Dresden bombing, Britain’s forgotten war crime of WWII
Press TV – February 14, 2013
While Britain claims to be an advocate of human rights in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and many other countries around the world, British history itself is corroborating evidence that Britain, the greatest human rights preacher has also been the most flagrant human rights offender.
More than 500,000 German civilians and refugees, mostly women and children, were slaughtered by Britain’s saturation bombing in 1945, one of the worst massacres of all time.
Over 700,000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million defenseless inhabitants of German city Dresden under Britain’s then Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s order, which not only reduced one of the greatest centers of northern Europe to flaming ruins, but also led to one of the worst war crimes of the Second World War.
Dresden’s bombing on February 13, 1945 was so relentless that some historians believe it was the height of Winston Churchill’s madness.
“I do not want suggestions as to how we can disable the economy and the machinery of war, what I want are suggestions as to how we can roast the German refugees on their escape from Breslau,” Churchill said once.
Toward the end of the war, Churchill’s desired firestorm was finally created. More than 260,000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted after British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) assaulted Dresden. However, those who perished in the centre of the city could not be traced, as the temperature in the area reached 1,600 degrees Centigrade.
Dresden’s citizens barely had time to reach their shelters and those who seek refuge underground often suffocated as oxygen was pulled from the air to feed the flames. Others perished in a blast of white heat, heat strong enough to melt human flesh.
When the bombing started, no one could imagine that in less than 24 hours all those innocent people could die screaming in Churchill’s firestorms.
If there was ever a war crime, certainly the Dresden bombing would rank as one of the most sinister of all time. Sadly, however, Churchill, who ordered the slaughter of up to a half million innocent people in this horrifying tragedy, was knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.
The British queen made Churchill a knight of the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest order of knighthood.
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Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, commemorates the destruction of Dresden. It’s well worth reading.
After the bombing the Nazi government only made a claim of 200,000 people killed by the bombing. The City authorities at the time estimated only a victim count of 25,000 and that figure has been supported by a study authorized by the Dresden City Council. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
There is still considerable room for debate despite the Commission’s findings of a maximum of 25,000 fatalities (though obviously 260,000 is far too high). What distinguishes it from, say, Hamburg (40,000 dead) is that there is no conceivable military rationale behind the bombing. It reveals the whole “strategic” bombing campaign for what it had become – a campaign of systematic mass murder undertaken at the expense of the war effort. Like the Germans – who diverted much needed transport resources in order to kill as many Jews as possible – the Allied leaders were willing to have their own personnel pay the price so that they could kill the maximum number of civilians.
While appeals to authoritative sources may impress some, others are aware that official sources are usually unreliable, certainly not useful on their own for historical purposes.
Reblogged this on Dogma and Geopolitics and commented:
Remember DRESDEN’S HOLOCAUST also, not just the AUSCHWITZ HOLOCAUST …Please ???
Thanking you kindly .
One little matter… The parts of the revised Geneva Convention that make the bombing of Dresden a war crime were enacted AFTER the end of the war… Indeed, they were very much a reaction to the excesses that occurred during the war…
In other words, legally speaking, at the time the bombing of Dresden was NOT a war crime…