No, The Allies Were Not Paragons of Morality

The moral narrative of the Second World War is central to progressive mythology. This war, we are told, was an epic clash between good and evil, in which the righteous Allies, whose moral fiber was marred only by America’s un-progressive internment of its Japanese residents on the West Coast, prevailed over the thoroughly wicked Nazis. It is only now beginning to enter the media’s consciousness that the Allies committed what the Chronicle of Higher Education refers to as “the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history.” In other words, ethnic cleansing. Of over twelve million people.

The commission of the largest ethnic cleansing in European history does not square with the black-and-white narrative of the war; and neither do the bombings of Dresden and of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US Army War College itself refers to the Dresden bombing in a Strategy Research Project paper as “one of the deadliest and ethically most problematic raids of WW II”. The historian Alexander McKee goes into more detail:

The bombing of urban areas which might contain targets of military importance was a policy advocated by leading British air strategists long before the outbreak of the war. McKee reviewed the writings of the air power theorists of the 1920s and 30s, observing that “retreading them now is like browsing through a British Mein Kampf. The horror to come is all there between the lines. What they are really advocating is an all-out attack on non-combatants, men, women, and children, as a deliberate policy of terror.”

After sifting through the evidence, the author refers to these profgered justifications as the “standard white-wash gambit.” There was a military barracks in Dresden, but it was located on the out skirts of the “New Town,” miles away from the selected target area. There were some hutted camps in the city-full of starving refugees who had fled from the advancing Red Terror in the East. The main road route passed on the west outside the city limits. The railway network led to an important junction, but this, too, passed outside the center of the “Old City,” which was the focal point for the bombing attacks. No railway stations were on the British target maps, nor, apparently, were bridges, the destruction of which could have impeded German communications with the Eastern Front.

What the author has discovered about the attack is that:

• By the end of Summer, 1944, “there is evidence that the Western Allies were contemplating some terrible but swift end to the war by committing an atrocity which would terrify the enemy into instant surrender. Without doubt, the inner truth has still to be prised loose, but the thread of thought can be discerned.”
• “The bomber commanders were not really interested in any purely military or economic targets …. What they were looking for was a big built-up area which they could burn …. The attraction Dresden had for Bomber Command was that the centre of the city should burn easily and magnificentlv: as indeed it was to do.”
• At the time of the attacks on February 13-14, 1945, the inhabitants of Dresden were mostly women and children, many of whom had just arrived as refugees from the East. There were also large numbers of Allied POWs. Few German males of military age were left in the city environs. The author cites the official Bomber Command history prepared by Sir Charles Webster and Dr. Noble Frankland, which reveals that “the unfortunate, frozen, starving civilian refugees were the first object of the attack, before military movements “
• Dresden was virtually undefended. Luftwaffe fighters stationed in the general vicinity were grounded for lack of fuel. With the exception of a few light guns, the anti-aircraft batteries had been dismantled for employment elsewhere. McKee quotes one British participant in the raid, who reported that “our biggest problem, quite truly, was with the chance of being hit by bombs from other Lancasters flying above us.”
• Targets of genuine military significance were not hit, and had not even been included on the official list of targets. Among the neglected military targets was the railway bridge spanning the Elbe River, the destruction of which could have halted rail traffic for months. The railway marshalling yards in Dresden were also outside the RAF target area. The important autobahn bridge to the west of the city was not attacked. Rubble from damaged buildings did interrupt the flow of traffic within the city, “but in terms of the Eastern Front communications network, road transport was virtually unimpaired.”
• In the course of the USAF daylight raids, American fighter- bombers strafed civilians: “Amongst these people who had lost everything in a single night, panic broke out. Women and children were massacred with cannon and bombs. It was mass murder.” American aircraft even attacked animals in the Dresden Zoo. The USAF was still at it in late April, with Mustangs strafing Allied POWs they discovered working in fields.
• The author concludes that, “Dresden had been bombed for political and not military reasons; but again, without effect. There was misery, but it did not affect the war.” Some have suggested that the bombing of Dresden was meant to serve as a warning to Stalin of what sort of destruction the Western Powers were capable of dealing. If that was their intent, it certainly failed to accomplish the objective.

Once word leaked out that the Dresden raids were generally viewed as terrorist attacks against civilians, those most responsible for ordering the bombings tried to avoid their just share of the blame. McKee points out that:

“In both the UK and the U.S.A. a high level of sophistication was to be employed in order to excuse or justify the raids, or to blame them on someone else. It is difficult to think of any other atrocity — and there were many in the Second World War — which has produced such an extraordinary aftermath of unscrupulous and mendacious polemics.”

Who were the men to blame for the attacks? The author reveals that:

“It was the Prime Minister himself who in effect had signed the death warrant for Dresden, which had been executed by Harris [chief of RAF Bomber Command]. And it was Churchill, too, who in the beginning had enthusiastically backed the bomber marshals in carrying out the indiscriminate area bombing policy in which they all believed. They were all in it together. Portal himself [head of the RAF, Harris of course, Trenchard [British air theorist] too, and the Prime Minister most of all. And many lesser people.”

As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

August 6 and August 9 mark the anniversaries of the US atomic-bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a split second. Some 13 square kilometres of the city were obliterated. By December, at least another 70,000 people had died from radiation and injuries.

Three days after Hiroshima’s destruction, the US dropped an A-bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of at least 70,000 people before the year was out.

Since 1945, tens of thousands more residents of the two cities have continued to suffer and die from radiation-induced cancers, birth defects and still births. …

On July 21, 2005, the British New Scientist magazine … reported that two historians had uncovered further evidence revealing that “the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki … was meant to kick-start the Cold War [against the Soviet Union, Washington’s war-time ally] rather than end the Second World War”. …

With Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in New York, Kuznick studied the diplomatic archives of the US, Japan and the USSR. They found that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was “looking for peace”. His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb. But the bombs were dropped anyway. “Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war”, Selden told the New Scientist.

While the capitalist media immediately dubbed the historians’ “theory” “controversial”, it accords with the testimony of many central US political and military players at the time, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who stated bluntly in a 1963 Newsweek interview that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”.

Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, stated in his memoirs that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

At the time though, Washington cold-bloodedly decided to obliterate the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to show off the terrible power of its new super weapon and underline the US rulers’ ruthless preparedness to use it.

These terrible acts were intended to warn the leaders of the Soviet Union that their cities would suffer the same fate if the USSR attempted to stand in the way of Washington’s plans to create an “American Century” of US global domination. Nuclear scientist Leo Szilard recounted to his biographers how Truman’s secretary of state, James Byrnes, told him before the Hiroshima attack that “Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might and that a demonstration of the bomb may impress Russia”.

Henry H. Arnold, Commanding General of the US Army Air Forces, agreed with Eisenhower and Leahy, saying that “the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell because the Japanese had lost control of their own air”; so did Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet, who wrote, “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.” The US Strategic Bombing Survey, tasked with evaluating the effectiveness of American air strategy in the war, reported that:

The public admission of defeat by the responsible Japanese leaders, which constituted the political objective of the United States offensive begun in 1943, was thus secured prior to invasion and while Japan was still possessed of some 2,000,000 troops and over 9,000 planes in the home islands. Military defeats in the air, at sea and on the land, destruction of shipping by submarines and by air, and direct air attack with conventional as well as atomic bombs, all contributed to this accomplishment.

There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan’s unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan’s disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

Of course, they knew that. As was stated above, the goal of the atomic bombing was not to defeat a country whose defeat was already assured, but to—at the cost of approximately 200,000 lives—scare the Soviets.

200,000 lives to scare the Soviets, between 500,000 and two million more to expel twelve million Germans, and 25,000 more, along with the destruction of one of the most significant cultural and historical centers of Europe, in a failed attempt to “commit an atrocity which would terrify the enemy into instant surrender”. And this does not even take into account the “labor reparations” plan devised to extract forced labor from many German prisoners of war, or their internment in Allied concentration camps, both of which have yet to enter at all into the historical consciousness.

The winners write the history books. This is no less true of the Second World War than of any other conflict.