A butcher with a chest covered with medals, but still a butcher.
Why is everyone posting from āValhallaā all of a sudden?
I guess weāve cropped up on a neo-nazi site as a good place for them to spread propaganda again.
For those of you who think Harris was a war criminal, go away and read the relevant law (Hague Convention), specifically the bit about bombardment of defended cities (those which are still protected from occupation by enemy ground troops). The only area he was breaking the laws of war was (arguably) not making enough effort not to hit protected sites such as hospitals. Killing civilians by bombardment was entirely legal at the time.
Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907
Art. 27.
In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague04.asp#art27
A fast wiki quote states :
A Dresden police report written shortly after the attacks reported that the old town and the inner eastern suburbs had been engulfed in a single fire that had destroyed almost 12,000 dwellings. The same report said that the raids had destroyed 24 banks, 26 insurance buildings, 31 stores and retail houses, 640 shops, 64 warehouses, 2 market halls, 31 large hotels, 26 public houses, 63 administrative buildings, 3 theatres, 18 cinemas, 11 churches, 6 chapels; 5 other cultural buildings, 19 hospitals including auxiliary, overflow hospitals, and private clinics, 39 schools, 5 consulates, the zoo, the waterworks, the railways, 19 postal facilities, 4 facilities, and 19 ships and barges.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
According to this the guy was a war criminal.
horst There are two exceptions made in the excerpts you posted, Can you with certainty cite legitimate sources that state without error that these exceptions were non existent ?
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all necessary steps must be taken to spare, āas far as possibleā
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āprovided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.ā
Weāre splitting hairs with semantics at bestā¦
Itās very, very tenuous - the critical statement is āall necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possibleā. This would have been taken at the time of writing as being a requirement to do everything that does not expose your own forces to significantly increased risk or cripple the effectiveness of the bombardment. Harris would have a strong case that ,given the technology of the time, he had taken all practical steps to protect such places.
Additionally, Germany was also breaking the rules over those hospitals - the Hague convention also requires that they be clearly marked in such a was as the bombarding forces can clearly see and avoid them. Blacking them out as was done historically is the correct military reaction (if you can hide the entire town, youāre much better off) and probably isnāt enough for them to lose their status as protected places, but would make it rather easy for Harris in any notional ātrialā to argue that they were hit by accident because his crews couldnāt see them.
Saturation bombing is a tacit renunciation to any attempt of discriminating targets, it is like throwing a grenade in an elevator, you can not spare anything ā as far as possibleā, since Harris resorted to that methods he violated Art. 27 and therefore is considered a war criminal.
According to THC there were almost no air defenses in Dresden by the time, much less in hospitals, theaters, schools, etc.
On the night of February 13, hundreds of RAF bombers descended on Dresden in two waves, dropping their lethal cargo indiscriminately over the city. The cityās air defenses were so weak that only six Lancaster bombers were shot down.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dresden-devastated
Iāll take that as a ānoā . All I see so far Horst, is your opinion projected upon a point so lacking in definition that it is impossible to prove, or disprove with any degree of finality. Some might think that to be a manipulation, some may think it to be jumping to conclusions. Iāll go with plain unimpressive.
Ummmā¦ you know what āBombardmentā meant when they wrote the Hague convention? Artillery, and very inaccurate artillery at that. Hence the statement āas far as possibleā - itās a recognition of the fact that with artillery of the time high accuracy wasnāt possible.
So what? Air defences arenāt mentioned in the Hague convention (for the simple reason that they didnāt exist at the time). The ādefencesā mentioned are on the ground. Essentially, if a city was resisting your attempts to take it, or troops outside it are preventing you from capturing it, you were allowed to bombard it in support of your attack. There is no requirement for how close your attack must be at the time, or indeed that the bombardment is in direct support of an attack.
freinds lets get back to the plotā¦ bomber harris not the finates of the geneva convention ?
I wavered a bit towards ābastard but our bastardā, but came down in favour of āpragmatic wartime leaderā. As General W.T. Sherman put it, āWar is Hellā, and few on the Allied side would have questioned his methods on moral grounds at the time. Mind you, I do believe that his faith in the ability of conventional strategic bombing alone to be a decisive, war-winning technique was questionable; but then, WW2 was the first war in which strategic bombing was actually possible, and people were still feeling their way with it a bit. Best regards, JR.
Kill civilian in order to destroy the willing to fight a war is terrorism for me.
So I vote for a war criminal.
I donāt think there are too many, if any, examples of [given that this thread is primarily about Bomber Harris] intentional British bombing of purely civilian targets in Europe. The only one I can think of is a low level raid on a French or Belgian prison to release prisoners of the Germans.
The problem with high altitude aerial bombing in WWII, for all sides, was that it was largely inaccurate for various human and technical reasons. Those problems were amplified by flying onto heavily defended targets. Major British bombing in Europe was made even less accurate by concentrating on night raids. Not that daylight raids by the Americans were huge successes, either. Thatās not to say that British and Allied raids on Europe (and American raids on Japan) werenāt highly destructive, because they were, but their success in hitting their targets was fairly low as a percentage of bombs dropped.
As for killing civilians to destroy the will to fight, the purpose in all air forces was not to kill civilians per se or even at all, but to destroy the capacity to make war by destroying enemy forces, enemy weapons and enemy weapon production capacity and to impose burdens on the target nation which diverted its resources from war purposes, whether by absorbing hospital and related medical resources and thus denying them to the armed forces; or impeding electronic and physical communications; or clogging transport routes with refugees to impede military traffic; and so on. Whether that was successful and proportionate to the attacking nationās effort is a different question, but it made sense at the time.
Looking at another target of Allied bombing, being Japan, what is generally ignored in outrage about the pre-atomic bombing and firebombing of Japan in the last year of the war is that it is simplistic to say that civilians alone were targeted. Japan then, and even now although to a much lesser extent, had a highly diversified industrial supply network with manufacturing of components starting in large numbers of tiny home factories which fed up the line to increasingly larger factories.
The diversified industrial production in Japan illustrates the problem in trying to draw a clearly articulated line between military and civilian targets, but those making the decisions are forced ultimately to draw an arbitrary line beyond which there are no targets. At the lowest level, was strafing a farmer and his horse ploughing his field a war crime upon an innocent civilian (and an undoubtedly innocent horse) or a legitimate step to deny the enemy the production of food for troops, or munitions workers, or other civilians contributing to the war effort, which might come from that field and ploughing?
But does it matter in the end when aerial bombs are often woefully inaccurate, to the extent that the Orwellian term ācollateral damageā was, depending upon oneās source, coined a quarter (Vietnam) to half a century (GW1) after WWII by the masters of aerial bombing, the Americans, to excuse hitting the wrong targets?
IIRC until some time in 1945 the RAF had a lower average miss distance bombing by night than the USAAF āprecisionā bombing by day. This would largely have been down to the RAF having more sophisticated electronic aids and a better pathfinder force, thus reducing the fraction that went very, very off-target. A small number of RAF squadrons were capable of highly accurate bombing (mainly those like 617 who were principally dropping Tallboys on very hard targets), most of the rest were distinctly poorer.
Itās also worth noting that one of the first Luftwaffe raids of the war hit the wrong country - their own. Navigation was a massive problem and only really solved towards the end of the war with the routine use of electronic aids.
Area Bombing Directive of make the civilians areas (not the industrial one) as primary object of RAF bombing. Firestorms are used to annihilate historical centre of ancient city and their habitants, not to destroy the industrial outskirts.
Iām not agree that inefficient navigation equipment cannot be more accurate: itās true at the start of war, in 1940, but with the spread of pathfinder and radar in 1943 they can assure even nightly accuracy, at least to be sure that they are aiming to the centre of the city, not to the outskirts.
Sadly it isnāt that simple - in many cases much of the industrial production was spread out through city centres, and in others housing was clustered tightly around factories. Furthermore, the UK experience from being on the receiving end (London, Coventry, etc.) was that factories were pretty difficult to destroy, but that the infrastructure that supports them (water, electricity, workers, transport, etc.) was much more vulnerable, and most easily disrupted by burning down the town centre.
Ummmā¦ sort of. A lot depended on the weather and on if there were any features around the city that identified it clearly. Hamburg, for instance, has some very clear water features pointing right at the centre of the city that show up on radar - thatās one of the major reasons it was hit with the first 1,000 bomber raid (and another good reason to hit the city centre - it is the easiest to identify). Berlin on the other hand was a notoriously difficult radar target and right up to the end of the war raids frequently missed their targeted areas. It was only really in 1945 with the destruction of the German night-fighter defences and really widespread use of electronic aids like Gee and Oboe that Bomber Command could routinely manage destructive raids like Dresden or Wesel. The USAAF had a similar learning curve, and for all their rhetoric about precision bombing they were quite happy to use area bombing when the weather was too bad for anything else.
Iām not questioning that Gee (his initial accuracy is 8 kilometers) and Oboe accuracy is far from nowadays GPS accuracy, iām saying that Harris imposes as primary objective the civilian workers, not the industrial complex. Even if Gee is accurate as GPS, RAF will aim for the center of city, because they simply donāt care where the industry are o not are.
There may be an element of the Nuremberg defence (āI was only following ordersā) in this, but Harris didnāt choose the civilian workers as targets. That came from Professor Lindemannās, Churchillās scientific adviser, recommendations in what is commonly called the āDehousing paperā early in 1942, around the time Harris was appointed to run Bomber Command. Lindemann recommended ādehousingā German workers and civilians to harm the German war effort and civilian morale. Harris was merely implementing British Government policy. He was the servant, not the architect, of that policy.
Over the past fifty or so years Iāve read a fair number of personal accounts of bombing missions over Germany.
The crews werenāt supermen.
The navigators werenāt supermen. They still relied upon star sights and landmarks to fix their positions, after allowing for wind drift and other fairly incalculable variables on very long flights with no stars and no landmarks visible for part or all of the way.
Radio navigation equipment didnāt always work properly.
Bomb runs onto targets were interfered with by cloud and flak.
Target markings were confused by errors in identification and, where Pathfinders were used, similar errors on their part.
The poor degree of accuracy in eliminating purely military targets in WWII wasnāt much better half a century later in Gulf War I with non-guided bombs where area or carpet bombing was again employed, but with vastly greater bomb loads. http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-myth.htm