Luftwaffe Bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam

[Klaus1943]

The British propaganda leaflets never mention that Britain will bring the USA into the war on their side.

[4thskorpion]

The fact than Bryan claims he took a photo of a destroyed Warsaw building does not prove that the building was destroyed on a specific date. The negatives do not have the time and date when the photo was taken, only perhaps when they were developed. The claim of Polish Jews that their neighborhood was singled out by the Luftwaffe bombers is absurd on the face of it. Warsaw was not an open city but it had been turned into a fortress with some 150,000 Polish soldiers and artillery and AAA. It was a legitimate military target. The Luftwaffe had excellent air recon on which targets were selected. If artillery, tanks, masses of troops were located, that would be the target. The Germans did not have an abundant supply of bombs and shells. What has not been provided is the number and types of aircraft which bombed on a certain day, let alone the German units involved and the type of bombs dropped. The claim that German records no longer exist is a poor excuse. The burden of proof is on the person making a claim and wartime allegations are just not enough. The fact that the Polish Jews make no mention whatsoever of any military units in their neighborhood is enough to discredit their story in my mind.

If it were just Bryan who stated the "Jewish quarter" of Warsaw was fire-bombed on 16 September 1939 and thereafter, then you might have a valid point but this is not the case because other witnesses such as Kaplan also confirm this...there are many others who witnessed the siege who also contradict the source you rely upon to state that no bombs were dropped on Warsaw on 16 September, only leaflets.

The fact that Varsovian Jews do not mention military units in their neighbourhood can equally be argued that it is because there were no military units in the Jewish quarter to report. But maybe you can provide evidence of the Polish troop, artillery or AAA dispositions in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw during the siege that made this densely populated area a target for fire-bombing?

Does your source give the dates that the Heinkel Hs 123 was used to bomb Warsaw?

[4thskorpion]

The British propaganda leaflets never mention that Britain will bring the USA into the war on their side.

Entirely irrelevant.

Using you own argument the Germans' were responsible for their own civilian deaths for the entire war, and not Churchill, because they ignored the British propaganda leaflet drops of 3-4 September 1939 that called for the German people not to support Hitler's war, a war the propaganda leaflets said Germany could not win - which ultimately proved to be the case at the cost of millions of lives.

[4thskorpion]

Klaus1943 wrote:

The first raid on the city (other than airfields or aircraft factories by a few aircraft) was on 13 Sept. by 183 bombers with the object being the rail system in Praga to block Polish reenforcements from the East. Naturally, not every bomb is going to hit its intended target. By this time several bomber units had moved to the Western Front.

Not so. Just one example of bombing dated 8 September 1939 from The mask of warriors: The siege of Warsaw, September 1939 by Marta Korwin-Rhodes

The mask of warriors

There is page after page of such examples in this book, by another eyewitness during the siege, of non-military targets being bombed in Warsaw but I am not going to scan the entire book here!

Marta Korwin-Rhodes who was in charge of staffing at the Knights of Malta Hospital in Warsaw also reported that the Red Cross banner that was put on the roof of the Malta hospital had to be taken down because the hospital was being deliberately bombed as were other similarly marked hospital building across the city.

More Polish anti-German propaganda I guess?

[4thskorpion]

The first raid on the city (other than airfields or aircraft factories by a few aircraft) was on 13 Sept. by 183 bombers with the object being the rail system in Praga to block Polish reenforcements from the East. Naturally, not every bomb is going to hit its intended target. By this time several bomber units had moved to the Western Front.

The next raid was on 25 September. I can find nothing regarding any bombing attacks on Warsaw between the 13th and the 25th. (See Kampfflieger Vol.1 by J. Richard Smith).

Extracts from the 1941 book by Stefan Baley, "Two Septembers 1939 and 1940. A Diary of Events

9 September 1939 - Luffwaffe bombs Praga district in vain attempt to blow up the five river crossing bridges! So much for the claimed precision bombing prowess of the German bomber crews!

The first raid on the city (other than airfields or aircraft factories by a few aircraft) was on 13 Sept. by 183 bombers with the object being the rail system in Praga

Apart from the bombing of Warsaw's Praga district on the 9th September 1939!

Below... bombs, sweets and banknotes!

...further report that Warsaw's heavily populated Jewish quarter was subject to terror-bombing.

Below......20 September 1939 and the bombing of Warsaw environs continues despite the transfer of Luftwaffe units to the Western front.

[Kurfürst]

From Richard Overy, The Bombing War:

"Though the popular view in the West has always been that German bombing was ‘terror bombing’, almost by definition, Hitler for once held back. In the first years of the war, until British area bombing called for retaliation in kind, Hitler refused to sanction ‘terror bombing’ and rejected requests from the German Air Staff to initiate it. Not until the onset of the V-Weapon attacks in June 1944 did he endorse the entirely indiscriminate assault of British targets.4

FROM WARSAW TO PARIS

For the first year of the war the German Air Force conducted what was called ‘Operational Air War’ as it had been laid down in the ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Air Warfare’ drawn up by the infant force in 1935 and issued in a revised version in 1940. Although the air force sought to distinguish air strategy from that of the army and navy by virtue of its exceptional mobility, flexibility and striking power, in practice German air strategy was linked closely to the ground campaign. Air forces were expected to defeat the enemy air force and its sources of supply and operation; to provide direct battlefield support for the army or navy against the enemy surface forces; and to attack more distant targets, several hundred kilometres from the front line, which served the enemy air effort. These targets included energy supply, war production, food supply, imports, the transport network, military bases and centres of government and administration. The list did not include attacks on enemy morale or residential centres, which the air force regarded as a waste of strategic effort, but it did include provision for revenge attacks if an enemy bombed German civilians. All operations, except these last, were designed to undermine the enemy’s capacity to sustain front-line resistance. Operational air warfare contributed to the central aim of forcing the enemy armed forces to give up the fight.5

In practice the limits of German air technology, with a heavy multi-engine bomber still at the development stage, meant that the air force was regarded principally as a powerful tool to unhinge the enemy front by using fighters to destroy the enemy air force while twin-engine medium bombers, heavy fighters and dive-bombers attacked the enemy field formations and more distant economic and military targets. The instructions for air support of the army, issued in July 1939, acknowledged that air power could be exercised indirectly in support of the army by undermining enemy supply and production and reducing the war-willingness of the enemy nation. But it was emphasized that the air force would be needed primarily to help speed up the movement of the army by attacking a wide number of targets, fixed or fleeting, on or just behind the battlefront, which stood in the army’s way.6 The decision to organize the air force in integrated air fleets, each with its own component of bombers, fighters, dive-bombers and reconnaissance aircraft, and each allocated to a particular army group, enhanced the flexible, multi-tasked character of air warfare, but also tied the air force to the land campaign. The critical element in air-army cooperation was rightly seen to be effective communication between ground and air, and air force directives in 1939 and 1940 made something of a fetish of precisely described links by radio or signal or liaison officer.7
This joint effort was the core of what later came to be called ‘Blitzkrieg’ and it was used to devastating effect in all the German land operations of the first two years of war (and would have been used in southern England, too, if German forces had got ashore in the autumn of 1940). Yet it is difficult to reconcile the idea of a German Air Force tied flexibly but surely to the land campaign with the popular recollection of the German bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and of Rotterdam eight months later. Long before the onset of the ‘Blitz’, the Western world had come to assume that the German Air Force, for all its vaunted support of German armies, was an instrument for perpetrating aerial terror, as it was widely believed to have done at Guernica in April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. A British wartime account claimed that Germany’s earlier bombing would go down in history ‘as an outstanding example of depraved conduct … murder on a scale that Christendom had never before experienced’.8 So powerful is this conventional view of German bombing atrocity (which helped to legitimate the heavy bombing of German cities later in the war) that it is worth looking in greater detail at the story of German city-bombing before the onset of the campaign against Britain in September 1940.

The German aggression against Poland which began on 1 September 1939 was a model of the modern exercise of air power. On that day the 397 aircraft of the Polish Air Force, including 154 mainly obsolete bombers and 159 fighters, faced two German air fleets, Air Fleet 1 under General Albert Kesselring and Air Fleet 4 under Lt General Alexander Löhr, with a total of 1,581 aircraft including 897 bombers and 439 fighters and fighter-bombers. Polish combat aircraft were outnumbered by more than four to one. During the first three days of the campaign waves of German bombers and dive-bombers attacked airfields, rail centres, military depots and radio stations. So rapidly was the Polish Air Force overwhelmed that resistance almost entirely disappeared; half their planes were lost in combat and those that remained flew on 17 September to bases in Romania rather than risk destruction or capture.

From 4 September the German air fleets were able to concentrate attacks on communications to slow down the Polish army as it tried to re-form in the Polish interior. Between 6 and 13 September air attacks spread out further east towards the Vistula River and targets in Praga, the part of Warsaw on the far bank of the river. Resistance was light but the military targets which German aircraft were told to hit were obscured by smoke and haze and suffered little in the preliminary attacks. As the German armies closed the ring around Warsaw and the nearby fortress at Modlin, the air forces were ordered to bomb enemy troop concentrations in and around the city, but not to attack ‘the streaming columns of refugees’ on the roads leaving the Polish capital.9

On 16 September the Polish commander in Warsaw was given six hours to surrender. He refused, declaring the capital to be a ‘special military zone’, and as a result German planes dropped leaflets warning the population to leave. As Warsaw was a defended city, it was legitimate for German air forces to join the German Army artillery in the siege.

On 22 September Hitler ordered the final liquidation of Polish resistance in Warsaw, including air strikes on important military and economic targets, as well as buildings housing the military and political authorities.10 The German Foreign Office requested that the air force make every effort to avoid damaging the Belvedere Palace; Hitler ordered special care to be taken not to hit the Soviet diplomats leaving the city after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September.11

On 25 September there was extensive incendiary bombing and heavy damage to the centre of Warsaw in an attack which dropped some 632 tonnes of bombs, the largest air attack made by any air force until then. Troops of the German Third Army were killed when German aircraft strayed too far into areas already occupied by German forces, and on 26 September all bombing ceased. The following morning Warsaw surrendered.12

The air attacks on Warsaw were designed to speed up the capitulation of the armed forces defending the city, but no more than that. When Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, designated ‘Air Leader for Special Tasks’ (Fliegerführer zur besonderen Verfügung) and a veteran of the Guernica bombing, requested annihilating attacks on the whole urban area, the German Air Force chief of staff, Colonel-General Hans Jeschonnek, refused.13 Nevertheless, the impression made on the Polish population and those foreigners unlucky enough to be caught in the path of the bombing was of deliberately random attack. A Polish doctor, Zygmunt Klukowski, drove through Lublin on 4 September, where he saw his first evidence of the bombing: ‘three completely destroyed apartment buildings. Many buildings had broken windows and collapsed roofs.’ Five days later he survived eight raids on Lublin in one day: ‘Practically everyone prayed,’ ran his diary. ‘Some civilians were shaking with fright.’ Klukowski observed that he had experienced nothing quite like this in the First World War.14 Chaim Kaplan described in his diary the hell in Warsaw, worse than ‘Dante’s description of the Inferno’; everyone ran to shelter in ‘dark holes’, full of hysterical women.15 An unlucky strike hit the American ambassador’s residence outside Warsaw on 2 September.16 The gap between the air force orders, which specified economic, military and administrative targets, and the reality on the ground, reflected the overwhelming air power German forces were able to bring to bear, but above all the problems faced in achieving a high degree of accuracy even when dive-bombing from low altitude, a problem that characterized almost all bombing operations throughout the war.

German post-operational research showed that two aircraft factories at Mielec and Lublin, reported by the pilots who bombed them as destroyed, were untouched. Trains were seen steaming along tracks described by pilots as ‘wrecked’ shortly before.17 A post-operational assessment made by General Hans Speidel in November highlighted the particular importance that had been attached to destroying sources of power (electricity, gas), but since many of these installations were located close to residential zones, the raids inevitably involved civilian casualties.18 A final figure for the dead in Warsaw from bombing has never been calculated with any certainty. Many were the victims of artillery fire rather than bombing; Chaim Kaplan thought shelling to be the greater menace to the civilian population.19 The claims that between 20,000 and 40,000 died is certainly an exaggeration, for fatalities on this scale would have required a firestorm on the scale of Hamburg in 1943 or Dresden in 1945, and of that there is no evidence, nor was the German Air Force at that stage capable of creating one. Current estimates suggest around 7,000 dead, on the assumption that casualty rates per ton of bombs might have equalled the Dresden raid, but a casualty rate equivalent to the Blitz on London would mean around 2,500 deaths on the basis of the limited tonnage dropped.20

The German Air Force itself made the most of its contribution to victory in Poland and in doing so helped to nurture the myth of Warsaw’s destruction from the air. The propaganda arm produced the film Baptism of Fire (Feuertaufe), a documentary deliberately designed to present to the German public and to foreign audiences the image of awesome aerial power exerted against the unfortunate Poles. In November 1939 the new Reich Commissar of the Polish ‘General-Government’, Hans Frank, hosted neutral diplomats and military attachés formerly accredited to Warsaw at a reception in the former capital. In his address he asked them to examine closely the extensive bomb damage in Warsaw (it was claimed that out of 17,000 buildings only 300 had escaped unscathed); as a result of their observations he suggested they should ‘recommend to their respective Governments to intercede for peace’.21 By February 1940 Mussolini was openly talking of the 40,000 Poles who he claimed had died in the ruins of Warsaw, though only 12 per cent of the city had been destroyed or seriously damaged, and not all of that was due to bombing.22 The Hitler regime was happy to make political capital out of the bombing, just as the German Air Force clearly exploited the Polish campaign to enhance its own political weight and strategic status alongside the German Army. Yet the fact remains that the air campaign in Poland was a model of the operational air warfare elaborated before 1939, with air forces closely supporting the land campaign by destroying (with a wide margin of error) military, industrial and infrastructure targets designed to weaken Polish military resistance – and not an example of ruthless Douhetism."

[Michael Kenny]

‘General-Government’, Hans Frank, hosted neutral diplomats and military attachés formerly accredited to Warsaw at a reception in the former capital. In his address he asked them to examine closely the extensive bomb damage in Warsaw (it was claimed that out of 17,000 buildings only 300 had escaped unscathed); as a result of their observations he suggested they should ‘recommend to their respective Governments to intercede for peace’ By February 1940 Mussolini was openly talking of the 40,000 Poles who he claimed had died in the ruins of Warsaw,

If only the Germans had not decided to brag about the destruction you might have got away with posting your fiction..............

[Kurfürst]

‘General-Government’, Hans Frank, hosted neutral diplomats and military attachés formerly accredited to Warsaw at a reception in the former capital. In his address he asked them to examine closely the extensive bomb damage in Warsaw (it was claimed that out of 17,000 buildings only 300 had escaped unscathed); as a result of their observations he suggested they should ‘recommend to their respective Governments to intercede for peace’ By February 1940 Mussolini was openly talking of the 40,000 Poles who he claimed had died in the ruins of Warsaw,

If only the Germans had not decided to brag about the destruction you might have got away with posting your fiction..............

Opinion of Richard James Overy (born 23 December 1947) is a British historian who has published extensively on the history of World War II and the Third Reich. In 2007 as The Times editor of Complete History of the World he chose the 50 key dates of world history.

Awards and honours[edit]
1977 Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
2000 Fellow of the British Academy
2003 Fellow of King's College
2001 Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History
2004 Wolfson History Prize, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany; Stalin's Russia
2005 Hessell-Tiltman Prize, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia

Publications[edit]
William Morris, Viscount Nuffield (1976), ISBN 0-900362-84-7
The Air War: 1939–1945 (1980), ISBN 1-57488-716-5
The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932–1938 (1982), ISBN 0-521-55286-9
Goering: The "Iron Man" (1984), ISBN 1-84212-048-4
All Our Working Lives (with Peter Pagnamenta, 1984), ISBN 0-563-20117-7
The Origins of the Second World War (1987), ISBN 0-582-29085-6.
co-written with Timothy Mason: "Debate: Germany, 'Domestic Crisis' and War in 1939" pages 200–240 from Past and Present, Number 122, February 1989 reprinted as "Debate: Germany, 'Domestic Crisis' and the War in 1939" from The Origins of The Second World War edited by Patrick Finney, Edward Arnold: London, United Kingdom, 1997, ISBN 0-340-67640-X.
The Road To War (with Andrew Wheatcroft, 1989), ISBN 0-14-028530-X
The Inter-War Crisis, 1919–1939 (1994), ISBN 0-582-35379-3
War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994), ISBN 0-19-820290-3
Why the Allies Won (1995), ISBN 0-224-04172-X
The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich (1996), ISBN 0-14-051330-2
The Times Atlas of the Twentieth Century (ed., 1996), ISBN 0-7230-0766-7
Bomber Command, 1939–45 (1997), ISBN 0-00-472014-8
Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow (1997), ISBN 1-57500-051-2
The Times History of the 20th Century (1999), ISBN 0-00-716637-0
The Battle (2000), ISBN 0-14-029419-8 (republished as The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality)
Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (2001), ISBN 0-7139-9350-2 (republished as Interrogations: Inside the Minds of the Nazi Elite)
Germany: A New Social and Economic History. Vol. 3: Since 1800 (ed. with Sheilagh Ogilvie, 2003), ISBN 0-340-65215-2
The Times Complete History of the World (6th ed., 2004), ISBN 0-00-718129-9
The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004), ISBN 0-7139-9309-X
Collins Atlas of Twentieth Century History (2005), ISBN 0-00-720170-2
Imperial War Museum's Second World War Experience Volume 1: Blitzkrieg (2008), ISBN 978-1-84442-014-8
Imperial War Museum's Second World War Experience Volume 2: Axis Ascendant (2008), ISBN 978-1-84442-008-7
1939: Countdown to War (2009), ISBN 978-960-16-3467-8
The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (2009), ISBN 978-0-7139-9563-3
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (2013), ISBN 0713995610 (later published as The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940–1945, ISBN 978-0-670-02515-2)

vs

opinion of Michael Kenny, an electrician, living in Teesside.

[Michael Kenny]

A deperate attempt to distract from an awkward fact. The Germans themselves boasted they had terror bombed Warsaw and even gave guided tours to showcase the destruction. .

Your own source states:

General-Government’, Hans Frank, hosted neutral diplomats and military attachés formerly accredited to Warsaw at a reception in the former capital. In his address he asked them to examine closely the extensive bomb damage in Warsaw (it was claimed that out of 17,000 buildings only 300 had escaped unscathed); as a result of their observations he suggested they should ‘recommend to their respective Governments to intercede for peace’ By February 1940 Mussolini was openly talking of the 40,000 Poles who he claimed had died in the ruins of Warsaw,

Anyone doubting the bona-fides of the scholar who wrote this please see here for his qualifications


Richard James Overy (born 23 December 1947) is a British historian who has published extensively on the history of World War II and the Third Reich. In 2007 as The Times editor of Complete History of the World he chose the 50 key dates of world history.

Awards and honours
1977 Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
2000 Fellow of the British Academy
2003 Fellow of King's College
2001 Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History
2004 Wolfson History Prize, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany; Stalin's Russia
2005 Hessell-Tiltman Prize, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia

Publications
William Morris, Viscount Nuffield (1976), ISBN 0-900362-84-7
The Air War: 1939–1945 (1980), ISBN 1-57488-716-5
The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932–1938 (1982), ISBN 0-521-55286-9
Goering: The "Iron Man" (1984), ISBN 1-84212-048-4
All Our Working Lives (with Peter Pagnamenta, 1984), ISBN 0-563-20117-7
The Origins of the Second World War (1987), ISBN 0-582-29085-6.
co-written with Timothy Mason: "Debate: Germany, 'Domestic Crisis' and War in 1939" pages 200–240 from Past and Present, Number 122, February 1989 reprinted as "Debate: Germany, 'Domestic Crisis' and the War in 1939" from The Origins of The Second World War edited by Patrick Finney, Edward Arnold: London, United Kingdom, 1997, ISBN 0-340-67640-X.
The Road To War (with Andrew Wheatcroft, 1989), ISBN 0-14-028530-X
The Inter-War Crisis, 1919–1939 (1994), ISBN 0-582-35379-3
War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994), ISBN 0-19-820290-3
Why the Allies Won (1995), ISBN 0-224-04172-X
The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich (1996), ISBN 0-14-051330-2
The Times Atlas of the Twentieth Century (ed., 1996), ISBN 0-7230-0766-7
Bomber Command, 1939–45 (1997), ISBN 0-00-472014-8
Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow (1997), ISBN 1-57500-051-2
The Times History of the 20th Century (1999), ISBN 0-00-716637-0
The Battle (2000), ISBN 0-14-029419-8 (republished as The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality)
Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (2001), ISBN 0-7139-9350-2 (republished as Interrogations: Inside the Minds of the Nazi Elite)
Germany: A New Social and Economic History. Vol. 3: Since 1800 (ed. with Sheilagh Ogilvie, 2003), ISBN 0-340-65215-2
The Times Complete History of the World (6th ed., 2004), ISBN 0-00-718129-9
The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004), ISBN 0-7139-9309-X
Collins Atlas of Twentieth Century History (2005), ISBN 0-00-720170-2
Imperial War Museum's Second World War Experience Volume 1: Blitzkrieg (2008), ISBN 978-1-84442-014-8
Imperial War Museum's Second World War Experience Volume 2: Axis Ascendant (2008), ISBN 978-1-84442-008-7
1939: Countdown to War (2009), ISBN 978-960-16-3467-8
The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (2009), ISBN 978-0-7139-9563-3
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (2013), ISBN 0713995610 (later published as The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940–1945, ISBN 978-0-670-02515-2)

[Kurfürst]

Snipping off the lead of the relevant paragraph from Overy ("The German Air Force itself made the most of its contribution to victory in Poland and in doing so helped to nurture the myth of Warsaw’s destruction from the air."), how original and convincing.

[Michael Kenny]

Hans Frank was the man of the ground. He is referenced (by a famous British historian) :


In his address he asked them to examine closely the extensive bomb damage in Warsaw (it was claimed that out of 17,000 buildings only 300 had escaped unscathed); as a result of their observations he suggested they should ‘recommend to their respective Governments to intercede for peace’

There can be no better placed person than Frank to know the full extent of the damage to Warasw and we are fortunate his words survived to destroy the mendacious fabrications of the apologists.

[Kurfürst]

Well I suppose the Polish commander on Warsaw could have saved a whole lot of trouble for everyone if he had just raised the white flag a week earlier, instead of postponing the inevitable.

[4thskorpion]

Well I suppose the Polish commander on Warsaw could have saved a whole lot of trouble for everyone if he had just raised the white flag a week earlier, instead of postponing the inevitable.

Well, I guess one could argue the same for the commander of the German nation had he killed himself a few years earlier instead of postponing the inevitable in 1945.

[durb]

I guess the bombing damage on Warsaw on Sept. 1939 was rather small when compared to the later damage of 1944 when the whole city was demolished. Of course the bombing damage might have looked very big by the "destruction standards" of 1939...the scale of bombing destruction and the "destruction standards" grew hugely during the WW2. If a 10 - 30 % of destruction of targeted city center was considered a big "success" by 1939, the destruction standard later grew to 80% or even 100 % of targeted city center in some cases...as well as the rise of civilian casualties.

German terror bombings were relatively limited efforts when compared to later Allied strategic bombings of Germany and Japan. Principally Luftwaffe was a tactical air weapon designed to give close support of ground forces and achieve tactical air superiority, "strategic" terror bombings were of secondary importance and thought to be just swift knock-out operations to demoralize already beaten enemy (Warsaw) or make otherwise weaker enemy (Belgrad) to surrender more quickly. Of the Rotterdam case I have read that it was an "unnecessary accident" as the Dutch were already surrendering but the bombing unit was not informed of it. If it was intended as a show-case to scare British (or even French) out of war, it failed miserably.

[4thskorpion]

Hans Frank was the man of the ground. He is referenced (by a famous British historian) :


In his address he asked them to examine closely the extensive bomb damage in Warsaw (it was claimed that out of 17,000 buildings only 300 had escaped unscathed); as a result of their observations he suggested they should ‘recommend to their respective Governments to intercede for peace’

There can be no better placed person than Frank to know the full extent of the damage to Warasw and we are fortunate his words survived to destroy the mendacious fabrications of the apologists.

This small selection from an album of photos taken by a Polish photographer during the siege of Warsaw illustrates what Frank was talking about:

"po wybuchu" means "explosion"

"Zamek" is the Royal Castle in Wasaw and ul. Marszałkowska was one of Warsaw's main commercial streets.

One of many destroyed military installations cunningly disguised as residential apartment blocks by Varsovians!