Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden, Germany, which incinerated tens of thousands of people – the vast majority of them civilians – in the closing days of the war in Europe. Below is an article by Brett Wilkins about the bombing. – Natylie

The Beasts and the Bombings: Reflecting on Dresden, February 1945

The Dresden bombing shocked the world’s conscience.

The Allied destruction of Dresden wasn’t the biggest or deadliest aerial bombardment of a German city during World War II. But it is by far the most infamous, largely due to Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five. February 13 marks the 75th anniversary of what Vonnegut, who survived the bombing as a prisoner-of-war, called “carnage unfathomable.”

Butcher Harris and British Terror Bombing

By early 1945 the once-unstoppable German army was in retreat on all fronts. Its desperate last-ditch counteroffensives against the rapidly advancing Allied forces in the west—the Battle of the Bulge and Operation Baseplate—had failed, while in the east the Red Army rolled into German territory during the first Silesian Offensive. The time was right, British commanders argued, for large-scale aerial attacks on cities in eastern Germany that would aid the Soviet offensive and crush German morale.

Long before this time the British had implemented a policy of what they called “terror bombing,” or the total deliberate destruction of German cities, as a method of breaking the will of the German people to continue fighting. Waves of Royal Air Force (RAF) warplanes bombed densely populated cities under cover of night, abandoning any pretense of precision targeting and causing widespread, indiscriminate death and destruction. The chief of the RAF Bomber Command, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, declared his desire to visit “the horrors of fire” on the German people. Once Harris was pulled over by a British police officer for speeding in his black Bentley. “You could have killed someone,” the constable admonished him. “Young man,” the commander retorted, “I kill thousands of people every night.”

In 1943, Harris wrote that “the aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany” while “downplaying the obliteration of German cities and their inhabitants.”

He wasn’t lying. Although the British government insisted that it was never its policy to target civilians, the truth was something altogether different. As Harris said after Luftwaffe bombers blitzed British cities, since the Germans had “sown the wind” they should “reap the whirlwind.” In 1943, Harris wrote that “the aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany” while “downplaying the obliteration of German cities and their inhabitants.”

“Bomber” was indeed a fitting nickname for Harris, but his men had another one for him — “Butcher.” He lived up to the moniker. Around 50 German cities were subjected to horrific aerial bombardment, often with incendiary bombs designed to spark massive firestorms and maximize death, destruction and terror. In July 1943, some 45,000 civilians including 21,000 women and 8,000 children died during more than a week of relentless bombing in Hamburg. In February 1945 hundreds of Lancaster bombers leveled Pforzheim, killing nearly a third of the population. The list went on and on.

‘Fire, Only Fire’

Harris and other RAF commanders proposed simultaneous attacks on Berlin, Chemnitz, Dresden and Leipzig in the winter of 1945. Dresden, Germany’s seventh-largest city, was the largest urban area in the Third Reich that hadn’t yet been bombed. It had been spared from Allied attack because it was an important cultural city — known as the Jewel Box for its celebrated architecture — with relatively few significant military targets. It was a city of refuge, with 19 hospitals and more than a million refugees fleeing the horrors of the Red Army advance encamped there. They were drawn by Dresden’s reputation as a safe haven from the flames of war that had engulfed most of the rest of Germany, a reputation reinforced by the presence of some 25,000 Allied prisoners of war held in and around the city.

The first RAF warplanes approached the city after 9:30 p.m. on February 13. Some 200,000 incendiary bombs along with 500 tons of high-explosive munitions including two-ton “blockbuster” bombs were dropped during the initial raids, sparking thousands of fires that could be seen from 500 miles (800 km) away in the air. The heat generated by the inferno melted human flesh, turning many victims into piles of goop. Men, women, children, the sick, the elderly, refugees and Allied POWs and even the animals in the city zoo — all were incinerated together. The 2700º Fahrenheit (1480° C) firestorm sucked all the oxygen from the air; many thousands suffocated to death. Lothar Metzger, who was nine years old at the time, later recalled:

About 9:30 p.m. the alarm was given. We children knew that sound and… hurried downstairs into our cellar… My older sister and I carried my baby twin sisters, my mother carried a little suitcase and the bottles with milk for our babies. On the radio we heard with great horror the news: “Attention, a great air raid will come over our town!” … Some minutes later we heard a horrible noise — the bombers. There were nonstop explosions. Our cellar was filled with fire and smoke and was damaged, the lights went out and wounded people shouted dreadfully. In great fear we struggled to leave this cellar…

We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we looked… It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. It became more and more difficult to breathe… Inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon… cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from… The twins had disappeared… we never saw my two baby sisters again.

The following morning, a wave of more than 300 United States Army Air Force Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers pounded the survivors with over 700 tons of explosives. On February 15, US warplanes bombed the city’s southeastern suburbs, as well as the nearby towns of Meissen and Prina. By the time it was all over, some 25,000 men, women and children were dead and nearly 90 percent of the homes in central Dresden were obliterated. Many of the targets that could have been considered of military interest — a few factories, the railway system — remained relatively unscathed. Nazi military trains were chugging through the city again within three days of the bombing.

‘Are We Beasts?’

British and American officials insisted Dresden was chosen as a target because of its industrial and transportation infrastructure. This is only partially true. On the eve of the bombing, the Red Army was a mere 80 miles (130 km) from Dresden and the US and Britain, knowing that Europe would be carved up between themselves and the Soviets after the war, wanted to impress Stalin with a massive show of force. An RAF memo to airmen the night of the attack explained that “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.” A few months later, the United States would wage the world’s first and only nuclear war, obliterating two Japanese cities and killing hundreds of thousands of their people, in what was partly yet another bid to shock and awe the Soviets.

The Dresden bombing shocked the world’s conscience. Churchill, not known for outpourings of compassion, was appalled by the savagery of the attack, calling it “an act of terror and wanton destruction.” After seeing photographs of the devastated city, the prime minister asked, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” In a top secret memo dated March 28, 1945, he wrote:

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. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.

Others defended the bombing. “Butcher” Harris acknowledged that “the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were fully justified.” However, he asserted that terror bombing would “shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers.” Harris infamously added: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier.”

As many as 600,000 German civilians were killed by Allied bombing over the course of the war. Many of these victims died during the war’s final months, when Germany’s defeat was certain and such slaughter served no valid military purpose. And while the Nazis may have started the air war by bombing British cities, killing 14,000 civilians during the Blitz, the whirlwind they reaped—to paraphrase Harris—was so grossly disproportionate that it would forever stain the Allies’ self-righteous claims of having waged the “last good war.”

Brett Wilkins is a San Francisco-based freelance author and editor-at-large for US news at Digital Journal. His work, which focuses on issues of war and peace and human rights, is archived at www.brettwilkins.com.

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Recently Noam Chomsky tweeted out the video below of Hillary Clinton testifying before Congress in 2009 about how the U.S. – with the help of Pakistan – helped create, fund and train the jihadist fighters who became Al Qaeda in order to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5uCHHWOU-k

However, the U.S.’s role started even before Clinton acknowledges. President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, bragged in a 1998 interview with the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur that he had encouraged Carter to sign a secret order in 1979 to begin training and funding jihadists in Afghanistan. The purpose of the order was to lure the Soviet Union into invading – so it could have “its own Vietnam” quagmire. This was known as Operation Cyclone.

The Soviet-Afghan war is estimated to have killed around a million Afghans*.

Here are images from 1960’s era Afghanistan taken by an American college professor named Bill Podlich who was there at the time – before the horrors of the Taliban and other extremist jihadists were unleashed on behalf of Brzezinski’s wet dream of socking it to the Soviets:

See the full article with more images at My Modern Met.

The Atlantic also has a great photo-journal of this era here.

*Afghanistan:  Demographic Consequences of War, 1978-1987” by NA Khalidi.  Central Asian Survey, Volume 10, No. 3, pp. 101-126.  1991.

A recent Levada Center poll shows that about half of Russians approve of the new PM Mikhail Mishustin. This reflects a clear improvement over Russians’ views of the former PM Dmitry Medvedev, according to BBC Monitoring:

The poll published on the Levada site on 30 January reported that some 48 per cent of respondents said they liked the “first activities” of Mishustin as prime minister. A further 37 per cent said they did not approve, and 15 per cent did not give an answer.

When asked the same question in December 2019 about the actions of then prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, 38 per cent of respondents said they approved and 61 per cent said they were not in favour.

The real test of Mishustin’s popularity will come over the next year or so during which Russians will be looking at their standard of living and pocketbooks. The Financial Times reported yesterday that decisions on budget spending will be decided on next week:

Russia’s 2020 state expenditure could swell by more than Rbs 2tn ($32bn), equivalent to around 1.3 per cent of GDP, analysts have estimated, if the amendments are approved. That would be on top of an already agreed Rbs19.5tn spending blueprint, helped by cash from an oil-fuelled national wealth fund that has swollen to $125bn….

…Real incomes in Russia have fallen for five of the past six years as Mr Putin’s administration prioritised tight state spending and the building up of a fiscal safety net that helped Moscow weather the brunt of western sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea….

…Andrei Belousov, a pro-spending former Kremlin aide who was promoted to the powerful role of first deputy prime minister in the new government, said on Wednesday that additional capital had been approved for the initiative. He described the budget changes as “a serious injection of liquidity into the economy.”

Mr Belousov, who is seen by investors as the embodiment of Mr Putin’s new-found desire for stimulus, said that the government estimated Rbs300bn could be spent from the national wealth fund each year without affecting inflation, a key concern to more hawkish ministers under the previous government who had argued against spending the fund’s proceeds domestically.

Another Levada poll showed that Russians are about evenly split on the goal of Putin’s recent proposed constitutional changes. Russian news agency Interfax reported:

Forty-seven percent of the respondents polled by Levada said that the constitutional amendments were aimed at improving the public governance system for the benefit of most residents, and the same percentage argued that the amendments served the interests of the incumbent president, who wished to broaden his power and to stay in office after 2024.

A state-backed poll that was reported on by TASS in early February breaks down Russians’ views regarding the proposed changes in more detail. With respect to the amendments involving social benefits, an overwhelming majority of Russians were supportive:

The poll results indicated 91% of Russians applauded the initiative to have regular cost-of-living adjustments to pensions and other monetary benefits for inflation enshrined in the Constitution. Some 90% of respondents welcomed the initiative to set the minimum wage no lower than the subsistence level.

Proposed changes that tighten citizenship and residency requirements on office-holders was very popular:

Some 87% of those polled approved the idea to raise the residency qualification for Russian presidential candidates from 10 to 25 years. The idea to grant the Constitutional Court the power to check bills at the president’s request was supported by 81% of the survey’s respondents.

Provisions allowing for the Constitutional Court to review proposed legislation for legality beforehand also received overwhelming support, according to BBC Monitoring’s reporting on the same poll:

…. Eighty-one per cent of respondents described as “rather positive” the amendment allowing the president to refer bills passed by the State Duma to the Constitutional Court and veto them if they are found to contravene the constitution.  

Meanwhile Putin has reiterated that the Russian people will vote on the proposed changes. He further stated that, depending on how the vote goes, he can sign or not sign the changes into law. The AP reported Putin’s comments at the end of January:

“It is necessary that people come to the polling stations and say whether they want the changes or not, ” Putin said at a meeting with municipal officials in a Moscow suburb.

“Only after the people speak out, I will either sign or not sign” the amendments into law, Putin added.

Putin continued to clean house in recent weeks when he dismissed the regional governor of Chuvashia, Mikhail Ignatyev. Ignatyev was first expelled from the United Russia party on January 29th, then Putin fired him the following day, citing “loss of confidence.” Putin appointed State Duma deputy Oleg Nikolaev as the interim governor.

Ignatyev had engaged in a pattern of disturbing behavior, including stating publicly on January 18th that journalists critical of the government should be “wiped out” – comments condemned by his Russian colleagues as well as the UN and OSCE. Shortly after, a video emerged of Ignatyev dangling a set of keys to a fire engine above the head of a firefighter, forcing him to jump up and down to retrieve them. According to The Moscow Times, Ignatyev tried to mitigate the fallout, but both colleagues and authorities higher up weren’t having it:

The Chuvash administration’s press service and the regional fire department defended Ignatyev’s latest actions as a “friendly joke,” saying the jumping firefighter is the governor’s longtime acquaintance. Ignatyev also apologized for using the phrase “wipe out” in reference to journalists and said his words had been “distorted.”

One Russian analyst quoted by Vesti News said that particularly in a region like Chuvashia, which is relatively low-income, such behavior by the governor makes it look like he is out of touch and sees himself as a king.

In a post last month, I discussed an article by William Arkin published by Newsweek about how “usable” or “low yield” tactical nuclear warheads were being manufactured pursuant to legislation allowing it. The Federation of American Scientists has now learned that the first “usable” nuke has been deployed onto to a U.S. submarine patrolling the Atlantic ocean. Common Dreams reported the following:

The low-yield Trident nuclear warhead was commissioned in 2018 by President Donald Trump.

The warhead has an explosive yield of five kilotons, about a third of the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945, which killed 80,000 people instantly and tens of thousands later from radiation exposure.

Compared to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, the effect of the W76-2 “would be very beneficial to a military officer who was going to advise to the president whether we should cross the nuclear threshold,” according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at FAS, which learned about the recent deployment from government briefings…

…According to Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the U.S. government claims the Trident is a deterrent against Russia….

…While Russia’s nuclear threat level is questionable, Trump has said he may direct the use of nuclear weapons to respond to “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” on the U.S., its allies, or “infrastructure.”

Last week, the Grayzone’s Aaron Mate interviewed Professor Stephen F. Cohen regarding Representative Adam Schiff’s dangerous mischaracterizations of Russia and the civil war in Ukraine during his remarks at the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

Some more background on Schiff’s motivations for vilifying Russia and boosting the new cold war narrative is provided in this article by Liza Featherstone, which discusses how generous the military-industrial-complex has been to Schiff’s campaign.