ZGram - 2/15/2004 - "Terror Bombing" Part I
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Sun Feb 15 09:51:07 EST 2004
Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny: Now more than ever!
February 15, 2004
Good Morning from the Zundelsite
Yesterday, two thousand people walked in silent columns to honor the
memory of the men, women and children who died in the Dresden
Holocaust caused by three ferocious Allied bombing raids on February
13-14, 1945. Michael Walsh of England has summarized and footnoted
how some of these, and similar, bombing raids took place. I am
running a two-part Zgram to make up for yesterday and catch up with
today. Please note: Sources are listed at the end of Terror
Bombing, Part II"
[START]
TERROR BOMBING:
THE CRIME OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
"In terms of personal success, there has been no career more
fortunate than that of Winston Churchill. In terms of human suffering
to millions of people and destruction of the noble edifice of mankind
there has been no career more disastrous." -
The European and English Journal. Source. American Manifest Destiny
and the Holocausts. P.176
"The most uncivilized means of warfare that the world had known since
the Mongol invasions."
February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Flo-rence
of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not
one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the
city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was
filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for
"suggestions how to blaze 600.000 refugees". He wasn't interested how
to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More
than 700.000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One
bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city
reached 1600 o centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of
bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city
can't be traced. Appr. 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded
soldiers and the animals of the zoo were murdered in one night.
This autumn the British Broadcasting Corporation will be releasing a
£2 million two-part drama called 'Night and Day'. It purports to be a
true account of RAF Bomber Command's monstrous conflagration of
Europe. It will in fact be a crude one-sided attempt to launder a
series of British and American war crimes equaled only by Josef
Stalin and Ghenghis Khan's grotesque 'scorched earth' policies which
reduced eastern Europe to ashes and decimated its population.
Doubtless, the same programme makers would be able to find similar
justification for the equally evil 'hidden holocaust'. This occurred
when Josef Stalin's British equipped Red Army in 1945 turned northern
Germany into a wasteland upon which was scattered the remains of four
million Germans, mostly women and children. Not even animals were
spared.
The BBC's Night and Day programme will be a carefully edited
'account' of RAF Bomber Command's air war against Germany; a
glorification of what the eminent British war historian Captain Sir.
Basil Liddell Hart declared as being "the most uncivilized means of
warfare that the world had known since the Mongol invasions." (1)
'ABSOLUTELY CONTRARY TO INTERNATIONAL LAW'
Night and Day will certainly fail to mention, as did Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain, that England's bombing policy "was absolutely
contrary to international law." (2). The Prime Minister, before being
ousted in a Winston Churchill coup, told a packed House of Commons in
London: 'His Majesty's Government will never resort to the deliberate
attack on women and children and other civilians for the purpose of
mere terrorism.' (3).
The slick an' sick 'Day and Night' docu-drama will undoubtedly trot
out the usual canard summed up by Bomber Command's Bill Reid, VC of
Crieff in Perthshire who said: "In 1942 the bombing of Germany was
the only way we had of hitting back." (Daily Mail, 7 February 2001).
Note the key words: 'Hitting back!' You will hear it time after time
during this programme.
This lends spurious credence to the 'Britain at Bay' lie that
suggests that Britain had no other means of defending herself against
the Nazi onslaught. It will of course fail to point out the since
proven facts. All German air attacks against Britain were in
retaliation against Britain's air war. As Britain's most illustrious
historian A.J.P Taylor reminded us, it was Germany that was at bay.
Another myth peddled by the victor nation's 'palace journalists' is
that Germany gave as good as it got. Hardly!
During the war, more bombs by weight were dropped on the city of
Berlin than were released on the whole of Great Britain during the
entire war.
All German towns and cities above 50,000 population were from 50% to
80% destroyed. Dresden with a population larger than that of
Liverpool was incinerated with an estimated 135,000 civilian
inhabitants burned and buried in the ruins. Hamburg was totally
destroyed and 70,000 civilians died in the most appalling
circumstances. Cologne with a population greater than Glasgow's was
turned into a moonscape. As Hamburg burned the winds feeding the
three-mile high flames reached twice hurricane speed to exceed 150
miles per hour. On the outskirts of the city trees three feet in
diameter were sucked from the ground by the supernatural forces of
these winds and hurled miles into the city-inferno, as were vehicles,
men, women and children.
VOLCANIC FLAMES 5,000 FEET HIGH
The volcanic flames ensuing were thrown five times the height of New
York's Empire State Building, with gases as high again caused
meteorological reaction as high as the stratosphere. Likewise
Frankfurt and scores of other cities like them. Middle Europe, the
cradle of civilization, was incinerated along with its inhabitants.
Between 1940 and 1945, sixty-one German cities with a total
population of 25 million souls were destroyed or devastated in a
bombing campaign that was unquestionably 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 bombing retaliation
that result in 60,000 British dead and 86,000 injured.
Indiscriminate bombing was internationally outlawed. The Washington
Treaty (1922) expressly forbade the use of bombing against civilian
populations. Although not ratified by the Geneva Convention 'it was
still universally agreed that terror bombing (of civilians) would not
be employed. As with all other promises they were torn up and
discarded at will.
Adolf Hitler alone, a man whom Lord Rothermere said: "There is no
human being living whose promise on important matters I would trust
more readily", remained within international law, refusing
steadfastly to repudiate it.
"BOMBING - AN ILLEGAL BARBARITY"
The German leader was resolute: "The construction of bombing
airplanes would soon be abandoned as superfluous and ineffective if
bombing as such were branded as an illegal barbarity. If, through the
Red Cross Convention, it definitely turned out possible to prevent
the killing of a defenseless wounded man or prisoner, then it ought
to be equally possible, by analogous convention, and finally to stop
the bombing of equally defenseless civil populations. I owe it to my
position not to admit any doubt as to the possibility of maintaining
peace. The people want peace. It must be possible for governments to
maintain it. We believe that if the nations of the world could agree
to destroy all their gas and inflammatory and explosive bombs it
would be a much more useful achievement than using them to destroy
each other." (4)
English warlord Winston Churchill however rejected this. "His
enthusiasm for behind the lines destruction of civilian populations
could be traced back to his comment: 'The air opened paths along
which death and terror could be carried far behind the lines of the
actual enemy; to women, children, the aged, the sick, who in earlier
struggles would perforce have been left untouched.'" (5) This alluded
to England's air war against Persian tribes' people.
ENGLAND INITIATED TERROR BOMBING
J.M Spaight, CB, CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry (RAF)
conceded that "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." (6)
The first breach of international law occurred very early on in
England's war against the German nation. As the noted jurist, F.J.P
Veale surmised. "This raid on the night of May 11th 1940, although in
itself trivial, was an epoch-marking event since it was the first
deliberate breach of the fundamental rule of civilized warfare that
hostilities must only be waged against the enemy's combatant forces,
Their flight marked the end of an epoch which had lasted for two and
one-half centuries." (7)
Again the first 'area air attack' of the war was carried out by 134
British bombers on the German city of Mannheim on the 16th December
1940. The object of this attack, as Air Chief Marshall Peirse later
explained, was, 'to concentrate the maximum amount of damage in the
center of the town.'" (8).
DELIBERATE GOADING OF GERMANY
As early as 1953 H.M Stationery Office published the first volume of
a work, The Royal Air Force, 1939 - 1945, The Fight at Odds.p.122.
This tome is recognized as being 'officially commissioned and based
throughout on official documents. It has been read and approved by
the Air Ministry Historical Branch. Its author, Dennis Richards,
reveals that: "If the Royal Air Force raided the Ruhr, destroying oil
plants with its most accurately placedbombs and urban property with
those that went astray, the outcry for retaliation against Britain
might prove too strong for the German generals to resist. Indeed,
Hitler himself would probably lead the clamor. The attack on the Ruhr
was therefore an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London."
England's Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry agreed: "We began
to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to
bomb objectives on the British mainland."
He added: "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 11 1940, the publicity it deserves." (9).
In a grim testimony to the adage that the nice guy never wins: "Air
Marshall Tedder made every effort to be a worthy pupil of his warlord
leader Winston Churchill. The Marshall told high British officers
that Germany had lost the war because she had not followed the
principle of total warfare." (10)
"Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany... there
was a reasonable possibility that our capital and industrial centers
would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from
attacking those of Germany," added the triumphant Principal Secretary
to the Air Ministry. He went on to admit: "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." (11)
GLOATING THAT THE ENGLISH PEOPLE WERE LIED TO
In his groundbreaking analysis of England's bombing war, F.J.P Veale
summed up. "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 it was undergoing rested
on the German leaders. Too high praise cannot, therefore, be lavished
on the British emotional engineers for the infinite skill with which
the public mind was conditioned prior to and during a period of
unparalleled strain." He added: "The inhabitants of Coventry, for
example, continued to imagine that their sufferings were due to the
innate villainy of Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision,
splendid or otherwise, of the British War Cabinet, was the decisive
factor in the case." (12).
WORKING CLASS TARGETED FOR HIGH KILL RATIOS
As the air war against National Socialist Europe developed the
civilian populations of Germany, Austria, Hungary and other European
cities and towns, were increasingly targeted as a means of causing
maximum bloodshed and instilling outright terror. This began on 11
March 1942 with the adoption of the Lindemann Plan by the British War
Cabinet.
This genocidal policy continued with undiminished ferocity until the
end of the war in May 1945. "The bombing during this period was not
as the Germans complained indiscriminate. On the contrary it was
concentrated on working class houses because, as Churchill's Jewish
key advisor, Professor Frederick 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." (13)
"I am in full agreement (of terror bombing)." added Sir Archibald
Sinclair, Secretary for Air (RAF). "I am all for the bombing of
working class areas in German cities. I am a Cromwellian - I believe
in 'slaying in the name of the Lord."
WOMEN AND CHILDREN TO BE SLAUGHTERED FIRST
"They, the British Air Chiefs drawn almost exclusively from the
English upper class public school system, 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." (14)
Even Churchill, hardly renowned for timidity in war blanched and
thought twice. "It seems to me that the moment has come when the
question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing
terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed." (15)
"In the course of the film showing the bombing of German towns from
the air, very well and dramatically done, W.C (Winston Churchill)
suddenly sat bolt upright and said to me: 'Are we beasts? Are we
taking this too far?'" (16)
AN RAF AIRCREW MEMBER CONFESSES
On 13th February 1945 I was a navigator on one of the Lancaster
bombers which devastated Dresden. I well remember the briefing by our
Group Captain. We were told that the Red Army was thrusting towards
Dresden and that the town would be crowded with refugees and that the
center of the town would be full of women and children. Our aiming
point would be the market place.
I recall that we were somewhat uneasy, but we did as we were told. We
accordingly bombed the target and on our way back our wireless
operator picked up a German broadcast accusing the RAF of terror
tactics, and that 65,000 civilians had died. We dismissed this as
German propaganda.
The penny didn't drop until a few weeks later when my squadron
received a visit from the Crown Film Unit who were making the wartime
propaganda films. There was a mock briefing, with one notable
difference. The same Group Captain now said, 'as the market place
would be filled with women and children on no account would we bomb
the center of the town. Instead, our aiming point would be a vital
railway junction to the east.
I can categorically confirm that the Dresden raid was a black mark on
Britain's war record. The aircrews on my squadron were convinced that
this wicked act was not instigated by our much-respected guvnor
'Butch' Harris but by Churchill. I have waited 29 years to say this,
and it still worries me." (17)
COWARDS ATTACKED DEFENSELESS TARGETS
Nobody knows for sure just how many people innocent civilians were
bombed and burned to death in Dresden. What is beyond dispute was
that its destruction was of no military significance whatsoever. It
did not shorten the war by as much as a minute, nor was it intended
to. The war by February 1945 was to all intents and purposes won. The
city itself had no military, political or industrial significance.
The British Government was well aware that Dresden and indeed all
other German cities were defenseless. Its 600,000 population was
swollen by an estimated further 500,000 refugees fleeing from the Red
Army.
One waits with anticipation to see how the BBC's 'Night and Day' will
excuse the incineration of Dresden where the strafing of columns of
refugees by both American and British fighter planes was par for the
blood crazed course. In Dresden, "Even the huddled remnants of a
children's' choir were machine-gunned in a street bordering a park."
observed historian David Irving.
The British Press for the large part described the needless massacre
of tens of thousands of refugees as 'an unexpected and fortunate
bonus.' (18)
THE FIRESTORM OF HAMBURG
Whilst Dresden and occasionally Hamburg are referred to in regard to
what became known as 'saturation bombing', never to be forgotten or
forgiven are the sixty-one German cities, scores of towns and indeed
other towns and cities across Europe devastated by allied bombing
attacks. Germany was not by any means alone in suffering from allied
air attacks; it is a little known fact that allied air attacks on
France alone resulted in far more deaths and injuries than from
German attacks. Sisley Huddleston was scathing: ""One town I know (in
Normandy) had 2,000 inhabitants killed or wounded out of a population
of 5,000, and hardly a house was left standing." - Petain, Patriot or
Traitor, Dakers, p.202.
It is a grim fact that British soldiers, occupying France after the
Germans had been driven out, unlike the German troops, were confined
to barracks for their own safety.
Let the maritime city of Hamburg then speak for all of those who
perished beneath the wings of Bomber Command. The story of Hamburg
illustrates the full horror of the cowardly English-inspired air war
that the British Broadcasting Corporation with equal infamy today
seeks to whitewash.
The Police President of Hamburg spoke after the initial bombing
raids: "Its horror is revealed in the howling and raging of the
firestorms, the hellish noise of exploding bombs and the death cries
of martyred human beings as well as the big silence after the raids.
Speech is impotent to portray the measure of the horror, which shook
the people for ten days and nights and the traces of which were
written indelibly on the face of the city and its inhabitants.
GRUESOME SCENES OF HORROR
No flight of imagination will ever succeed in measuring and
describing the gruesome scenes of horror in the many buried air
shelters. Posterity can only bow its head in honour of the fate of
these innocents, sacrificed by the murderous lust of a sadistic
enemy...."
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan's only two Christian cities come first
to mind when one considers total incineration from the air but the
destruction of those great cities, along with their inhabitants, pale
into relative insignificance when compared with the greater and more
sustained destruction of middle Europe's great cities. American
Martin Caidin, one of the world's foremost experts on the effects of
bombing said, "Neither Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffering from the
smashing blows of nuclear explosions could match the utter hell of
Hamburg." (See end notes on Martin Caidin).
Coventry of course is always thrown up when apologists seek to
justify the saturation bombing of European cities. Notwithstanding
the fact that it has since been proved that the bombing of Coventry,
like the sinking of the Lusitania, was deliberately set up as 'a
means to an end', it might be remembered in terms of proportion that
Coventry lost 100 acres through bombing. In just ten terrible days in
the summer of 1943 British bombers gutted more than six thousand
acres of Hamburg.
During the entire course of the war a little over 300 people in
Coventry lost their lives. In just ten days an estimated 70,000
citizens of Hamburg were killed.
Martin Caidin was furious at the wanton loss of life: "The fire and
horror lasted ten full days. This is what makes Hamburg - and the
loss of some seventy thousand men, women and children - stand out as
the worst of the disasters visited upon civilization during the
insanity of World War 2."
[END]
Part II to follow
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