Intentional Civilian Bombing
Until recently, nobody quite understood that the terror bombing of
German civilians was not a "friendly fire" mistake, or the result of a
bomber missing its mark, or because some horrid atrocity had to be
prevented. We always heard that "a school was accidentally hit" or a
church "had to be bombed" because soldiers were firing from it, or a
town was demolished because some mayor "refused to surrender."
Until Harris vigorously championed terror bombing and prepared a list of 60 German cities he
intended to initially destroy, the bombing was tit for tat between Britain and Germany. The policy
changed under his command, and his bombers were instructed to concentrate not on dockyards,
factories and military targets, but on built-up residential areas and heavily populated civilian districts
to, in his words, "disrupt Germany's economy, destroy morale and create chaos by leaving millions
shelterless."  Lower income areas would be the first targets because of denser population and tightly
clustered buildings. At first, German cities with over 100,000 people were slated for bombing,
including multiple attacks on one target. Some cities were attacked 100, even 200 or more times.
Eventually, even tiny, totally insignificant hamlets would be included as "legitimate" targets.
In this second attack, a mix of munitions was used which had a higher proportion of incendiaries,
including phosphorus and napalm. It was here, not Dresden, that the use of the term Feuersturm or
firestorm was first used, and at least 45,000 to 55,000 civilians were murdered in an agonizing
manner in the intentionally created firestorm that corralled the population, leaving them no escape.
Because of fear over public opinion, U.S. Allied commanders were at first
opposed to the RAF bombing policy, and when they began bombing runs over
Germany in 1943 it was mutually agreed that the U.S.A.A.F would carry out
daytime raids on military and industrial targets, and the RAF would conduct the
nighttime 'area' bombing of civilian population centers. Nonetheless, the USA
joined the British and Canadians to destroy Hamburg in "Operation
Gomorrah".The hideous ten day long firebombing not only murdered thousands,
it left a million people homeless and the historic ancient city wholly obliterated.
Targeting of the Refugees
Winston Churchill, 1944: "Expulsion is the method which, in so
far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory
and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause
endless trouble. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed
by these transferences." Thus, at the end, war was mercilessly
waged against civilian non-combatant refugees to abet Stalin's  
stated objective to "modestly reduce" the German population.
In January 1945, Harris sent a letter to Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal in which he further
advocated the destruction of "Magdeburg, Leipzig, Chemnitz, Dresden, Breslau, Posen, Halle,
Erfurt, Gotha, Weimar, Eisenach, and the rest of Berlin," in other words, all points where refugees
were flocking to. Part of the impetus of the British plan named "Operation Thunderclap" was the
targeting of refugees fleeing from the Red Army as promised to Stalin. Bomber Command was
ordered to attack these cities in order to, in their own words, "cause confusion in the evacuation from
the east," referring not to retreating troops, but to civilian refugees, and (secondarily) to "hamper the
movements of troops from the west." When ordering the bombing of Chemnitz following Dresden,
the Allied commander stated the motive to the pilots: "The reason you are going there tonight is to
finish off the refugees who managed to escape from Dresden."
Intentional Cultural Devastation
The Associated Press finally admitted that "the Allied air commanders have made
the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the great German
population centers." Gen. Carl Spaatz, U.S. strategic air forces commander in
Europe, came up with Operation "Clarion" in February 1945, targeting smaller
German towns "to spread the impact on the population." Spaatz was urged not to
by General Ira Eaker, the former commander of the Eighth Air Force in Europe,
and others, but Spaatz got his way. The carnage escalated rapidly.
Before Dresden, 45,000 people had already died in the 1943 firestorms in
Hamburg, and 10,000 in another firestorm in Kassel in 1943. Cologne suffered
huge fatalities and 60 percent of her population had to be evacuated. Darmstadt,
another classic center of German culture, produced less than two-tenths of one
percent of Germany's total war production, yet, a minimum of ten percent of
Darmstadt's population died as a result of an intentionally created firestorm.
The mounting devastation of the European heritage had already been raised in vain in the British
parliament by the Bishop of Chichester on February 9, 1944. The Bishop begged for a more
discriminating approach: "In the fifth year of the war it must be apparent to any but the most
complacent and reckless how far the destruction of European culture has already gone. We ought to
think once, twice and three times before destroying the rest." His words fell on deaf ears
Playing God
U.S. General Frederick Anderson explained that these late stage terror
bombing operations were not expected to shorten the war but it was "to be
expected that the fact that Germany was struck all over will be passed on,
from father to son, thence to grandson; that a deterrent for the initiation of
future wars will definitely result." In other words, the Allies decided it was
their mission to "teach people a lesson." In doing so, countless thousands of
innocent civilians were needlessly roasted alive and forced to watch their
children die horrible deaths.
Allied bombing destroyed 3.5 million homes and left 7.5 million Germans
homeless. Only three medieval German cities, Bamberg, Heidelberg and
Göttingen, remained for the most part, intact. 190 others were lost. Over
80 million incendiary sticks were dropped on German cities by the war's
end. Germany was reduced to a smaller size than she was in the year 1125.
Soon after Dresden, with the German military/industrial complexes already in ruins, the British and
Americans compiled new "hit lists" which included devastating civilian attacks on mainly small, rural
towns that had not yet been assaulted. In the vicinity of the great castle of Mad King Ludwig, lies
Ellingen, a small town in Bavaria which had 1,500 inhabitants, most of them farmers. Ellingen had
nothing of military value to attack, and was totally unprepared on February 23, 1945 when 25
American bombers violently dumped 285 high explosive bombs on the small town in a surprise attack
which left 120 bomb craters. The assault killed the town's farm animals and 98 villagers.
With Hamburg, the world media, starting in London, turned the mass murder of German civilian
populations into an “acceptable” and “legitimate” method of war, and RAF bombing runs would
often be jokingly referred to as "Hamburgizations" by their crews from then on .
Millions of terrified people not only suffered through saying goodbye to their
homes, not only drowned when ships trying to save them were purposely and
mercilessly sunk, not only lost their own fathers, sons and husbands, not only
were subjected to brutal rapes, murders, starvation and agonizing days and
weeks walking on frozen feet to what they hoped was safety, they were now to
be shot at and incinerated under the approved guidelines of a policy both the
British and the Americans set in place to eliminate the future "refugee problem"
for their Soviet allies. Left: Page after page of missing German children were posted in
cities across Germany.
Aside from the "normal" terror bombings, cities incinerated by fiendishly crafted firestorms included
Dresden, Wuppertal, Hamburg, Remscheid, Kassel, Braunschweig, Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken,
Darmstadt, Stuttgart, Heilbronn, Ulm, Pforzheim, Mainz, Würzburg and Hildesheim.
As early as 1942, 45,732 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany by the RAF, and even at that
early stage, only 4% of them were aimed at industrial targets or ports! The rest were squarely aimed
at city centers and civilians, not because their weapons were "inaccurate" or "unsophisticated" but
because it was planned. Allied bombing would end up killing 1,000 German civilians a day by the
later stages of the war because of this homicidal and morally corrupt policy.
We never heard that there was a deliberate campaign of extermination of the innocent as well as the
guilty, the children as well as the soldiers or that on July 8, 1940, Winston Churchill had called for
"an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers" on Germany and approved
the first raid against Germany, the bombing of Berlin on August 25,1940, two weeks before Britain
was bombed by Germany.  
By early 1942, members of Churchill's Cabinet more openly suggested that the strategic bombing
of Germany be directed against German working-class houses, leaving factories and military
objectives alone, and in 1942, upon his taking over the entire U.K. Bomber Command, Arthur
"Bomber" Harris issued the following directive: "It has been decided that the primary objective of
your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular,
of industrial workers", a policy intended to terrorize the German population into subjugation.
The first deliberate attack on a cultural target and mass bombing of a historic city was the RAF attack
which incinerated over 80 per cent of the ancient Hanseatic town of Lübeck on Palm Sunday, March
28, 1942. This attack by over 200 heavy bombers was ordered by Harris, not in defense, but as an
experiment to test whether bombing timber framed buildings could start an inferno large enough to be
used as an easy aiming point for later waves of bombers: "I wanted my crews to be well-blooded, as
they say in fox hunting, to have a taste of success for a change."
"What we want to do is to bring the masonry crashing down on top of the Boche,
to kill Boche and to terrify the Boche."
Arthur Harris
The bombing of Hamburg by the British is all but forgotten, but the destruction came on the night of
July 27, 1943 and followed a smaller bombing three days earlier which killed only 1,500 people.
On February 16, 1945, British bombers attacked the town of Pforzheim on nothing more than a
rumor, killing one-third of its people. Wurzberg was 89% destroyed with 5,000 civilian deaths and
90,000 left homeless in March of 1945, less than two months before the fighting in Europe stopped.
In fact, the most intense period of firebombing occurred between January and May of 1945 when
German cities were virtually defenseless. The Allies then bombed German cities "round the clock".
Centuries old castles, cathedrals, medieval villages and ancient libraries were at
this point all needlessly lost forever. Bach's, Goethe's and Durer's birth houses,
Martin Luther landmarks, Leipzig's ancient book district were deemed legitimate
targets. Towns having little or nothing to do with the war effort and no military
significance were needlessly obliterated at this stage with these devastating attacks
on civilian populations. The birth houses of Durer, Bach, Brahms,,Goethe at left
By February 3, 1945, there was no surprise when Berlin was attacked again in
bombing orchestrated by Spaatz, this time killing another 25,000 people, including
thousands of refugees. City after city was destroyed as Germany's doom was
obvious, yet under the new "Operation Clarion," smaller towns and cities had their
fates sealed when under the flimsiest of pretexts they were incinerated. Nürnberg
was attacked because it was an "ideological" center, and likewise, Bayreuth.
There were abysmal British losses from the time Arthur Harris took charge of the expanded bombing
operations until the end of war, yet Harris only allowed 26 per cent of Bomber Command's attacks
to be directed against Germany's remaining oil facilities between January and May of 1945, while he
fanatically continued to concentrate his resources on civilian area bombing, a policy which not only
murdered thousands more civilians unnecessarily, but killed hundreds of his own men as well.
We were somehow led to believe that a campaign which dropped environmentally catastrophic
bombs having the force of major earthquakes, bombs which actually changed weather patterns and
the shape of the map, and bombs which exterminated whole species of birds and insects were all
within the normal reaches of warfare, or at least somehow implemented for the greater good and
carried out only in cases of sheer and utter necessity. Lastly, as is the case with Hiroshima, it was
explained away and justified as "the only way to bring an end to war". We also misled into believing
the preposterous notion that there was only one villain, one supreme face of evil that absolved all
others of any wrongdoing. We were misled.
While the US later partook in the destruction of Dresden and many other cities, only 6% of American
bombs actually fell on German city centers in the war. At the peak of the bombing "war" in 1945,
the U.S. Eighth Air Force dropped fully half of its bombs on transportation targets; the figure for the
RAF, who concentrated largely on cities, was only 13%. The RAF Bomber Command would end up
killing three German civilians for every one killed by the U.S.A. In contrast, Germany only bombed
Britain with a mere five percent of the tonnage that Britain slammed down on Germany.
They got what they
deserved?
Mortality figures from Allied bombing, kept top secret for many years, now trickled out, as did
photos, personal accounts, old newspaper clippings and statements by those who were responsible
for and of those who bore the brunt of the attacks. At the same time that the Allied bombing of
Germany was coming under closer scrutiny, a monument of Bomber Harris shot up in Britain and
was graced by a wreath laid by the Queen in eternal gratitude.
“The aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers
and the disruption of civilised community life throughout Germany.
It should be emphasised that the destruction of houses, public utilities,
transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an
unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home
and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and
intensified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our
bombing policy, they are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."
Arthur Harris, October 25, 1943
Hell is big enough for more than one Man
When people think of the Allied bombing of Germany, "Dresden" automatically comes to mind,
surely not Wesel, Nürnberg, Kassel, Pforzheim or Würzburg or the other hundreds of victims of
Allied wrath. Most people have absolutely no idea as to the scope of the destruction. Until the
Internet leaked out uncensored, unfiltered information, most of the grim images and graphic accounts
of the horror which rained from the skies over Germany were neatly hidden away.
The choreographed inferno circled the city and spread inward, creating a swirling column of super-
heated air which generated ferocious winds of 150 miles per hour which, like a tornado, sucked up
small children. People were fried to the melting pavement or slowly choked in the cellars they fled to.
At the same time the US military denied to the American public that any terror bombing was taking
place, they were supplying the British with the napalm-like phosphorous to burn German civilians
alive. The chemical cannot be extinguished once ablaze, and the exploding phosphorous bombs
sprayed their contents on people in such a way that a gruesome death was the inevitable outcome.
The Prelude: Between May 8 and June 11,1943, Allied aircraft flew 5,285 bombing sorties against targets on tiny
Pantelleria Island in the Strait of Sicily. They wanted the island accessible for future launches. 6,313 tons of bombs were
suddenly dumped on Italian and German forces ensconced there. Since they had no escape, their garrisons surrendered,
and this experiment marked the first time in history that an enemy land force was compelled to surrender without an
accompanying ground invasion. The experience convinced the Allies that intense air bombardment preceding landing
operations would save time and the lives of their own men. It set the pattern for a new strategy of super violent air
bombardment to pave the way for land forces.
The initial RAF bombing of military targets was generally unsuccessful and dangerous. Only one out
of five bombs reached within 5 miles of its intended target and nearly 50 per cent of British bombers
were being shot down. Results were slow in coming, therefore the British leadership studied the idea
of terror bombing city centers instead, a concept devoid of morality.
Like Churchill, Harris was steeped in the hatred engendered by the First World War, and he probably
agreed in full with the sentiment Churchill had himself expressed during those years when he was
quoted as having said: "Perhaps the next time around, the way to do it will be to kill women, children
and the civilian population."
The following pages are not intended as a political statement or as a rebuke for the understandable
destruction of legitimate military targets. Of the populated German city centers bombed during World
War Two, very few fell under that catagory.