Category Archives: Second World War

Britain, History, Military, Second World War, Society, United States

Dresden and the Allied bombings of World War II…

70 YEARS ON

Today, the blossoming of Dresden in the east of Germany stands in stark contrast to how the city looked from the ruins of the Allied bombings towards the end of World War II.

British and American bombers dropped 3,900 tonnes of explosives on the Saxony city during four raids on 13th-15th February 1945, killing an estimated 25,000 people and reducing the city to rubble.

The bombing, ordered by Royal Air Force marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, was widely criticised because of the indiscriminate and ‘blanket bombing’ which hit civilian areas as well as military targets – killing thousands of innocents.

Over two days and nights in February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), turned the city into a sea of flames and rubble.

The resulting firestorm is said to have reached temperatures of over 1,500C (2,700F), destroying over 1,600 acres of the city centre.

The victims – mostly women and children – died in savage firestorms whipped up by the intense heat of 2,400 tons of high explosive and 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs.

It was initially claimed that up to 250,000 civilians lost their lives in the Dresden bombings but an official report released after the war showed the casualty figure was in fact closer to between 22,500 and 25,000.

A police report written shortly after the bombings showed that the city centre firestorm had destroyed almost 12,000 houses, including 640 shops, 18 cinemas, 39 schools, 26 public houses and the city zoo.

The destruction of Dresden has been subjected to much fierce debate in the 70 years since the war. No one has ever been charged over the bombings, but several historians both in Germany and former Allied nations hold the opinion that the bombing was a war crime.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, ultimately responsible for the attack, distanced himself from the bombing of Dresden shortly afterwards.

An RAF memo issued to airmen on the night of the attack said:

… ‘Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester is also the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westward and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas.

… At one time, and well known for its china, Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance…. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front… and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.’

Bomber Command, which suffered the highest casualty rate of any British unit, losing 55,573 of its 125,000 men, eventually gained a memorial in 2012, but sections of society in Britain were outraged and disgusted with public recognition being given to such attacks. It is the view of many that such a memorial should never have been authorised by the British Government because of the attacks on civilians and on non-strategic targets.

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History, Human Rights, Legal, Second World War, Society

International Re-evaluation: ‘Were the Nuremberg War Trials (1945-6) a Travesty of Justice?’…

(From the archives) Originally posted on February 7, 2011 by markdowe

HISTORY: NUREMBERG WAR TRIALS

Intro:-

THE ACTIONS carried out by the Nazis in the Second World War led the Allied powers as early as 1943 to promise to bring war criminals to justice. These trials were held in Nuremberg between November 1945 and August 1946. The Allies set up an international Military Tribunal to judge the accused, the bench comprising four judges, with a deputy for each in case of illness, representing the four main Allied powers: Britain, France, the USA and the USSR. Some 199 were accused at Nuremberg, but thousands of others were tried elsewhere: in Allied military courts, by their own countrymen after the Allied withdrawal, and in former occupied countries. Important questions about the legality of the trials were raised even at the time, and continue to be asked by those who think they were inspired more by vengeance than by justice.

 

AT NUREMBERG, the prisoners were tried on four counts: crimes against peace – preparing and carrying out acts of aggression; war crimes – the ill-treatment of prisoners of war and civilian populations; extremes of brutality against individuals or groups; and conspiracy – participation in plans to commit the other three offences. A number of the accused, including Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, were already dead. Another, Robert Ley, former Head of the Nazi Labour front, hanged himself before the trial started; another, Hermann Goering, swallowed cyanide when it was over in order to avoid the gallows. Another Gustav Krupp, was senile and did not understand the charges; his son Alfred was later tried and sentenced in his place. Of the twenty-four who were brought to trial, three were acquitted. Three, including Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, received life imprisonment. Two got twenty years, one fifteen and Doenitz, who had made the final surrender to the Allies, got ten years’ imprisonment. A number of the accused, including Adolf Eichmann (responsible for administering the ‘Final Solution’ for the Jews) and Franz Stangl (the former Commandant of the camps at Treblinka and Sobibor), were later found abroad, brought to trial and convicted. Twelve were hanged on 16 October 1946.

Week after week, the evidence had mounted up during the trial, evidence at the same time chilling and overwhelming. One of the accused, Hess, gave every sign of mental derangement; only Goering maintained his quick-witted awareness to the end. The others were broken men. One, Hans Frank, whose thirty-eight volume diary gave irrefutable evidence of his involvement in murder, starvation and extermination, despaired completely and summed up what many of them felt when he said: ‘A thousand years will pass, and this guilt of Germany will not pass away!’

How justified was this trial and its outcome? Few disputed the moral justification for it. The crimes involved were so dreadful and so overwhelming that no one imagined there was no redress; everyone supposed that the legal basis for the trial lay in The Hague and Geneva Conventions. The general reaction, therefore, was to welcome the trial as going some way towards atoning for unprecedented atrocities.

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YET THERE REMAIN disturbing features. How could aggression be illegal if there was no legislative agreement under which it could be punished? It was highly unusual for any state or individual ruler to be punished for breaking a treaty, though a number of such trials have been held since Nuremberg. To spare the Soviet Union’s embarrassment, for the USSR had also been guilty of exactly the same offences against Poland and Finland, the charge was confined to aggression by the Axis powers alone. Thus the offence seemed to be specially designed to fit the crime and was applied only selectively. No Italians were ever charged. Italy had changed sides, and to indict an ally would have opened the door to a similar indictment against the USSR.

The accused were also condemned for crimes that were not crimes in international law at the time they were committed. If extreme crimes against humanity, or conspiracy to commit such crimes, were now offences against international law, the same charges could have been brought against Churchill for his complicity in the bombing of Dresden, if the Germans had been victorious instead of defeated.

Furthermore, the accused were not allowed to say: ‘But I was only obeying my orders.’ To expect an individual subordinate to be able to distinguish between a legal order and a criminal one was quite unrealistic. The Allies themselves, throughout the war, considered men bounded by superior orders, and not legally liable for them. But now the Allies were saying that obedience to orders was not a defence, but only a mitigation. This would have certainly been bad news to the bombardier aboard Enola Gay who was ordered to drop the first atom bomb on Hiroshima.

But the most fundamental criticism was the simplest. For punishment to have at least the appearance of justice, the prosecutor must not also be the judge. The judges at Nuremberg represented the nations that were parties to the action, and therefore could not be said to be impartial. It would have been better that the judges should have been empanelled from among neutral nations such as Sweden or Switzerland, for this would have given a greater impression of impartiality. The partiality of the bench gave ammunition to those who maintained that the trials were merely acts of vengeance carried out by the victor against the vanquished. As Goering himself shrewdly observed at the trial: ‘The victors will always be the judge, the vanquished the accused.’ Such a criticism will always weaken the moral justification of the Nuremberg Tribunal, though it will not lessen the frightfulness of the crimes that brought the trials about.

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Arts, Britain, Government, History, Military, Science, Second World War

Britain: ‘RAF and the ‘Battle of the Beams’…

R.V JONES: ‘RADIO WAVES & ELECTRONIC JAMMING’

ON THE AFTERNOON of September 7, 1940, the first German bombers came rumbling up the Thames, to drop their bombs on London in the opening act of what became known as the “Blitz.” They were followed by a further 250 Luftwaffe bombers, unloading the first instalment of a massive payload of some 14,000 tons of high explosive that rained down on London until May of the following year.

The trial by fire that started more than 70 years ago is often depicted as a triumph of human resilience, a refusal by ordinary people to submit to terror. And so it was. But it was also a victory for a less known aspect of applied science, for, alongside the ferocious aerial combat another secret, electronic war was taking place, known to very few at the time and little appreciated since.

We rightly celebrate military victory in the Battle of Britain and civilian grit in the Blitz, but Britain’s astonishing scientific triumph in what Winston Churchill later called “the Battle of the Beams” has often been too easily overlooked. It saved countless thousands of lives, confused the German assault and helped to stave off the threat of invasion. This battle was fought, not with bombs and bullets, but radio waves. In the age of Shock and Awe, this covert scientific battle offers a timely reminder that ingenuity is just as important in war as brute force.

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THREE MONTHS before the Blitz began, a 28-year-old scientist named Reginald Victor (R. V.) Jones was summoned to Downing Street to address the cabinet on the subject of radio beams. Churchill had become increasingly worried by intelligence reports suggesting that the Nazis had developed some kind of secret ray that could magically guide the Luftwaffe bombers to their targets, even when flying at night and in dense cloud.

Though outnumbered, heroic RAF pilots flying nimble and venomous Spitfires and Hurricanes saw off the Luftwaffe, their decisive victory finally coming on September 15, 1940.

An RAF officer working in technical intelligence, Jones had begun studying German radio navigation systems several months earlier and offered the Cabinet a most alarming conclusion: the Germans were using two narrow radio beams transmitted from separate locations in continental Europe to pinpoint strategic locations in Britain. In effect, the German bomber pilot could follow one radio beam until it intersected with the other beam and then drop his payload – directly over the target.

Night-bombing made bombers safer from interception by fighters and anti-aircraft systems, but finding a target in the blackout or bad weather using traditional navigation was tricky. German scientists, it seemed, had solved the problem: they codenamed it “Knickebein”, meaning “crooked leg”, a reference either to the shape of the intersecting beams or the bent appearance of the transmitting antennae. The Germans could never resist a hinting code-word – the German codename for their long-range radar system, for example, was “Heimdall”, after the Norse god with the power to see over vast distances. But the British were similarly addicted to code-wordplay. With admirable understatement, this threatening new German radio navigation system was given the codename “Headache”; the countermeasures required to defeat it were named, perhaps appropriately, “Aspirin”.

 

TO TACKLE the problem, R.V. Jones turned for help to medicine. Electro-diathermy sets were used in hospitals to destroy abnormal tissue and to cauterise wounds. Suitably modified, they also proved highly effective at jamming the Knickebein transmissions and were now deployed to send out a blizzard of radio noise over a wide range of frequencies.

Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, had given Hitler his personal pledge that the radio navigation system was invulnerable. He was far wide of the mark and so, increasingly, were his bombers. During the crucial months of September and October 1940, as the Luftwaffe night-raids mounted in intensity, Jones and his fellow scientists became ever more adept at jamming and diverting the radio beams, using more powerful radio transmitters to “inject” the Knickebein signals with confusing Morse code elements.

Deprived of reliable electronic direction, the Luftwaffe crews could become disorientated at night. One pilot was said to have landed in Dover, thinking he was back in France. Bombs intended for vital and heavily populated targets fell relatively harmlessly in fields and hills. According to some estimates, as much as 80 per cent of the German night bombs missed their target. Intercepted messages between German ground controllers and Luftwaffe pilots unable to locate their targets provided vital evidence that the beam-jammers were having the desired effect.

Even so, “Aspirin” was far from a cure-all remedy. The German bombers still caused appalling damage. London represented a target too vast to miss, even at night. A derivative of Knickebein radio navigation, known as “X Apparatus” was used to guide 400 Luftwaffe pilots to Coventry on November 14, 1940. Because of a technical error, the British jammer stations attacked the wrong frequency. The city was devastated, 568 people died, and Joseph Goebbels coined the term “Coventriert” to describe a particularly satisfactory level of destruction.

But how many more lives might have been lost, how many key military and industrial installations would have been destroyed and with what effect on the progress of war, if the Luftwaffe had been able to continue precise bombing under cover of darkness? Churchill was never in any doubt that science had played a pivotal role in blunting the Blitz. He dubbed R.V. Jones the “man who bent the bloody beams”.

 

R.V. JONES, who died in 1997, was a remarkable warrior, but one who believed in trickery and creativity as the antidote to savagery. In 1993, the CIA founded an intelligence award named in his honour, for “scientific acumen applied with art in the cause of freedom”. Yet, in this country, which he did so much to defend, so secretly, his is not a household name.

The Blitz and the Battle of Britain are synonymous terms that have left an enduring legacy of proud national stereotypes; the Spitfire pilot, the ambulance driver, the unbowed housewife sweeping up after the bombs had left their mark.

Just as important, although much less lauded, was the scientist in his lab, using a medical gadget to baffle and confuse Hitler’s bombers.

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