Allies 'massacred' German civilians, says author

Kyt · Oct 11, 2008

Firebomb fury: Allies 'massacred' German civilians, says author

It's the controversy that refuses to die, even 63 years after the end of the Second World War.

Only a year ago, a somewhat bruised and battered Canadian War Museum thought the controversy had been put to rest. And now, up pops a book that comes within a centimetre of branding some allied military leaders as "war criminals" for the massive bombing of German cities and the resulting deaths of 600,000 people, mainly civilians.

The book, which is due to hit stores Oct. 14, is called Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942-45. The author is Randall Hansen, a political science professor at the University of Toronto.

Hansen's views are well-known by those familiar with the Bomber Command controversy that erupted at the war museum last year when veterans complained an exhibition on the bombing campaign made even ordinary airmen look like "war criminals."

The Senate held hearings on the issue and Hansen was among the expert witnesses. Hansen also wrote newspaper articles and participated in debates with veterans on the issue. Now, he is unleashing a hard-hitting book condemning the large-scale bombing of German civilian targets.

The need to defeat Germany can not justify "what in the end became a massacre," Hansen's book concludes.

"It cannot change the fact that area bombing was a moral and strategic failure, whether or not it was a war crime."

Well, does Hansen think the bombing campaign was a war crime perpetuated by Canadians and other allies on the Germans?

It is difficult to get a firm answer from him. In an interview, Hansen did say that the deliberate bombing of a city for no clear purpose seems like a war crime "or something close to it."

He is careful to put most of the blame on Arthur "Bomber" Harris (known to his critics as "Butcher" Harris), the British architect of the campaign to bomb civilians. Hansen does not blame the British and Canadian airmen who were simply following orders as they dropped the bombs on German cities.

"I don't hold them in any way responsible for this," Hansen said in the interview.

Area bombing resulted in the destruction of many homes, churches, shops and other buildings with non-military and non-industrial functions. Precision bombing, which was favoured more by the Americans, tended to target factories, railroads and other targets key to the German war effort.

Harris believed that area bombing would so reduce German morale that the country's military would be crippled.

However, Hansen argues that the campaign was ineffective and he even quotes German leaders as saying the war would have ended a few years sooner had the bombing campaign concentrated on certain bottlenecks in the military machine, notably ball bearing factories, rather than on civilian targets.

The book contains many grisly accounts of the suffering caused by the bombing. Cities would be devastated by firestorms, melting the pavement on streets and even causing rivers to boil. Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden, Berlin and many other cities were among the targets.

Hansen's book could very well re-ignite a debate similar to the one that raged last year over the war museum exhibit. The Senate committee joined veterans in pressing for a softening of the wording on the text panel of the exhibit.

The war museum director, Joe Geurts, balked. Then Geurts mysteriously disappeared, a new director was appointed and the text panel was changed to address concerns of veterans groups.

The only people complaining after all that were historians and other academics who considered the war museum was engaging in revisionist history to appease veterans and their supporters in Parliament. Hansen was among those complainers.

Hansen started his research on Bomber Command before the war museum fight erupted. He offers

no apologies for taking a stand so unpopular among Canadian war veterans.

"On the contrary: The freedom to write and speak the truth is what the aircrew were fighting for," Hansen writes in the very last line of the book.
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Amazon.com: Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942--1945: Randall Hansen: Books

Adrian Roberts · Oct 11, 2008

This debate will run and run. But the article below suggests the opposite, that the casualty figures at Dresden were much lower than some figures suggest, less than 25000 rather than 500,000. Not that 25000 dead civilians is anything other than terrible, but the fact that one can say "only" is in the context of what is still the bloodiest war in history. And the interesting thing about this article is that it is German researchers who are suggesting the lower figure. It is also pointing out that it is the German Far-Right who have a vested interest in claiming a higher figure. This puts them in an unholy alliance with the anti-establishment Left in Britain and Canada who use the higher figures for their own ends. It is very bad history to say that Britain, or Harris in particular, invented the concept of indiscriminate bombing.

Dresden bombing death toll lower than thought - Telegraph

For decades historians have accused the Allies of killing up to 500,000 civilians on the night of February 13 1945, when British and American planes destroyed the old city centre.
But a special commission, comprising 13 prominent German historians, has now revealed that the previous figures were exaggerated or derived from dubious sources.
Instead, they concluded that no more than 25,000 people died during the attacks, debunking the claims of many revisionist historians who wished to compare the bombing to the Holocaust.
The commission, assembled in 2004 and headed by one the country's most prominent military historians, Rolf-Dieter Mueller, studied all the available evidence about the event - much of which was examined for the first time.
Mr Mueller said that the final report of the commission, to be published next year, aims to end the "ludicrous speculation" about the Dresden causalities, which was used for propaganda by the Nazis.
"In the course of its research the commission has so far identified around 18,000 victims of the air raids in Dresden," Mr Mueller said. "The commission estimates that a maximum of 25,000 people lost their lives in the February attacks."
Unofficially, commission members indicated that they did not expect the final death toll to exceed 20,000.
Immediately after the bombing, the wartime authorities of Dresden estimated the number of casualties to be up to 25,000, but Nazi propaganda chiefs circulated much higher figures.
The exaggerated numbers were later manipulated by neo-Nazis and revisionist historians who compared the "Dresden massacre" to the Holocaust.
David Irving, the British historian, used the Dresden bombing to argue that Allied leaders, including Winston Churchill, were responsible for genocide-like war crimes.
The commission examined all the documents relating to the burial of bombing victims and data on the number of registered inhabitants and refugees living in the city at the time.
It also examined photographs, soil samples from the city, the testimony of survivors and new interviews with surviving witnesses to the attacks.
The findings showed that the high temperatures created by the explosions were not sufficient to make a human body completely disappear - a claim used at the time to justify the inflated casualty figures.
However, the new report does not dispute the severity of the attacks, which only took 63 minutes but claimed a disproportionately large number of victims.
Antony Beevor, the author of Berlin: The Downfall, 1945, said the bombings were not unnecessarily brutal. "This argument is removed from the context that they were the ones who invented terror bombing," Mr Beevor said, referring to German attacks on Coventry, Rotterdam and Warsaw.
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Antipodean Andy · Oct 12, 2008

An interesting counter argument, AR. I was going to make exactly the same comment re what the "other" side did. If they're going to argue about Dresden and the bombing campaign, perhaps they need to first consider Conventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw etc

Glass houses and stones come to mind. I'm not starting a "we did not start it" argument, just that nothing like this can be looked at in isolation.

Kyt · Oct 12, 2008

Adrian Roberts said: ↑

It is also pointing out that it is the German Far-Right who have a vested interest in claiming a higher figure. This puts them in an unholy alliance with the anti-establishment Left in Britain and Canada who use the higher figures for their own ends.
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Maybe not the first but one of the most vocal voices on the "higher figures" debate is David Irving, and we all know where he stands.

David Irving - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the first edition (of The Destruction of Dresden), Irving's estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000 — notably higher than most previously published figures. These figures became authoritative and widely accepted in many standard reference works. In later editions of the book over the next three decades, he gradually adjusted the figure downwards to 50,000-100,000. According to the evidence introduced by Richard J. Evans at the libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, Irving based his estimates of the dead of Dresden on the word of one individual who provided no supporting documentation, used forged documents, and described one witness who was a urologist as Dresden's Deputy Chief Medical Officer. The doctor has since complained about being misidentified by Irving, and further, was only reporting rumours about the death toll.
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Unfortunately, at the time of the book coming out Irving was still considered a genuine historian, and such his work has been citedin many books afterwards. So a lot of people are now conviced that the higher figures are the true ones, and that it is the new lower figures that are revisionist!!

spidge · Oct 12, 2008

Kyt said: ↑

Maybe not the first but one of the most vocal voices on the "higher figures" debate is David Irving, and we all know where he stands.

David Irving - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unfortunately, at the time of the book coming out Irving was still considered a genuine historian, and such his work has been citedin many books afterwards. So a lot of people are now conviced that the higher figures are the true ones, and that it is the new lower figures that are revisionist!!
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This misinformation will continue to raise it's head by those who determine their numbers by (as you say) discredited historians.

You also have people analysing the actions taken by those in wartime with their personal morals in the 21st century.

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