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Was Winston Churchill a war criminal?
German victims cry out against Allied bombing
Paul Gallagher
The Scotsman, 22 November 2002
HE WAS the inspirational wartime leader who once said: "History will be
kind to me, for I intend to write it."
But while Winston Churchill's stock has arguably never been higher in the
English-speaking world, the legacy of the former Prime Minister has
finally been called into question in the nation he vanquished in the
Second World War.
A new book by the historian Jörg Friedrich has provoked claims in Germany
that Churchill should be named in the court of history as a war criminal
for deliberately ordering the massacre of civilians in their homes.
Friedrich's study of the Allied bombing offensive between 1940 and 1945
suggests that Churchill had decided deliberately to target civilians even
before Adolf Hitler sent the Luftwaffe into the skies over Europe.
The book also claims that as many as 635,000 civilians died in German
cities such as Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne during the strategy of
"area-bombing" carried out by RAF Bomber Command under Churchill's
orders.
Rather than accepting the strategy as a necessary evil for the Allies as
they attempted to force out the Nazi regime, Friedrich's argument is that
the German civilians who suffered have not been given the recognition
they deserve.
It is the first time such views have been so publicly debated in Germany
since the defeat of Hitler and they were stridently espoused this week in
the country's mass-circulation tabloid Bild, which is serialising the
book. It has awakened a feeling among Germans that they can now discuss
being victims in the conflict, even though it was a war started by their
own country.
Friedrich defended his work yesterday, saying it was time for Britain to
face up to the truth about its wartime history. He asked: "Do you want to
live in a nation which doesn't know its own past?
"You have to look into the face of the past. Then you can ask if it was a
heroic one or a tragic one or perhaps a criminal one, or if it included
necessary evils in a tragic time. You have to look into this face even if
it has a Medusa face, and in the British case the Medusa's face is the
bombing campaigns."
Friedrich accused British historians of closing their minds to what took
place after the RAF bombs left the aircraft flying over Germany during
the war. "You have to look at what happened on the ground. This is a new
contribution to the discussion, the depth of the suffering which happened
on the ground," he added.
The RAF bombing of German cities began in retaliation for Hitler's 1940
attacks on London but was expanded because of the failure of Bomber
Command to pinpoint Nazi airfields and installations during raids. It was
estimated that only one in five bombs was landing within five miles of
its intended target.
For Churchill's military chiefs, "area bombing" - aiming for a target
like a city which was so large it could not be missed - was the only
method available to inflict damage on Hitler's regime.
Dr Paul Addison, a Churchill historian based at the University of
Edinburgh, said it was not the case that British historians had ignored
the moral dimension of the strategic bombing campaign.
He pointed out that many academics - such as John Keegan, who said
Britain had "descended to the enemy's level" - had been sharply
critical
of the policy and refused to brush over its impact.
Even during the war, there was public opposition to the policy from the
Bishop of Chichester and there have been numerous iconoclastic historians
who have used the bombing strategy to rubbish Churchill's reputation.
"There are those who say it is simply wrong to kill civilians during war
but others say there is a more complex moral dilemma," Dr Addison said.
"Of course, the killing of civilians is evil but if that prevents a
greater evil, then it could be justified.
"The question is, how far did bombing contribute to victory, and military
historians generally agree that it was a very important part of the
defeat of Nazi Germany."
Dr Addison said Churchill was acutely aware of the moral questions raised
by the bombing of Germany. He is said to have thrown his hands up in
horror and asked aloud, "Are we beasts?" after seeing footage of the
destruction of Dresden.
In the final weeks of the war, Churchill wrote in a memo to his Chiefs of
Staff: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of
bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror,
though under other pretexts, should be reviewed ... the destruction of
Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing."
Friedrich's book, The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment 1940-45 claims to
be the most authoritative account of the impact of the bombing campaign.
The historian said that it was the Allies, as much as Hitler, who were
responsible for "abolishing the principles and traditions which protected
civilians from war since the Christian knights".
The 1939-45 war leaders should all be judged using the same standards, he
added. As victors, the Allies had largely not been forced to ask whether
their actions were justified because they had won.
"Germany, with the horrors of the Holocaust and the Russian campaign,
cannot in any way be self-righteous about this, but we should engage in a
common fight for the truth," Friedrich added.
The account comes at a time when Churchill's reputation in Britain and
the US is higher than it has ever been since his death in 1965. Both US
President George Bush and the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani,
borrowed from his speeches after 11 September and cited him as an
inspiration in a time of crisis.
President Bush keeps a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office and during a
visit to London last year, he asked to be taken to the cabinet war rooms
where the Prime Minister led Britain during the Blitz.
The US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, also drew parallels between
Churchill's "lone voice" against Hitler in the 1930s and the current
American warnings about the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his
weapons of mass destruction.
In his home country, Churchill is among the favourites to win the poll in
the BBC programme Great Britons and a film about his life and work will
be presented in the series tonight by Mo Mowlam.
A survey published yesterday found that Churchill was the clear favourite
to appear on the back of a £100 note, if one is ever introduced in
England and Wales. In Scotland, where a £100 note already exists, 27 per
cent said they would like to see Churchill on a £200 note.
The claims in Friedrich's book are unlikely to damage Churchill's
standing in Britain but Dr Addison said there was a danger that they
could be taken up by Neo-Nazis as part of attempts to revise history and
play down the role of Hitler.
"It probably is true that we have not looked too closely at the German
civilians who suffered," he added. "There is an argument that towards
the
end of the war the bombing was being done in an almost mechanical way but
there is a danger that people can forget that this was part of the wider
context of the war.
"I believe it is a healthy development that historians in Germany now
feel able to examine what happened on the ground during the Second World
War and discuss the suffering of ordinary people. But I am wary of this
being taken up by the Neo-Nazi movement to suggest that Churchill was
just as bad as Hitler, which is not the case."
Britain saw just cause in attacks
IT IS estimated that at least 500,000 German civilians were killed during
the Allied bombing raids of the Second World War. Jörg Friedrich puts the
figure at 635,000 dead.
In comparison, there were 1,236 people killed during the 41 bombing raids
on Coventry, the city which suffered the most in Britain under Nazi
attacks between 1940-42. About 60,000 civilians were killed in Britain by
German air raids.
During the war, more bombs by weight were dropped on the city of Berlin
than were released on the whole of Great Britain in the blitz.
Indiscriminate bombing of civilians was explicitly outlawed under the
1922 Washington Treaty and the targeting of non-combatants was also
prohibited under the Geneva Convention.
But after Hitler's Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam and Warsaw in the early
stages of the war and his aircraft conducted the first bombing raid over
London in August 1940, it was felt justified in Britain that the Nazis
should "reap the whirlwind" they had sown.
Industrial cities such as Cologne and Hamburg endured the greatest
bombardment, but by the summer of 1944, bombing raids on cities were
scaled down as Allied ground forces fought with the German army to regain
invaded territories in Europe.
In the final months of the war there was an escalation of the bombing as
the Allied generals decided it was better to continue rather than risk
soldiers' lives while wiping out the remnants of the Nazi resistance.
RAF aircraft had already destroyed nearly all industrial centres and so
it switched to towns with little military importance, such as the
medieval towns of Würzburg and Pforzheim.
In Dresden and Leipzig, the bombers were told to "cause confusion in the
evacuation from the east", which resulted in tens of thousands of
civilian refugees being targeted.
As the historian Max Hastings wrote: "Those air forces were allowed to
continue to do things which it must be said in cold blood were a moral
blemish, a moral blot perhaps on the conduct of the Allies."
