Harris’s “Bomber Command” rained down explosives in such quantities that, in the cities of Hamburg and Dresden, they created firestorms. A firestorm takes hold when the combustion site exhausts its supply of oxygen and begins drawing in the surrounding air to keep the inferno alive. The inrushing air soon acquires the speed of a gale-force wind. This not only fuels the flames, it fans them, increasing the size and heat of the conflagration to truly horrific levels. Without oxygen, those huddling in bomb shelters are asphyxiated. Those attempting to flee find their feet sinking into superheated asphalt as, all around them, the streets melt. So hot did it become in Dresden, that school-girls seeking protection from the intense heat in a water tank were boiled alive.
Harris was not in the least bit fazed. In a notorious address, delivered to the British people in 1942, at the start of his no-holds-barred bombing campaign, Harris chillingly declared:
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 naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
Challenged to justify the huge civilian losses at Dresden, in the context of a war that was clearly only weeks away from being won, Harris responded:
The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.
It isn’t difficult to understand why Harris had to wait so long for his statue. But, those who turned their backs on him were the worst kind of hypocrites. In the context of an increasingly brutal global conflict, Harris distinguished himself by refusing to cloak the brutality of war in fine phraseology, or weasel words. The strategy of “carpet bombing” German cities was approved by Britain’s war cabinet because it worked. Home Office researchers had discovered that people coped better with losing their loved ones than they did with losing their homes.
People who say that bombing civilians doesn’t work are, quite simply, wrong.
Nor is it the case that New Zealanders can stand aloof from Harris’s cold-blooded destruction of human life. Six thousand Kiwis flew in those bombers, ofttimes navigating by the terrible red glow in the skies ahead of their aircraft. Nearly 2,000 of them never returned to base.
I rehearse these facts as the Israeli Air Force rains death and destruction upon the defenceless cities of Gaza. The world stands aghast at the horrific scenes filling the screens of its devices. “These are civilians!”, it cries, “Innocent women and children!” From the streets of the Middle East rises the grim accusation: “Israel is guilty of war crimes!”
But if the Israelis are guilty of war crimes, then so were my father’s generation – and my grandfather’s. It was “our side” that blockaded Germany for the duration of World War I. Like the other British Dominions, New Zealand was quite willing to have the Royal Navy starve Germany to death. It was war. You do what it takes to win.
“Bomber” Harris spoke the brutal language of military necessity. Faced with the impossibility of defeating Germany without killing Germans, he point-blank refused to indulge in moral humbug.
Sorting out the guilty from the innocent in the crimson fog of war is beyond the competence of mortal men.
Sir Arthur Harris (he was knighted in 1953) died in 1984, and his statue was unveiled by the Queen Mum in 1992. She was taken aback to hear the jeers and boos of the crowd.
Harris was not in the least bit fazed. In a notorious address, delivered to the British people in 1942, at the start of his no-holds-barred bombing campaign, Harris chillingly declared:
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 naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
Challenged to justify the huge civilian losses at Dresden, in the context of a war that was clearly only weeks away from being won, Harris responded:
The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.
It isn’t difficult to understand why Harris had to wait so long for his statue. But, those who turned their backs on him were the worst kind of hypocrites. In the context of an increasingly brutal global conflict, Harris distinguished himself by refusing to cloak the brutality of war in fine phraseology, or weasel words. The strategy of “carpet bombing” German cities was approved by Britain’s war cabinet because it worked. Home Office researchers had discovered that people coped better with losing their loved ones than they did with losing their homes.
People who say that bombing civilians doesn’t work are, quite simply, wrong.
Nor is it the case that New Zealanders can stand aloof from Harris’s cold-blooded destruction of human life. Six thousand Kiwis flew in those bombers, ofttimes navigating by the terrible red glow in the skies ahead of their aircraft. Nearly 2,000 of them never returned to base.
I rehearse these facts as the Israeli Air Force rains death and destruction upon the defenceless cities of Gaza. The world stands aghast at the horrific scenes filling the screens of its devices. “These are civilians!”, it cries, “Innocent women and children!” From the streets of the Middle East rises the grim accusation: “Israel is guilty of war crimes!”
But if the Israelis are guilty of war crimes, then so were my father’s generation – and my grandfather’s. It was “our side” that blockaded Germany for the duration of World War I. Like the other British Dominions, New Zealand was quite willing to have the Royal Navy starve Germany to death. It was war. You do what it takes to win.
“Bomber” Harris spoke the brutal language of military necessity. Faced with the impossibility of defeating Germany without killing Germans, he point-blank refused to indulge in moral humbug.
Sorting out the guilty from the innocent in the crimson fog of war is beyond the competence of mortal men.
Sir Arthur Harris (he was knighted in 1953) died in 1984, and his statue was unveiled by the Queen Mum in 1992. She was taken aback to hear the jeers and boos of the crowd.
Chris Trotter is a political commentator who blogs at bowalleyroad.blogspot.co.nz. - where this article was sourced.
16 comments:
Chris.
I understand your point but - NO! Civilians, especially children, should not have to suffer like this. I have no useful suggestions on how Israel should have responded to the brutality of Hamas at its kibbutzim - but what is happening in Gaza is not acceptable either.
On a personal note - I have been a long-standing supporter of Israel and believe that the western media has failed to understand the problems of living there under constant threat of terrorism and that there has been distortion of the truth in order in order to cast Israel as the only aggressor. I still believe that these things are largely true but Israel does not have my support over the current murder of innocents in Gaza.
David Lillis
David
War's a nasty business. We like to think that we're on the side of good and decency and play-by-the-rules but the reality is that both sides think that, or justify it, and both are wrong, albeit to varying degrees.
Far more civilians die in any war than combatants, despite all the rules of engagement. Collateral damage is inevitable and often sanctioned.
It's easy to be civilised and charitable when nobody is attacking you but impending death and defeat tends to promote our basic survival instincts.
When faced with defeat the losing side will carry out whatever tactics give them the greatest chance of winning.
Nothing is worse than losing.
Only generations who have never experienced war can afford to take the moral high ground, despising their own commanders for deeds done.
This is the position of virtue and naivety, something our woke generation specialise in. Only a war can change that view and imbue them with a sense of needs must.
Wars are terrible, but losing is more so.
Well put DeeM
Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.
Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth.
"Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist." By who exactly?
Never forget, Hamas embrace death, like the rest of humanity embrace life. As long as they exist, they remain an existential threat to the Jewish people and Israel, and like many times before, the latter didn't start this latest conflict.
If Israel had not been attacked again , Israel would not have immediately retaliated .
That should have been thought of before the recent attack on Israel Quite simple really .
“Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.”
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Agreed, David Lillis ... "Israel does not have my support over the current murder of innocents in Gaza."
Nor little other support. One does not punish the majority, much of it blameless, for the sins of a minority.
"War is Hell" a phrase attributed to American Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. Sure is!
"New Zealand was quite willing to have the Royal Navy starve Germany to death."
Yes, firebombing is more spectacular, but death by starvation and diseases made lethal by malnutrition is just as dead and especially kills the very young and very old. Perhaps 500,000 plus died as a consequence of the blockade which continued, IIRC, after the armistice as an inducement for Germany to agree to Allied peace terms at Versailles. Germany collapsed in 1918 as much because of the immiseration of civilians as because of miliary defeats on the Western Front. The distinction between soldiers and civilians is somewhat artificial, given that soldiers cannot fight without food, clothes, munitions produced and delivered by civilians.
In Japan, where blockade had reduced civilian calory intake to starvation levels by 1945, it is possible/likely that widespread starvation would have forced Japan to sue for peace before 1946.
One small nit pick, entirely irrelevant to the issue raised by this post: "A firestorm ... begins drawing in the surrounding air to keep the inferno alive." This sounds rather teleological. I assume the physical explanation is the same as for cold air entering your steamy shower when you open the door - hot air rises through the top and denser, cooler air enters lower down.
Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.
Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.
Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?
Make no mistake, the Hamas rebels would no full well that Israel would retaliate swiftly and deadly.
Would they at the time have considered that any response from Israel would result in their country and populace being destroyed bit by bit.
Those consideration do not figure in the mind of those intent on murder and mayhem.
Civilians will always be victims of conflict, sad to say its a fact of warfare.
We can argue at length that civilians play no part in war, but we know that civilians can and do, albeit behind the "lines". Munitions, arms, food etc.
It is a bit different in this case in that Israel has bombed Gaza hoping to destroy Hamas and the Hamas government.
Israel will also know that they will probably not stop other Arab nations from trying to destroy Jews.
The plight of civilians during wartime is a fact of life.
Millions have died during WW2 in Britain, Germany, France, Poland, Russia and other nations.
Also not forgetting the price Jews paid under at German extermination camps.
Israel has a special place in history and while it continues to attract hatred and condemnation from around the world it will fight many more battles to protect their homeland.
I’ve always found it strange how Lucy Letby murdered maybe seven newborns, some still months before their due date had even arrived, and is spoken of with disgust as the worst type of murderer, and yet, had she worked instead in an abortion clinic, her exact same actions would ensure only money in her bank and the sense by all of a social good well done.
A baby killed just before it slips from the birth canal is the same baby, the same death, the same loss, as one killed after.
We have in fact defined the right to life as being the right to life ONLY if someone else values it.
I say this not in judgement but as a cold hard fact about how we as a society really feel about the killing of babies.
What the media do not report is the background to the present explosion of violence in Gaza. The actions of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank are but one of many examples. There have been repeated, well-documented instances of settlers uprooting Palestinian olive trees, to which Israeli soldiers have turned a blind eye. Olive oil production is the mainstay of the Palestinian economy, so it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the intention is to drive the Palestinian farmers off their land.
Some might call it ‘drip-feed genocide’.
There's no doubt that both sides have behaved barbarically, so to get to the root of the problem, one must examine its origins. Jews for Justice in the Middle East have published "The Origin of Palestine-Israel Conflict" a detailed account by a group who cannot be accused of pro-Palestinian bias.
“The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict”:
https://archive.org/details/TheOriginOfThePalestine-israelConflict
Chris, there is no doubt you have a wide knowledge of history and are one of the best commentators we have in NZ, however, I think there are some large gaps in that knowledge. The British, French & American elites (what a mis-use of a term), particularly the British, were responsible for WWI & WWII. Read "Prolonging The Agony" by Jim MacGregor & Gerry Docherty for a detailed analysis. If you'd like some insight into WWII see the following and then dig some more ...
https://www.unz.com/runz/hitler-churchill-the-holocaust-and-the-war-in-ukraine/. As for Gaza, how can people believe such tripe that the Palestinians butchered babies, raped the women and committed other atrocities ? This is the same B/S that the Iraqi troops unplugged the incubators in Kuwaiti Hospital in the first Gulf War. That was proven to be a load of old tosh just as today's claims are. How about the following ...
An Israeli woman named Yasmin Porat confirmed in an interview with Israel Radio that the military “without a doubt” killed numerous Israeli civilians during firefights with Hamas militants on October 7. Strength.
As David Sheen and Ali Abunimah reported in Electronic Intifada, Porat described “very, very heavy crossfire” and shelling by Israeli tanks, which caused many Israeli casualties.
As she was held by Hamas gunmen, Porat recalled: “They didn’t abuse us. We were treated very humanely… No one treated us violently.”
She added: “The goal was to kidnap us and take us to Gaza as hostages, not to kill us.”
According to Haaretz, the army managed to restore control over Be’eri only after actually “bombing” the homes of Israelis who had been taken prisoner. “The price was terrible: at least 112 residents of Be’eri were killed,” the newspaper reported. “Others have been kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. Other bodies are believed to still lie in the rubble.”
Much of the shelling in Be’eri was carried out by Israeli tank crews. As a journalist from the Israeli Foreign Ministry-sponsored i24 newspaper noted during a visit to Be’eri, “small, picturesque houses [were] bombed or destroyed” and “well-kept lawns [were] torn up by vehicle tracks armored vehicle, maybe a tank.”
Still, as long as most people can live in their own smug little bubble, secure in their beliefs shaped by the corrupt media they will continue to condemn the Palestinians and justify the Israelis.
It is about time we stopped justifying measures taken in war and realise how we are being set up. We need to change and throw off the shackles around our minds & hold those responsible to account.
Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel. A cease fire will not change this well-known fact. They carried out this brutal attack knowing what the response would be. They're counting on pressure from the international community for a cease fire, all the while using the civilian population as human shields.
To claim Gaza is a prison simply isn't true. Palestinians were free to travel and work in Israel prior to this attack. Israel voluntarily pulled out of Gaza. Palestinians promptly turned it into a terrorist camp. Billions of dollars in yearly aid have been used to purchase weapons & build underground bunkers & tunnels under schools, playgrounds and hospitals.
Stop to think why Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and no other Arab country will take Palestinian refugees. They know they can't weed out the terrorists from the radical Islamic extremists.
Trotter's analysis is correct. Time for appeasement and diplomacy is over. Hamas has crossed a line that civilized countries can't accept and must be destroyed.
Somewhat off the main theme but bomber Harris was hard not only on the German populance. In the desperate middle years bomber airmen were rostered for, from memory, two tours each of 20 trips. But the loss rate was 5%....Very few from that period survived and then mostly those who succeeded in safely parachuting into a safe neighbourhood, or out due injury etc.
and by bombing Coventry, Plymouth, London etc the Germans did invite reaction
So the bombing of Gaza is the moral equivalent of the bombing of Germany in WW2. The Palestinians are the Nazis here? What's happened to you, Chris?
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