| | One needs to remember that Bomber Command started its operations when the German military machine had subjugated Western Europe and was threatening to eliminate the USSR. If that happened then nothing would have stood in the way of the German invasion of Britain. There wasn't time to fuck around worrying about the poor German civilian. Britain was a hair away from being defeated & occupied! There wasn't time to develop laser-guided munitions and thermal imaging equipment required to enable a bombardier to pick out industrial targets built in the middle of suburbia.
Harris & his Bomber Command took the technology and manpower they had available and used it to the best of their ability to help defeat the Nazis. Civilians died. That is unfortunate. What would you have Britain do? Surrender and allow Hitler to rule the Western Hemisphere to avoid inadvertently killing a single German Housewife with your crude and ungainly weapon?
The *reason* why the British & Americans adopted "carpet bombing" was that there was no other way to hit the targets. The technology wasn't up to it and wouldn't be for another 2-3 decades. Indeed, there was fuck all else the Brits could to carry the fight to the German homeland prior to 1944.
The British Army had had the shit kicked out of it in France, Greece, Crete, Libya, Egypt, Malaya, Burma, and Singapore. They didn't start regularly beating German field armies until 1943. And even when they did sort their army out - they still had to get that army back onto mainland Europe and across the Rhine before they could attack Germany directly.
As for Britain's poorly-equipped and under-manned navy, it was diluted by the need to secure sea-lanes across the Atlantic, the Med., and the Indian Ocean. In the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the RN & Merchant Marine were loosing more battles then they were winning. In the Med., Malta was hanging on by its fingernails at the cost of slowly bleeding the RN white. But if Malta had fallen then it's likely that Suez would have gone with it.
It took the Allies until late 1943 to knock back the Axis navies to the point that their land operations could be supported, unimpeded, by sea.
So Bomber Command was the only weapon the Brits had. When Harris took over he inherited a force equipped mainly with 2-engined medium-bombers with insufficient range to carry a heavy bomb-load into Germany. Nor could they navigate very well by night, and they were suffering at the hands of the German night-fighter force.
Under Harris' command the RAF introduced technology and tactics to mitigate and even solve each of these problems. They had to start this process from scratch because nobody (on the Allied side at least) had ever attempted to subdue an enemy by aerial assault before. Thus Kurt's conclusion (Post 1) that Harris was a "first class ass" is stupid. Under his leadership Bomber command went from a force unable to regularly put a single bomb on a German city to being able to annihilate one in the period of about 1 year. That was the reason they hired him in the first place!!!
The point when area-bombing might have become immoral was when it was used in spite of the fact that better and less blunt weapons were available. With British, American and Russian Field Armies entering Germany there are good moral and military cases supporting the conclusion that the destruction of Dresden was unnecessary.
On the other hand:
(1) Had the destruction of Dresden resulted in an immediate surrender - as the destruction of Nagasaki did in the case of Japan - we would not be so quick to hang Harris in effigy. Indeed had the German leadership had listened to common sense (and the advice of significant German Generals i.e. von Rundstedt) and surrendered on or about the 15th of Feb then Stalin, in April 1945, wouldn't have had to send 6,300 tanks and 8,500 aircraft to immolate Berlin. How many civilians and military men would bombing Dresden have been saved in this case?
The answer is difficult to figure out. But look at what was left to do to defeat Germany: The war went on another 3 months after Dresden. The US and British Armies had yet to cross the Rhine at that point, they had only just reduced the Salient caused by the German Ardennes offensive (The Battle of the Bulge - launched at a time when everybody, except Hitler, thought that the Whermarcht was finished). The US Army captured the Bridge at Remagen on 7th March (the Brits didn't cross the upper Rhine until 23rd March) and encircled the Ruhr on the 4th of April where upon it undertook operations to destroy FM Model's Army Group B (an army of over 400,000 men). It would take US 1st Army until 18th April to reach the Elbe river and even then the Germans didn't surrender until 7th May, after the Soviets had taken the Reichstag!
(2) Might I also point out that the British mainland was under V-1 and V-2 attack from June 1944 to the end of March 1945? Over 4,000 of these cruise and ballistic missiles struck British cities during this time. Strange how no one mentions these indiscriminate attacks when they discuss the Destruction of Dresden. I suppose it is considered unsporting for the British to reply in kind...
In Conclusion:
The Allies didn't start the war and ALL they required for it to stop was Germany's unconditional surrender. Contrast this with the Germans: they weren't prepared to stop until they had done unto Russia (not to mention the Jews) what the Romans did unto Carthage. Using the most effective war machine the world had ever known, the Germans pursued the war and ignored every opportunity to end it. They stopped only after the Soviets occupied the rubble-mound that was once their capital. If you want to blame someone for Dresden, blame Hitler.
Harris believed that he could pound the German people into submission, and he believed he could do it without exposing the British infantryman to the sort of slaughter he witnessed during WWI. If he was mistaken, he wasn't the only one. His belief that air-power - alone - could subdue a nation, was held by commanders before him and after him. He shared this belief with his contemporaries both Allied and Nazi. He could not have known that only a bullet in Hitler's skull could induce the entire German military and civil machine to throw in the towel. After all, any normal megalomaniac would have chucked it in after France fell and the Russian's destroyed Army Group Center.
And lastly, I hope that this little rant has put some context into the 'Bomber Harris' debate. Context - as objectivists well know - is extremely important when it comes to drawing conclusions.
(Edited by Robert Winefield
on 5/20, 11:21pm)
|
|
