From Dresden to
Baghdad
58 Years of "Shock and Awe"
"If
war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means sparing,
in every way we can, the innocent."
--George W. Bush, in his
State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003
The Pentagon
recently revealed its plan for the first day of the inevitable saturation
bombing of Iraq...Baghdad, in particular. On "Air Strikes Day" (or
"A Day") the US and Britain will launch 300 to 400 cruise missiles
into Iraq. "That's more missiles than were launched during the entire
40-day Persian Gulf was of 1991," says James Ridgeway in the Village
Voice.
The following
day, another 400 missiles will be launched. "The sheer size of this has
never been contemplated before," one Pentagon strategist told CBS News.
"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad." In warspeak, this plan
is called "shock and awe." The idea is to crush the enemy's will to
fight. According to military strategist Harlan Ullman, the planned attack will
be "rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima." Air Strikes Day
will "take the city down," wipe out the water and power supplies in
Baghdad, and leave the Iraqis "physically, emotionally, and
psychologically exhausted."
"What Bush
proposes," says Ridgeway, "is not collateral damage, but a level of
civilian destruction not seen since the Second World War, with tens of thousands
of intended civilian casualties."
Is Bush unique
in his bloodlust? Hardly. He's the just the latest in a long line of
humanitarians willing to slaughter the masses in the name of democracy. With
the 58th anniversary of the US and British firebombing of Dresden on February
13, let's go back to the future.
Marshal Arthur
Harris, the director of England's Bomber Command decided, in mid-1941, to
abandoned the illusion of surgical strikes. Harris, nicknamed "Bomber,"
mastered the ins and outs of committing war crimes from his insidious instructor,
Winston Churchill.
The year was
1919. The Royal Air Force asked Churchill for permission to use chemical
weapons "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment." Churchill, secretary
of state at the war office at the time, promptly consented. "I am strongly
in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes," he explained.
Bomber Harris, an up-and-coming air force officer in 1919, concurred:
"They [the Arabs and Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties
and damage."
Harris and Churchill
teamed up again some 25 years later to execute a relentless terror bombing
campaign during WWII for which neither offered any apologies nor demonstrated
any qualms. "Now everyone's at it," Churchill said about the
deliberate targeting of civilians. "It's simply a question of fashion -
similar to that of whether short or long dresses are in."
Bomber's
attitude was best displayed when, during the later stages of the war, a
motorcycle policeman stopped Harris for speeding. "You might have killed
someone, sir," came the reprimand, to which Bomber Harris replied, "Young
man, I kill thousands of people every night."
As for the
Americans in the European theater, under direct orders from President
Roosevelt, US bombers initially stuck to a slightly more humane policy of
daylight precision bombing. Unlike their British counterparts, Americans did
not have images of the Luftwaffe over London to motivate them towards unabashed
mass murder; it took them a little longer to reach the point of targeting
civilians as policy.
The risks of
daylight bombing runs did not pay off in accuracy-only 50 percent of US bombs
fell within a quarter of a mile of the target. America soon joined its English
allies in the execution of nighttime area bombing campaigns of civilian targets
in Germany. The saturation bombardment of Bomber Harris and his US counterparts
resulted in at least 635,000 dead German civilians.
Day or night,
the great number of shells falling where they were not aimed easily debunked
the myth of precision. A July 24 and 25, 1944 bombing operation called COBRA
called for 1,800 US bombers to hit German defenders near Saint-Lô. The planes
arrived one day early and bombed so inaccurately that twenty-five Americans
were killed and 131 wounded-causing some US units to open fire on their own
aircraft. The next day, with the American soldiers withdrawn thousands of yards
to avoid a repeat performance, the bombers still missed their mark and ended up
killing 111 GIs and wounding nearly 500 more.
"In order
to invade the Continent," says historian Paul Fussell, "the Allies killed
12,000 innocent French and Belgian civilians who happened to live in the wrong
part of town, that is, too near the railway tracks."
In 1945, Britain
and America added fuel to the fire.
On February
13-14, 1945, Allied bombers laid siege to the German town of Dresden-once known
as "Florence on the Elbe." With the Russians advancing rapidly
towards Berlin, tens of thousands of German civilians fled into Dresden,
believing it to be safe from attack. As a result, the city's population swelled
from its usual 600,000 to at least one million.
Following up a
smaller raid on Hamburg in July 1943 that killed at least 48,000 civilians,
Winston Churchill enlisted the aid of British scientists to cook up "a new
kind of weather." The goal was not only maximum destruction and loss of
life, but also to show their communist allies what a capitalist war machine
could do...in case Stalin had any crazy ideas.
An internal
Royal Air Force memo described the anti-communist plans as such: "Dresden,
the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is
also [by] far the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got. In the
midst of winter, with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs
are at a premium, not only to give shelter... but to house the administrative
services displaced from other areas... The intentions of the attack are to hit
the enemy where he will feel it most...and to show the Russians when they
arrive what Bomber Command can do."
There was never
any doubt on the part of the Allies exactly who they would be bombing at
Dresden. Brian S. Blades, a flight engineer in a Lancaster of 460 (Australian)
Squadron, wrote that during briefings, he heard phrases like "Virgin
target," and "Intelligence reports thousands of refugees streaming
into the city from other bombed areas."
Beside the
stream of refugees, Dresden was also known for its china and its Baroque and
Rococo architecture. Its galleries housed works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens,
and Botticelli.
On the evening
of February 13, none of this would matter.
Using the
Dresden soccer stadium as a reference point, over 2000 British Lancasters and
American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs every 50 square
yards out from this marker. The enormous flame that resulted was eight square
miles wide, shooting smoke three miles high. For the next eighteen hours,
regular bombs were dropped on top of this strange brew. Twenty-five minutes
after the bombing, winds reaching 150 miles-per-hour sucked everything into the
heart of the storm. Because the air became superheated and rushed upward, the
fire lost most of its oxygen, creating tornadoes of flame that can suck the air
right out of human lungs.
Seventy percent
of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases that turned
their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some bodies into the
pavement like bubblegum, or shrunk them into three-foot long charred carcasses.
Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through the "human soup"
found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air propelled victims
skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as fifteen miles outside
Dresden.
"The flames
ate everything organic, everything that would burn," wrote journalist
Phillip Knightley. "People died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or
suffocated. Then American planes came the next day to machine-gun survivors as
they struggled to the banks of the Elbe."
The Allied
firebombing did more than shock and awe. The bombing campaign murdered more
than 100,000 people-mostly civilians-but the exact number may never be known
due to the high number of refugees in the area.
In his wartime
memoirs, Sir Winston Churchill seemed unable to work up much emotion in
recalling the Dresden assault. He wrote: "We made a heavy raid in the
latter month on Dresden, then a centre of communication of Germany's Eastern
Front."
We're still a
few years away from Dubya's inevitable post-White House book deal. The final
chapters of this epoch still might be ours to write.
(Next month: 58
years since the US firebombing of Tokyo.)
Mickey Z. is the author of The Murdering of My Years: Artists and
Activists Making Ends Meet (www.murderingofmyyears.com) and an editor at Wide
Angle (www.wideangleny.com). He can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net.