By Finian Cunningham
February 17, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - This weekend 75
years ago, the German city of Dresden was razed
to the ground by British and American aerial
bombardment. At least 25,000 mainly civilians
were destroyed in raid after raid by over 1,200
heavy bombers, indiscriminately dropping high
explosives and incendiaries. It took seven years
just to clear the rubble.
The destruction of Dresden, a world-famous
cultural center of Baroque majesty, has been
long dogged by controversy. Official British and
American military accounts claim it was
necessary to hasten the collapse of the Third
Reich; with a reasoning that resonates with US
claims for dropping the atomic bombs on the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
August 1945.
Critics say, however, that the mass bombing
of Dresden was immaterial in the effort to
defeat Nazi Germany. It was a wanton act of
terror – a war crime – carried out by the
British and Americans. Critics point out that
most of the industrial and military targets on
the outskirts of the beautiful city were largely
left untouched by the bombing. British wartime
leader Winston Churchill is even said to have
expressed
misgivings about the morality of this and
other indiscriminate bombing of German civilian
centers.
Ardent advocates of the terror-bombing
campaign said it would exhaust German morale. A
classic case of ends justifying means, no matter
how vile the means.
There were also claims at the time that the
damage to Nazi communication and transport lines
would aid the advancing Soviet Red Army.
But there is good reason to believe that the
rationale for the obliteration of Dresden was
for an altogether more sinister reason. It
wasn’t so much an act of terror aimed at Nazi
Germany, but rather a show of maniacal power to
the Soviet Union.
A British Royal Air Force memo on the Dresden
operation noted that it would “show the Russians
when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
(See caption 17 in this linked
photo essay.)
By mid-February 1945, the front lines of the
Western and Eastern allied forces were such that
the American and British ground troops had not
yet entered Germany territory, while the Soviet
Red Army had crossed the Oder River and were a
mere 70 kilometers from Berlin, the seat of the
Third Reich. Such was the keen advance of the
Soviets that the Western allies were concerned
that the Red Army might take all of German
territory.
Rather than aiding Soviet forces from the
mass bombing of Dresden, Leipzig and other
cities in the German east, it seems plausible
that, as the above British RAF memo indicates,
the Western allies were intent on demonstrating
a shockingly brutal, raw power to Moscow. Not
just military power, but a will power to use any
means necessary to defeat enemies.
There is a direct analogy here with the
subsequent atomic bombing of Japan. At the
Potsdam conference in July 1945 following the
defeat of Nazi Germany and the carve-up of
Berlin, giving the Western allies shared control
of the German capital way beyond their final
front lines, the American president Harry Truman
relished the ability to drop a sinister hint
to Josef Stalin about a newly acquired secret
weapon – the A-bomb.
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As with the earlier British and American
bombing of Dresden and other German cities,
there was arguably little military justification
for dropping the atomic weapons on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Like Dresden, the
military significance of those cities was
dubious. The death of 200,000 civilians from the
atomic inferno was not a military necessity for
defeating imperial Japan, as Truman’s top
generals MacArthur and Eisenhower were
advising him against.
So if the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki
was unnecessary from a military point of view to
end the Pacific War, why was it done?
As with Dresden, the point was a monstrous
display of terror by Western powers to let the
Soviet Union know that nothing would be
off-limits in the postwar geopolitical stand-off
that was anticipated and which became the Cold
War.
When the A-bombs were dropped on Japan,
Stalin was said to have been
frozen by reports of the awesome new
destructive power. The Soviet Union was not to
develop its A-bomb until 1949.
The terror unleashed at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki seems to have had the intended effect
of halting Soviet Red Army advances that were
being made into the Korean Peninsula and onwards
to Japan. The American troop lines were
relatively remote by comparison with their
Soviet counterparts, yet after the A-bombing the
US was catapulted to take over both
Asian-Pacific territories in the postwar period.
Not unlike the precocious territorial gains that
were acquired by the Western allies in defeated
Nazi Germany.
Thus the moral controversies about the
British and American bombing of German and
Japanese cities goes way beyond arguments about
the right or wrong of mass murder for the
supposed purpose of ending wars. That moral
hazard is difficult enough. But even more
fiendish is a bigger picture; one in which the
cold, calculated use of terror and genocide is
not about ending war, but rather to simply exert
geopolitical power against a perceived rival in
the postwar era. Terror for terror sake, evil
for evil sake.
A final note: it has become fashionable to
falsify the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany by
claiming that the Red Army became an occupying
tyranny in eastern Europe after the war’s end.
Suffice to say that if the Soviets committed
even a fraction of the crimes that were actually
carried out by the Americans and British from
their aerial bombing of civilians in both
Germany and Japan, one would never hear the end
of deafening Western condemnations against
Moscow to this day, and for decades to come.
