"Unlike the American populace, the UK man on the Clapham omnibus was, is and will be resolutely anti-war."
THE ALLIED TERROR BOMBING OF GERMANY
\ufffdA MOST UNCIVILISED MEANS OF WARFARE\ufffd
During the war, more bombs by weight were dropped on the city of Berlin than were released on the whole of Great Britain during the entire war. All German towns and cities above 50,000 population were from 50% to 80% destroyed. Dresden, an unprotected city was incinerated with an estimated 135,000 civilian inhabitants burned and buried in the ruins. Hamburg was totally destroyed and 70,000 civilians died in the most appalling circumstances. Cologne one of Christian Germany\ufffds most beautiful cities was turned into a moonscape. As Hamburg burned the winds feeding the three-mile high flames reached twice hurricane speed to exceeded 150 miles per hour. Trees three feet in diameter on the outskirts of the city, were sucked from the ground by the supernatural forces of these winds and hurled miles into the city-inferno, as were vehicles, men, women... and children. The volcanic flames reached 1,500 metres with gases as high again caused meteorological reaction as high as the stratosphere. Likewise Frankfurt and other cities like them. Between 1940 and 1945, sixty-one German cities with a total population of 25 million souls were destroyed of devastated in a bombing campaign that was initiated by the British government. Destruction on this scale had no other purpose than the indiscriminate mass murder of as many German people as possible quite regardless of their civilian status. It led to bombing retaliation resulting in 60,000 British dead and 86,000 injured.
THE MOST UNCIVILISED FORM OF WARFARE
The British war historian and strategist, Captain Sir. Basil Liddell Hart declared that through this strategy victory had been achieved "through practicing the most uncivilized means of warfare that the world had known since the Mongol invasions." The Evolution of Warfare. Baber & Faber, 1946, p.75
"Was absolutely contrary to international law." Said British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who added: "The British Government would never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children for the purposes of mere terrorism."
HITLER'S REVULSION
Adolf Hitler was repelled by the thought of bombs raining down on civilian populations. "The construction of bombing aeroplanes would soon be abandoned as superfluous and ineffective if bombing as such were branded as an illegal barbarity. If, through the Red Cross Convention, it definitely turned out possible to prevent the killing of a defenseless wounded man or prisoner, then it ought to be equally possible, by analogous convention, and finally to stop the bombing of equally defenseless civil populations. "I owe it to my position not to admit any doubt as to the possibility of maintaining peace. The people want peace. It must be possible for governments to maintain it. We believe that if the nations of the world could agree to destroy all their gas and inflammatory and explosive bombs it would be a much more useful achievement than using them to destroy each other." Adolf Hitler
WHO WAS THE FIRST TO BOMB CIVILIANS?
"Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones." J.M Spaight. CB. CBE. Bombing Vindicated, p.47. Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry
"Churchill was obsessed with getting America into the war. He tried to frighten Roosevelt with the prospect of an early German victory. He searched for an outrage, such as the sinking of the Lusitania in the First World War that would arouse American public opinion. German bombing of British civilians might well achieve this. But for weeks it looked as if the Germans had no intention of being so obliging." The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley, Andre Deutsch. London. 1975
THE FIRST BREACH OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
"This raid on the night of May 11th 1940, although in itself trivial, was an epoch-marking event since it was the first deliberate breach of the fundamental rule of civilized warfare that hostilities must only be waged against the enemy combatant forces, Their flight marked the end of an epoch which had lasted for two and one-half centuries." F.J.P Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p.172
"The first 'area' air attack of the war was carried out by 134 British bombers on the German city of Mannheim, on the 16th December 1940. The object of this attack, as Air Chief Marshall Peirse later explained, was, 'to concentrate the maximum amount of damage in the centre of the town.'" The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany. (H.M Stationery Office, London, 1961)
As early as 1953 H.M Stationery Office published the first volume of a work, The Royal Air Force, 1939 - 1945, The Fight at Odds.p.122 described as 'officially commissioned and based throughout on official documents which had been read and approved by the Air Ministry Historical Branch, its author, Dennis Richards, reveals that: "If the Royal Air Force raided the Ruhr, destroying oil plants with its most accurately placed bombs and urban property with those that went astray, the outcry for retaliation against Britain might prove too strong for the German generals to resist. Indeed, Hitler himself would probably lead the clamour. The attack on the Ruhr was therefore an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London." "We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland.\ufffd J.M. Spaight, CB., CBE., Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry / "Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May,11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves." Bombing Vindicated. J.M. Spaight, CB. CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry "Air Marshall Tedder made every effort to be a worthy pupil of his superior, Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The Marshall told high British officers that Germany had lost the war because she had not followed the principle of total warfare."
New York Times, January, 10th 1946
"Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany... there was a reasonable possibility that our capital and industrial centres would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany." J.M. Spaight, CB. CBE. Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry
"The primary purpose of these raids was to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a similar character on Britain. Such raids would arouse intense indignation in Britain against Germany and so create a war psychosis without which it would be impossible to carry on a modern war." Dennis Richards, The Royal Air Force, 1939 - 1945; The Fight at Odds. H.M Stationery Office
"It gave Coventry and Birmingham, Sheffield and Southampton, the right to look Kiev and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol, in the face. Our Soviet allies would be less critical of our inactivity if they had understood what we had done." J.M. Spaight, CB., CBE., Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry
THE TRUTH HIDDEN FROM THE BRITISH PUBLIC
"It is one of the greatest triumphs of modern emotional engineering that, in spite of the plain facts of the case which could never be disguised or even materially distorted, the British public, throughout the Blitz Period (1940 - 1941), remained convinced that the entire responsibility for their sufferings it was undergoing rested on the German leaders. Too high praise cannot, therefore, be lavished on the British emotional engineers for the infinite skill with which the public mind was conditioned prior to and during a period of unparalleled strain." Advance to Barbarism, P.168. Mitre Press, London. F.J.P Veale, British Jurist
"... the inhabitants of Coventry, for example continued to imagine that their sufferings were due to the innate villainy of Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision, splendid or otherwise, of the British War Cabinet, was the decisive factor in the case." F.J.P Veale. Advance to Barbarism, P.169
"One of the most unhealthy features of the bombing offensive was that the War Cabinet - and in particular the Secretary for Air, Archibald Sinclair (now Lord Thurso) felt it necessary to repudiate publicly the orders which they themselves had given to Bomber Command." R.H.S Crosman. Labour Minister, Minister of Housing. Sunday Telegraph, Oct.1st, 1961
"Is terror bombing now part of our policy? Why is it that the people of this country who are supposed to be responsible for what is going on, are the only people who may not know what is being done in their name? On the other hand, if terror bombing be part of our policy, why was this statement put out at all? I think we shall live to rue the day we did this, and that it, (The bombing of Dresden) will stand for all time as a blot on our escutcheon.\ufffd Richard Stokes, M.P. This Member of Parliament was referring to the Associated Press Correspondent of Supreme Allied Headquarters in Paris, which had gloatingly described: "this unprecedented assault in daylight on the refugee-crowded capital, fleeing from the Russian tide in the East. The report had been widely broadcast in America, and by Paris Radio. It was suppressed in Britain for fear of public revulsion.
"Thus, in a minute dated 28th February, 1943, Sir Archibald Sinclair explained to Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, that it was necessary to stifle all public discussion on the subject because if the truth had been disclosed in response to the enquiries being made by influential political and religious leaders, their inevitable condemnation would impair the morale of the bomber crews and consequently their bombing efficiency." F.J.P Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p.29
WORKING CLASS TARGETED FOR HIGH KILL RATIOS
"The third and last phase of the British air offensive against Germany began in March, 1942, with the adoption of the Lindemann Plan by the British War Cabinet, and continued with undiminished ferocity until the end of the war in May, 1945. The bombing during this period was not, as the Germans complained, indiscriminate. On the contrary. It was concentrated on working class houses because, as Professor Lindemann maintained, a higher percentage of bloodshed per ton of explosives dropped could be expected from bombing houses built close together, rather than by bombing higher class houses surrounded by gardens." Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P Veale, British Author and Jurist
I don't know about the "was" part, Peter... Even Hitler was disgusted...