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| Guernica by Pablo Picasso (Wiki Commons) On display at Renia Sofia Museum, Madrid |
After the Second World War the Royal Air Force was given a church of its own in London. You probably know the name of this church from the nursery rhyme:
‘Oranges and Lemons say the bells of Saint Clements.’
You can see St Clement Danes as you enter Fleet Street from Westminster. At the front of the church stand statues of Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command and Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris whose nickname indicates clearly what role he played in the war.
The Queen Mother, who unveiled the statue of Harris, was reportedly upset by the hostility shown to him, the statue having to be protected from vandalism and often covered in graffiti. She had lived through the Blitz and said that she was glad when Buckingham Palace was bombed as it meant she could look east enders in the face, they having suffered the brunt of the bombing,in reality far worse than anything the royal family had to endure.
Harris was not a diplomatic man and always maintained that the bombing of German cities, which he was well aware would result in the deaths of many civilians, was a justified tactic. It was practiced by the Germans and would be practiced on them until they finally realised that the war was unwinnable. I have often called the bombing of Dresden the Hiroshima of Europe, a hammer blow that would convince an opponent that they were beaten, something they had previously refused to concede.
This is not entirely accurate because Dresden was bombed in February 1945 and the Nazis did not surrender until three months later. The bombing of Hiroshima and later Nagasaki had a more immediate effect in making the Japanese quickly admit defeat. Both they and the Germans had showed a stubborn determination in continuing to fight a war that had obviously long since been lost. It was as though Hitler was punishing his people for losing the war, his own suicide finally allowing them to surrender.
This refusal to admit they were fighting for a lost cause meant that allied forces had to work their way slowly and bloodily towards both Berlin and Tokyo, overcoming their enemies and losing lives as they did so. If you think that the bombing of cities like Dresden and Hiroshima was unforgivable, you would have to be prepared to say to the parents and loved ones of the men who fought that it was possible to end the war quickly but their lives would continue to be lost as it was fought slowly.
I would not be prepared to do that, so I cannot call the bombing of Dresden (or the dropping of the atom bombs) war crimes. Killing thousands of civilians who were burned to death as bombs rained down on them from above was obviously a horrible thing to do but it effectively saved the lives of the many soldiers who would otherwise have died on the battlefield as they advanced towards the heart of enemy power. Life is about alternatives not absolutes and this is a choice that I would have made.
It is thought that about 25,000 people were killed at Dresden, a pretty city with a population of about a million. The Nazis claimed it was ten times that number and described the bombing as mass murder. If anyone knew about mass murder, it was the Nazis who were shipping millions of Jews as well as gays, gypsies and disabled people off to the gas chambers. They were the real experts in the process of the wholesale killing of defenceless people.
Although the bombing of towns and cities had begun in the First World War, with the Kaiser initially and rather quaintly forbidding the Luftwaffe from bombing London lest they hit Buckingham Place, it was in 1937 that the Nazis conducted what is still probably their most notorious air raid. This was during the Spanish Civil War when the Condor Legion bombed a Spanish republican town called Guernica.
Again, an unofficial competition grew up between the victims, who claimed a larger loss of life, and the perpetrators, who estimated a smaller one. The number was probably around 300, way below that of Dresden or those killed by the atom bombs, which was over 100,000. The bombing is (in)famous mainly because of Pablo Picasso’s famous painting of it, which was returned to Spain, after democracy was re-established there.
There is a story that a Nazi confronted Picasso, who was living in Paris during the Second World War, and saw either the painting or a sketch of it in his studio. The Nazi said, ‘Did you do this?’ (knowing full well that he was the painter) to which the artist coolly replied, ‘No. You did it.’ The implication was that fascists had perpetrated the atrocity while the artist had merely shown the world what they had done.
When it comes to doing, we were bombers as well. In my tourist guiding days I had an elderly American client who seemed mild-mannered but who quietly admitted to me that he must have been responsible for the death of thousands during his time in Bomber Command when he helped drop bombs on German cities and the helpless citizens down below who had no way of defending themselves.
Blanket bombing of civilians is no longer considered acceptable but it was how war was waged in the twentieth century. Although it was probably just as dangerous for the men involved, it did not involve the kind of individual gallantry shown by fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain so it did not attract the heroic status the fighters enjoyed. Bombing was not nice but it was necessary and it should not be called a war crime.
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
Edwin Lerner
