British Night bombing

[Nashwan]

That's the claim that gas bombs were used by the RAF in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not true, of course, but it's done the propoganda rounds in the run up to the recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Tilt]

Originally posted by Nashwan
That's the claim that gas bombs were used by the RAF in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not true, of course, but it's done the propoganda rounds in the run up to the recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

They were not used..........but the RAF was under no stricture of moral code vis a vis whether they should be or not.......(Harris is again on record as is Churchhill in this respect).......neither was the RAF concerned as to whether the victims were Muslims or not. They were Kurdish insurgents that needed quelling.

It was quite simply cheaper to bomb and shoot them from aeroplanes than use troops on the ground

There is no moral high ground to be sought in war .........there never is IMO.

[Nashwan]

We Brits just wanted to kill Jerry in large numbers; and we did.

What the RAF were trying to do was destroy German cities. That's different from killing people, just as destroying a factory is different from killing it's workers.

Bomber Commands policy of area raids was developed from German attacks on Britiain in 1940 and 1941. In particular it was found that the damage done in German area attacks caused far more lost production than German raids on factories.

Here's a letter passed on from Herschel Johnson to the US secretary of state in early 1941, describing the effect of German raids on British towns, particulary Coventry:

At numerous industrial plants, in this part of England, where  hundreds of workmen are employed, only a neglible percent of such workpeople is not in one way or another adversely affected in consequence of air raids. Loss of sleep is a factor even in cases where the workmen remain at home and do not repair to shelters.

But, generally speaking, a more potent factor is worry induced by the disintegration of family life. It requires little imagination to comprehend what must be the state of mind of a workman who begins his task in the morning knowing that his wife and children are standing at some windswept bus stop both hungry and cold, or what must be the state of mind of a workman who knows that his wife and family must remain in a house which has been rendered unfit for human habitation and which it is beyond his means to repair.
 
The bombing of working-class residential districts in this area has come to be accepted as an ingenious and effective move on the part of Germany. Moreover, such bombing has come to be viewed as even a greater menace than the damage actually done to industrial plant. What happened at Coventry well illustrates the devilish effectiveness of the bombing of districts inhabited by working-class people. It seems to be pretty well established that as many as 70,000 houses in the comparatively small city of Coventry were affected by bombing and that of these 30,000 were made unfit for human habitation, and 7,000 demolished entirely.
 
The big raid on Coventry took place during the night of November 14-15, 1940. Since that time some weeks have elapsed and great strides have been made in the direction of make-shift repairs to damaged working-class residences. But there is not a sizeable industrial enterprise in the whole of Coventry whose production is not still being adversely affected by raiding has wrought in the lives of Coventry working people. There hovers over that city an apprehensiveness which has lingered since the raid took place. This apprehensiveness is born of a realization that the Germans can at will again do to Coventry what they did to it
during that one horrible night in November.
 
Intricate, costly, and heavy machine tools can be extricated from the cellars of demolished manufacturing plants. Many of them can be repaired and installed in new plant. But the workers
who man these machines, so long as they live as they do today, can never attain the efficiency which, before the events in question took place, they maintained as a mere matter of course.

Note there is no mention of civilian casualties there. That's because the vast majority of raids produced relatively small civilian casualties.

Even the most devastating attack in Europe, the bombing of Hamburg, killed about 3% of the population, yet resulted in about 50% decline in production for months afterwards.

Britain was the recipient of both daylight precision attacks, and night time area raids, and found the latter much more damaging to production. It's based on that, and following the German example, that the RAF switched to area bombing themselves.

Well I am glad at least one Brit on this forums agrees. For the record the allies didn't even charge the Nazi's with war crimes related to the bombing of cities and civilians.

That's because it wasn't a crime. There was no international law or treaty prohibiting it. In fact, international law (the Hague Conventions of 1907) specifically allowed the bombardment by land and sea of defended cities, in the abscence of aircraft being mentioned, the same rules were applied to them.

There was a brief ban on bombardment from balloons, but that ws only designed to run for 5 years, and nobody agreed to extend that once the five years was up.

the Dams:

The objective was to destroy the dams and knock out the electricity generated to the Ruhr industries...

What it accomplished was it killed a bunch of civilians. Ruhr industry was hardly effected.

Not only that but the loss of pilots and crews were hardly worth killing those civilians.

Well, Speer diverted electric motors and specialist engineers from all over Germany to help restore the damage. In his own words, he wanted to restore armament production in the Ruhr to half it's normal after one week, and back to full production within 2 weeks. In all, not far off half of all armament production for the entire Ruhr area was lost for the month. (As just one example, steel production was down by about 400,000 tons because of the raid)

Plus 27,000 workers had to be used to clear up the mess, dredge some of the rivers that had been blocked to navigation, restore the pumping plants and electricity generators, etc. About half of these were taken directly from their work constructing defences on the Atlantic Wall, making for an easier time in 1944.

sub pens:

What sub pens were closed by the RAF?

Answer is none. In fact some were still in operation in France at the time of surrender.

Well, the RAF did of course destroy submarine pens, but not until later in the war, when the Tallboy became available. The simple truth is the pens were impervious to normal bombs.

It was the USAAF who expended most effort on the submarine pens, making them number one priority for much of 1942 and 1943, although I don't they succeeded in destroying any (the bombs simply wouldn't penetrate).

Tirpitz:

You really think that was a 'success'? Look at all the resources that the RAF had tied up going after a single ship that was for the most part contained and posed little threat at that stage of the war.

I believe the RAF lost 13 aircraft attacking the Tirpitz, which seems like a good return. They launched 3 raids in 1943, 3 more before the end of the war, iirc. In total less than 200 aircraft, and total losses amounted to 13 (again iirc)

And the Tirpitz was a threat to the Artic convoys, which tied up several British and US battleships and carriers.

His goal was to kill err... 'de-house' civilians.

No, his goal was to win the war.

[Schaden]

Bomber Harris when caught speeding by police in 1943 - Policeman "Sir, you might have killed someone!!" - Harris in reply "It's my job to kill people...."

[Thrawn]

Gosh sounds bad for the Germans.  I guess they shouldn't have started the freaking war eh?

[Nashwan]

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

Arthur Harris

They were not used..........but the RAF was under no stricture of moral code vis a vis whether they should be or not.......(Harris is again on record as is Churchhill in this respect).......neither was the RAF concerned as to whether the victims were Muslims or not. They were Kurdish insurgents that needed quelling.

The claim that Churchill advocated "gassing" tribesmen needs to be seen in the context of the point he made:

"I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected."

[Tony Williams]

On the effectiveness of the Allied bombing of Germany, this is a quote from a presentation given by Professor Richard Overy, the historian:

"The effects of the bombing campaign went far beyond the mere physical destruction of factories and dwelling-houses, although these effects should not be underestimated in a complex and technically sophisticated industrial economy stretched taut by the demands of war. The bombing produced serious social dislocation and a high cost in terms of man-hours (or woman-hours in many cases). Evacuation, rehabilitation and welfare provision were carried out on the largest scale in an economy struggling with serious manpower losses and cuts in civilian production. Bombing also encouraged a strategic response from Hitler which placed a further strain on the war economy by diverting vast resources to projects of little advantage to the German war effort.

The net effect of the many ways in which bombing directly or indirectly impeded economic mobilisation cannot be calculated precisely. But in the absence of physical destruction and dislocation, without expensive programmes for secret weapons and underground production and without the diversion of four-fifths of the fighter force, one-third of all guns and one-fifth of all ammunition to the anti-bombing war the German armed forces could have been supplied with at least 50% more equipment in the last two years of war, perhaps much more. In an environment entirely free of bomb attack the German authorities and German industrial managers would have had the opportunity to exploit Germany’s resource-rich empire in Europe to the full. In 1942 the air force had begun to plan the production of 7000 aircraft a month, yet at the peak in 1944 a little over 3000 were produced, of which one-quarter were destroyed before even reaching the front-line.

Bombing took the strategic initiative away from German forces, and compelled Germany to divert an ever-increasing share of its manpower and resources away from production for the battlefield. As it was, German forces proved a formidable barrier to the end of the war. With more men, more heavily armed, an intact transport system and an uninterrupted flow of industrial resources Germany might well have kept the Allies at bay in 1945. Then the Allies would have faced the agonising decision about whether or not to drop atomic weapons on German cities rather than on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

[Tony Williams]

A few comments on USAAF day-bombing v RAF night-bombing.

Targets: in the last year of the war, the RAF attacked area targets about two-thirds of the time, precision targets the other third. For the USAAF, the figures were the other way round. It is not generally known that although the initial RAF attack on Dresden did most of the damage, the USAAF follow-ups sent more bombers in total against that unfortunate city. A key difference between them was the Harris was honest about what he was doing, the USAAF never admitted it: they would say that they were bombing a specific target without mentioning that it was surrounded by housing. The German inhabitants often wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between a USAAF 'precision' raid and an RAF 'area' raid.

Technology: part of the reason for the USAAF's use of area attacks was that the weather frequently made visual attacks impossible. In the last 9 months of the war, no fewer than 70% of USAAF raids on Germany used radar bombing - which was no more accurate during the day than it was at night (which is to say, not very). The RAF used radar bombing when the weather was bad, but at other times they had, by the final stages of the war, developed a highly sophisticated system which involved Pathfinder crews locating and marking the target, and Master Bombers cruising overhead telling each incoming plane where to drop its bombs. When done well, this was phenomenally accurate and resulted in the obliteration of the target with few 'strays'.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

[Wotan]

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

Arthur Harris

That would be all well and good but the Nazi strategy wasn't to bomb their way to victory. What was the plan anyway, to prove they could kill more by bomb then the Nazi's?

Rotterdam was bombed because it was a port bringing in supplies to feed Allied troops. The ports were the targets not civilians...

Warsaw was bombed because Polish military withdrew into the city. 'Flying artillery' was sent in not to target civilians but to demoralize those troops.

London? London was an escalation brought on by British retaliation of 'a few bombs gone astray'.

Harris not only went after civilians with a fervor but he went at them at the expense of his own aircraft and crews...

As an example:

Harris had claimed that he could "flatten" Berlin and cause the Germans to crumble under the weight of Bomber Command's assault. He didn't even come close. Bomber Command losses were high. In the nineteen raids on Berlin that comprised the "Battle of Berlin" BC lost 625 aircraft and over 3,000 aircrewmen killed or captured. The overall damage to Berlin, after nineteen heavy, concentrated raids, was relatively minor. Approximately 10,000 civilian deaths are attributed to those raids. The city's infra structure and arms production capabilities were not significantly degraded.

Martin Middlebrook "The Berlin Raids," chapter 12.

His theory of victory was flawed, even some Brits at the time thought so. Churchill was tried to distance himself from Harris after Dresden.



Besides Harris was well versed on the use of bombs and bombers as terror weapons well before WW2:

WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq

How the British bombed Iraq in the 1920s
By Henry Michaels
1 April 2003
Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

The US and British governments, and most Western media pundits, have tried to explain the determined resistance of the Iraqi people to the US-led assault by referring to the first Bush administration’s 1991 betrayal of the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Once Iraqis are confident that the Allies are serious about occupying the country, the argument goes, they will rise up and welcome them as liberators.

These assertions ignore the deeply-felt hostility to decades of colonial and semi-colonial rule by the Western powers, who long plundered Iraq’s oil reserves. During World War I, Mesopotamia was occupied by British forces, and it became a British mandated territory in 1920. In 1921, a kingdom was established under Faisal I, son of King Hussein of Hejaz and leader of the Arab Army in World War I. Britain withdrew from Iraq in 1932, but British and American oil companies retained their grip over the country.

One of the most bitter chapters in this history, one with direct parallels to the current military campaign, occurred during the 1920s. In many respects, the air war now being employed in Iraq is an offshoot of a military policy developed by Britain as it clung to its Iraqi colony 80 years ago.

Confronting a financial crisis after World War I, in mid-February 1920 Minister of War and Air Winston Churchill asked Chief of the Air Staff Hugh Trenchard to draw up a plan whereby Mesopotamia could be cheaply policed by aircraft armed with gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British and 10,000 Indian troops.

Several months later, a widespread uprising broke out, which was only put down through months of heavy aerial bombardment, including the use of mustard gas. At the height of the suppression, both Churchill and Trenchard tried to put the most flattering light upon actions of the Royal Air Force.

British historian David Omissi, author of Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939, records: “During the first week of July there was fierce fighting around Samawa and Rumaitha on the Euphrates but, Churchill told the Cabinet on 7 July, ‘our attack was successful.... The enemy were bombed and machine-gunned with effect by aeroplanes which cooperated with the troops’.”

The order issued by one RAF wing commander, J.A. Chamier, specified: “The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle.”

*Arthur “Bomber” Harris, a young RAF squadron commander, reported after a mission in 1924: “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage: They know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.”

The RAF sent a report to the British Parliament outlining the steps that its pilots had taken to avoid civilian casualties. The air war was less brutal than other forms of military control, it stated, concluding that “the main purpose is to bring about submission with the minimum of destruction and loss of life.”

Knowing the truth, at least one military officer resigned. Air Commander Lionel Charlton sent a letter of protest and resigned in 1923 over what he considered the “policy of intimidation by bomb” after visiting a local hospital full of injured civilians.

The methods pioneered in Iraq were applied throughout the Middle East. Omissi writes: “The policing role of most political moment carried out by the Royal Air Force during the 1920s was to maintain the power of the Arab kingdoms in Transjordan and Iraq; but aeroplanes also helped to dominate other populations under British sway.

“Schemes of air control similar to that practiced in Mesopotamia were set up in the Palestine Mandate in 1922 and in the Aden Protectorate six years later. Bombers were active at various times against rioters in Egypt, tribesmen on the Frontier, pastoralists in the Southern Sudan and nomads in the Somali hinterland.”

* sound familiar?

EDIT:

ADDED IMAGE...

[Wotan]

Mr. Williams

There has been some rebuttal of Overy's conclusions. His a quote (I will dig up the source later today):

Richard Overy, in his book Why the Allies Won, makes the following statement about the effectiveness of British and American bombing of the Third Reich: "At the end of January 1945 Albert Speer and his ministerial colleagues met in Berlin to sum up what bombing had done to production schedules for 1944. They found that Germany had produced 35 percent fewer tanks than planned, 31 percent fewer aircraft and 42 percent fewer lorries as a result of bombing. The denial of these huge resources to German forces in 1944 fatally weakened their response to bombing and invasion and eased the path of Allied armies."

On the surface, Speer's analysis tells us that the Allied strategic bombing campaign had a decisive impact on the German war effort in 1944. Based on figures found in Paul Kennedy's "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," the Germans produced in 1944: 17,800 tanks, 39,807 aircraft. So that, on the basis of Speer's statement, they aimed to produce 24,030 tanks and 52,147 aircraft. For comparison, Allied production of tanks and aircraft in 1944 resulted in 51,500 tanks (USSR: 29,000; UK: 5,000; USA: 17,500) and 163,079 aircraft (USSR: 40,300; UK 26,461; USA: 96,318). Therefore, even with the additional production that would have resulted from no bombing at all, the Allies still produce twice as many tanks and more than three times the number of aircraft as the Third Reich.

Such figures do not support Overy's conclusion that bombing Germany had "fatally weakened their response to bombing and invasion and eased the path of Allied armies." In terms of the kind of war of attrition fought in 1944 the additional German production would not have made a decisive difference. Allied production for 1944 is clearly overwhelming. Looking at the military situation on the ground in 1944 is even more telling of how the war is going.

Overy goes on to say: "The indirect effects were more important still, for the bombing offensive forced the German economy to switch very large resources away from equipment for the fighting fronts, using them instead to combat the bombing threat." At least, an ever-increasing number of Luftwaffe units were devoted to the air defense of the Reich as the war progressed. And, new aircraft production shifted towards fighters and away from bombers. The question remains as to whether this impact of the Allied bombing campaign was decisive to the outcome of the war or had just a marginal effect on it.

Furthermore, the converse of Overy's remark was also true. The production of bomber forces represented a significant resource expenditure for the US and especially Great Britain. Was this a worthwhile military expenditure? The results of the campaign are debatable. Certainly the German capitulation did not come about because of the Allied bombing campaign. That honor must go to the land campaigns fought by the allies. So, could the resources devoted to the bomber force been more effectively employed elsewhere?

Perhaps the greatest oversight in an analysis that focuses on the latter part of the war is that the crucial period to consider is from 1941 to 1943. It is in this period that German power is substantial and the possibility of a German military victory exists. How effective was the Allied bomber campaign during this period? According to a table found in the Penguin Atlas of World History, the Allies dropped about 10,000 tons on Germany in 1940, 30,000 tons in 1941, 40,000 tons in 1942 and 120,000 tons in 1943 while in 1944 they drop 650,000 tons and in 1945, about 500,000 tons are dropped in the first four months (at that rate, 1.5 million tons would be dropped over the course of 1945). Considering that Germany dropped about 37,000 tons on the UK in 1940, another 22,000 tons in 1941, with a few thousand tons every year thereafter with marginal results, there is little reason to believe that the scale of Allied bombing between 1940 and 1943 was substantial enough to alter the military balance in 1941 or 1942 either. Yet those are critical years to consider because that was when Soviet survival hung in the balance and British possessions in the Middle East were threatened by conquest.

[Easyscor]

Interesting discussion gentlemen.

<>

[brady]

Thanks Wotan, for posting that very interesting, espichaly the part covering British use of Air power in the 20's, this was news to me, espichaly the use of gas on the population, I knew their was no love for British Colonalism but I now know why it was so heartfelt.

[Nashwan]

It's worth pointing out that Wotan's bit about the bombing of Iraq in the 20s is from the World Socialist Website, as part of their opposition to the (then coming) invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In particular, no-one has ever been able to find any evidence of gas being used. The claims seem to have originated in an attempt to excuse Saddam's gassing of the Kurds, by claiming the British did it first.

[Nashwan]

That would be all well and good but the Nazi strategy wasn't to bomb their way to victory.

It seems it was when neccessary, for example the Blitz. When faced with an enemy on the other side of the channel that they couldn't invade, they resorted to using the Luftwaffe in an all out attempt to bomb their way to victory. (see as evidence the 40,000 British civilians killed in 1940/41)

Indeed, they even went so far as to develop cruise and ballistic missiles in an attempt to bomb their way to vitory, when it became clear their air force couldn't.

What was the plan anyway, to prove they could kill more by bomb then the Nazi's?

No, the plan was to win the war.

Rotterdam was bombed because it was a port bringing in supplies to feed Allied troops. The ports were the targets not civilians..

And German cities were bombed because they were producing the supplies for the German armies. The cties were the targets, not the civilians.

Warsaw was bombed because Polish military withdrew into the city. 'Flying artillery' was sent in not to target civilians but to demoralize those troops.

When you look in to it, you'll find a lot of Luftwaffe bombing of towns and cities in Poland.

London? London was an escalation brought on by British retaliation of 'a few bombs gone astray'.

No, London was part of a gradual escalation as the Germans switched more bombers to night attacks because they didn't have enough escorts for daylight attacks.

London was also because Kesselring wanted to suck the RAF into a big air battle where he hoped for victory (and he'd been pushing Goering for it for weeks).

And London was because the Germans wanted to bomb their way to victory, because they couldn't stage a successfull invasion. As Jodl wrote before the BoB even began:

The Continuation of the War against England.

"If political means are without results, England's will to resist must be broken by force:

"a) by making war against the English mother country.

"b) by extending the war on the periphery.

"Regarding Point a) there are three possibilities:

"1) Siege....

"2) Terror attacks against English centers of population.

"3) Landing of troops...."

and

"Together with propaganda and temporary terror attacks-declared to be reprisal actions-this increasing weakening of English food supply will paralyze the will of her people to resist and finally break and thus force its government to capitulate

That was written in June 1940.

Otto Bechtle, in a lecture to the Luftwaffe General Staff in 1944, summed up the turn on London as "Economic warfare from the air was begun"

Harris not only went after civilians with a fervor but he went at them at the expense of his own aircraft and crews

Harris went after Germany with a fervour, with the aim of preventing the large scale slaughter of British troops that happened in WW1.

Bomber Command casualties were high, but it's worth pointing out they were lower tby orders of magnatiude than any of the major battles of WW1.

They were only a fraction of overall British casualties, as well.

More civilians in Britain died from German bombing than Bomber Command crewmen killed in battle. Bomber Command killed formed about 7% of total Commonwealth military killed.

And German civilians killed in bombing formed about 1% of all people killed in WW2, less than 10% of the number of Jews murdered, and less than the number of civilians killed in the siege of Leningrad.

Furthermore, the converse of Overy's remark was also true. The production of bomber forces represented a significant resource expenditure for the US and especially Great Britain. Was this a worthwhile military expenditure?

Considering the allies didn't lack for resources, but did lack ways to bring them to bear, then yes. More tank divisions don't help when you can't get supplies to the one's you've got, or when you can't effectively deploy the one's you've got against the enemy.

It makes sense when you overwhelming resources to open more fronts, and spread your enemy thinner, and that's precisely what the bombing campaign did.

And your remarks only consider the amount of allied resources vs the German production lost, without taking into account the amount of resources the Germans pitted against the bombing campaign (very large percentages of artillery output, almost their entire air force, most of their electronic industry, hundreds of thousands of men, etc)

Perhaps the greatest oversight in an analysis that focuses on the latter part of the war is that the crucial period to consider is from 1941 to 1943. It is in this period that German power is substantial and the possibility of a German military victory exists. How effective was the Allied bomber campaign during this period? According to a table found in the Penguin Atlas of World History, the Allies dropped about 10,000 tons on Germany in 1940, 30,000 tons in 1941, 40,000 tons in 1942 and 120,000 tons in 1943 while in 1944 they drop 650,000 tons and in 1945, about 500,000 tons are dropped in the first four months (at that rate, 1.5 million tons would be dropped over the course of 1945). Considering that Germany dropped about 37,000 tons on the UK in 1940, another 22,000 tons in 1941, with a few thousand tons every year thereafter with marginal results, there is little reason to believe that the scale of Allied bombing between 1940 and 1943 was substantial enough to alter the military balance in 1941 or 1942 either.

There's also little reason to believe the allied effort devoted to such small bomber forces would have made a difference to the military balance in 1941 or 1942 either.

There was no prospect of an invasion of Europe in 1941 or 42, even if there had been no bombing camapign, sufficient resouces were allocated for victory in NA, what exactly could be done different with resources devoted from the rather small bomber forces of the day?

Sending troops to Russia was out of the question (and the fact that it wasn't done is due to politics, not to a shortage of troops in 1941/42), there was no real prospect of the British losing Egypt (as Rommel proved when he got as far as El Alamein, he had gone beyond his supply chain).

[Oldman731]

Originally posted by Nashwan
When faced with an enemy on the other side of the channel that they couldn't invade, they resorted to using the Luftwaffe in an all out attempt to bomb their way to victory.

Nashwan, that was a remarkably accurate, and amazingly self-restrained, post.  I agree with all of your points.

- oldman