also has a page on this. The BBC’s page lists information it gets from the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs.
Even with the information the Lebanese themselves provide, it’s abundantly clear, as alkfafjafa points out, that Israel is not waging any kind of “terror campaign” designed to sap the will of the population. These air strikes are nothing like the ones over Dresden and Tokyo, and of course the scale of this war is also nothing like the scale of WWII.
Worth noting: the page lists 5,000 private homes destroyed, and yet at most 380 civilians have died in the fighting so far. In other words, Israel is indeed going out of its way to warn people out of warzones, and those warnings are being heeded.
I would argue that using massive military force is the more moral strategy: look at the first Gulf War: massive allied force destroyed the enemy’s ability to fight in one battle, made an end run on them, choking them into one roadway on which allied aircraft were free to decimate all vehicles. How many civilians died in the allied assault on Iraqi forces in Kuwait?
Likewise, the US went into Afghanistan with a similar disproportionality, surgically bombing every Taliban vehicle and building they could find.
Then Rummy and Wolfie pulled a MacNamara in Iraq: short changing military units of sufficient forces both in the invasion and the occupation. Enabling the Baathists to escape to Syria, along with who knows what sort of weaponry, perhaps even WMD, we won’t know til we go into Syria, and enabling an insurgency to operate in a country with insufficient occupation forces.
They pulled it again in the occupation of Afghanistan: the Taliban are now regrouped and resupplied, and one highway accident helped reignited popular support for them.
I am all for Israel to act disproportionately. When you fight proportionately, it makes the other guy think he has a fighting chance, even when he’s in retreat, of coming back to fight another day. Fighting disproportionately is required to achieve the sort of cognitive shock absolutely necessary to achieve surrender.
Behind the jingoism of “The Dambusters” and Barnes-Wallis’s “bouncing bomb”, and the diversionary discussion which attempts to brand critics of this exercise as “hand-wringing peaceniks” lies a difficult truth…
… this bombing achieved next to nothing. The German war effort hardly flickered as a result.
Go ahead, label me a “peacenik” if you have no logical argument in place of name-calling – but this bombing attacked the wrong targets, and achieved nothing.
Unless, Jonathan, you glory in having drowned a convent of nuns?
To the poster who claimed that they visited Dresden in the 1990’s and couldn’t see any devasation – you’re a clinical idiot with your head up your arse.
Others on this thread have already stated the facts concerning the effect of Allied bombing. The most important one for me was the stretching of German air forces to defend against Allied bombing raids, thus preventing their deployment to the Eastern Front, and probably having a much larger effect against the Red Army.
Permit this counter-factual wrt to German air force deployment: no bombing raids against Germany across the Channel. What happens?
TWG
Jonathan, thank you for link to the Christopher Hitchens’ article. Does it not follow from one of his major points that appropriate early action is the key to the prevention of all this mayhem? Perhaps the removal of Saddam Hussein in an example.
The identification of this “appropriate early action” then becomes the necessity. This however is not enough as the information battle has to be won before the action can be attempted. Today in England, unfortunately, the entirely reasonable aim of Israel to stop rockets being fired at her civilians seems to be loosing this information battle.
Whilst I applaud the ongoing effort to understand our history, the imaginative identification of future possibilities, is for me the priority.
A start to the identification “appropriate early action” could be the identification of “inappropriate early action”. An example: the demonizing of all Muslims.
Finally, any fellow posters who are irritated, provoked or just bored by my comments, just ignore them as I have already been categorized as a fool.
David Roberts (Fool)
Wobbly Guy, you commit the classic logical fallacy of extrapolating a conclusion unrelated to the point you’ve made, or indeed unrelated to the discussion-topic. The discussion-topic is the morality of using massive force. You suggest that the only alternative to a poorly-planned, poorly-executed raid on the wrong targets is – not to try at all? Permit me to suggest that a properly-planned raid on militarily significant targets (not convents of nuns washed-away by the wreckage of the Oder Dam) might actually have finished the war rather faster?
Massive force, by all means – but against useful targets, and not merely to prove the potty bomb-bouncing theories of an English eccentric.
There is a further point here. English quirkiness in waging war permitted the Soviet Union to make much greater inroads – with true “massive force” and the losses that go with it – on Nazi Germany. Let’s remember, who was it that took Berlin? Was it the Bouncing British? No, it was the Red Army. The subsequent division of Europe that followed the end of WW2 was a direct result of a lack of decisiveness in British/American tactics. (Or one might argue that the Brits and Yanks cynically held-back to allow Ivan Ivanovich to take a pounding for them first). Whatever – those poor tactics, and misapplication of massive force ultimately left Churchill and Roosevelt on the back foot at Yalta – contrary to what is taught in British schools, WW2 was won by the Russians… with some diversionary weakening of the Nazis by the Brits and Americans towards the end.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Red_army_soldiers_raising_the_soviet_flag_on_the_roof_of_the_reichstag_berlin_germany.jpg/300px-Red_army_soldiers_raising_the_soviet_flag_on_the_roof_of_the_reichstag_berlin_germany.jpg
But I suppose at least the bombing of the Oder and other Dams gave the Brits a jolly patriotic film with a good march tune in it 😉
Johnathan
Having changed jobs and country this year, i have only been an occasional visitor to Samizdata. Hence i missed your spat with Verity referred to on the previous post.
Shame she’s stormed off but i’m not surprised. I remember one thread where i could have happily strangled her and her repulsive alter-ego, GCooper (i think it was over Cameron’s ‘exploitation’ of his mentally handicapped child). However, despite being madder then a cut snake, she was entertaining and very well informed.
She gave me hell when i first started commenting here. In fact it was not unlike a College drinking club initiation test – stand up to months of intimidating and aggressive comments from Verity and you’re in.
ps – why the recent (crushingly dull) focus on weapons technology and aeroplanes?
Keith,
The use of nukes, while inadvisable, would be legitimate. Rounding Mulsims up into camps and exterminating them on an industrial scale would not.
So you can see where I’m coming from: Using a gun to shoot someone in the head is legitimate, using the same gun on a victim who is tied up merely to maim them and then pulling thier fingernails out with pliers, is not.
I don’t know how else to make my point.
Death camps are an abomination and their existence is never justifiable.
I think that talk of nukes is just american bluster. I don’t think that any western government has the balls.
I don’t see how you can read my comment as wholehearted support for area bombing. In fact, on the previous thread, I was attacked for being a “peacenic” for daring to suggest that massive bombing can be highly immoral in certain contexts. The “convent” comment of yours is just silly.
You say that there was no impact on the German economy from the raids. Well it is true that Albert Speer was able, in incredible circumstances, to sustain military production. It is also clear from what I have read that Arthur Harris went slightly off his head towards the end of the military campaign.
But I don’t think there can be much doubt either that for the British, having suffered so many big reverses, the bombing offensive was seen as a way of humbling the Nazi state. It did tie up a lot of German aircraft and materiel, and to claim that it was purely motivated by a killing lust is silly.
I agree with you about Dresden. The city was one of the finest in Europe and it was bombed, according to the Hitchens piece, to appease Stalin. Utterly shameful episode in Britain’s military history.
pommy, welcome back. Yes, Verity was amusing but she was also nuts. I used to think of her as Samizdata’s crazy aunt. After a while the joke got tired and she had to go.
With 20/20 hindsight, the answer to that rhetorical question might be yes. I certainly think that Bomber Command might have been more effective had it focussed on building more Mosquito-type fast bombers and fewer Lancasters, focussing on precision raids. The Mozzi was an incredibly quick aircraft given that it could also deliver a higher bomb load than say, a B-17 Flying Fortress.
Mocking the Dambuster raids is glib. 617 Squadron specialised in precision raids on important targets, developing use of things like the Earthquake bomb, which was used on things like the massive U-boat pens on the French Atlantic coast. Barnes Wallis, who developed the bouncing bomb, was no nutty professor. He invented the Wellington bomber and many other things besides. The idea of bouncing a bomb against a wall and punch a hole inside a dam is hardly an “eccentric” idea. Bouncing things like cannon balls was used in the Royal Navy. The flooding of the Ruhr and related areas did not cause lasting damage to the Nazi state, but it was worth a try.
Britain was not ready to launch a ground offensive against Hitler’s French armies until the spring/summer of 1944, so in the meantime, Churchill probably, and rightly concluded that bombing the crap out of German urban targets was the least-bad way to hit the Nazi state.
Daveon,
“The bombings of the British and German cities were designed to sap the will of the civilians and degrade trust and support in the government.
It didn’t work on either side. ”
True, it didn’t, but it did help save the UK from invasion.
The bombing of Berlin in 1940 had a simple effect: Hitler decided to bomb London in return which gave the RAF a window of opportunity to regroup and helped us to win the Battle of Britain. It’s one of the most significant days in winning the war.
There is a flip-side to this. What is the morality of allowing mass civilian populations to come under attack?
Well, it depends how you look at it.
If you’re like me and I suspect all of you are on this issue, it is a cowardly and immoral tactic.
If you’re Hez, it’s brilliant. Hez flagrantly started this with brazen attacks against a country that had pulled out of Leb years before. A few hundred kiddies get martyred and look how public opinion around the world is changing. Israel is now the aggressor in this conflict to a great many people. It is passive resistance taken to it’s logical conclusion. Somehow I doubt Gandhi would be too proud of them mind.
I suspect they rationalise this to themselves in terms of serving Islam. And anyway, Allah will know his own fallen etc.
This war is asymetric on more levels than technology. There is a totally different approach to life and death on both sides. Even if Israel causing deaths from colateral damaged is wrong, the far greater sin lies with Hez for actively seeking that result.
If you have to fight and fighting means killing innocents because your opponent has deliberately put them in your way then the moral blame lies entirely with the opponent.
Yes, wrt Soviet overwhelming force against Germany. They took Britain because they had relocated industry out of range of German bombers, and between that and massive supplies from US industry, had so much artillery by the time they reached Berlin they were short of space to park it all.
As for Party of God, we see the Qana “massacre” is now a staged event: the residents of the town were warned to flee north of the Latani River, repeatedly. The rest of the town was empty, just the one building with only women and children in it (where were all the men? Off fighting for Hezbollah, of course, using their own women and children as pawns) which was being used as a launching point for Hezbollah missiles, which is quite easily seen from the UAV video of missile launches now being shown on TV.
Hezbollah’s use of human shields in Qana is to be condemned, and they should be charged in international courts for war crimes, as such is clearly a vast violation of the Geneva Conventions. The Israeli video makes clear who the real criminals are in this sad drama.
Britain was not ready to launch a ground offensive against Hitler’s French armies until the spring/summer of 1944, so in the meantime, Churchill probably, and rightly concluded that bombing the crap out of German urban targets was the least-bad way to hit the Nazi state.
The question is why we could not launch D-Day until June 1944? The fact that fully 25% of our war economy was devoted to Bomber Command must be a factor.
If it takes you 25% of your war effort to destroy less than 25% of the enemy’s, then that is simply not an efficient or effective way of fighting a war. This is not to criticize the aircrew of Bomber Command, simply to point out that Bomber Harris’s theory that you could win the war by air power was wrong. No two ways about it, you can only win a war by taking control of the enemy country. France was virtually undefended in mid 1943, and if D-Day could have been carried out then, the war could have been over much quicker. Instead the effort was diverted into Bomber Command and the Italian campaign. It was simply not a good use of resources.
Ditto Mike Lorrey’s comment wrt to Hez. I’m getting annoying emails from friends citing Qana as “evidence” that I’ve been wrong all along and that the Israelis have been targeting civilians (apparently for fun) since the get-go. As though it is even possible to run two weeks of bombing raids with Israeli firepower and only kill 400 without putting some effort into avoiding civilians.
There’s certainly room for argument about how far a nation need go in avoiding civilians (which varies with the objective) – but the facts in this case speak for themselves: Israel has been doing it and Hezbollah has not. It’s really galling that many on the world stage seem to see it the other way around. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Kofi to tell Hez to knock it off with the human shield line.
Right on Nick M and Mike,
In watching the news off and on today (Fox News that is) I see a consensus emerging that civilians planted at military sites (willingly or not ) are considered regrettable collateral damage. If the West hangs tough on this, then it will go a long way toward real cessation of hostilities. Otherwise, scoundrels the world over will protect their evil schemes by wrapping them in a bullet (or bomb) proof cloak of women and children. If they place so little value on their citizens ……..
It may have been a factor. The question cannot really be answered very conclusively through simple percentages. Suppose that we said that if the money, men and energy devoted to building heavy bombers had been diverted into producing say, a top-class tank instead like the Russian T-34, or, instead, used to build more fighter-bombers, or more light armed personnel carriers, etc? I guess it is possible that we could have invaded the continent earlier. The what-ifs can be mulled over for hours and I don’t really know how that helps. All kinds of factors come in.
For example, if there had been no serious bombing campaign, then the Luftwaffe would have been freed up to deploy aircraft in other theatres, like the Russian front, the west, etc. That would have counted against both the western powers and the Russkies. It is all about trade-offs to an extent.
Reiner Torheit, tell me what significance you think the massive resources diverted into flak and airforce to defend greater Germany were. Imagine all those 88mm guns instead deployed as AT weapons on the Eastern Front.
The USAAF quite literally shot the Luftwaffe out of the daylight skies over Germany in a vast attrition campaign and the RAF EW campaign made the Luftwaffe blind and ineffective at night. By late 1944 strategic bombing accuracy, even in poor weather and at night, was sufficient to obliterate German P.O.L. refining and major stockpiling almost at will and if you do not think that had a major effect on German combat effectiveness, you are mistaken. In early 1943 the allied strategic air offensive may have been little more that futile ‘agricultural bombing’, by late 1944 it was quite, quite different when addressed to the correct targets (i.e. Carl Spaatz’s “Oil Plan”).
If you are interested in the German experience of the night strategic air offensive, I would strongly recommend Geschichte der deutschen Nachtjagd, 1017-1945 by Gebhard Aders. It is pretty much the definitive work on the subject.
Libertarians my ****! You bleat about a petty Malaysian government law about naming babies but start drooling about the massive and ruthless use of State power when it takes the form of military force!
Well Timbo, that would be because here in the real world, there are all manner of people who cannot be reasoned with or bought off with tax money and platitudes, they can only be opposed using force and at that point everything becomes subordinate to winning.
There is little point on trying to achieve a political oder that is less corrosive to liberty if you are not prepared to do what it takes to defend such an order when you have the barbarians turn up at the gates.
Feel free to try and quote Rothbard at a member of Al Qaeda if you wish or maybe even try and hit him over the head with nice hardback edition of Ethics of Liberty. Personally I perfer to take my chances with a well organised military which uses laser guided 500kg bombs myself. As I see defence as one of the few legitimate roles of the state, I would rather like the state to be good at doing that sort of thing.
The impression given by too many avowedly ‘anti-statist’ people here is that the use of powerful weaponry by the State turns them on in a way in which theoretical arguments about the limits of self-defence do not.
An example? Well, here’s one from your previous post: “laser guided 500kg bombs”. Most people would just have left it at “well organised military”.
Oh, “theoretical arguments about the limits of self-defence” turn me on plenty, brother. Especially that bit about how you’re allowed to respond to attempts on your life in kind.
By late 1944 strategic bombing accuracy, even in poor weather and at night, was sufficient to obliterate German P.O.L. refining and major stockpiling almost at will and if you do not think that had a major effect on German combat effectiveness, you are mistaken. In early 1943 the allied strategic air offensive may have been little more that futile ‘agricultural bombing’, by late 1944 it was quite, quite different when addressed to the correct targets (i.e. Carl Spaatz’s “Oil Plan”).
I quite agree that by late 1944 strategic bombing was a powerful weapon. Bomber Command could destroy a German town every few days, and were steadily working their way through the list, and the 8th Air Force, more usefully, was attacking the synthetic oil plants. Sadly, the strategic bombing campaign reached its climax just as the ground forces were actually poised to invade Germany. They ensured that the allies occupied a devastated country, but I do not think the war was much shortened. A second front in 1943 would have done this, but instead we had the Italian campaign and Bomber Harris’s 1000 bomber raids, which achieved nothing much of any military value. In March 1944 Harris launched his “Battle of Berlin” which was meant to win the war without the need for the second front. He lost a lot of aircrew, and laid waste to large parts of Berlin, but the idea that he could knock Germany out of the war by such attacks was a fantasy.
As I pointed out, to be able to mount 1000 bomber raids required the resources of 25% of the war economy. Yet Harris claimed he could win the war if he could only have 4000 bombers, which seems to imply that he wanted the entire war economy devoted to Bomber Command. The man was clearly cracked, and if the War Cabinet had swallowed his mad plan, the only result would have been that the Russians would have occupied all of Europe instaed of just the east.
It just seems to me that the strategic bombing campaign was a wasteful use of resources which would never have won the war.
trimbo, we write about military affairs here lbecause, whether we like it or not, one of the biggest issues for anyone interested in liberty is the proper use of military force and self-defence, including how such force can be used in dealing with terror, etc. We have given these issues a good airing and will continue to do so.
P De: “Feel free to try and quote Rothbard at a member of Al Qaeda if you wish or maybe even try and hit him over the head with nice hardback edition of Ethics of Liberty. Personally I perfer to take my chances with a well organised military…”
Yup. The nation-state – you can’t live with it and you won’t live without it.
A very good point on this topic was made in the United Nations yesterday:
The Israeli Ambassador said that whenever civilian casualties occurred Israel apologised for them contrary to the Hezbollah who have never apologised for anything.
A War is being fought with two opposing views on morality; wherein the pangs of conscience on the one side plays into the propaganda apparatus of the other.
Where does one drop those “500kg bombs”? This is the dilemma.
I maintain that morality, laudable as it is, has no place in War which by nature is immoral.
The case for going to War therefore has to be clearly defined and legitimized in order to justify the suspension of moral behaviour. This is a huge price to pay for a Civilized Society, one that causes both public and private soul searching.
However; once the painful decision has been made to enter into a War the whole focus of the Nation should be on winning!
Morality can only be reinstated after the hostilities have ceased and the War is over. How the Civilized Society treats and helps the vanquished is the true measure of Morality.
Christopher, first things: I unreservedly apologise for some of the the things I said or implied in the previous thread. Your posts did come across as brutal, but I should have not let them get to me.
I don’t think that we can suspend any sort of moral or ethical code during times of war. The decision to go to war, for example, may be a moral thing to do if it is the only alternative to submitting to slavery. To fight like a man rather than submit as a slave is a moral decision, albeit a terrible one to have to take.
Of course, how one treats the vanquished is a key test of morality. I think our treatment of the Germans after 1945, the Japanese after same, gives some indication of how states should behave.
Johnathan: please accept my apologies as well, and consider the whole misunderstanding as forgiven, forgotten and finished.
Indeed… which is why I am a minarchist not an anarchist. We need states, just so long as they are bound hand and foot as to what they can do. The idea behind the way the US Constitution is exactly correct in how it seperates and limits powers… it just did not go far enough and much of what did work has been undone over time.
To say that the bombardment of both British and German cities did not fulfill the purpose of demoralizing the other side, is off the point. The question is: given that the Germans initiated the bombardment of London and other British cities, thus affecting its civilian population, what was Britain supposed to do? Sit back and say “hey, bombing German cities will not demoralise them, so let us not do that”?
Of course we all would prefer that those bombings would not have taken place in any side. But once the Germans initiated it, the British had no other choice but hit back.
Now fast forward to 2006 and the Israeli position against Hezbollah attacts on its civilian population.
As I read in Atlas Shrugs yesterday: If you use your baby as cover to attack the life of my baby, you and you alone will be responsible for children’s deaths.
I learned a lot while working a year at a Quaker school while finishing up grad school.
Pennsylvania, the Quaker colony, had religious freedom so that non-Quakers would live there and fight the Indians for them.
Pacifists have the right to exist among us and hold their opinions and voice them. However, let’s not kid ourselves; pacifists rely on others to do the fighting for them, so they keep their security and freedom to speak out and protest. (This is something I remind my pacifist friends of, much to their chagrin.) I think the pacifists are realizing this to some extent. Hence, the whole “support-the-troops-but-not-the-war” movement. They know they have a debt of gratitude.
I certainly don’t want to see pacifists as elected leaders making decisions. Leave it to the hippie granola organic earth-worship college kiddie crowd and their cute demonstrations. Most of them will outgrow it with maturity and reflection upon history and current events, though some don’t.