In addition to ignoring all German efforts to make peace, Winston Churchill and other leaders of Great Britain began to conduct a war of unprecedented violence. On July 3, 1940, a British fleet attacked and destroyed much of the French fleet at Oran in southwestern Algeria to prevent it from falling into German hands. The French navy went to the bottom of the sea, and with it 1,297 French sailors. Churchill and the British government did not seem to mind that 1,297 of their French ally’s sailors were killed in the attack. This attack of the French fleet illustrates Churchill’s determination to continue fighting Hitler “no matter what the cost.”[1]
A surprising aspect of the British attack on the French fleet is that low-flying British airplanes repeatedly machine-gunned masses of French sailors as they struggled in the water. It is an event still remembered with great bitterness in France. This deliberate British war crime was soon followed by the assassination of French Adm. Francois Darlan by British agents in Algiers.[2]
Great Britain also began to violate the essential rule of civilized warfare that hostilities must be limited to the combatant forces. On May 11, 1940, British bombers began to attack the industrial areas of Germany. The British government adopted a new definition of military objectives so that this term included any building which in any way contributed, directly or indirectly, to the war effort of the enemy. On December 16, 1940, a moonlight raid by 134 British planes took place on Mannheim designed “to concentrate the maximum amount of damage in the center of the town.” Great Britain abandoned all pretense of attacking military, industrial or any other particular target with this raid.[3]
Yet Churchill tried to publicly distance himself from the terror bombings.
On March 28, 1942, the British air offensive against Germany initiated Frederick Lindemann’s bombing plan. The Lindemann Plan, which continued with undiminished ferocity until the end of the war, concentrated on bombing German working-class houses. The British bombing during this period was simple terror bombing designed to shatter the morale of the German civilian population and thereby generate an inclination to surrender. The bombing focused on working-class houses built close together because a higher percentage of bloodshed per ton of explosives dropped could be expected as opposed to bombing higher-class houses surrounded by large yards and gardens.[4]
The climax of the British bombing offensive under the Lindemann Plan was reached on the night of February 13, 1945, when a massive bombing raid was directed against Dresden. The population of Dresden was swollen by a horde of terrified German women and children running from the advancing Soviet army. No one will ever know exactly how many people died in the bombing of Dresden, but estimates of 250,000 civilian deaths appear to be reasonable. The bombing of Dresden served little military purpose; it was designed primarily to terrify the German civilian population and break their will to continue the war.[5]
A horrifying aspect of the Dresden terror bombings occurred during the daylight hours of February 14, 1945. On this day low-flying American fighters machine-gunned helpless Germans as they rushed toward the Elbe River in a desperate attempt to escape the inferno. Since Dresden had no air defense, the German civilians were easy targets.[6]
Winston Churchill, the man directly responsible for the Dresden bombings, began to publicly distance himself from the terror bombings. Churchill stated to Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the British Air Staff, on March 28, 1945:
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. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing….I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.[7]
Below: British rifleman Victor Gregg was a POW held in Dresden Prison sentenced to death after escaping twice and burning down a factory. He witnessed the bombing of Dresden and wrote an account of the horror. He appeared on several British TV programs. His book and interviews support the official death toll of 25,000. If this figure is to be believed then the bombing of Dresden was a botched operation.
In spite of Churchill’s protests, the British terror bombing continued unabated until the end of the war. On May 3, 1945, the British Royal Air Force attacked the German Cap Arcona and Thielbek passenger ships. Both of these ships were flying many large white flags with huge Red Cross emblems painted on the sides of the ships. The British attacks, which were a violation of international law, resulted in the deaths of approximately 7,000 prisoners being shipped from the Neuengamme concentration camp to Stockholm. When large numbers of corpses dressed in concentration camp garb washed ashore the German coastline a few days later, the British claimed the Germans had intentionally drowned the prisoners in the Baltic Sea. It took years for the truth of the illegal British attacks to be made public.[8]
The Jewish Brigade, which was part of the British Eighth Army, also murdered many disarmed and defenseless German officers. The Jewish Brigade was established not to fight in the war, but to follow behind the British army and kill senior German officers who were typically not guilty of anything except having served in defense of their country. Morris Beckman states in his book The Jewish Brigade:
“These were the first post-war executions of selected top Nazis. There were several dozen revenge squads operating; the highest estimate of executions was 1,500. The exact figure will never be known.”[9]
ENDNOTES
[1] Fischer, Klaus P., Hitler and America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, pp. 122-123.
[2] Bird, Vivian, “An Examination of British War Crimes During World War II,” The Barnes Review, Vol. VI, No. 6, Nov. /Dec. 2000, p. 56.
[3] Veale, Frederick J. P., Advance to Barbarism, Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, pp. 182-183.
[4] Ibid., pp. 184-185.
[5] Ibid., pp. 185-186, 192-193.
[6] Bird, Vivian, “An Examination of British War Crimes During World War II,” The Barnes Review, Vol. VI, No. 6, Nov. /Dec. 2000, p. 59. See also McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, pp. 219-224.
[7] Veale, Frederick J. P., Advance to Barbarism, Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, p. 194.
[8] Weber, Mark, “The 1945 Sinking of the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 19, No. 4, July/Aug. 2000, pp. 2-3; see also Schmidt, Hans, Hitler Boys in America: Re-Education Exposed, Pensacola, FL: Hans Schmidt Publications, 2003, pp. 231-232.
[9] Beckman Morris, The Jewish Brigade: An Army with Two Masters, 1944-45, Rockville Centre, NY: Sarpedon, 1998, p. xiii.
Source: https://wearswar.wordpress.com/2019/02/22/why-the-truth-about-britains-role-in-fomenting-wwii-will-remain-hidden-the-myth-she-fought-a-clean-war-will-persist/
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