Firebombing in Europe

Bring Hitler down by Killing Civilians . Bomber Harris was a War Criminal !
Easy for you to say, God damnit! Its called a WORLD WAR people! Anything goes, right or wrong. It was kill or be killed, no time to pour over faded ink on crumbly bits of paper while the bombs rain down. They believed that stategic bombing would help shorten the war, it was worth trying. No point in giving the Nazis and Japs a free ride. On the subject of the Japs, everyone was a possible combatant and material producer. Any attack on Japanese cities was an attack on its war industry. Plus, anything that happened to Japan or Germany were no where near as bad as the Holocaust or the Rape or Nanjing, etc. If they of Bomber Command and the USAAF hadn't been willing to lay down their lives you'd be speaking German and saying "Heil Hitler" all day if you were lucky, or a slave to the Japanese if you weren't. :mad::mad::mad:
 
Dear Michele,

please stop putting words into my mouth, I talked about strategic area bombings, not strategic bombings. Straw men attacks are so lame.

I concentrated my comments on the Thameshaven raid as it was the only attack You listed. It is not my job to make Your points in a debate, sorry.

After enjoying Your innovative legal approach in the Nuremberg thread, I have once again been exposed to Your interesting legal ideas. Refreshing.

Some free advice: Googling a few treaties is a good start, but not enough.

Have a nice day.
 

Markus

Banned
It is however worth mentioning that the German ultimatum specifically threatened the Dutch with the utter destruction of the city, and of other Dutch cities, by aerial bombing. The Dutch were, in other words, expected to give up the fight and surrender under the threat of area bombing of their civilians.

I´m not aware that the ultimatum was also about other towns. In the case of Rotterdam it was not the attackers fault there where civilians in what legally was a fortress.


So the Germans were playing the same trick the Allies would later play on them; exploit a situation where the city can be legitimately bombed and it contains war-related targets, for actually trying to force the enemy to surrender outright.
Stop! The situations were TOTALLY different. In Rotterdam the frontline was at or in the town. German ground troops on one side, Dutch at the other.
Towns like Cologne and Hamburg were firebombed when there were no allied troops the gate of the towns. The Brits simply declared that the presence of some AA-units meant a town were "defended" according the the definition of the Hague convention and thus could be attacked. An interesting legal opinion, but the actual situations could not have been more different.
 
If I remember rightly, wasn't Warsaw being bombed (with expected civilian deaths) more or less from the declaration of war upon Poland? German troops were not in reach of the city untill weeks later. Given such was planned before the tactical successes that allowed Germany to reach Warsaw it seems difficult to justify it as purely tactical bombing.
 
It would be unnecessary. You might be able to get a firestorm started in parts of Berlin (and other cities that refused to burn despite numerous attempts), but feeding it would require constant bomber streams. In most German cities, there's enough fuel already. A napalm bomb is overkill in one spot. Small incendiaries are by far the superior strategy.

What the British would do is pack incendiary sticks around a 4000lb high capacity bomb fused for impact rather than penetration and have it blow the roofs of of the buildings while the sticks set the contents on fire. The rubble in the immediate area burned wee too.
 

Markus

Banned
No, an attack was planned, but not executed. Air raids on the city did not start until two weeks later. On Sept.8th german units already reached the outskirts of Warsaw. From that day Warsaw -legally a fortress now- was shelled with artillery. On Sept. 24th and 25th massive air raids were flown targeting military installations all over the city. By that time many bomber units had already been deployed west, so Ju52 transports were being used as auxiliary bombers, which did not made accurate targeting hardly possible.
 
As the original author of this thread, I'm surprised how far off-track it has become. I suppose there's not much I can do about it, but at the same time I really wonder how many people think that they're going to change each other's opinions about the issue.
 

backstab

Banned
Easy for you to say, God damnit! Its called a WORLD WAR people! Anything goes, right or wrong. It was kill or be killed, no time to pour over faded ink on crumbly bits of paper while the bombs rain down. They believed that stategic bombing would help shorten the war, it was worth trying. No point in giving the Nazis and Japs a free ride. On the subject of the Japs, everyone was a possible combatant and material producer. Any attack on Japanese cities was an attack on its war industry. Plus, anything that happened to Japan or Germany were no where near as bad as the Holocaust or the Rape or Nanjing, etc. If they of Bomber Command and the USAAF hadn't been willing to lay down their lives you'd be speaking German and saying "Heil Hitler" all day if you were lucky, or a slave to the Japanese if you weren't. :mad::mad::mad:

That is so pathetic ... I'm sure Hitler and his cronies thought the same thing. Just because we are the good guys, this does not mean we get to burn German woman and children because the Great Bomber Harris think it might win the war !
 
Georgepatton, if you say that anything is valid in order to win the war, you are in fact saying there are no such things as war crimes, as anything can be justified as helping to win the war from the executioner's point of view. And if you are saying that anything was valid if you were on the good side, it deprives the the allies, of its moral strength, something that on my view was important and worthy.
 
Bring Hitler down by Killing Civilians . Bomber Harris was a War Criminal !
Given the lack of the technology for a precision bombing(IMO true precision bombing during the war was a myth)are you saying that there was an alternative for bringing down the economy of the Third Reich, other than bloodily prolonging the war and have tens, possibly hundreds of thousands more allied servicemen died, not to mention the few survivors in the concentration camps?

Yes it was terrible, but the ends justified the means. Arthur Harris helped shorten the war considerably and liberate millions of Europeans. If you dispute the means you would effectively be denying millions freedom for years after. Even Speer stated that the air war was Germanys greatest defeat.

I also have to point out the primary aim was not to kill, but to destroy the German economy. There is a difference.
 
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Georgepatton, if you say that anything is valid in order to win the war, you are in fact saying there are no such things as war crimes, as anything can be justified as helping to win the war from the executioner's point of view. And if you are saying that anything was valid if you were on the good side, it deprives the the allies, of its moral strength, something that on my view was important and worthy.
Look, in a fight for your life, do you think about if how you're fighting is right or wrong. That's something you figure out after the war. If it can be justified as productive to the war effort, then you should do it. The Allies thought that they could win the war by attacking German cities, which were heavily defended military targets. Maybe firebombing was a bit much, but there are people with far more blood on their hands than Harris, but they never get talked about. Precision bombing just didn't happen during the war, and there was no way to hit any one thing, or any group of things. Air power was a weapon the Allies had, and good thing they used it rather than deciding it was immoral and wasting tens of thousands of British and American lives on the ground.
 
Georgepatton, if you say that anything is valid in order to win the war, you are in fact saying there are no such things as war crimes, as anything can be justified as helping to win the war from the executioner's point of view. And if you are saying that anything was valid if you were on the good side, it deprives the the allies, of its moral strength, something that on my view was important and worthy.

There are no such things as war crimes, except those actions deemed such by the victors after the unconditional surrender of the vanquished. They are, pretty much, a post-WWII construct as a means to punish perceived excesses in the past war and prevent possible excesses in future wars.

It is just the fact that if one does not fight as brutally as your opponent you are not going to win. In Total War everything is possible since it is usually the entire nation that has been completely mobilized for war. With an entire nation behind the war effort it is easy to consider that all inhabitants are 'citizen soldiers'.
 
You are right, but then I find a bit hipocrytal to consider war crimes, as it has been done, the killing of Pows, wiping out towns (by hand, so to speak, not with bombers) or the sinking of civilian ships. The objective was the same, to hurt the opponent's war effort by killing unarmed civilians. Of course I am judging from my XXI century, civilian, morality, but is the one I got. If I was born in the Rome in Neron's time I would find it normal to feed christians to the lions.
 
Factories to build the weapons of warfare (planes, tanks, bomb, guns, bullets etc) need people to work in them. These people generally live close to the factories so if you are dropping bombs on said factories from 30 thousand feet you may very well hit the homes of people that work there. Will this effect the productivity at the factory hell yes the workers are the weakest link in the chainest of weapon production.

Is this the same as rounding up part of you own population because of what ever reason and killing them. Is it the same as working to death starving or shooting soldiers or civilians who have surrendered and given up their weapons.

For every Dresden there was a Coventry, the Allies never starved or shot their prisoners. I guess before D-Day by which time they owned the skys they could have saved a lot of allied lives by carpet bombing their way to Berlin.
 
Pows can slow your advance at a decisive moment. Then you shoot them in order to keep going without letting enemy soldiers behind. Villages give support to partisans that are attacking your rearguard. Then you destroy the villages to deprive them of that support. It all can be justified as an effort to win the war and save your own soldier's lives.
And I am sure that late stage strategic bombing was not directed at factories, but deliberately targeted civilians, choosing the best bomb (firebombs against Tokio or Hamburg) to kill as many as possible. Or are you saying that Schweinfurt and Dresden were the same tipe of raid?
Did the germans commit worst crimes? Of course. The nazis were evil, but does it justify all the allies actions? hardly.
I've always thought that what made strategic bombing more bearable was not the effect or the purpose, but the weapon. Wonder if the same pilots would have killed all those civilians (yes, the workers of the factories and their sons and daughters) with a machinegun or a flamethrower and still consider they were doing the right thing.
 
I would recommend trying to find a copy of a British book from 1944, written by the Principal Assistant Secretary of the Air Ministry, James Spaight, "Bombing Vindicated". It seems to be relevant to the discussion but sadly neglected.

Perhaps it was neglected because the frank and truthful language in the book became useful for the German propaganda. Perhaps not the effect Spaight had wanted....

Here are some interesting quotes from his book.:D
 
...Snip some text....
I've always thought that what made strategic bombing more bearable was not the effect or the purpose, but the weapon. Wonder if the same pilots would have killed all those civilians (yes, the workers of the factories and their sons and daughters) with a machinegun or a flamethrower and still consider they were doing the right thing.

Yes, considering what the infantry got up to they probably would. Take this quote for example. "'We just blew it all up. We don't know if there were women and children or whatever, we just blew them up,'"

And as to what another post said about not starving prisoners....:D
 
I´m not aware that the ultimatum was also about other towns. In the case of Rotterdam it was not the attackers fault there where civilians in what legally was a fortress.


Stop! The situations were TOTALLY different. In Rotterdam the frontline was at or in the town. German ground troops on one side, Dutch at the other.
Towns like Cologne and Hamburg were firebombed when there were no allied troops the gate of the towns. The Brits simply declared that the presence of some AA-units meant a town were "defended" according the the definition of the Hague convention and thus could be attacked. An interesting legal opinion, but the actual situations could not have been more different.

If one type of bombing was wrong why is not the other as wrong .
Lets talk about the crew members that made the raids how many ever made it back from all ther missions . And How much of the Damage to the German Houseing was from Falling Flak rounds .
As a child I spent some time in Germany in the Early 50's and saw the results of the bombing raids yes they were bad byt what is the diffrence in dieing from a bombing raid or in an artrly attack or even by a stray round that kills you , you are dead eather way .


Something you have to rember is you are putting todays value on life to 1940's value of life . Today the average citizen would be up in arms over a single bombing raid of a 100 B-17 bombers . Back then they were willing to kill 1,000's civilans to end a war were we are up set it we kill 2 Civilans by accadent in a bombing raid .
 
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