Terror Bombing -- The Nazis Started It

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Musashi
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Terror Bombing -- The Nazis Started It

#1

Post by Musashi » 28 Jun 2003, 13:46

Gerry wrote: Normally the countries who won the war have not reason to admit any warcrimes. Up to today the allies refuse to admit, that the excessive bombing of german civilians was not justified. Neither would they admit that the aircraft (fighters) which used their machine-guns on civilian fugitives, farmers on the field, children playing outside the house - were wrong.
Justified or not you should know the Germans had "introduced" the method a bit earlier than the so called Allies did. Starting from very famous Guernica in Spain......
Then there was hunting on the civilians using the fighters in Poland, carpet bombing the cities, etc. ALL THE EXAMPLES YOU HAVE GIVEN. So the Germans were very good teachers.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen,
Musashi

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#2

Post by viriato » 28 Jun 2003, 16:31

Not so fast Musashi. Just read what happened in Irak in the twenties on the orders of Churchill and Arthur Harris:
The British armed forces underpinned this indirect imperialism. Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary from 1921, believed that British bombers could control the dissident Iraqi tribesmen. Some army officers feared such methods might be too brutal, but despite this they were adopted because they promised to be very cheap. In 1922, the Air Ministry took over the defence of the new kingdom. Like Saddarn's bombers, the squadrons of the Royal Air Force flew most of their missions against the Kurds who resented rule from Baghdad. For 10 years the British waged an almost continuous bombing campaign in the oil-rich and mountainous north-east against the Kurdish rebels, to whom they had earlier promised autonomy.

The Iraqi air force - which the British had built up, trained and equipped - carried on the work after Iraq became nominally independent in 1932.

Churchill consistently urged that the RAF should use mustard gas during these raids, despite the warning by one of his advisers that "it may ... kill children and sickly persons, more especially as the people against whom we intend to use it have no medical knowledge with which to supply antidotes". In the event the air force did not use gas bombs - for technical rather than humanitarian reasons. Even without gas the campaign was brutal enough. Some Iraqi villages were destroyed merely because their inhabitants had not paid their taxes. The British authorities always maintained in public, however, that people were not bombed for refusing to pay - merely for refusing to appear when summoned to explain non-payment.

The primitive bombs sometimes did not explode, and tribal children developed a passion for playing with the duds. When the air force proposed using bombs with delayed action fuses, one senior officer protested that the result would be “blowing a lot of children to pieces". Nevertheless, the RAF went ahead - without the knowledge of the civilian High Commissioner for Iraq, Sir Henry Dobbs - because delayed-action bombs prevented tribesmen from tending their crops under cover of darkness.


This "police bombing” was too much for some air force officers to stomach. In 1924, a distinguished Air Commodore, Lionel CharIton, resigned his post as a staff officer in Iraq after he visited a hospital and saw the victims of British bombing recovering from their injuries. The air force recalled him to England, promising not to otherwise damage his career provided he took his protests no further; but they went back on their word and placed him on the retired list in 1928.

Other officers seemed to enjoy the work. One who did was Arthur Harris, who would later achieve fame directing the bomber offensive against Germany in the second world war. Known to his friends as Bomber and to his enemies as Butcher, he first practised his trade against Kurdish villages in Iraq. "Where the Arab and Kurd had begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing, and still argue," he reported after one raid in 1924, "they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape." The British employed "police bombing" elsewhere in the empire - in Transjordan; against the Pathan tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India; in the Aden Protectorate (now the southern part of Yemen); and against the Nuer people of the southern Sudan.

The Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard, had great ambitions for his bombers. In a paper written early in 1920, when some politicians feared a revolution in Britain, he suggested that the RAF could even suppress “industrial disturbances or risings" in England itself.

Source: Guardian/UK
from:

http://www.khilafah.com/home/category.p ... 88&TagID=2
WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq

How the British bombed Iraq in the 1920s
By Henry Michaels
1 April 2003
Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

The US and British governments, and most Western media pundits, have tried to explain the determined resistance of the Iraqi people to the US-led assault by referring to the first Bush administration’s 1991 betrayal of the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Once Iraqis are confident that the Allies are serious about occupying the country, the argument goes, they will rise up and welcome them as liberators.

These assertions ignore the deeply-felt hostility to decades of colonial and semi-colonial rule by the Western powers, who long plundered Iraq’s oil reserves. During World War I, Mesopotamia was occupied by British forces, and it became a British mandated territory in 1920. In 1921, a kingdom was established under Faisal I, son of King Hussein of Hejaz and leader of the Arab Army in World War I. Britain withdrew from Iraq in 1932, but British and American oil companies retained their grip over the country.

One of the most bitter chapters in this history, one with direct parallels to the current military campaign, occurred during the 1920s. In many respects, the air war now being employed in Iraq is an offshoot of a military policy developed by Britain as it clung to its Iraqi colony 80 years ago.

Confronting a financial crisis after World War I, in mid-February 1920 Minister of War and Air Winston Churchill asked Chief of the Air Staff Hugh Trenchard to draw up a plan whereby Mesopotamia could be cheaply policed by aircraft armed with gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British and 10,000 Indian troops.

Several months later, a widespread uprising broke out, which was only put down through months of heavy aerial bombardment, including the use of mustard gas. At the height of the suppression, both Churchill and Trenchard tried to put the most flattering light upon actions of the Royal Air Force.

British historian David Omissi, author of Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939, records: “During the first week of July there was fierce fighting around Samawa and Rumaitha on the Euphrates but, Churchill told the Cabinet on 7 July, ‘our attack was successful.... The enemy were bombed and machine-gunned with effect by aeroplanes which cooperated with the troops’.”

The order issued by one RAF wing commander, J.A. Chamier, specified: “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.”

Arthur “Bomber” Harris, a young RAF squadron commander, reported after a mission in 1924: “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage: They know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.”

The RAF sent a report to the British Parliament outlining the steps that its pilots had taken to avoid civilian casualties. The air war was less brutal than other forms of military control, it stated, concluding that “the main purpose is to bring about submission with the minimum of destruction and loss of life.”

Knowing the truth, at least one military officer resigned. Air Commander Lionel Charlton sent a letter of protest and resigned in 1923 over what he considered the “policy of intimidation by bomb” after visiting a local hospital full of injured civilians.

The methods pioneered in Iraq were applied throughout the Middle East. Omissi writes: “The policing role of most political moment carried out by the Royal Air Force during the 1920s was to maintain the power of the Arab kingdoms in Transjordan and Iraq; but aeroplanes also helped to dominate other populations under British sway.

“Schemes of air control similar to that practiced in Mesopotamia were set up in the Palestine Mandate in 1922 and in the Aden Protectorate six years later. Bombers were active at various times against rioters in Egypt, tribesmen on the Frontier, pastoralists in the Southern Sudan and nomads in the Somali hinterland.”
from:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr20 ... -a01.shtml

As you see the British were the real teachers one one comes to bombing civilians!


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Re: What war crimes did the allies "admit" to?

#3

Post by POW » 28 Jun 2003, 17:18

Musashi wrote:Justified or not you should know the Germans had "introduced" the method a bit earlier than the so called Allies did.
This apologia is used very often and as often it's wrong. A crime is a crime. If you condemn actions of the Germans you have to condemn the same actions of the Allies. Otherwise you have an error in reasoning
Starting from very famous Guernica in Spain......
Any context between Guernica and WW2?

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Re: What war crimes did the allies "admit" to?

#4

Post by Musashi » 28 Jun 2003, 19:05

POW wrote:
Musashi wrote:Justified or not you should know the Germans had "introduced" the method a bit earlier than the so called Allies did.
This apologia is used very often and as often it's wrong. A crime is a crime. If you condemn actions of the Germans you have to condemn the same actions of the Allies. Otherwise you have an error in reasoning
You are right. There is no difference. However if somebody applies a such method he shouldn't be suprised somebody other will apply the same method upon him.
Starting from very famous Guernica in Spain......
POW wrote:Any context between Guernica and WW2?
Guernica was the first foreign city COMPLETELY destroyed for fun by the German bombers.

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Re: What war crimes did the allies "admit" to?

#5

Post by POW » 28 Jun 2003, 19:24

Musashi wrote:You are right. There is no difference. However if somebody applies a such method he shouldn't be suprised somebody other will apply the same method upon him.
I'm not surprised. I'm surprised when one justify crimes because the others started them.
Guernica was the first foreign city COMPLETELY destroyed for fun by the German bombers.
Because Germany tried gassing whole ethnical groups others are allowed to do the same?

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#6

Post by Attila the Hunking » 28 Jun 2003, 21:42

You are right. There is no difference. However if somebody applies a such method he shouldn't be suprised somebody other will apply the same method upon him.
The inhabitants of Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden, Swinemünde etc. applied indiscriminate area bombing??? Huh? 8O
Guernica was the first foreign city COMPLETELY destroyed for fun by the German bombers.
If I recall it correctly, Guernica was destroyed because the Luftwaffe intented to try out tactics of destruction as well as the effciency of their weapons. Against Dwellings - but not against the people as such. However, this wasn't nice but on the other hand it wasn't about morale bombing against the civillian population itself, as it was the case with allied air-warfare.
So the Germans were very good teachers.
Sorry but this is utter nonsense. Read also viriatos post. :roll:

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Terror Bombing -- The Nazis Started It

#7

Post by David Brown » 29 Jun 2003, 00:10

Sorry Musashi but viriato is right. The German Luftwaffe were only expanding on techniques developed by the British in Iraq....the world benefits from yet another British innovation. Concentration camps being another.

However in the context of World War Two, the bombing of German cities were, for the want of a better word, retaliatory in some respects after the wholesale destruction of Coventry and those fateful days during May in Liverpool.

It can be argued that the change in the Luftwaffe's bombing tactics, from the airfield to the cities, were prompted by a bombing raid on Berlin by the RAF during the Battle of Britain, but this was only in response to a Luftwaffe bomber who made a right pigs ear with its co-ordinates and accidentally dropped its payload on the streets of London's East End.

Dave

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Re: What war crimes did the allies "admit" to?

#8

Post by Scott Smith » 29 Jun 2003, 04:31

Musashi wrote:Guernica was the first foreign city COMPLETELY destroyed for fun by the German bombers.
Sorry, but that is absurd. The Luftwaffe was used as "flying artillery" in direct support of Nationalist forces. About 600 were killed, mostly Republican troops.

However, since Communist propaganda and the Western Left promoted Guernica as a Fascist atrocity, notably through Picasso's Guernica mural, there were some long-ranging effects.

1) The Luftwaffe determined that direct support or interdiction worked better than pinprick strategic bombing raids on cities. A strategic air force required building a long-range bomber force instead of close-air support fighters and medium bombers. 2) The Germans learned by Guernica that the mystique of the Luftwaffe could serve as a diplomatic Big Stick much the way the British Fleet or the gunboats of Western powers had in the past. When Commodore Perry steamed into Tokyo harbor in 1853 the isolationist Japanese said, Okay, we'll trade with America.

So, in WWII the Luftwaffe was developed for support of the Army (and to a lesser extend the Navy, when the Army didn't need fires put out). However, the British and American air forces, were developed from the start for strategic bombing. The main aspect of airpower theory that the Allies liked was the notion of Douhet that strategic air forces could win wars all by themselves.

When foreign representative were shown the Luftwaffe, which went public in 1935 after being banned by the Versailles treaty, they say the same planes taking off and landing with the markings changed to give the impression of greater size. And especially foreigners saw that the National Socialist Luftwaffe had the swastike on its tailplane, in sharp contrast to the Prussian Army or the Imperial Navy. Göring showed Charles Lindbergh the Luftwaffe and the industries behind it with full state-support, deliberately trying not to hide its presence but instead to make it look more fearsome that it really was, an ace in the hole if anyone tried to make war with Germany. Lindbergh was impressed and prudently agreed that the West, particularly America, should not make war with Germany.

During the first part of the war, the Luftwaffe was used in support of ground forces until the Battle of Britain, and then it was used against airfields, radar, and then in retaliation against British bomber factories. It took numerous provocations of Churchill and meager attacks upon German cities before Hitler ordered the enemy cities to be area-bombed at night. When Hitler area-bombed during the Battle of Britain there were diplomatic terms on the table. When the Allies area-bombed in force later in the war, the terms were Unconditional Surrender--and the Soviet Union was an equal partner in that Allied Peace.

It wasn't until the Battle of Britain when the Luftwaffe lost a battle of attrition with the RAF Fighter Command. The myth of the Luftwaffe as a diplomatic trump card was exposed. The weapon had been used well initially but for the first time it had failed to deliver. The RAF retreated into the interior beyond the range of German single-engined escort fighters, and the powerfully-armed twin-engined escort fighters were not maneuverable enough to deal with British interceptors, nor were they fast enough to get away. Thus, the Luftwaffe went to nighttime area-attacks, and these were rarely remarkable except for the Coventry raid, when electronic navigation methods produced an unusually stunning result--which, however, did not win the war or bring the British to the peace table. Indeed, the result, as Churchill had hoped, was to galvanize the British public into supporting the prosecution of an unpopular war with Germany.

Because of the pressure that Hitler and the tactical Luftwaffe had placed on the isolated British island (uncertain at this point of American salvation) the British war machine drew the conclusion that Terror Bombing was the preferred war-winning weapon "to take the fight to the enemy" if only sufficient force could be concentrated. The strategic RAF would be able to deliver Germany to the Democracies on a plate. When the Cherwell doctrine was secretly accepted by Churchill's war cabinet in March, 1942, Bomber Command never made any pretext about going after anything other than nonmilitary targets. Of course, this was denied in Parliament and after the war.
:)
Last edited by Scott Smith on 29 Jun 2003, 14:14, edited 1 time in total.

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#9

Post by R.M. Schultz » 29 Jun 2003, 06:35

viriato wrote:… As you see the British were the real teachers one one comes to bombing civilians!
Goodness! Such dastardly behaviour might lead one to believe that Imperialism is intrinsically wrong! Thank God the good old U.S. of A. would never become involved in oil-grabbing imperialist adventurism in that part of the world!

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#10

Post by Musashi » 29 Jun 2003, 13:12

The main goal of allied carpet bombings was breaking German morale. I agree it was not humanitarian. However I am completely sure the Germans would have done exactly the same if they had had enough number (any number) of strategic bombers.

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#11

Post by viriato » 29 Jun 2003, 13:27

Scott Smith you mistakenly wrote (my emphasis):
The Luftwaffe was used as "flying artillery" in direct support of Republican forces.
But it should be:
The Luftwaffe was used as "flying artillery" in direct support of Nationalists forces.

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#12

Post by viriato » 29 Jun 2003, 13:35

R.M. Schultz wrote:
Such dastardly behaviour might lead one to believe that Imperialism is intrinsically wrong! Thank God the good old U.S. of A. would never become involved in oil-grabbing imperialist adventurism in that part of the world!
What do you mean by "Imperialism is [not] intrinsically wrong"? As to the US "never becoming involved in oil-grabbimg imperialist adventurism in that part of the world" I'm not so sure if it hasn't already happened...

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#13

Post by POW » 29 Jun 2003, 13:43

Musashi wrote:However I am completely sure the Germans would have done exactly the same if they had had enough number (any number) of strategic bombers.
What do you like to express?

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#14

Post by Scott Smith » 29 Jun 2003, 14:13

viriato wrote:Scott Smith you mistakenly wrote (my emphasis):
The Luftwaffe was used as "flying artillery" in direct support of Republican forces.
But it should be:
The Luftwaffe was used as "flying artillery" in direct support of Nationalists forces.
You are so right, viriato. Thank you for catching that. I will edit it into the Memory Hole immediately.
:oops:

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#15

Post by ChristopherPerrien » 29 Jun 2003, 15:11

Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary from 1921, believed that British bombers could
I get the feeling Churchill liked bombing things like PEOPLE!

Good post Viriato, kinda cut the bs down real quick with that one.
Now, I will cut your "good post" to shreds as to who "terror bombed first".

Zepplin raids WWI,

Damn, they will revoke my party membership for that one. :lol:

Correction: The Germans terror-bombed first, not the Nazi's.
Last edited by ChristopherPerrien on 29 Jun 2003, 15:17, edited 3 times in total.

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