Arthur'Bomber'Harris.

backstab

Banned
Bombing was very inaccurate back then. They had to drop huge bomb tonnages to destroy targets. With incendiary bombs, you didn't have to hit a target to destroy it. Just set the city on fire and hope it burned down.
Not a big target like a rail marshalling yard
 
Harris acknowledged at the time that if the Nazis had won the war, they would have executed him as a war criminal. That doesn't mean that he believed that he was one.

In fighting such a war, the important thing is to win it, because the winners decided what was acceptable and what wasn't. Broadly speaking, the moral justification for Allied actions was that Nazi Germany represented such evil that almost anything to put an end to the regime was justified. Naturally, the Nazis didn't see it that way...

It may not often happen in wars, but if ever there was a case of one side being clearly and totally in the wrong, in terms of both starting the war and in their behaviour during it, the Nazis qualify. As indeed do the Japanese, but that's another argument - and no-one seems to get too fussed about the firebombing of Japanese cities.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum
The firebombing of Japanese cities is overshadowed by the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities.
 
It seems to me a little surprising that some here deny that city bombing was a war crime by saying how effective it was.
Or how needed it was to win the war.
Or even against who it was commited.
A crime is a crime in spite of those factors. In my view, if in war you deliberately target civilians that's a war crime. If you round them up in a street and machine gun them -nazi style- it's a crime, if you put a bomb through his roof while they are sleeping you only change the weapon of choice. And the fact that you don't see their faces.
So if we admit that the objective was to kill civilians -even if you call them factory workers of nazi voters- IMHO it is a war crime.
I am pretty sure in 1945 people did not think a lot about it. It was killing germans or japanese, not PEOPLE. But we can see it from a different point of view today.
 
Not a big target like a rail marshalling yard
'Fraid so - even under ideal conditions, the bomb pattern of a B-17 force covered the best part of a mile. And conditions were rarely ideal; in the last seven months of the war, the weather was so bad that the day bombers used radar rather than visual bombing for 70% of their raids, which meant a pattern of around 2 miles in diameter.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum
 
It seems to me a little surprising that some here deny that city bombing was a war crime by saying how effective it was.
Or how needed it was to win the war.
Or even against who it was commited.
A crime is a crime in spite of those factors. In my view, if in war you deliberately target civilians that's a war crime. If you round them up in a street and machine gun them -nazi style- it's a crime, if you put a bomb through his roof while they are sleeping you only change the weapon of choice. And the fact that you don't see their faces.
So if we admit that the objective was to kill civilians -even if you call them factory workers of nazi voters- IMHO it is a war crime.

You are entitled to your opinion, but most people who have studied this issue do not agree with you. There is a fundamental difference between rounding up and killing civilians (by definition, in an area under your control) and bombing an area under enemy control which includes factories and factory workers supporting the war effort. Once you control an area, you are legally responsible for the people within it - that is international law.

The purpose of the bombing was not to kill people, but to disrupt production by destroying the factories and "de-housing" the people. As far as the Allies were concerned, that was achieved just as well by driving the workers out of the cities, away from the factories, as by killing them. The deaths were, in modern terminology, "collateral damage", and we still see a lot of that today, even with smart munitions.

Let me give you an analogy. It was not considered a war crime, even by the Allies, for the U-boats to torpedo merchant ships and thereby cause the death of their civilian crews, because killing the crews was not the purpose of the action. But if the U-boat then surfaced and machine-gunned the survivors, then it was a war crime.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum
 
I don't think we're going to get any resolution to the "Lets hang Harris as a war criminal/Sorry, but war is war" debate. Both sides seem to be in trenches the likes of which are unseen since 1918.

There is also a debate on whether the RAF should have switched to TAC aircraft. I doubt this was possible given the production lines, but the fact is more TAC aircraft were not much needed. From D+1 to D+60 "limejuice" was available to British (and American) troops pretty much as they wanted it. By late 1944, British artillery was the best organised in the world (an FOO could bring down 3 rounds from every field gun in an Army Group onto a specified field within 5 minutes of asking) so TAC was not really necessary.

Incidentally the regimental diaries I have read indicate that TAC was regarded by the infantry as usually inaccurate. However, they quite liked it as the explosions, noise, etc tended to affect morale.
 
Tony, I see your point, but have to disagree. In the sinking of ships, it is clear that the target is the ship itself, its cargo, not the crew. The bombing of factories would be the correct analogy. But the bombing of residential areas was deliberately targeting civilians, and they tried to kill as many as possible, using weapons designed to do so like phosphorous bombs. Curtis Le May himself said, years after the war, that if Japan would have won "we would have been charged for acting like war criminals". Harris also has been quoted as saying "I kill thousands of people every night".
 
For those who do not seem to think that the strategic bombing campaign had effects on the German war industries such as production and muunitions etc, should refer to Speer's memoirs. Speer states explicitly that the decentralisation program that he oversaw was in response to the damage being done by 24 hour/day bombing raids (implicitly stating that the RAF as well as the USAAF were contributing)

The fact that Speer's decentralisation policy eventually led to an *increase* in German production is a triibute to Speer, not a criticism of the bombing campaign
 
But the bombing of residential areas was deliberately targeting civilians, and they tried to kill as many as possible, using weapons designed to do so like phosphorous bombs.
The incendiary bombs were not directly lethal - they were intended to set buildings alight. As I have said, they were not specifically trying to kill people, merely "de-house" them so they could no longer live there and could not work in the factories. Many people died, of course, just as many merchant sailors died when their ships were torpedoed.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum
 
Forget about the moral debate - I want to know more about the plausibility and effects of the Allies never adopting a policy of area bombing.
 
The fact that Speer's decentralisation policy eventually led to an *increase* in German production is a triibute to Speer, not a criticism of the bombing campaign

I assume you mean that Speer increased production in spite of decentralisation, not because of it, right?
 
Forget about the moral debate - I want to know more about the plausibility and effects of the Allies never adopting a policy of area bombing.

That is a difficult one to answer. The whole raison d'etre of the RAF was strategic bombing; they took on other roles with reluctance, under pressure. Without strategic bombing, there was logically no reason for the RAF to exist - their resources could have been divided up between the army and the navy, as before (which is, of course, partly why they were so wedded to it).

Your POD should therefore go back at least to 1918 when the RAF was formed. And it would have to assume that Douhet's ideas (the Italian proponent of strategic bombing in the 1920s) were not accepted. Difficult, given the fuss in WW1 caused by the Zeppelin and Gotha raids on Britain.

If all of that happened and Britain still suffered the Blitz, you can bet that there would have been an outcry in favour of striking back in kind, by bombing German cities. It is really hard to imagine that this could have been resisted on moral grounds at that time. So bombers would probably still have been built and used, although the process would have got off to a slower start.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum
 
Firebombing caused more deaths in total than the combined total of the two atomic bombs. In Tokyo alone, one raid killed 100,000.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum
Be that as it may, they still overshadow them. You hear tons of debate over the use of the A-bombs, but never any debate over the firebombing of Japanese cities.
 
Last edited:
Top