ZERO HOUR
In 1945, in the Observer newspaper, George Orwell wrote, ‘To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation.’(12) German cities and towns had been reduced to eerie moonscapes. People lived in cellars and holes in the ground. A civilised culture, once able to boast one of the densest patchworks of ancient towns and cities in Europe, had been reduced to a troglodyte existence. No major population centre had escaped unscathed. James Stern, an American citizen who had lived in Germany before the war, was sent back shortly after the war to research the effects of the bombing. He wrote, ‘Destruction on such a scale takes the mind a long time to absorb. You have to live with it to believe it. You think of it at first not as destruction, as something done deliberately by man to man, but as an earthquake… Nothing I saw in Frankfurt remained in so unharmed a state as to convince me I’d really been there before… ‘(13) In Hamburg, the Allies had destroyed 6,200 acres of the city; by contrast the Germans had destroyed 600 acres in London and 100 acres in Coventry. Patricia Meehan has written, ‘… the Allies had created a desert and called it peace.’(14)
W.G. Sebald was one of the first German authors to break the taboo of silence about the suffering inflicted on German civilians during the reign of terror by Bomber Harris, and about the long-term psychological damage this caused. He opened a debate that saw scores of publications on the subject, and a reappraisal by many of the nature of the area bombing campaign on German cities and towns. In 2002, he wrote, ‘Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War, still harder to think of the horrors involved in that devastation.’ An excerpt from his book, On The Natural History of Destruction, which was published before his untimely death in a car crash, illustrates a sense of the true horror of the bombing war. It describes how in Hamburg on 27th July 1943, ‘… at 1.20 a.m. a firestorm… at its height the storm… tore trees from the ground and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing facades the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at the speed of 150 kilometres an hour. Spun across open squares in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders of fire… Those who fled from their air raid shelters sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt. No one knows for certain how many lost their lives that night… Elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone or whole heaps of bodies had cooked in the water gushing from bursting boilers. Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat, which had risen to 1,000 degrees or more, that remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket…’(5) Sebald goes on to argue, ‘The destruction [was] on a scale without historical precedent… even after 1950, wooden crosses still stood on the piles of rubble in towns like Pforzheim, which had lost almost one third of its 60,000 inhabitants in a single raid on the night of 22nd February 1945.’(15)
The British philosopher, A.C. Grayling, emphasised the wanton destruction as an act of violence against cultural identity, by pointing out that: ‘The area bombing of Germany’s cities meant destroying its libraries, schools, universities, theatres, museums, art galleries, shops, monuments, architectural treasures, clinics, hotels, workshops, studios, concert halls; in short its cultural fabric, its embodied memory and character.’(16) The extent of the cultural genocide is often overlooked. The very repositories of the memory of the nation were obliterated in Germany on a scale not seen in any other nation in Europe during the Second World War, or any other war in the modern era. Joerg Friedrich called the carpet bombing of German cities the ‘greatest burning of books of all time’ and Grayling called it ‘culturecide’. Friedrich, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper in 2003, went on to say, ‘If you destroy a landscape of a hundred and sixty cities, most of medieval origin, you do something to the cultural identity of a people.’(17) That ‘something’ was not publicly discussed in Germany for nearly sixty years and the ‘hidden damage’ is something the Germans are only just coming to terms with now.
The final phase of the bombing war, from January to May 1945, destroyed small towns of no military significance, such as the Pied Piper town of Hamelin, the Christmas Toy town of Rothenburg, the historic cathedral town of Worms, the ancient Hanse town of Wismar, even the library in the university town of Göttingen. Countless other ‘non-military’ towns were destroyed, just because there were no major targets left to bomb. When the Allies looked back on what they had done, Admiral Ralph Ofstie of the US navy, who served on the US Strategic Bombing Survey, gave one of the most sobering analyses. He told the armed services committee, ‘The Allied bombing campaign of the war had shown, strategic bombing was inherently inaccurate and no matter how well defined it inevitably involved mass slaughter of men, women and children in the enemy country. It was not only militarily ineffective but with its ruthless, barbaric methods it lowered the moral standards of the society whose forces carried it out.’(18) He went on to ask, ‘Must we translate the historical mistakes of the Second World War into a permanent concept merely to avoid clouding the prestige of those who led us down the wrong road in the past?’ The ‘art’ of bombing had come into its own just at the time when the skies were emptied of the Luftwaffe and Bomber Harris’s aircrews could bomb with brutal perfection and impunity. Dresden is often cited as a city where they went too far. One of Europe’s greatest architectural gems, Dresden was filled to the brim with evacuees and refugees when it was bombed close to the end of the war. The last four months of the war saw the most unprecedented destruction of historic towns and cities, many with little or no military significance. Bomber Harris kept on bombing to try and prove he could win the war by bombing alone, that the German people would finally crack. Although he did so in contravention of the specific instructions of his superior, Air Chief Marshal Portal, who wanted to focus the RAF’s attentions on the all-important and strategically vital oil plants, neither Portal nor Churchill intervened to stop him. The raid on Dresden was not a one-off; Stettin, Königsberg, Potsdam, Swinemünde, Kolberg and Danzig, not to mention the baroque medieval masterpieces of Würzburg and Pforzheim, all fell victim to Harris’s murderous whirlwind. He had simply amassed too many planes and bombs, and had run out of large targets to bomb, so he switched to ever smaller, mostly medieval targets that, in his words, burned ‘like firecrackers’.
Whether the level of destruction was an Allied war aim, or the consequence of the escalation of the bombing campaign in the only front on which Churchill could show Stalin that Britain ‘was paying its way’, it resulted in the obliteration of Germany’s cultural and historic reference points and helped destroy her people’s sense of cultural identity. The Old Germany, the capital cities of the Holy Roman Empire, the capitals of its ancient regions and the fabric of the state built by Bismarck, lay in ruins. The term coined by the Germans at the end of the war to describe the lowest point in their national history, was ‘Zero Hour’, which recognised the death of one nation and the hope that a new one might emerge. ‘Zero Hour’ meant a new beginning, but Max Sebald described what arose out of those ruins as: ‘A reconstruction tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the nation’s own past history, prohibiting any backward view… a new faceless reality, pointing the population exclusively towards the future…’(19)
Today most of Germany’s cities are utterly soulless places, functional and business-like in the extreme. When looking at photographs in restaurants and bars of what once stood in their place, one has to ask, ‘Could the same people have built these two cities?’ The Erlebnisgeneration (the generation of those who lived through the war) often walk through these cities like sleep walkers, as if walking through a city of shadows, talking with such joie de vivre, saying things like, ‘I got married there and then we went to a restaurant in the old town there; this used to be the most luxurious street with the f
anciest villas,’ while looking at NCP car parks, concrete bunkers and glass boxes; a double tragedy, borne of a nation that abandoned its heritage in the headlong pursuit to move on.
Apparently there was no ‘alternative’ to the bombing. However, in practice, the USAAF, in contrast to the RAF, continued to focus primarily on strategic targets up until the end of the war. From the summer of 1944, the USAAF targeted the Luftwaffe airbases, clearing German fighters from the sky and, even more essentially, stopping Germany’s synthetic oil production, which cut off the fuel supply to her tanks and airplanes. General George Marshall boasted to the Soviets at Yalta in February 1945 of the accuracy of Allied bombing, not least in their targeted destruction of 80 per cent of Germany’s synthetic oil production and in obliterating the German rail network.(19.1) Both the RAF and USAAF had proved, during the D-Day offensive, that key targets could be pinpointed and taken out. The Allies had total air superiority and destroyed German airfields, marshalling yards and defences before the troops hit the beaches. In cities such as Schwäbisch Hall and Bamberg, the Allies had successfully hit only the main railway stations. And in Italy the Allies took far more care in their raids on Rome and on Italian cities in general not to carpet bomb civilians and the nation’s cultural monuments. Collateral damage, then as now, was unavoidable, particularly where armament factories were close to major population centres. But area bombing did not break German morale; just as the London Blitz had not broken the morale of the British people, it strengthened it; nor did it shatter German war production, which kept on rising sharply until the autumn of 1944, when the Allies reached Germany’s borders. Revenge and the mistaken belief that area bombing would break German morale prolonged the war, not least in the belief of the head of German armaments production Albert Speer, who simply could not understand why the Allies did not focus all their attention on armaments and oil.
Much of the discussion about the bombing war has been spent on the playground argument of who started it. Was it the German bombing of Wielun in western Poland on 1st September 1939 or Britain’s subsequent attack on Wilhelmshafen on 4th September? Was it Germany’s destruction of Rotterdam in May 1940, or Churchill’s decision to start bombing German cities that same month, after which the Germans replied by switching their attack from British airfields to bombing London? The RAF then bombed Berlin, so the Luftwaffe razed Coventry, and so it went on. Each attack was in revenge for the last, Hitler called for the obliteration of English cities and Bomber Harris promised they would ‘reap the whirlwind’. Britain made its major strategic shift on 14th February 1942 with the Air Ministry’s Area Bombing Directive, ‘You are accordingly authorised to use forces without restriction… operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civilian population and on industrial workers in particular.’ Charles Portal left no room for misunderstanding in a follow-up letter to Air Chief Marshal Norman Bottomley the following day, writing, ‘I suppose it is clear, that the aiming points will be built up areas, and not, for instance, dockyards or aircraft factories.’cclxvi(20)
The first major area bombing attack the RAF made under its new directives was on the old Hanse city of Lübeck, on the Baltic coast, on 29th March 1942. The first 1,000-bomber raid was made over Cologne on 30th May 1942 and destroyed much of the medieval city. The RAF, with considerable effort, was able to create ‘firestorms’ in the following cities (with the estimated civilian death tolls in brackets): Hamburg (45,000), Dresden (35,000), Königsberg, (25,000), Swinemünde (23,000), Pforzheim (21,000), Darmstadt (12,500), Kassel (10,000) Heilbronn (7,000), Würzburg (5,000), and Braunschweig (2,600) among others. Firestorms remained the exception, as both technical and climactic conditions had to converge to create perfect bombing conditions; the majority of German civilians continued to be killed in regular bombing raids with an ever-increasing number of bombers and bombs at the disposal of the Allies. Total German civilian losses during the bombing war are estimated to have been between 600,000 and 800,000. The total death toll of British civilians during the bombing war, including deaths caused by ‘V’ weapons (‘V’ stood for Vergeltung, ‘revenge’) is estimated at between 60,000 and 66,000. Other comparative figures of civilians killed by the German bombing war are; 800 in the bombing of Rotterdam, 10,000 in the bombing of Wielun and Warsaw, and between 20,000 and 40,000 civilians killed in the bombing of Stalingrad. Nevertheless, many other Soviet cities suffered Blitzkrieg air attacks including Minsk, Kiev, Leningrad and Smolensk among others. The overall death tolls are harder to arrive at, with the MPVD (Russian State Military Archives) giving a total Soviet death toll from German bombing as 52,000 with a further 140,000 injured, but some estimates put fatalities in the hundreds of thousands.(22) What is impossible to count is the number of people who later died of their injuries, or who died as a result of being made homeless, and the difficult conditions of mass evacuations, such as the two-year-old girl of a lawyer bombed out in Hamburg in 1943, who caught pneumonia and died a few days later.(23) All in all, 76,000 children died as a direct result of Allied bombing and more would die of its consequences.
In describing Britain’s strategic decision to carpet bomb German cities and target civilian centres, the Secretary of the Air Ministry, J.M. Spaight, wrote, ‘It was a splendid decision… Thanks to that decision the English today can walk with their heads held high. When Churchill began to bomb Germany, he knew that the Germans did not want a bombing war. Their air force, unlike that of the British, was not made for heavy bombs.’ When asked why Churchill’s decision was not made public at the time, Spaight answered:
Because we were doubtful of the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision… the publicity which it deserved. That was surely a mistake. It was a splendid decision. It was as heroic, as self-sacrificing, as Russia’s decision to adopt her policy of ‘scorched earth’. It gave Coventry and Birmingham, Sheffield and Southampton, the right to look Kiev and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol in the face.(24)
That this proved to be a strategic disaster needlessly prolonging the war was summarised by the man at the sharp end in Germany, Albert Speer, Minister for Armaments Production, who wrote in his memoirs, ‘I had early recognised, the war could largely have been decided in 1943 if instead of the vast but pointless area bombing the planes had concentrated on the centres of armaments production.’ He makes the same point about the inconsistency to follow up the attacks on the Ruhr dams or the ball-bearing production at Schweinfurt — all essential to the war effort — in favour of continued area bombing, saying, ‘Thus if the Allies continued their attacks of March and April with the same energy, we would quickly have been at our last gasp.’ But instead of paralysing vital segments of industry, the RAF began an air offensive against Berlin.(25) The key link in the chain of the German war machine was not targeted effectively until May 1944 when the USAAF launched 935 daylight bombers against German fuel plants in central and eastern Germany. Speer wrote, ‘I shall never forget the date May 12th… On that day the technological war was decided… a new era in the air war began. It meant the end of German armaments production.’ At a meeting with Hitler and General Keitel at the Obersalzburg mountain retreat on the German-Austrian border on 19th May 1944, Speer told them, ‘If they persist at it this time, we will soon no longer have any fuel production worth mentioning. Our one hope is that the other side has an air force General Staff as scatter-brained as ours!’(26)
The Soviets, who had experienced the futility of bombing cities and the usefulness ruins can make when having to defend a city like Stalingrad, regarded ‘strategic bombing’ (read ‘carpet bombing’) as militarily counterproductive and from January 1945 (when the Anglo-American air forces dropped most of their bombs on Germany) chose to rely instead on artillery and lighter targeted battlefield and air attacks to take their objectives. And they made far greater and swifter advances by doing so than their Western counterparts.
> There certainly was no alternative to the Allied area bombing campaign, if the destruction of Germany had become the main war aim, rather just a consequence of an ever-escalating scale of violence and brutality. Breaking German morale and defeating Nazi Germany militarily no longer appeared to be enough. While Stalin’s greatest fear throughout the war was that Churchill or Roosevelt, or both of them, would make a separate peace with Hitler, he need not have worried. The Anglo-American Alliance entertained no such plans, quite the opposite. The greatest fear of the Anglo-Americans, by contrast, was that the Germans would topple Hitler and that the Allies would be under a greater obligation to negotiate peace terms with a more moderate German leadership. German resistance leaders such as Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffercclxvii met with Bishop Bell from Britain in neutral Stockholm in 1942, when the German military was still in the ascendancy, to ask for support in their plot to overthrow Hitler. All the Germans asked in return was for Britain to recognise their successor government to the Nazi regime. The message was passed on to the British Cabinet and to Churchill, but no response was given and no assurances were made.(27) Roosevelt was no less averse to a negotiated settlement. He spoke privately about the need to extinguish Prussian militarism and his desire to remake post-war Germany from the ground up. In his book, The Conquerors, Michael Beschloss outlines Roosevelt’s thinking in more detail when he summarises, ‘But as more became known about Nazi atrocities, in a reply to Admiral William Leahy, who asked that a pledge of hope be given to Germans by stating that only German military aggression would be destroyed, Roosevelt replied he was “not willing” to say “that we do not intend to destroy Germany”.’(28) When the Allied response finally came, it was unequivocal. At his meeting in Casablanca with Churchill in January 1943, Roosevelt proposed the Allies insist upon ‘unconditional surrender’, slamming the door shut and pulling the rug from under any resistance movement in Germany.(29)
Death of a Nation Page 70