Churchill’s defenders contend he was referring to nonlethal gas and believed it more humane than high-explosive bombs and shells. But the gas the British used did kill Kurds and Iraqis, and during World War II, Churchill would drop the distinction between nonlethal and deadly gas. The same day he took office as prime minister, he ordered the bombing of civilians. After the fall of France, Churchill wrote a somber letter to Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Air Production:
When I look round to see how we can win the war I see that there is only one sure path. We have no Continental army which can defeat the German military power. The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and probably Africa to draw from. Should he be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward, and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him down and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.146
This letter “is of great historical significance,” writes Paul Johnson, “marking the point at which the moral relativism of the totalitarian societies invaded the decision-making process of a major legitimate power.”147
Churchill led the West into adopting the methods of barbarism of their totalitarian enemies. By late 1940, writes Johnson, “British bombers were being used on a great and increasing scale to kill and frighten the German civilian population in their homes.”148
The policy, initiated by Churchill, approved in cabinet, endorsed by parliament and, so far as can be judged, enthusiastically backed by the bulk of the British people—thus fulfilling all the conditions of the process of consent in a democracy under law—marked a critical stage in the moral declension of humanity in our times.149
“The adoption of terror bombing was a measure of Britain’s desperation,” writes Johnson, and, one might add, of the moral decline of Winston Churchill.150 “So far as air strategy was concerned,” writes A.J.P. Taylor, “the British outdid German frightfulness first in theory, later in practice, and a nation which claimed to be fighting for a moral cause gloried in the extent of its immoral acts.”151
“WOLVES WITH THE MINDS OF MEN”
IN ADVANCE TO BARBARISM, to which the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral wrote the foreword, historian F.J.P. Veale traces Britain’s abandonment of the rules of civilized warfare to May 11, 1940. Just twenty-four hours after the German army invaded France, Bomber Command sent eighteen Whitley bombers on a night run far from the front, on Westphalia. Writes Veale, italicizing his words: “This raid on the night of May 11, 1940, although in itself trivial, was an epoch-making event since it was the first deliberate breach of the fundamental rule of civilized warfare that hostilities must only be waged against the enemy combatant forces.”152
It had taken Churchill only twenty-four hours as prime minister to remove the keystone upholding “the whole structure of civilized warfare as it had been gradually built up in Europe during the preceding two centuries.”153 From there, that “structure of civilized warfare…collapsed in ruins.”154
B. H. Liddell Hart confirms it: “[W]hen Mr. Churchill came into power, one of the first decisions of his Government was to extend bombing to the non-combatant area.”155 While the Luftwaffe had bombed cities, Liddell Hart noted the critical strategic and moral difference with what Britain was doing: “Bombing [of Warsaw and Rotterdam] did not take place until German troops were fighting their way into these cities and thus conformed to the old rules of siege bombardment.”156
In his first meeting with Stalin in 1942, Churchill brought up the Royal Air Force bombing of German cities to ingratiate himself with the tyrant by impressing upon him how ruthless Britain intended to be.
Churchill now spoke of the bombing of Germany. This was already considerable, he said, and would increase. Britain looked upon the morale of the German civilian population “as a military target. We sought no mercy and we would show no mercy.” Britain hoped to “shatter” twenty German cities, as several had already been shattered. “If need be, as the war went on, we hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city.”157
At this point in the conversation, writes Martin Gilbert, the “record of the meeting noted, ‘Stalin smiled and said that would not be bad’…and thence forward the atmosphere became progressively more cordial.”158
What Churchill had been describing to Stalin was a British policy to “de-house” the civilian population of Germany.159 Who was instigator and architect of the policy to carpet-bomb German cities? Frederick Lindemann, “the Prof,” an intimate of Churchill’s whom he had brought into his war Cabinet as science adviser. Lindemann had “an almost pathological hatred for Nazi Germany, and an almost medieval desire for revenge.”160
C. P. Snow, a science adviser to the war government, wrote that Lindemann had a zealot’s faith in the efficacy of bombing. Early in 1942, when Britain had failed to achieve a single major victory, Lindemann presented his great paper to the Cabinet.
The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed especially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them, and so are bound to waste bombs…. The paper claimed that—given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of bombing aircraft—it would be possible, in all the larger towns of Germany (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants), to destroy fifty percent of all houses.161
This was to be accomplished in just eighteen months, from March 1942 to September 1943. Snow, in his 1960 Godkin lectures at Harvard, asked—about himself and his colleagues in wartime—“What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.”162
In his 1944 Bombing Vindicated, J. M. Spaight, Principal Secretary for the Air Ministry, claims full credit for Churchill’s Britain for having been first to initiate the bombing of civilians:
Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity which it deserved…. It was a splendid decision. It wasas heroic, as self-sacrificing, as Russia’s decision to adopt her policy of “scorched earth.”163
Our “splendid…heroic and self-sacrificing” decision to bomb cities, insists Spaight, gave Britons the right to stand as equals alongside the Red Army. For these preemptive strikes on German cities brought Luftwaffe retaliation on British cities, giving “Coventry and Birmingham, Sheffield and Southampton, the right to look Kiev and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol in the face. Our Soviet Allies would have been less critical of our inactivity in 1942 if they had understood what we have done.”164
Though British propaganda broadcasts charged that the Luftwaffe had begun the bombing of cities by brutally targeting London, Spaight believed that British cities might have been spared had Churchill not first resorted to city bombing: “There was no certainty, but there was a reasonable probability that our capital and our industrial centres would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany.”165
“To achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go,” Churchill told Parliament on September 21, 1943.166 By 1944, he had come back around to the idea of using chemical and biological warfare on civilians. In one secret project, he commissioned the preparation of five million anthrax cakes to be dropped onto the pastures of north Germany to poison the cattle and through them the people. As the Glasgow Sunday Herald reported in 2001,
The aim of Operation Vegetarian was to wipe out the German beef and dairy herds and then see the bacterium spread to the human population. With people then having no access to antibiotics, this would have caused many thousands—perhaps even millions—of German men, women and children to suffer awful deaths.167
The anthrax cakes
were tested on Gruinard Island, off Wester Ross in Scotland, which was not cleared of contamination until 1990.
In July of 1944, as the Allies were still attempting a breakout from Normandy, Churchill minuted General “Pug” Ismay of the Chief of Staffs committee,
I want you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas…. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention…. [I]f we do it, let us do it one hundred percent. In the meantime, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists…. I shall of course have to square Uncle Joe and the President.168
“It is absurd to consider morality on this topic,” Churchill told his RAF planners.169
On the fiftieth anniversary of the destruction of Dresden, the Washington Post’s Ken Ringle wrote, “[I]f any one person can be blamed for the tragedy at Dresden, it appears to have been Churchill.”170
Before leaving for Yalta, Churchill ordered Operation Thunderclap, massive air strikes to de-house German civilians to turn them into refugees to clog the roads over which German soldiers had to move to stop a Red Army offensive. Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris put Dresden on the target list. On the first night of the raid, 770 Lancasters arrived over Dresden around 10 P.M.:
In two waves three hours apart, 650,000 incendiary bombs rained down on Dresden’s narrow streets and baroque buildings, together with another 1,474 tons of high explosives…. The fires burned for seven days.
More than 1,600 acres of the city were devastated (compared to 100 acres burned in the German raid on Coventry) and melting streets burned the shoes off those attempting to flee. Cars untouched by fire burst into flames just from the heat. Thousands sought refuge in cellars where they died, robbed of oxygen by the flames, before the buildings above them collapsed.
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who as one of twenty-six thousand Allied prisoners of war in Dresden helped clean up after the attack, remembers tunneling into the ruins to find the dead sitting upright in what he would describe in “Slaughter-house Five” as “corpse mines.” Floating in the static water tanks were the boiled bodies of hundreds more.171
The morning after the Lancasters struck, five hundred B-17s arrived over Dresden in two waves with three hundred fighter escorts to strafe fleeing survivors. Estimates of the dead in the firestorm range from 35,000 to 250,000. The Associated Press reported, “Allied war chiefs have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German populated centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.”172
In a memo to his air chiefs, Churchill acknowledged what Dresden had been about: “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.”173 Sensing they were about to be scapegoated for actions Churchill himself ordered, the air chiefs returned the memo. In his 1947 memoir, Bomber Offensive, Air Marshal Harris implies that Churchill gave the order to incinerate Dresden: “I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself.”174
Writes A.J.P. Taylor of his countrymen at war:
What mattered was the outlook: the readiness by the British, of all people, to stop at nothing when waging war. Civilized restraints, all considerations of morality, were abandoned. By the end of the war, men were…ready to kill countless women and children…. This was the legacy of the bombing strategy which the British adopted with such high-minded motives.175
Concludes F.J.P. Veale: “The indiscriminate bombing of civilians, enemy cities, and civilian property brought about a terrifying and unprecedentedly destructive reversion to primary and total warfare” as once practiced “by Sennacherib, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane.”176
The old Churchill had made young Churchill a prophet. As he had written in his novel Savrola, long before the war in which he led his nation, “Chivalrous gallantry is not among the peculiar characteristics of excited democracy.”177
Americans, too, played a role in adopting methods of barbarism from which earlier generations would have recoiled in horror and disgust. During World War I, we condemned the British starvation blockade before we went in, but supported it with our warships after we went in. If Churchill initiated terror bombing, America perfected it. Boasted Curtis LeMay of his famous raid on Tokyo, “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9–10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”178 We and the British fought for moral ends. We did not always use moral means by any Christian definition, and Churchill played the lead role in Western man’s reversion to barbarism.
CHURCHILL’S CONVICTIONS
THE FEROCITY WITH WHICH Churchill pursued war against civilians can be traced to his convictions. He was less a Christian than a pagan in the Roman tradition. Though he might sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” at Placentia Bay and sign an Atlantic Charter on the rights of peoples, these had nothing to do with how he prosecuted war. His views on some issues were not that far removed from the man in Berlin for whom he had expressed grudging admiration in Great Contemporaries.
Indeed, Churchill might justly be called a post-Christian man. After reading the exuberantly anti-Christian Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade in Bangalore as a twenty-one-year-old subaltern, Churchill wrote his mother:
One of these days the cold bright light of science & reason will shine through the cathedral windows & we shall go out into the fields to seek God for ourselves. The great laws of Nature will be understood—our destiny and our past will be clear. We shall then be able to dispense with the religious toys that have agreeably fostered the development of mankind.179
After his capture in the armored train disaster by the fiercely Christian Boers, who fought for God and country, Churchill confessed to having been profoundly shaken when he heard a sound,
which was worse even than the sound of shells: the sound of Boers singing psalms. “It struck the fear of God into me. What sort of men are we fighting? They have the better cause—and the cause is everything—at least I mean to them it is the better cause.”180
In truth, the Boers had the “better cause.” And Churchill could count himself fortunate that his captors were pious Christians and not Afghan or Sioux.
Nor did Churchill in his last days hold out hope for the world to come. He approached his end a despairing atheist, telling his lifelong friend Violet Bonham Carter that “death meant extinction” and “eternity was a nightmare possibility.”181
Writing in The Spectator in scorn of “the cult of Churchill,” Michael Lind put on the record views of the Great Man that might shock Americans. Churchill was no egalitarian humanist. In 1910, he informed Prime Minister Asquith of his gnawing social concern:
The unnatural and increasingly rapid rise of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.182
When the Mental Deficiency Act was advanced to sterilize the feeble-minded and “other degenerate types,” Asquith’s government agreed to consider the measure. Writes Edwin Black, author of War Against the Weak,
Home Secretary Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, reassured one group of eugenicists that Britain’s 120,000 feeble-minded persons “should, if possible, be segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations.” The plan called for the creation of vast colonies. Thousands of Britain’s unfit would be moved into these colonies to live out their days.183
“Hitler’s ultimately genocidal programme of ‘racial hygiene’ began with the kind of c
ompulsory sterilization of the ‘feeble-minded and insane classes’ that Churchill urged on the British government,” writes Lind.184
Though a philo-Semite and supporter of Zionism, Churchill’s views on the roots of Bolshevism seem not markedly different from those of Hitler. In the Illustrated Sunday Herald of February 8, 1920, after the failed Allied intervention in Russia, Churchill wrote that in the “creation of Bolshevism” the role of “atheistical Jews…probably outweighs all others.”185 Contrasting the patriotism of “National Russian Jews” with the “schemes of the International Jews,” Churchill describes the latter:
[A] sinister confederacy…[of] men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (the United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of the arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing…. [T]his band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.186
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