VDH UltraWorld War II. Churchill, the Terrorist? Part Seven
Victor Davis Hanson
As far as terrorism and terrorist bombing, who exactly started the first systematic campaign of terror bombing?
It was the Luftwaffe.
Without provocation, German planes first indiscriminately bombed civilian targets in Poland to instill panic, terror, and mass death (150,000–200,000 Polish civilians killed in the actual invasion, perhaps the majority of them during the German bombing of Warsaw and smaller cities like Frampol, Wieluń, and Sulejów). Hitler continued that terror tactic unapologetically in Holland, where it flattened the center of Rotterdam (nearly 1,000 civilians dead, over 20,000 homes destroyed) during the first two weeks of May 1940.
Despite Hitler’s demonstrably false claims that the Allies had started civilian bombing, he continued his strategy of incinerating civilians against Coventry and London. One of the reasons that the British began leaflet “bombing” after they had declared war on Germany was in order not to become the first in the conflict to bomb civilian targets, as Hitler had done from the very start in Poland.
As I pointed out earlier in the first part of my series of replies, in terms of soldiers lost versus civilians killed, Britain waged a less lethal war than almost all of the other belligerents. It lost fewer soldiers than its two allies and killed far fewer of its enemies as well.
Dresden and Hamburg paled before the American incendiary campaigns against Japanese cities between March and July 1945, followed by the two atomic bombs. Yet America’s bombing of civilian targets resulted in far fewer civilian deaths than did the Japanese army’s systematic and decade-long slaughter of millions of Chinese, not to mention Hitler’s agendas of destroying European Jewry and slaughtering so-called “Slavic sub-humans” in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Cooper cites as proof of the British embrace of terror the ill-fated Operation Razzle, designed by Bomber Command to torch some German forests. But the brief attacks proved a huge fizzle and incurred large bomber losses without effective bombing. The Black Forest, not far from the border with France, was according to British intelligence a massive depot of German arms and supplies—a fact which explained the first British missions in mid-June 1940, just days before the fall of France.
The bombing also reflected the weakness and desperation of the RAF of 1939–41, which could not conduct successful daylight precision-bombing raids across the occupied European continent—lacking fighter escort, updated radar, effective navigation, accurate bomb sights, and reliable four-engine heavy bombers.
The RAF in 1942 warned Americans from bitter experience that it was suicidal to fly daylight, unescorted precision-bombing raids over occupied Europe into Germany and Eastern Europe. After thousands of lost B-17s and dead airmen, the Americans gradually agreed. They found sustainable success only in mid to late 1944 with the arrival of fighter escorts, the liberation of France, improved tactics, and a depleted Luftwaffe—and even then, they at times copied British area bombing.
Again, true terror might be properly gauged by the number of civilians a military killed compared to the number of its soldiers lost. Japan most likely won that sick contest by butchering some 15-20 million Chinese, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders, although Hitler came close through the Holocaust, the deaths of millions of Red Army prisoners, and the unrestricted butchery of Polish and Russian civilians.
As terrible as the suffering of the German and Japanese people became, it was minuscule in comparison to the tens of millions of innocents that Germany and Japan butchered in their respective campaigns to absorb Russia, China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific—to say nothing of the Holocaust.
In sum, there was no prewar Allied terror plan to wipe out millions of enemy civilians in order to absorb and colonize their territories as was true of the Germans in Eastern Europe and Russia, the Japanese in China, and the Italians in East Africa.
The post VDH UltraWorld War II. Churchill, the Terrorist? Part Seven appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.
