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LINDEMANN'S PLAN
The RAF raid on Berlin on the night of May 11th 1940, although itself trivial, was a deliberate breach of the fundamental rule of civilised warfare in Europe that hostilities should only be waged against the enemy combatant forces. Its aim was to anger Hitler and divert him from attacking military targets in England so that he would be provoked into blitzing London. Hitler obliged.
The Fight at Odds is a book issued by HM Stationary Office, and described by its author, Dennis Richards, as “officially commissioned and based throughout on official documents which had been read and approved by the Air Ministry Historical Branch.” Richards revealed that the British introduced anti-civilian bombing to goad Hitler into bombing cities and raise the stakes in the war:
“If the Royal Air Force raided the Ruhr, destroying oil plants with its most accurately placed bombs and urban property with those that went astray, the outcry for retaliation against Britain might prove too strong for the German generals to resist. Indeed, Hitler himself would probably lead the clamour. The attack on the Ruhr was therefore an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London. The primary purpose of these raids was to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a similar character on Britain. Such raids would arouse intense indignation in Britain against Germany and so create a war psychosis without which it would be impossible to carry on a modern war.” (p.122)
In March 1942 Churchill’s War Cabinet accepted a plan put before it by Professor Lindemann in which ‘top priority’ as an objective for air attack was in future to be given to obliterating “working-class houses in densely populated residential areas.”
This decision of the War Cabinet was kept a closely guarded secret from the British public for nearly twenty years until it was revealed in 1961 in a book called Science and Government by the physicist and novelist, Sir Charles Snow. Snow described the genesis of this policy:
“Early in 1942 Professor Lindemann, by this time Lord Cherwell and a member of the Cabinet, laid a cabinet paper before the Cabinet on the strategic bombing of Germany. It described in quantitative terms the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next eighteen months (approximately March 1942 – September 1943). The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them and so are bound to waste bombs; factories and ‘military objectives’ had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit. The paper claimed that – given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of aircraft – it would be possible, in all the larger towns of Germany (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants), to destroy 50 per cent of all houses.” (pp. 47-48.)
The Terror bombing proposed in the Lindemann Plan was a novelty in warfare rendered possible by the Allied conquest of the air. It was not, as the Germans complained, indiscriminate. On the contrary, it was concentrated on working class houses because, as Professor Lindemann maintained, a higher percentage of killing per ton of explosives dropped could be got from bombing houses built close together, rather than by bombing middle class houses surrounded by gardens.
In 1943 the British bombing of Germany was one-tenth of what it became in 1944. As the Russian Army closed in the Germans had to strip their air-defences to bolster their land defences. That meant that Dresden and other cities were almost defenceless.
THE 'THUNDERCLAP' RAID
The RAF’s objective of carrying out a “thunderclap” raid – a colossal massacre of more than 100,000 deaths – that would destroy German civilian morale had been frustrated during 1944. It had been attempted on Berlin but the city without a centre and with effective fire-breaks had refused to burn. The effective bunker system had protected the civilian population to the extent that the British had to lose 3,000 airmen to kill 10,000 Berliners. A thousand-bomber attempt at a “thunderclap” in February 1945 had been calculated to kill 110,000 but had only killed 3,000.
The British idea of closed zones of annihilation that killed to the maximum could be most effectively be achieved within areas of 2 square miles according to the scientists. Small and medium sized cities with densely packed old towns were vulnerable to fire-storms and only fire could enhance the casualties to “thunderclap” proportions.
Dresden was chosen as a target because it fulfilled this criteria for a colossal massacre. It had been ignored by the Allied bombers for four years because it was militarily insignificant. The USAF had attacked targets nearby with as much as 8,000 tons of bombs but Dresden was not considered worthwhile.
In September 1944 a firestorm had been attempted in Stuttgart by the RAF but the use of tunnels by the populace had frustrated the attempted massacre. Then they succeeded with Darmstadt, which lost over 10% of its population in one night, with casualties ten times higher than the larger raid on Stuttgart. Only in the town of Pforzheim did the RAF achieve a better result – annihilating a third of the population in one night.
Churchill had planned to attack 60 German towns through germ-warfare. By late 1943 a four-pound anthrax spore bomb had been developed with the code-name ‘N’. Churchill was assured by Lord Cherwell that using this four Lancasters could kill anyone found within a square mile of its impact. Churchill ordered half a million anthrax bombs from the US in March 1944. But the US push for D-Day and landings on the continent frustrated the plan to achieve the easy and cheap mass extermination Churchill desired since the anthrax had an unpredictable spread (PRO PREM 3/65 cited in Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, pp.100-1).
Dresden was not a military target in any reasonable sense of the term. The object was not to destroy the German ability to continue the war – which was on its last legs. It was to incinerate the inhabitants by use of a technique perfected over the previous two years. The German racial stock was to be culled by the English Social Darwinists.
The use of terror bombing of German cities by the RAF was a very different strategy from the earlier bombings of cities – like the German attacks on London – where a scattering of bombs were dropped on selected targets over a couple of hours. What RAF Bomber Command did was drop a huge concentration of bombs in a very short period with the intention of making an inferno of working class districts to burn up the labour force and their dependants. And then the Americans did the same the next day to bomb the bombed and the dying. The concentration of incendiaries produced a firestorm whose effect was not in the sum total of each bomb but in the multiplying effect of the fire-storm created.
The British scientists had used method study to plan the desired massacre. The fan principle had been developed by RAF No. 5 Bomber Group. The fan was a quarter of a circle with a vortex. The quality of the bombing was determined by how much the entire fan area could be covered equally by fire, blast waves and explosions. Then fire was spread like paste. A Master Bomber and a Marker Leader made sure no gaps developed that would prevent the fire closing up. The fire had to spread faster than firefighters could handle it. Otherwise there would be plenty of fires but no annihilation. It was important that bombs were not dropped randomly on a city. The exact angle taken by each bomber, the precise overshoot and the distance between pivot and bomb release, were all important to achieve the maximum number of people incinerated.
The only real debate on the subject of terror bombing took place in the House of Commons on the 6th March 1945, three weeks after the mass terror air raid on Dresden. In it the cat came out of the bag with regard to Dresden.
The debate was initiated by Richard Stokes, M.P., who demanded to be told why an authorised report, issued regarding the raid by the Associated Press Correspondent from Supreme Allied Headquarters in Paris, had gloatingly described “this unprecedented assault in daylight on the refugee-crowded capital, fleeing from the Russian tide in the East.” Stokes declared it showed that “the long-awaited decision had been taken to adopt deliberate terror-bombing of German populated centres as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.”
Stokes read this report and reminded the House of Commons that it had been widely published in America and broadcast by Paris Radio. On the morning of The 17th February the Censor had released it in Britain but in the evening of that day it had been suppressed from publication – presumably as a result of the unease that it might have aroused.
Stokes asked,
“Is terror bombing now part of our policy? Why is it that the people of this country who are supposed to be responsible for what is going on, the only people who may not know what is being done in their name? On the other hand, if terror bombing be not part of our policy, why was this statement put out at all? I think we shall live to rue the day we did this, and that it (the air raid on Dresden) will stand for all time as a blot on our escutcheon.”
After the war the Labour Minister, Richard Crossman described the bombing of Dresden as “the worst massacre in the history of the world” and wrote: “The devastation of Dresden in February, 1945, was one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been arraigned at Nuremberg if that court had not been perverted.”