new book: 'Britain 1st to bomb civilians indiscriminately '

[Hannover]

It was the British who began to bomb indiscriminately.

source: The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945, by Richard Overy.
reviewed here:
"Second World War bombings meticulously chronicled:
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/ ... icled#full

excerpts from review:

It was the British who began to bomb indiscriminately. (Overy suggests that “British cities might have been spared the full horrors of the winter of 1940-41”, had Bomber Command not began to press its long-range attacks in the summer of 1940.) Churchill was under enormous political pressure to show the people of occupied Europe that Britain meant business – after the fall of France and the retreat of Dunkirk, the RAF was virtually the only weapon Churchill possessed to strike back at Germany.

Overy details the escalation of bombing attacks from limited strikes to the all-out obliteration of German cities and towns. Overy quotes Sir Richard Peirse, Harris’s predecessor at Bomber Command, who admitted to a sympathetic audience in late 1941 that the air force had been attacking “the people themselves”. He offered this explanation “because”, he explained “for a long time, the government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call military targets … I can assure you, Gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples”.

In no instance was strategic bombing a war-winning game changer. It certainly brought misery, death and destruction to those – English, Italian, French, German, Polish – who had to endure it. “Bombs belonged to my life,” mused one German schoolgirl. But it was a futile pursuit. “Long-range bombing in the Second World War was a crude strategy,” Overy observes, “a wasteful use of resources, since most bombs did not hit the intended target, even when that target was the size of a city centre. Strategic bombing proved in the end to be inadequate in its own terms for carrying out its principal assignments and was morally compromised by deliberate escalation against civilian populations.”

- Hannover

[hermod]

excerpts from review:

It was the British who began to bomb indiscriminately. (Overy suggests that “British cities might have been spared the full horrors of the winter of 1940-41”, had Bomber Command not began to press its long-range attacks in the summer of 1940.) Churchill was under enormous political pressure to show the people of occupied Europe that Britain meant business – after the fall of France and the retreat of Dunkirk, the RAF was virtually the only weapon Churchill possessed to strike back at Germany.

False. Churchill ordered indiscriminate bombings the day after he was appointed Prime Minister, long before the fall of France and the retreat of Dunkirk, as he had announced he would do as early as during WW1; when he stated: "Perhaps the next time round the way to do it will be to kill women, children and the civilian population." Of course, as usually, Churchill used the German offensive in the West as an excuse, but one has to be really naive to believe that was the real reason for that policy.

10 May 1940: Churchill appointed Prime Minister.
11 May - 12 May 1940: deliberate bombing of the residential areas of Mönchengladbach-Rheydt.

On 3 September 1939 the French and British empires had declared war on Germany and UK's Royal Air Force began attacking German warships along the German coast with the North Sea.

The attacks by the Royal Air Force (RAF) on German cities began with the attack on Wilhelmshaven on 5 September 1939.

Eight months later, on 9 May 1940 began the German offensive in the West. On 11 May the British Cabinet decided to unleash the Bomber Command on the air war against the German hinterland. The following night British planes aimlessly dropped bombs for the first time on residential areas of Mönchengladbach-Rheydt. And from then on made such attacks on cities in the Ruhr area night after night. Up to 13 May 1940, i.e. two days later,the German side registered a total of 51 British air attacks on non-military targets plus 14 attacks on military targets such as bridges, railway tracks, defense and industrial plants. The first carpet bombing of a German city was in the night from 15 to 16 May 1940 in Duisburg. After that the RAF committed repeated air attacks on German cities. The night of 24th August 1940 - bombs meant to be dropped on the Thames haven oil storage depot and on the Short's factory at Rochester, by mistake or simply because they were randomly unloaded in order to escape fighters, fell on the City of London and nine other districts inside the Greater London limit. Incendiaries lit fires in Bethnal Green, and St Giles' Church in Cripplegate was damaged. Oxford Street department storeswere damaged. Nine people were killed and 58 injured.

On 6/7 September 1940, a German air raid on London took place - but specifically on military targets such as ports, railway stations, war factories and power stations. Crews were expressly prohibitted to drop their bombs on residential areas because thereby "no war deciding success could be reached."


http://fr.scribd.com/doc/87187334/Churc ... ties-First

[Kingfisher]

Can you give a source for "Perhaps the next time round the way to do it will be to kill women, children and the civilian population.", please, Hermod?

[hermod]

Can you give a source for "Perhaps the next time round the way to do it will be to kill women, children and the civilian population.", please, Hermod?

The Daily Telegraph (among others)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... minal.html

[Barrington James]

In May of 1940 Hitler still had hopes of getting Great Britain to call off its long planned war, an extension of its WW1 aim to destroy Germany and Russia - which was a neat trick considering the fact that Russia and Germany were on the opposite sides in WW1. In any case, in order to ruin all chances of Hitler’s peace plans and , just as importantly, to get the British people to follow his lead into war, Churchill, as stated above , immediately began to escalate the phoney war into a real bombing war as soon as he could by secretly bombing Germany. Of course, what made this war such a good thing in the minds of the British war mongers was the fact that Hitler had no four engine bombers, whereas the British did, and they, the Brits, would soon have their hideous Lancaster bomber and its 20 ton payload. It seemed like an unfair fight: a bombing war in which only one side had real bombers. Read David Irving, AJP Taylor, David Hoggan, Liddel Hart,…

Two years later on 1942, the bombing of civilians, a war crime by the way, became a secret, though much denied British war policy.

"This decision of the War Cabinet was kept a closely guarded secret from the British public for nearly twenty years until it was unobtrusively revealed in 1961 in a little book entitled Science and Government by the physicist and novelist, Sir Charles Snow, in which occurred the following oft-quoted passage which was immediately translated and published in every language in the world:

"Early in 1942 Professor Lindemann, by this time Lord Cherwell and a member of the Cabinet, laid a cabinet paper before the Cabinet on the strategic bombing of Germany. It described in quantitative terms the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next eighteen months (approximately March 1942 – September 1943). The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them and so are bound to waste bombs; factories and "military objectives" had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit. The paper claimed that – given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of aircraft – it would be possible, in all the larger towns of Germany (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants), to destroy 50 per cent of all houses.' (pp. 47-48.)" "

So with the Brits bombing Germany at night, the Americans bombing it during the day , (at the expense of 40, 000 British air crew and even more Americans, and the deaths of millions of Germans in their beds) and with the USA supplied and directed Red Army destroying the German army on the Eastern front, followed up with the post war death camps of Eisenhower, the post war genocide of millions of German Nationals throughout Eastern Europe from Poland to the Ukraine, and the Ethnic cleansing of East Prussia by the Russians after the war, one would have thought that Great Britain would have gotten its wish to destroy Germany once and for all. But it didn’t work out that way. Why not?

[Mortimer]

BOMBING VINDICATED is the name of a book written by J M Spaight and published in 1944. He was an official of the British air ministry and he admitted that the British government was deliberately targeting civilians. He also admitted that Hitler offered to cease the bombing of civilians if the RAF did the same. Churchill refused.
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/spaight.htm

[Barrington James]

Thanks for the book...I have wanted to buy it for years now but I didn't like the cost...BJ

[hermod]

BOMBING VINDICATED is the name of a book written by J M Spaight and published in 1944. He was an official of the British air ministry and he admitted that the British government was deliberately targeting civilians. He also admitted that Hitler offered to cease the bombing of civilians if the RAF did the same. Churchill refused.

http://www.jrbooksonline.com/spaight.htm

Because Britain continued to resist "the Blitz", [Colonel general Hans] Jeschonnek (Chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe during WW2) suggested in September 1940 that the Luftwaffe should terror bomb London's residential suburbs, a suggestion declined by Adolf Hitler.

Shirer, William (1983). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jeschonnek

Hitler stayed the hand of the Luftwaffe and forbade any attack on London under pain of court-martial; the all-out saturation bombing of London, which his strategic advisers Räder, Jodl, and Jeschonnek all urged upon him, was vetoed

http://britain.greyfalcon.us/Poland.htm

Who Started the Blitz?

Between 1940 and 1945, sixty-one German cities with a total population of 25 millions were destroyed or devastated in a bombing campaign initiated by the British government. Destruction on this scale had no other purpose than the indiscriminate mass murder of as many German people as possible quite regardless of their civilian status. It led to retaliatory bombing resulting in 60,000 British dead and 86,000 injured.

'It is one of the greatest triumphs of modern emotional engineering that, in spite of the plain facts of the case which could never be disguised or even materially distorted, the British public, throughout the Blitz Period (1940-1941), remained convinced that the entire responsibility for their sufferings rested on the German leaders.' - Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P. Veale.

'It may be Inconvenient History but England rather than Germany initiated the murderous slaughter of bombing civilians thus bringing about retaliation. Chamberlain conceded that it was "absolutely contrary to International law." It began in 1940 and Churchill believed it held the secret of victory. He was convinced that raids of sufficient intensity could destroy Germany's morale, and so his War Cabinet planned a campaign that abandoned the accepted practice of attacking the enemy's armed forces and, instead made civilians the primary target. Night after night, RAF bombers in ever increasing numbers struck throughout Germany, usually at working class housing, because it was more densely packed.' -The Peoples' War, Angus Calder. London, Jonathan Cape, 1969.*

'Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones... Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany... there was a reasonable possibility that our capital and industrial centres would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany... We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland... Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves.' - J.M. Spaight, CB, CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry, Bombing Vindicated.

'The attack on the Ruhr was therefore an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London. The primary purpose of these raids was to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a similar character on Britain. Such raids would arouse intense indignation in Britain against Germany and so create a war psychosis without which it would be impossible to carry on a modern war.' - The Royal Air Force, 1939-1945, The Fight at Odds, p. 122. Dennis Richards, Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

'They [the British Air Chiefs] argued that the desired result, of reducing German industrial production, would be more readily achieved if the homes of the workers in the factories were destroyed; if the workers were kept busy arranging for the burial of their wives and children, output might reasonably be expected to fall... It was concentrated on working class houses because, as Professor Lindemann maintained, a higher percentage of bloodshed per ton of explosives dropped could be expected from bombing houses built close together, rather than by bombing higher class houses surrounded by gardens.' - Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P. Veale.


http://www.heretical.com/miscellx/blitz.html

http://fotos.fotoflexer.com/7f51b3f2844 ... a3576d.jpg