RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

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Rob Stuart
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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#46

Post by Rob Stuart » 13 Jul 2015, 13:34

Klaus1943 wrote:As I pointed out in my posting "Winston Churchill The War Criminal," WC learned in the Boer War that making war on civilians paid handsome dividends when he saw 25,000 Boer old men, women and children die in the British concentration camps and he carried out the policy in WW1 in depriving Germans of food as long as the middle of 1919 to force them to sign the Versailles Treaty, resulting in at least 750,000 German civilian deaths. WC was no stranger to killing civilians.
It is ridiculous to single out Churchill as being responsible for the blockade of Germany in WW1. Its imposition was a collective decision of the cabinet. Moreover, your figure of "at least 750,000 German civilian deaths" is questionable. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany, the figure is in dispute, and the number you've quoted is at the upper end of the range and it includes the about 200,000 deaths due to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which ravaged the populations of many countries, including countries experiencing no food shortage. Canada, for example, had 50,000 dead, from a population of about 8,000,000 people. You should have said "at least 424,000 German civilian deaths", since this is the figure at the lower end of the range.

According to the same article, it is inaccurate to imply that the blockade continued until July 1919 without change. The article comments that:
According to the New Cambridge Modern History food imports into Germany were controlled by the Allies after the Armistice with Germany until Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.[16] The total blockade was lifted on 17 January 1919 when the Allies allowed the importation of food under their supervision. The Allies requested that the German government send German merchant ships to Allied ports to transport food supplies. However the Germans considered the armistice a temporary cessation of the war and refused, believing that should fighting break out again the ships would be confiscated.[17] The German government notified an American representative in Berlin that the shortage of food would not become critical until late spring. Food deliveries were delayed until March 1919 when the German government agreed to the restrictions imposed by the Allies. From March food imported from America in American ships arrived in Germany.[18] The restrictions on food imports were finally lifted on 12 July 1919 after Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles.[16]
In any case, the blockade of a coast or the besieging of a city is not a war crime. I would remind you of the siege of Paris from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War. The besiegers prevented any food getting into the city, their aim being to starve Paris in to surrendering, and 47,000 of the civilian inhabitants died. That's a much larger proportion of the population than in the 1914-1918 siege of Germany. Neither the German blockade of Paris nor the Allied blockade of Germany were illegal.

Sid Guttridge
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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#47

Post by Sid Guttridge » 15 Jul 2015, 13:07

Hi Klaus 1943,

You write, ".....WC learned in the Boer War that making war on civilians paid handsome dividends when he saw 25,000 Boer old men, women and children die in the British concentration camps and he carried out the policy in WW1 in depriving Germans of food as long as the middle of 1919 to force them to sign the Versailles Treaty, resulting in at least 750,000 German civilian deaths. WC was no stranger to killing civilians."

Firstly, what evidence have you that Churchill learnt any such thing and consequently applied it later against the Germans?

Secondly, while the Boer War concentration camps turned into a national disgrace for Britain, it is worth pointing out that they were not created for the purpose of killing Boer women and children. The deaths were the result of a disgraceful failure to provide the logistics to support them at the time they were created. Once the awful consequences were publicly known, the British, rather too belatedly, rectified their culpable errors to the point where the death rate in the camps fell below that of Glasgow, the so-called "Second City of the Empire".

It is also worth pointing out that the number of British soldiers who died of non combat causes, essentially disease, in the Boer War was of a magnitude approaching that of the Boer deaths in the concentration camps. These were not particularly healthy times or climes.

Finally, did the Armistice Terms of 11 November 1918 include a lifting of the blockade? And did the blockade continue after the signing of the peace in 1919?

Cheers,

Sid.


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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#48

Post by Kurfürst » 17 Jul 2015, 09:52

4thskorpion wrote:Nothing in this post proves your unfounded claim that the "RAF initiates Bombing of German Civilians" or ""Winston Churchill The War Criminal" unless you can provide details of any published speeches or documents where Churchill specifically states his preferred strategy was the RAF killing German civilians first and foremost as a war aim for the British government. The cabinet papers posted on this thread prove otherwise.
Letter by Churchill to Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Aircraft Production, written on 8 July 1940, urging him to increase the resources being put into bomber as opposed to fighter production:

"When I look round to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path. We have no continental ally which can defeat the German military power.... Should [Hitler] be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward, and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland."

Subsequent actions by Bomber Command leave very little doubt about the intent.

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4thskorpion
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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#49

Post by 4thskorpion » 17 Jul 2015, 10:33

Kurfürst wrote:
4thskorpion wrote:Nothing in this post proves your unfounded claim that the "RAF initiates Bombing of German Civilians" or ""Winston Churchill The War Criminal" unless you can provide details of any published speeches or documents where Churchill specifically states his preferred strategy was the RAF killing German civilians first and foremost as a war aim for the British government. The cabinet papers posted on this thread prove otherwise.
Letter by Churchill to Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Aircraft Production, written on 8 July 1940, urging him to increase the resources being put into bomber as opposed to fighter production:

"When I look round to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path. We have no continental ally which can defeat the German military power.... Should [Hitler] be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward, and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland."

Subsequent actions by Bomber Command leave very little doubt about the intent.
You can read what you like into the quoted text but glaringly what is still missing is the word "civilian or civilians" in Churchill's rather stridently expressed view or proof that the "RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians" or anything at all that supports the other claim that Churchill's preferred war aim was the "killing of German civilians" over "military" targets.

I would agree subsequent actions by the Luftwaffe left very little doubt over the intent of the war cabinet and RAF bomber command to strike back with like for like.

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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#50

Post by Kurfürst » 22 Jul 2015, 15:40

"exterminating attack"

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4thskorpion
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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#51

Post by 4thskorpion » 22 Jul 2015, 19:15

Kurfürst wrote:"exterminating attack"
Exterminating means to get rid of by destroying completely.

For example one could launch an exterminating attack on the vital German war industries locatated in the Ruhr meaning simply to destroy completely the vital German industries located in the Ruhr. etc., etc.

Of course you read it as you will, but no mention of German civilians being the preferred targets over and above military targets as has been claimed - unless there is an order by Churchill in which he says "Let us not attack war industries or military targets but let's bomb German civilians instead, as this will win the war." or something on similar lines.

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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#52

Post by edgardo gil » 11 Jan 2016, 20:50

In about Churchill preferences about killing whatever civilians.
Other names surely are knowed by you.

http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaste ... ontrol.htm

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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#53

Post by Sid Guttridge » 12 Jan 2016, 12:04

Hi degardo gil,

Not a good tertiary source, but it seems reasonably reliable as far as it goes in pushing a particular point of view.

However, there is nothing about Churchill having any preference for killing civilians.

Cheers,

Sid.

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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#54

Post by edgardo gil » 13 Jan 2016, 03:41

No by sure that Churchill doesn´t know what are they doing. :o Read the following and read the attached bibliography in the footnotes.
Poison Gas against Civilians: Churchill Says Yes

Churchill was at this point willing to use any means necessary to achieve his goals in Iraq, including poison gas bombing, which he actually argued was more "humane" than bombing with explosives. Writing to Trenchard on August 29, 1920, Churchill advised "I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury on them."[4] In his enthusiasm for utilizing the new technology of gas bombing, Churchill was unwilling to admit that even gas irritants could prove deadly to children, the elderly, and the infirm: "I am ready to authorise the construction of such [gas] bombs at once; the question of their use to be decided when the occasion arises."[5] Experience proved that many gas "irritants" caused blindness and other physical problems which could not be cured due to a lack of antidotes among the native population, but this was irrelevant to Churchill.

Once deployed in Iraq the RAF proceeded to bomb civilians and tribal insurgents alike. A Kurdish survivor of these attacks later recalled, "They were bombing here in the Kaniya Khoran ... Sometimes they raided three times a day."[6] Wing Commander Lewis, of the 30th RAF Squadron remembered: "one would get a signal that a certain Kurdish village had to be bombed."

Arthur Harris, the man who would later oversee the destruction of German cities during WW II, also saw action in Iraq and participated in the bombing of civilians as a wing commander. He wrote of this experience, "The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured."[7] Similarly, J.A. Chamier, another British wing commander, wrote, "The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle."[8] By March 1922 the Air Ministry had proven its tactics so effective that it was given control over security in Mesopotamia. For the next decade RAF planes would bomb numerous tribes that continued to defy British rule.



NOTES

1. T.D. Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 27.

2. Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality, p. 46.

3. Christopher Catherwood, Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq (NY: Carroll& Graf, 2004), p. 137.

4. Catherwood, Churchill's Folly, p. 85.

5. Catherwood, Churchill's Folly, p. 186.

6. Geoff Simons, Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam (NY: Macmillan, 1996), p. 214.

7. Simons, Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam, p. 214.

8. David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

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4thskorpion
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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#55

Post by 4thskorpion » 13 Jan 2016, 09:56

This is how the author in the quoted bibliography listed in "Notes" interprets the letter from Churchill to Trenchard:
image.jpeg
Christopher Catherwood, Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq (NY: Carroll& Graf, 2004)

The authors in weblink posted reach an entirely different interpretation of the letters meaning to Catherwood to suit their own agenda.

Knouterer
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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#56

Post by Knouterer » 13 Jan 2016, 14:21

So in short, there's no real evidence that in WWII Churchill was particularly keen on bombing civilians, rather the opposite.

In Among the Dead Cities, Grayling recounts a well-known anecdote from Australian statesman and diarist Richard Casey, who, during the war, watched a film with Churchill of RAF bombers in action over the Ruhr.

"All of a sudden," Casey wrote, "Churchill gives a start and he says to me, 'Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?' "

Casey replied that they hadn't started it and that it was "us or them".

Obviously, Churchill was willing to do what it took to defeat Nazi Germany, but all these attempts to depict him as as a war criminal, or to suggest that he was lacking in (physical) courage, or that he admired Stalin, are just ridiculous.

Winston Spencer Churchill, with all his human faults and shortcomings, was a great man, to whom we owe a lot. Only the seriously blinkered can fail to see that.
Last edited by Knouterer on 13 Jan 2016, 14:56, edited 1 time in total.
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Sid Guttridge
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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#57

Post by Sid Guttridge » 13 Jan 2016, 14:39

Hi knouterer,

Yup. There seems to be nothing about Churchill having any preference for killing civilians.

Churchill had many limitations and the faults of a man of his background and era.

Yet, he could learn. For example, the old imperialist agreed to a bipartisan approach to Indian independence when in opposition to Labour after WWII. As a result, Britain did not try to fight for its imperial possessions in the way the French or Dutch did. This saved blood, treasure and reputations on all sides.

Cheers,

Sid.

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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#58

Post by Urmel » 13 Jan 2016, 15:03

12th January, and already the 'Churchill is evil' crowd is abroad. Is that a new record?
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Sid Guttridge
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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#59

Post by Sid Guttridge » 13 Jan 2016, 15:22

Correction - 11th January.

An ever helpful Sid.

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4thskorpion
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Re: RAF Initiates Bombing of German Civilians

#60

Post by 4thskorpion » 13 Jan 2016, 15:23

Urmel wrote:12th January, and already the 'Churchill is evil' crowd is abroad. Is that a new record?
Technically you are one day out...it was 11th January when the 'Churchill is evil' posts started up again!

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