Blinkered revisionism published fifty years after the fact is at least disingenuous if not morally repugnant. By divorcing the German crimes from their just recompense (the Allied bombing campaign) an insidious moral equivalence – not shared by historians at the time and certainly not by those millions who suffered and died under the German’s yoke – creeps in.

I suppose, however, if one proudly declares oneself ‘post-moral’ then anything goes. No wonder you are happy to apologise for the Nazi’s, they liked Nietsche too.

Churchill’s bombing campaigns had no discernible effect on the progress of the war, and may have even slowed it, as one-third of Britain’s war production was devoted to this particular strategy.

Oh, and you might be taking the tag “post-moral” too seriously. There’s a dash of irony, there, I’m sure. I, for one, believe in truth and ethics.

And it’s quite odd to suggest that the Allied bombing was “just recompense”. Surely that’s a species of the invidious moral equivalence? Unlike the fashionable doctrines of the New World Order, the Allies in WW2 held the war criminals (note the term) to account through a judicial process of law rather than killing them or locking them up in Guantanamo Bay. Another instance where we are less civilised than the world of 1946. History doesn’t run in a straight line, I’m afraid.

I am an advocate of just war theory, the crimes of Hitler perpetrated by the German people were so unjust that they deserved, no demanded righteous intervention, urgently to stop the manifest barbarity being carried out. I cannot believe anyone would consider this a controversial position. Once again, a contrary view is not mainstream, it is extremist. It is not even the German view!

The Nuremburg trials, relying on shoddy legal precedent, actually relied more on just war theory than perhaps you’d imagine. The people prosecuted were uniformed military combatants. Terrorists are not. They are not accurately described as such even under the most strained readings of the Geneva Conventions. Again, claiming otherwise puts you outside mainstream legal opinion. Most people claim they could/should be treated as such, but very few if any claim that it is established legal thinking they they must be. Certainly opinion juris is against you http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/Adobefiles/a87a-trashing.pdf

Excuse my vehemence, but I cannot understand why an otherwise seemingly intelligent and humane individual would insist on defending terrorists and Nazis while randomly spraying vitriol at Western or WWII Allied interests.

It would have been possible to make the symbolic point that Britain was still in the way by bombing military targets. I have no doubt that justice was on the side of the Allies in World War II, but an understanding of war and history requires us to be critical of unjust actions no matter who their originator.

As to just war theory, I’d suggest you reflect on the requirement that the means be “proportionate”.

Many of those interned in Guantanamo Bay are in fact combatants. And, additionally, precedents were set for treating terrorists as criminals in the trials of the Al-Qaeda perpetrators of the bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993.

It’s off topic for this thread, really, but I’d make two quick points on this question:

1. Treating terrorists as criminals rather than an enemy to be destroyed would be a more sustainable strategy in building support for the West and undermining support for Al-Qaeda and militant Political Islamism;

2. The invasion of Iraq in no way meets the requirements of just war theory.

But as I said, I don’t want to get into this debate at length here.

Thanks for your acknowledgement that I’m a “an otherwise seemingly intelligent and humane individual” but I repeat that I am not “defending terrorists and Nazis”. That contention betrays a wiful failure to read, and understand. Nor am I “randomly straying vitriol”. The intent of my post is to open a debate on historical memory and its representation in literature. Your response, Dreadnought, rather proves my contention that such debates are inevitably politicised, but I’d prefer that discussion on this thread stay closer to the issues core to my post.

Thanks.

The deliberate mass bombing of civilians was horrific. So to was the firebombing of Japanese cities. More people died in the first night of firebombing in Hiroshima than were later to die in the atomic explosion.

These events were the apogee of total war. Let’s hope it never gets that far again.

Incidentally, contrary to what was said at the time, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end the war – the Imperial government of Japan had already put out peace feelers to Washington. Truman was trying to show the world the power the US had with the possession of atomic weapons, and to put Stalin back in his box. It’s unlikely it would have played out that way had FDR been alive.

By then, area bombing had assumed institutional inertia, of course. But you can really only apply just war principles after a possible alternative to area bombing became technologically feasible. The entire campaign before that is attributable to there being no alternative within the realms of technology.

As for the effectiveness of the campaign, that is yet to be determined. Certainly, the British assumed that the Germans had mobilised their economy for war as efficiently as they themselves had. They were shocked and amazed to find out about the ‘Blitzkreig Economy Theory’ they used, and astonished to find out that the Germans did not actually mobilise for War until late 1943! So the area bombing campaign was based on false assumptions from the start. That does not mean they were wrong to do it.

But in the end, and bearing in mind that we now know the depth to which German society was nazified and popularly supported the vile ideologies of that regime, it is very difficult to argue against area bombing. You may be aware of the recent German scholarship on this subject, which is still causing so much controversy in that country.

Did the Germans suffer for their longstanding and ingrained popular support of the Nazi regime? Yes. They did – but not nearly as much as Soviet, Polish, and Dutch people did (to name a few) as victims of that regime. I simply cannot regard their suffering as a bad thing irrespective of how much I can empathise with it on the personal level.

But I believe that they certainly remember the lessons they learned, to this day. And that is good thing, surely?

MarkL
Canberra

Mark your ‘former Conservative ministers and Anglican Bishops’ are the Chamberlain appeasers. Surely a less than credible voice in WWII unless perhaps I misjudge your position. It is entirely rational to conclude from your posts that you would have supported Chamberlain over Churchill.

Your just war analysis of the Iraq operations is an assertion, not a rebuttal. George Weigel wrote authoritatively on the issue pre and post the conflict. Certainly your claim that the WWII bombing of Nazi cities was not proportionate is misguided if not just wrong.

Closer to your core issues? Well any natural history of anything, let alone something as serious as the 20th Century catalogue of egregious destruction of human life should not begin with obfuscation and moral equivalence. It does not honour the dead and it does not help us to avoid such catastrophies in the future.

For instance, Dresden:

“Dresden was widely considered a city of little war-related industrial or strategic importance. Dresden itself was most noted as a cultural centre, with noted architecture in the Zwinger Palace, the Dresden State Opera House and its historic churches. It has been claimed that the bombing was at the request of Russia, to attack a German armoured division in transit through the city. However, RAF briefing notes indicate that one of the motives was to show “the Russians when they arrive, what Bomber Command can do” (that is, to intimidate the Russians).

At the time, town was full of refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army. Bomber Command was ordered to attack Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and other east German cities to “cause confusion in the evacuation from the east” and “hamper the movements of troops from the west”. This directive led to the raid on Dresden and marked the erosion of one last moral restriction in the bombing war: the term “evacuation from the east” did not refer to retreating troops but to the civilian refugees fleeing from the advancing Russians. Although these refugees clearly did not contribute to the German war effort, they were considered legitimate targets simply because the chaos caused by attacks on them might obstruct German troop reinforcements to the Eastern Front. There are reports that even civilians fleeing the firestorm engulfing Dresden in February 1945 were strafed by British and American aircraft.

The fire-bombing consisted of dropping large amounts of high-explosive to expose the timbers within buildings, followed by incendiary devices (fire-sticks) to ignite them and then more high-explosives to hamper the efforts of the fire services. This eventually created a self-sustaining ‘fire storm’ with temperatures peaking at over 1500 degrees C. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed area, become extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from the outside and people were sucked into the fire.

3,900 tonnes of bombs were dropped. Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed. An area of 15 square kilometers was totally destroyed, among that: 14,000 homes, 72 schools, 22 hospitals, 19 churches, 5 theaters, 50 bank and insurance companies, 31 department stores, 31 large hotels, and 62 administration buildings.”

http://www.artpolitic.org/infopedia/bo/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II.html

I don’t agree with what you say regarding the popular support for Nazism justifying disregarding the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. I am aware of the recent German scholarship on this – and it’s certainly changed the picture. But I can’t see how justice is served in any way by targetting non-combatants. Even if one assumes that those who give material support to a despotic regime are targets (and this assumption was certainly made by the French Resistance), indiscriminate bombing will inevitably kill opponents of the regime, or people who are indifferent to it. The safest ethical position is to observe the distinction between civilian and military targets, and if the available technology makes this difficult, then it should be used with extreme care.

I agree with your last comment.

Incidentally, and with no disrespect whatsoever to MarkL, how do you know that he is an “actual military analyst”?

I’m with Dreadnought on this one. As Basil Fawlty said, the Germans started it.

They chose to bomb civilian targets in Britain, for much the same reason that the British reciprocated. The true horrors of the concentration camps may not have been known at the time, but the Germans had racked up plenty of misdemeanors by the time the allies eventually got around to strategic bombing.

Eventually, the stronger side prevailed. Fortunately for us they were the good guys.

What does ‘popular support’ for the Nazis mean? In the 1932 elections Hilter got 37.3% of the vote, and after that the Nazis took over everything. Hiler did not get 50% in the 1933 election. There is no way of knowing that the ‘popular will’ was after that date.

Before WW2, Hitler made many declarations that he would never start a war, he went on about how he had been an ordinary soldier in WW1 and knew what war meant, &c.

Consider the access there is present-day America to information. Consider the attitudes of many Americans on Iraq and Afghanistan. Consider that every source of knowledge for Germans from 1933 was in the hands of the Nazi party.

It would have been a very brave (or very stupid) person who voiced opposition to the government during war – and that applies equally to Britain at the time.

The ordinary German civilians who were bombed during the war, and later were ‘ethnically cleansed’ from East Prussia and Czechoslovakia immediately after the war paid a very heavy price for the one-third who voted for Hitler in 1932.

In the end, the magnitude of what happened here is obscene.

It needs to be recognised as a failure of humanity on an incredible scale.

That does not mean that other events are excusable or diminished, just that we recognise that even the good guys commit gross acts.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17633

From a purely military point of view, the British bombing effort in World War 2 must be accounted as a failure; it consumed immense resources that might have been much more usefully employed in developing a decent battle-tank, and the manpower could have gone into at least a couple of more field armies.

In addition, German production in the latter part of the war was prodigious; what, in the end, brought the German war economy down was lack of oil and the destruction of Germany’s internal transport links.

There is a place for the heavy bomber in war, and that would be it- destroying the logisitic and energy capabilities of a state is far quicker then what was attempted in the Second World War.

But I might also add that the only way to preserve ‘moral purity’, if you will, is to not fight at all.

And I’m afraid Mark is joking if he thinks we live in a less civillised world then in 1946. I suspect he’s wearing rose coloured glasses again. He might forget, or perhaps he never knew, of the West’s complicity with some of Stalin’s worst atrocities. Many Russians who were liberated from slavery by British arms had no desire to return to the USSR. Stalin insisted they be returned to him, and the British supinely agreed. The Foreign Office legal advisor put out a memo.

This is purely a question for the Soviet authorities and does not concern His Majesty’s Government. In due course all those with whom the Soviet authorities desire to deal with must be handed over to them, and we are not concerned with the fact that they may be shot or otherwise more harshly dealt with then they might be under English law.

The West routinely committed acts which if they happened now by American forces would produce howls of outrage. (For some reason, the French get a free pass.) The fact that people now question US motives and behavior is, in the long run, a massive advantage to the United States.

I find the idea that populations as a whole can be held morally responsible for the acts of the state morally troubling. I don’t deny the extent of the complicity. The difficulty is evaluating the morality of individual actions in isolation from the circumstances in which they were carried out.

Presumably, Dreadnought does not believe that Germans could be killed with impunity after 1945, even though they were the very same people who he thinks deserved to die between 1940 and 1945.

Once you recognise that, I think you see what flimsy foundations the moral argument rests on: we obviously don’t think that they deserve punishment after the war ended, because we recognise that outside of the particular circumstnaces, there is nothing inherently collectively evil in those people.

I might go further and say that I have very little confidence that any of us could predict accurately what we would do as individuals in a set of circumstances like that. If you think of the range of things that a large section of the American public has come to embrace since 2001, for example, compared with what you might imagine their views might have been in the absence of the attack and the Administration’s exploitation of it, it’s difficult to believe that any society is immune to voluntarily acting in ways that are collectively wrong. (And no, I don’t think that Nazi Germany and post 2001 America are similar: the point is that it only took a comparatively trivial event like September 11 together with a cynical and manipulative government to cause a whole lot of people to reassess – without even thinking about it too much – some fairly fundamental beliefs of right and wrong.)

That’s a bit unfair on Mark. I think Australians would be far more aware of Stalin’s atrocities than most other countries because of it’s high post-WWII immigration. People hear things. One of my friends was the daughter of a refugee from East Prussia, circa 1944. Another was the the son of an Russian POW, who ended up killing some guards rather than be repatriated to the U.S.S.R. Both of these people ended up running to Australia. Only in this country could you make a movie like “Children of the Revolution”…

The WWII bombing of European cities was slightly different: it was total war, where the Germans first implemented the strategy of bombing cities, but the Allies quickly responded in kind. It was a “total war” situation because Britain was on the verge of being invaded and conquered, and that may well have occurred had the Allies not fought back with everything they had, including seeking to degrade the Germans’ industrial capacity by bombing productive industrial sites in and near cities. It certainly breached the Geneva Conventions, but was it “wrong”? I wouldn’t be prepared to condemn it even now; it was a life or death situation, and it may well have been death had the Allies not been prepared to do to the enemy what the enemy was already doing to them.

I don’t know about Scott’s comment that British bombing of German cities was ineffective anyway, because (he observes) German industrial production remained “prodigious” even in the latter stages of the war. That may be so, but might it not have been even more prodigious had the bombing not taken place? How much longer would the war then have been prolonged and how many more might then have died? It might well be true that the Allies would have been better advised to concentrate on energy and communication/transport targets, but that’s more a tactical than moral argument, and it’s by no means obvious that concentrating on those sorts of targets would have resulted in lower civilian casualties in any event.

Finally, I should note that we ought to be able to debate about whether and to what extent bombing of civilian areas (deliberately or as “collateral” damage) in WWII was justified, without having malicious point-scoring troublemakers labelling contributors (i.e. Mark Bahnisch) as “starting to feel bad for Hitler”. Mark’s contributions could not honestly be characterised in that way or anything like it. Despite the fact that Mark has drawn the unfair (and defamatory) characterisation to the gentleman’s attention, he has not seen fit either to apologise or correct it. The gentleman who did this professes to be a conservative christian, but doesn’t seem to acknowledge or practise standards of basic honesty or decency in the way he discusses issues. If he’s unwilling to practise either honesty or civility, then he simply isn’t welcome here, and others should easily be able to judge the sincerity and depth of his professed christian values.

On Scott’s point, I should clarify that when I said that history doesn’t go in a straight line, what I intended by that remark was that in some respects we can be both more and less civilised than people were at any given point in time. For instance, if one were to look at the impact of war on non-combatants, it was massive in the 17th century, very low in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and massive again in the 20th century. But it would be wrong to look at the 19th century as some sort of panacea. The murder rate in Australia, for instance, was much higher in the 1890s than in any decade of the twentieth century. And at the same time that Metternich’s “Concert of Europe” produced (relative) peace in Europe from 1815 to 1848, freedoms which we take for granted – for instance, freedom of the press were heavily restricted. Not to mention – in the German context – a distinct coarsening of manners in the middle class as compared to the cultural heights of the late 18th century and early 19th century and a preference for militaristic arrogance.

My family has two branches in Australia – in SA and Qld (originally settled on the Darling Downs). As with a lot of other German-Australians, my ancestors’ motivation for emigrating in was (in part) religious and political freedom. Again, in common with others, the community into which my father was born was very resistant to Nazi overtures in the 30s. Most people probably know that most of the German place names in Queensland were changed in WW1 – Marburg being the only exception, I think.

My grandfather grew up with his first language being German, but he was of the last generation (I think)to have that full linguistic/cultural inheritance.

There is some historical literature on the Germans in Australia, but not a lot. An actor of my acquaintance with a similar background was writing a play about all this, but I lost touch with her when she moved to Melbourne a few years ago.

I may be wrong on some of the details. Brian might correct me if I am – he knows the stories far better than I.

But it’s one reason I deeply resent the imputation that I am in some way defending Hitler and Nazism. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I know MarkL is a military analyst because he regularly reads DREADNOUGHT too.

Defamation? My comments were neither malicious, nor a manifestly untrue reading given the subject matter. I wonder at the quality of debate at Troppo if one can only post fawning comments supportive of the post in question, no matter how morally questionable. Especially if strongly worded but otherwise civil comments leave one open to disparaging attacks on the quality or otherwise of one’s Christian virtues.

My background is Polish, I am investing emotional capital in a Jew and I am also a human being. Perhaps that’s why I found a post that felt it was time to finally ’see Germans (which means Nazis, don’t forget) as the victims’ deeply offensive.

Perhaps Mark you need to publish such a post in the mainstream media to judge how truly offensive your comments were. In a bubble of sympathetic opinion extremist claims often start to sound reasonable.