5 books--book 4

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pzrmeyer2

5 books--book 4

Post by pzrmeyer2 »

The Fire, by Joerg Friedrich

from Tony Thomas:

"Nearly a million people, including about 100,000 Allied Air Crew, were murdered in the Allied terror bombing of Europe's cities, most in the fire bombing of Germany.

In the first years of WWII, the British and then the US, learned that it was simply impossible with the aircraft and technology of the 1940s to hit designated targets of economic and military importance without sustaining losses that would have eliminated the air crews. A British study of attempts to hit only such targets at the end of 1941, found that as many British aircrew were being killed as Germans on the ground. However, learning from German fire bombing of Coventry, the British discovered while hitting targets was hard, burning down an entire European city, or at least its central core, filled with wooden and wood-beamed buildings holding the legacy of culture, history, and religion from the times of the Romans on, was possible. To this task they set themselves, working with urban fire fighters, experts from insurance companies, pouring over insurance maps of Germany, studying not how to hit Germany armories, military barracks, tanks or army stockpiles, but how to burn furniture, home roof top, bedding, clothing, books, and children's toys, how to burn the people and their lives.

From then on, the British designed their bombing campaigns to produce firestorms. The most famous were the razing of Hamburg and Dresden which were not unique, but the achievement of what the British, later joined by the US, sought to do every time a large bombing raid was planned. Many smaller cities and towns in Germany suffered far worst damage in percentage of devastation and casualties than these two famous cities. Some cities were bombed HUNDREDS OF TIMES between 1942 and 1945. Especially, in 1944 and 1945 many cities, towns, and even villages were bombed for the simple reason that they had not been bombed before. Jörg Friedrich discloses that beyond the fire-bombing, Churchill kept the alternative of combined gas and Anthrax bombing of Germany available with a million bombs until he realized such chemical and biological warfare would also harm invading Allied troops.

Arthur Harris, commander of British Bomber Command, and Churchill behind him simply mean to murder people in Germany. Harris considered all other military efforts even the invasion of Western Europe to be a waste of time. He thought that all resources should be directed to murdering Germans in their homes from the air. In fact, in 1944 when ordered to carry out a campaign against oil facilities in Germany, Harris disregarded the order kept burning German cities. Often military facilties, such as the air base and Army barrcks in Dresden, were not impacted at all while thousands of elderly, women, and children were murdered by the British and American bombers. While post-war critics have attempted to demonize Harris, it was Churchill and the rest of the Allied leaders who put Harris in this position and sustained his plans with thousands of bombers, billions of tons of bombs, and hundreds of thousands of air crew.

After the war, studies especially by US intelligence and military found the bombing had little impact on German industrial production and increased the anger of the average German against the Allies. After all, if they could do such horror against Germans from the air, what horrors were ahead if the British and Americans occupied Germany.

Jörg Friedrich is very clear about the evil the Nazi government represented, about the heartless way Hitler and other Nazi leaders actually thought the terror bombing helped them by making millions of Germans "soldiers" in their homes. He relentlessly shows Nazi persecution of Jews, the labor movement, and other victims of Hitler's fascism. However, hee also documents the extraordinary work Germans did the minimize the human casualties. Allied air commanders assumed they had killed millions of Germans, but "only" five or six hundred thousand were murdered.

The greatness of this work is how he explains the human and cultural cost of the bombing. British bombers aimed for the old sections of the city made of wood. Most often their target points were the Cathedrals and high churches that the old towns and cities were built around. Hospitals, often linked with these religious institutions or mistaken for factories were also a frequent target. Walls of flames burnt away some of the most priceless religous and historical monuments in Europe. Friedrich explains the firebombing was the greatest book burning in human history, far outweighing the books Hitler burnt in 1933. He gives a great history of what was lost culturally and historically in the flames that swept across Germany in the war.

But what is the human cost! Jörg Friedrich gives us the stories of the thousands and thousands who were burned to death, torn apart by explosions, sucked into the super hurricane gales of the firestorms, smothered as the fire storms sucked all the oxygen out of shelters, and gassed as the heat of the fire storms turned the piles of coal and coke that were in every basement and cellar into carbon monoxide produers.

The allied bombs were specifically designed not only the launch fires but were planned to hinder fire fighting and rescue attempts. Waterworks were usually key targets in these raides. Delayed-detonation bombs that would go off even days after the fire storms made it dangerous for firefighters and often fatal for rescue teams. In 1944 and 1945, American and British fighters strafed refugees, rescuers, and fire fighters. Everything possible was done to multiply the death toll and stop the rescue and physical recovery.

This book is more understandable if one consults the map of Germany on inside back cover. It will force the reader unfamiliar with German and European history to learn more.

The claim that the bombing was a result of military measures was a lie. Harris considered any military operation other than murdering and "dehousing" Germans to be a diversion. Even in a place as hard hit as Dresden, the actual military targets--the town's airbase and army barracks for example--were hardly touched, but tens of thousands lost their lives in their homes, their schools, their churches, their libraries. Even though Jews fighting against the death camps urged the bombing of death factories like Aushclitz, neither US nor Britain, allowed such a task to interfere with their campaign to murder ordinary Germans."
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