Sir Arthur Harris, strategic bombing of Germany

We have read about the USSR’s “Great Patriotic War” and of the massive number of men the USSR was able to field on the Eastern Front. Stalin felt hard-pressed and urged Churchill and Roosevelt to establish a Western Front, but that was easy for them to do. To begin with, in 1939 Great Britain had no land army to speak of. It had the second greatest navy in the world and a competent air force but it had a minuscule army ill-equipped to fight a major army in Europe. As to the U.S. in 1939, it also had no army to speak of. It did have the greatest navy in the world and a Marine Corps capable of fighting the Japanese on the islands they held, but it also was not equipped to launch an invasion into Europe or fight a major war against the Wehrmacht. And one mustn’t forget that the Pacific Theater was largely an American-British affair; so the British/American attentions in Europe were to some extent divided; although the Pacific baton was almost entirely held by the Americans as time went on. All of which is to say that a Western Front against the German’s was not something the Americans and British could rush into. They simply didn’t have the armies for it until well into the war.

Which brings us to the beliefs of Sir Arthur Harris, head of the RAF Bomber Command. On page 29 of No Simple Victory, World War II In Europe, 1939-1945, Norman Davies writes, “Sir Arthur Harris, seemed to believe that his scheme would render plans for a ‘Second Front’ redundant. He set out to reduce all of Germany’s cities to ashes, one by one, till none was left to function. . . The first ‘Thousand Bomber Raid’ took place on 30/31 May 1942. Cologne, Germany’s most ancient city, was trashed in the space of two hours. In August 1942 the USAAF brought over its B-17 Flying Fortresses, and began a daily programme of escorted daylight raids to supplement the RAF’s night-time activities. At the Casablanca Conference of January 1943 the Allied leaders ordered that priority be given to ‘precision bombing’ of submarine yards, aircraft factories, railway lines and oil refineries. But this was largely ignored. On 27/8 July 1943 Hamburg, Germany’s premier port, was destroyed by a firestorm in which 43,000 people perished and a million were made homeless. Berlin was repeatedly attacked, so that it resembled a moonscape of rubble long before the Red Army arrived. On 3 February 1945 a USAAF raid on Berlin killed 25,000 people at one go. Less than two weeks later, a combined British and American raid on Dresden caused a second firestorm, as at Hamburg, in which perhaps 60,000 people died for no known military purpose. The simple fact is that the Strategic Bombing Offensive did not bring the German economy to a halt, and it did not break the morale of the German public. What it did to was to demonstrate that in the last year of the war the Western air forces enjoyed virtually total supremacy in the skies of Western Europe.”

COMMENT:

Britain as we have seen was not equipped for a land war in Europe, and that was by design. Other writers described how appalled Britain (and not just Britain) was by World War One.. The flower of British Youth was killed in European trenches and for no good reason that most in Britain could see; so Britain turned somewhat pacifistic. They in effect said “no more war” and meant it. So when, despite the best efforts of their leaders, peace was not to be obtained in their time, they were hard put to get their military act. They did have an excellent navy, the second largest in the world, and a decent air force, at least for home use. And not to be despised were the diplomatic efforts of Winston Churchill who in effect rallied America, with the world’s largest navy, to Britain’s aid. America cranked up its weapons-making industries and began shipping materials to Britain and to the USSR in a frantic hurry.

So we can perhaps see that the idea of Sir Arthur Harris was a rather good one. It was all well and good for Stalin to demand a second front from the allies, but for a long time the allies just weren’t up to it. The USSR didn’t have to engage in a complicated amphibious enterprise to get their forces in major contact with the Germans (Davies doesn’t consider the North African and Italian campaigns as major so I won’t either). So, thought Sir Arthur Harris, with the Americans shipping us so many airplanes, why not use them to bomb Germany. Maybe we can’t send an army there just yet, but we can bomb them. In fact I (I imagine he thought) see no reason why we can’t turn all their cities to rubble and escape the need to send another army over there.

Britain and America were later criticized for the strategic bombing of German cities. Davies can’t avoid a hint of criticism when he tells us that the bombing of Dresden “had no military purpose.” Furthermore, he tells us “the Strategic Bombing Offensive did not bring the German economy to a halt.”

I disagree with the arm-chair generals who after the fact declare that we should not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki because we should have known the Japanese were about to surrender. And we should not have engaged in the strategic bombing of Germany, particularly not the bombing of cities with “no known military purpose” because we should have known this bombing would not “bring the German economy to a halt.” But such criticism is anachronistic and in the case of the Japanese, wrong. We now have archival information which indicates that the Japanese military leadership wanted to fight on and cause the hundreds of thousands of American casualties that Truman hoped to avoid by dropping his bombs. Hirohito, his writings at the time indicate, was as much if not more worried about Russia entering the war if the Japanese didn’t surrender to the Americans in the near future. The atomic bombs did not terrorize Hirohito. They gave him the excuse he needed to counter the Military and surrender to the Americans.

And in regard to the Strategic Bombing of Germany, how can its effects be properly judged? Davies said that it did not bring the German economy to a halt, but surely it had some effect. Earlier Davies tells us the total casualties on both sides at the Battle of El Alamein II, October-November 1942 was 4,650. Another battle, the Battle of the Bulge, in December of 1944 resulted in the total casualties on both sides of 38,000, but, he just told us 43,000 were killed at Hamburg, 25,000 at Berlin, and 60,000 at Dresden in individual strategic bombing raids. That’s 128,000 Germans killed in three bombing raids which is just 4,000 shy of the 132,000 killed in Operation Overlord, 6 June – 21 July 1944. Of course the battles were conducted between armies so, presumably, only soldiers are reflected in the battle casualty numbers and we don’t know who was killed in the strategic bombing raids, but we can, from our own arm-chair judge that Sir Arthur Harris had high-hopes for his plan. He certainly didn’t, nor did anyone else, know that it wouldn’t work. The German’s had similar hopes for their bombing of London and of their effects of their V2 bombings late in the war; so it was commonly believed, probably by all sides, that Strategic bombing would be effective and that it would benefit the side doing the bombing.

So rather than mount our general’s arm-chair on a moral high-horse, we should utilize what we now know to influence the way we fight future wars. And we have. We (both the French and Americans) did consider using atomic bombs in defense of the French at Dien Bien Phu, General MacArthur wanted the ability to use atomic weapons against the Chinese during the Korean War, and the proverbial “brink” was maintained by the threat of atomic weapons usage, but we somehow managed to refrain.

And in regard to bombing, we still have great confidence in it, not in a strategic sense; perhaps, but surely in a tactical sense. We are perhaps even today dropping bombs with pin-point accuracy on Pakistani sites presumed to be housing Al Quaeda members. We aren’t going to stop bombing, but we have stopped bombing places like Dresden. We want to be able to say that we bombed actual enemies or actual weapons. And if innocents are killed we want to be able say that at least we targeted enemies and weapons. And it seems the case that we are spending lots of money on technology designed to improve the accuracy of our targeting systems.

So we have learned and have taken the proper actions from our knowledge. But should we have known not to bomb Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Hamburg and Dresden in World War II? I don’t see how. Given what was known at the time about the enemy, we could not have proved or even argued convincingly that these bombings wouldn’t accomplish their intended purpose.

Re: Socialism vs. Liberal Democracy

Concerned Citizen left the following comment in regard to "Socialism vs. Liberal Democracy":

We do not view socialism as just a particular set of controls over economic systems, but expand that view to include centralized government control of behavior and limitation of rights.

Maybe that is a non-linear, non-technical definition of socialism, so I will concede that point. However, we are now seeing more and more socialist programs emerge in this country: government controls on industry, healthcare, education, etc. There are over $700 billion dollars in the new Obama budget dedicated to socializing the healthcare industry.

I guess the line between socialism in a technical sense sometimes gets blurred with social liberalism which is just as destructive to the ideals that this nation was founded on.

Oh, and I don't trust Wiki, thank you. I independently research all of my topics to great lengths. If I make a mistake, I will be the first to apologize and clarify.

Lawrence responds:

I’m guessing that Concerned Citizen is the same person as the “Judging Truth” blogger that Michael Kuznetsov quoted. Even if that is correct, some of the above comments don’t make perfect sense to me. When you say “We do not view socialism as just a particular set of controls over economic systems,” who is “we”?

What I see in our modern “Liberal Democracies” is that they have incorporated the benefits to proletarians that Marx and Lenin said could only be obtained through revolution. Capitalism was more resilient than Marx or Lenin realized. We now have such entitlements as Social Security and medical insurance. But to vote ourselves these entitlements in a Liberal Democracy does not mean that we are morphing into Socialism proper, that is a Socialistic system like Marxism-Leninism. If you are saying that, then I agree with you.

Now on any given domestic issue, like the one “Judging Truth” referred to, we can disagree with a law, and if we have a sufficient number who share our disagreement, we can eventually counter a law (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t thwart us). There are other alternatives. If a school is too outrageous, we can put our children in private schools if we can afford them and if not we can home school. We might even move to a state that has laws more congenial to our point of view.

I have been wrestling with the just accusations of such places as China about the license we tolerate in America and don’t see a clear path to countering this tendency, and I continue to see it as an outgrowth of the “freedom” provided in Liberal Democracy rather than some element of Socialism. As Kuznetsov pointed out, that sort of excess was not tolerated in Soviet Russia and it is presently not tolerated in China so to attempt to relate it to Socialism in some way, makes no sense to me.

Victor Serge

A reader sent me the following review of a novel by Victor Serge, newly translated from the French by Richard Greeman). The novel is entitled Unforgiving Years and the reviewer is Michael Weiss: http://democratiya.org/review.asp?reviews_id=204

Victor Serge was born Victor Kbalchich in Belgium in 1890 of banished Russian-intellectual parents. He established himself as a writer in France and so was able to survive in Russia during the NEP period much longer than Russian writers who had no brave French friends willing to go to Stalin and beg for their lives: “Serge was only saved from execution by the intervention of the French left: Romain Rolland (with whom he had previously quarreled), André Gide, André Malraux, Boris Souvarine and various trade unionists raised enough of a fuss about his persecution that Stalin himself, when confronted by Rolland, signed off on Serge's safe conduct out of the Soviet Union. Tellingly, Serge was one of the few oppositionists not implicated publicly at any point during the Moscow Trials—yet another odd bit of good fortune that allowed Stalin to manumit him without losing too much face.”

I was amused by “Serge was audience to Panait Istrati’s animadversion on the ‘omelets and eggs’ excuse for the mounting pile of corpses in the Soviet Union. ‘Al right,’ Istratis said, ‘I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?’”

But perhaps the most interesting comment in the review is the following: “I'm not the first to suggest that the esteem for Serge's literary gifts has overshadowed the recognition of his skills as a real-time political diagnostician. Apart from claiming to have first invented the word 'totalitarian' to describe the Soviet state—he did so in a letter to Maurice and Magdeleine Paz and others in 1932, reaffirming the need to defend 'man,' 'truth' and 'thought' from the forces of reactions that were innate in socialism—Serge later predicted three ways that the U.S.S.R could develop following the Second World War. If it didn't yield to external or internal pressures, it would be consumed by war, probably nuclear and therefore apocalyptic. If it downplayed its brinkmanship due to external pressure but refused to reform within, the chance of war was diminished but not erased completely. Finally, '[i]f under combined pressure of masses at home and of the international conflicts which will arise in various ways, the regime may try and evolve towards a democratisation. Upon the slightest relaxation of terrorist totalitarianism, immense possibilities are opened out, which may cause the emergence in Russia of a Socialist-inclined or Socialist democracy, and permit a peaceful collaboration with the world outside. The nightmare of war is then removed.' The two other thinkers to anticipate this third and actual course were George Orwell and Robert Conquest.”

Ukraine and Belarus in WWII

Norman Davies in his No Simple Victory, World War II in Europe, 1939-1945, has promised to provide us a more comprehensive view of this war. Accordingly, the reader should encounter insights he has found in no previous history of this war. The following, about Belarus and Ukraine struck me as interesting.

On page 19 Davies tells us that “. . . Russians represented barely half of he USSRs population. And it was the western Soviet republics – not Russia – which were the scene of the heaviest fighting, and which bore the brunt of the German occupation.’

Further down, Davies looks for the European war’s “centre of gravity”: “Finally, on the subject of geography, one wonders if the war in Europe can be said to have had a ‘centre of gravity’ – a place which reflects the relative weight of military action to the north, east, west and south. No precise calculations can be made. But, given the overwhelming weight of the Eastern Front, the gravitational pull in that direction can have been only partly counterbalanced by the influence of other directions. The focal point would not have been Central Europe – halfway between East and West – but somewhere well to the east or south-east. The answer therefore is almost certainly Byelorussia (now Belarus) and western Ukraine. These countries lack all sense of individual identity in conventional histories of Europe. Yet they saw both the most intense warfare and the worst civilian horrors: the deportations, the Soviet and German occupations, the scourging of the Lebensraum and the Holocaust. They were involved in the thick of the fighting from the very beginning in September 1939 (when they were still best known to the world as eastern Poland) right to the final phase in 1944-5, when they provided the Red Army’s main point of re-entry into Central Europe. They provided the ground over which the war’s two biggest campaigns – Barbarossa and Bagration – were fought. It is no accident that Belarus lost a higher proportion of its civilian population than any other country in Europe, and that Ukraine lost the highest absolute number. The history of these countries deserves to be better publicized.”

COMMENT:

I found this bit of information remarkable. Davies earlier points out that popular writers and even some historians were sloppy in referring to Great Britain as “England” and the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics as “Russia.” He admits that the shorter terms are more convenient, but points out that they can be misleading. Russia represented only about half the population of the USSR, and as Davies tells us, the colossal number of “Russian” deaths we hear about from that war were not all Russian. In fact, more Ukrainians died than Russians.

Davies hasn’t provided very much information at this point, and I’m not yet inspired enough to seek out a book on the Ukraine or Belarus, but if the modern day Russian is feeling a bit xenophobic and inclined to thump his chest over WWII achievements, I wonder what the modern day man from the Ukraine or Belarus is thinking.

Muslims in Russia

I commented in the past about inroads being made by Muslins in European cities. These inroads are often not like what we see in the U.S. where immigrants are busy integrated. Europeans aren’t as open to immigrants as Americans are; so partly for that reason and partly because of Islamist influence there are many enclaves where Muslims keep to themselves, but they don’t just keep to themselves. When occasion calls for it, as it did when the Danes published some cartoons many Muslims felt were offensive to Mohammad, these enclaves erupted with broken windows and burning cars. But what of Russia? What’s going on there? An interesting article by Paul Goble gives us some insight on that subject: http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/03/window-on-eurasia-nizhnys-muslims-want.html

Goble writes, “The Muslim Spiritual Directorate of Nizhny Novgorod wants the authorities there to allow them to erect Islamic symbols to mark neighborhoods where Muslims form a majority, a request that mirrors efforts by the Russian Orthodox Church but one that is certain to spark new concerns about the increasing number of Muslims in Russian cities.”

This is especially interesting because the CIA factbook indicates that there are about as many registered Muslims in Russia as registered members of the Russian Orthodox Church. I think the Catholics and Protestants have the Muslims outnumbered in European cities, but that may not be true in Russia. The CIA estimates are vague, up to 15% for both the Russian Orthodox and Muslims with a great deal of uncertainty.

Here is indication that Muslims in Russia are not being integrated any better than they are in Europe but are forming enclaves in the same way: “On Friday, the presidium of the Nizhny Novgorod MSD announced that it was preparing an appeal to the deputies of the local legislature and the administration of the Red October District of the city to erect symbols of Islam around a region where Muslims now form 90 percent of the population . . .”

“Sources in the MSD told Islamnn.ru that Islamic leaders want to employ the Muslim injunction on these signs declaring in Arabic script that “There is no God but Allah.” They want such signs to be comparable in size to Orthodox crosses, which are sometimes nine meters tall and thus to declare to all visitors that they are entering a Muslim area.”

I got the impression from reading Michael Kuznetsov’s blog that Russia was something like 80 to 85% pure Russian, but that may be changing: “. . . the number of Muslims in Russia’s cities is increasing rapidly, both as a result of higher birthrates among historically Islamic peoples than among historically Orthodox ones like the ethnic Russians and the influx of Gastarbeiters from predominantly Muslim areas of Central Asia and the Caucasus, changing the ethnic face of Russia’s cities and sparking xenophobia.”

COMMENT:

I admit to being prejudiced in favor of the way Americans treat their immigrants. We have benefitted tremendously over the years from the xenophobia of other nations. Hitler killed a lot of Germany’s Jews, but many fled to the U.S. Many of them distinguished themselves here as did Russians who fled Russia because their thoughts were not as pure as Lenin, Stalin, and the GPU demanded.

How are we doing with our Muslims in America? Fine. They integrate as well as other immigrants. Much has been made recently over the fact that Muslim terrorists have taken advantage of our free and easy way of treating immigrants. So we are taking a harder look at Arab Muslims than we once did. That’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t indicate a change in our basic philosophy.

Lenin makes short work of dissenters in 1922

On page 180 Radzinski writes, “An operation which shocked the Russian intelligentsia at large was carried out at this time. An operation devised by Lenin. In the last days of 1922 a steamship from Russia put into the port of Stettin in Poland. There was no one waiting to welcome the new arrivals. They found a few horse-drawn wagons, loaded their luggage onto them, and walked behind in the roadway, husbands and wives arm in arm. ‘They’ were the fine flower and pride of Russian philosophy and social thought, all those who had shaped Russia’s social awareness in the early years of the twentieth century: Lossky, Berdyaev, Frank, Kizevetter, Prince Trubetskoy, Ilyin . . . 160 of them, eminent professors, philosophers, poets, and writers, the whole intellectual potential of Russia cast out at a stroke.

“Pravda published an article about the expulsion under the headline ‘First Warning.’ It was just that. Throughout 1922, while he was implementing the New Economic Policy, Lenin was also systematically purging the country of dissidents. With the General Secretary, faithful Koba [Stalin’s nickname at the time], at his side. In a dispatch to Koba, he said, ‘With reference to the expulsion of Mensheviks, Kadets etc. from Russia . . . several hundred such gentlemen should be mercilessly expelled. Let us make Russia clean for a long time to come.’ A special commission attached to the Politburo worked tirelessly. List after list of expellees was drawn up. And Koba’s rough handiwork can be seen in the systematic and unwavering implementation of Lenin’s scheme.

“Leaving Russia was a grotesque tragedy for these people.

“’We thought we should be returning in a year’s time. . . . That was all we lived for,’ wrote the daughter of the eminent agricultural scientist Professor A. Ugrimov. In Prague in the seventies I met a very old woman, the daughter of the eminent historian Professor Kizevetter. She had lived with her suitcase ready, packed, since 1922. She was still waiting.

“Lenin’s illness interrupted the gigantic purge which was getting under way. But the General Secretary had mastered its slogan: ‘Let us make Russia clean for a long time to come.’”

COMMENT:

Radzinski tells us that the GPU was given the power of summary execution. The bomb throwing sailors and the fire-brand Bolsheviks, even though they helped bring Lenin and Stalin to power, were no longer to be tolerated. Lenin was bent upon cleaning up the party and wasn’t afraid to clean up his own house first, but the intellectuals, those people who tended to think for themselves, were not far behind. The intellectuals were not shot but sent into exile. And in 1922 they were not sent to Siberia but to Poland. Radzinski describes Professor Kizevetter’s daughter who kept her bags packed for her return to Russia, even after 50 years, But perhaps some of the other intellectuals found a way to fit in and perhaps had somewhat normal lives.

Given human nature, I suspect some of those Russian émigrés had some critical things to say about Lenin and Stalin, and if so, I wonder if what they said had any effect on the decision to banish dissidents to Siberia instead of Poland.

Stalin and Evidence

While personal testimonies are interesting, they aren’t very good evidence about what is going on in an entire nation. If you have a nation of 140 million and question 1,000 people about a certain matter, that “sampling” would probably be inadequate from a scientific point of view. Pollsters have managed to make relatively small selections but their responders are considered “representative, and the evidence of their accuracy is in something that occurs later. Here in the U.S. that “something” is an election. Their polls results are often described as being accurate within plus or minus 5%. If you were a Russia working in government in Moscow and questioned 1,000 people who were friendly enough to answer your questions, you might not get “evidence” that was representative of the entire nation. Your results might not be considered scientific.

My own interest isn’t in finding out what a thousand people in Russia think today but in what actually happened in the past. Stalin and the Soviet Union epitomized Marxist-Leninism in action. What did Stalin do and why did he do it? Are his acts representative of any Marxist-Leninist enterprise? Earlier writers such as Robert Conquest say Stalin was a beast. Testimonies from some famous Russian leaders like Khrushchev and Gorbachev say Stalin was a beast. Writers such as Solzhenitsyn describe his beastliness by means of descriptions of his Concentration Camps in Siberia. But now we have gaggles of Leftist-historians in the U.S. saying no Stalin wasn’t a beast and it was only his enemies who said so and they were all lying. I am oversimplifying here but I don’t want to get bogged down in these particular details. Other historians more recently are striving to counter the Revisionist historians in both Russia and the U.S. They claim to be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. I am reading Norman Davies on World War II for that reason and I have also began a new book on Stalin. He claims to hate Stalin, but one jaded-sounding reviewer finds evidence that he admired him: http://www.rickmcginnis.com/books/radzinsky.htm . The following review seems a bit less emotional: http://readerswords.wordpress.com/1998/12/20/review-of-stalin-by-edvard-radzinsky/

Edward Radzinsky on page 5 of his Stalin, the First In-Depth Biography based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives, writes of his difficulty in assessing evidence of Stalin’s past acts: “He [Stalin] had succeeded in plunging the story of his life and the whole history of his country into impenetrable darkness. Systematically destroying his comrades-in-arms, he at once obliterated every trace of them in history. He personally directed the constant and relentless purging of the archives. He surrounded with the deepest secrecy everything even remotely relevant to the sources of his power. He converted the archives into closely guarded fortresses. Even now, if you are given access to the documents which used to be so jealously guarded, you find yourself confronting yet another mystery.

“He had foreseen this too.”

Radzinsky then gives a few examples of minutes to important meetings with nothing remaining but headings. Radzinsky on page 6 writes, “This secrecy was not his invention. It was traditional in the Order of Sword Bearers, as its leader, Stalin, once called the Communist Party.

“Stalin made the tradition absolute.

“So the moment we set about writing his life, we set foot in that great darkness.”

I suppose I must set foot in that great darkness as well.