How the RAF slaughtered German workers Statue unveiled to war criminal
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
How the RAF slaughtered German workers
The Lancaster bomber which droned overhead on 31 May, to coincide with the unveiling of the new statue to Arthur 'Bomber' Harris, evoked nostalgia among many older Londoners. Germans who survived the second world war would have had different feelings.
For the Lancasters, together with American Flying Fortresses, were the backbone of the air fleet which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of German civilians between 1943 and 1945.
Bomber Harris, although C-in-C of Bomber Command, did not invent the campaign to massacre German civilians. The decision to unleash a campaign of mass slaughter was made by the British and American governments.
Churchill's air war advisor, Professor FA Lindemann, estimated that German morale could be 'broken by the mass bombing of working class districts in the 58 German cities with more than 100,00 inhabitants. A third of the population, he reckoned, could be made homeless.
Lindemann's 1942 report was adopted and Harris given its execution. It was announced over the skies of Hamburg on 24 August 1943.
After a week of pounding – the British by night and the Americans by day – 50,000 civilians were dead. This compares with a figure of 51,509 for the total British losses in German bombing raids during the war. In the notorious German attack on Coventry, just 308 people were killed.
Hamburg was notable as the first German city in which bombing had resulted in a firestorm during the war. Part of the bombing plan was to combine high explosive with incendiary bombs, with the deliberate intent of causing a massively destructive firestorm.
Firestorm attacks were on Konigsberg, Darmstadt, Brunswick, Heilbronn and finally, in the most notorious raid of the war, on Dresden. Hundreds of thousands were killed in raids on cities like Cologne and Berlin, where the destruction failed to ignite a firestorm.
The firestorm raid on Dresden in February 1943 killed an unknown number of people; 135,000 is one of the lowest estimates, others say more than 200,000. After two waves of British bombers during the night, those attempting rescue work the next day were hit by US Flying Fortresses.
The Dresden raid was the first in history where the survivors could not cope with burying the dead. Tens of thousands died sheltering in cellars, their bodies often fused together in an indistinguishable lump of carbon. One Dresden pensioner recalled:
'One shape I shall never forget was the remains of what had apparently been a mother and child. They had shrivelled and charred into one piece, and had been stuck rigidly to the asphalt. They had to be prised up. The child must have been underneath the mother, because you could clearly see its shape, with its mother's arms clasped around it.'
The slaughterhouse of Dresden was the curtain-raiser for the firestorm bombing of Tokyo (where 90,000 were killed) and other Japanese cities, culminating in the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bomber Harris enthusiastically and efficiently carried out the orders given by others. Those orders were to slaughter and disperse the German working class – or at least that section of it which had not been sent by Hitler to die on the Russian front.
When Dresden was bombed the Red Army was just 80 miles away and Germany obviously defeated. Indeed the air marshals were concerned lest the bombers lose their way and accidentally attack the Russians.
The excuse for the raid was the Dresden was an important railway centre. Within a few days the trains were running through the city again.
Bomber Harris was only doing his job – just like Eichmann and Himmler with the concentration camps. Erecting a statue to him is an obscenity London can do without.