Did Lancaster bombers that killed 600,000 in German cities deliberately target civilians? A new book says YES...



To the RAF aircrews, the sight of the eastern German city ablaze looked like a terrifying vision of hell. As the vast stream of 796 four-engined Lancaster heavy bombers swept over Dresden on that night of February 14, 1945, almost 2,000 tons of explosives and incendiaries were dropped onto the inferno.

One Lancaster pilot recorded in his diary: 'The glow could be seen 50 miles away. The target area was almost like day. Down below, the town was a mass of flames, a pool of fire. It was awe-inspiring.'



The scenes in Dresden were Biblical in the scale of devastation. The merging of the fires sucked oxygen from the air and created a ferocious, howling tornado. Trees were pulled from their roots, buildings destroyed and people flung through the air like ragdolls.



Fearsome: A Lancaster bomber in action during the Second World War

Soaring temperatures turned the asphalt streets into a deadly, molten quagmire. Thousands suffocated or burned to death in the cellars of their homes. As the blaze intensified, huge crowds made for the city's reservoir and dived into the water.



But the sheer numbers, combined with the roaring heat and the lack of oxygen, made the place unbearable. People desperately tried to clamber out, yet the smooth cement edges made it impossible. Far from being a refuge, the reservoir turned into a sweltering graveyard.



The raid on Dresden is one of the most notorious episodes of Britain's war effort, a symbol of the ruthlessness of the RAF's strategic bombing offensive.



It has been estimated that around 25,000 people were killed that night - compare that to the 568 deaths in the assault on Coventry by the Luftwaffe in November 1940, by far the worst individual raid that any British city endured during the Blitz.



Yet, for all its infamy, the attack on Dresden was by no means the most savage of the RAF's bombing campaign. In July 1943, a series of raids on Hamburg killed at least 45,000 people in a gigantic firestorm.



Little more than a week after Dresden, 362 Lancasters dropped 1,551 tons of bombs on the small town of Pforzheim in 22 minutes. The central area became a blazing crematorium, with the death toll reaching 17,600, a quarter of the population.



In total, at least 600,000 civilians are thought to have lost their lives in the RAF's remorseless pounding of German cities. Because of the epic slaughter, the campaign has always provoked controversy.



During the war, the urban bombing had its detractors, not just from pacifists but even from figures within the Government itself, such as Tory Minister Lord Salisbury, who warned in 1943 that 'we are losing some of our moral superiority to the Germans'.



In the decades since 1945, the debate has continued to rage. Some have accused the British Government of war crimes. Others have drawn an emotionally charged parallel between the urban firestorms and the horrors of the Nazi gas chambers.



Defenders of the bombing offensive have long argued that such criticism is a gross injustice. The aim of the RAF, they maintain, was to destroy German industry and the military infrastructure. Civilian deaths were a regrettable consequence of this strategy, not its central goal.



The town centre became a blazing crematorium

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'We have always adhered firmly to the principle that we attack none but military objectives,' declared Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Air Secretary, in the Commons in October 1943.



In one post-war lecture, Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff throughout the campaign, said it was 'a fallacy that our bombing of the German cities was intended to kill Germans, and that we camouflaged this intention by the pretence that we would destroy industry. The loss of life was purely incidental'.



The truth is that such claims were dishonest. Unpublished papers I have unearthed for my new book on the Lancaster bomber reveal that the mass, indiscriminate killing of Germany's urban population was indeed the key goal of the RAF's campaign.



During my research on the Lancaster - the heavyweight plane that enabled the RAF to mount the bomber offensive - I uncovered a wealth of archival material which exposes the truth about the Government's policy.



Typical was one paper from the Air Ministry, written in August 1941, which urged that the focus of attacks must be 'the people in their homes and factories'.



Warming to this theme, the Directorate found inspiration in the Luftwaffe's bombing of Coventry, 'one of the most successful raids carried out by the German Air Force on this country', with a ton of incendiaries for every 800 citizens.



'If Bomber Command could carry out a raid on the Coventry scale every month, the result would be a complete state of panic in the industrialised west of Germany', and 'considerable loss of life'.



Another 1941 Ministry report called for 'saturation by incendiaries' to break 'the morale of the population' and leave the German people 'conscious of constant physical danger'.



At the same time, the RAF's chief Sir Charles Portal privately promised Winston Churchill that a significant expansion in the heavy bomber force would ultimately bring about 'the destruction of six million homes' and 'civilian casualties estimated at 900,000'.



Indeed, senior RAF planners did not hesitate to use the term 'terror-bombing' to describe some of their raids.



The most passionate enthusiast of the strategic offensive was, of course, Sir Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command from 1942. 'What we want to do is to bring masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill the Boche and to terrify the Boche,' he said.



So relentless was his determination to hit the German cities that he regarded any other operations as a distraction. He even regarded the famous Dambusters Raid of May 1943 as a waste of time, privately claiming that it 'achieved nothing'.



Aftermath: Death and devastation in Dresden after the allied bombing in February 1945

The son of a civil engineer based in imperial India, Harris had developed his spirit of aggressive independence while at English boarding schools.



A grizzled veteran of World War I, he had risen through the ranks of the RAF through his dynamism and natural authority. Churchill regarded him as a philistine, but he was not without humour and could poke fun at his own image as a bloodthirsty autocrat.



Once, driving fast in his Bentley towards Whitehall, he was stopped by a police officer. 'You should be more careful. You could kill someone,' said the constable. 'Young man, I kill thousands of people every night,' he replied.



Harris's complaint against the RAF top brass, highlighted in archive papers which have never been published before, was that the Government should be far more candid about its policy of deliberately targeting Germany's civilians.



He never had any time for Portal's and Sinclair's denials, as he explained in a letter to them in October 1943: 'The aim of Bomber Command should be . . . publicly stated: the destruction of German cities and the killing of German workers.'



In another memo, two months later, he stated that the 'working populations are literally the heart of Germany's war potential. That is why they are being deliberately attacked'. But neither Portal nor Sinclair abandoned their rhetorical deceit as the campaign continued.



'Young man, I will kill thousands of people every night'

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It was a campaign that would never have been possible without either the brilliance of the Avro Lancaster or the heroism of the aircrews.



Created by the visionary Avro designer Roy Chadwick and first entering RAF service in December 1941, the Lancaster transformed the performance of Bomber Command.



Its huge bomb bay, stretching twothirds of the fuselage, allied to the strength of its ultra-reliable Merlin engines, meant it could carry far greater loads than any other bomber in the European theatre. Its average load was 12,000lb, but towards the end of the war it was lifting the Grand Slam bomb weighing over 22,000lb, or ten tons.



Thanks to this capacity, the Lancasters dropped 51 million incendiaries and 607,000 tons of high explosives during the war. For all its weight, the Lancaster was also a highly manoeuvrable aircraft, capable of reaching more than 300mph in a shallow dive. It was also resilient, capable of absorbing large amounts of punishment and even of returning to England on just two engines.



But none of these virtues would have mattered without the bravery and selfsacrifice of the heavy bomber crews. No other part of the armed forces had consistently to endure such mortal dangers.



Of the 125,000 men who served in the Command, 55,700 - or 44 per cent - were killed in action, 8,400 seriously wounded and 9,800 taken prisoner.



'All war is brutal,' Harris-once warned. 'If there are any weaker brethren who cannot stomach it, the sooner we dispose of them, the better.'



Remarkably few airmen flinched in battle, despite the risks of flying through the German flak and fighters.



A rare few gloried in the slaughter, seeing it as revenge for the Blitz. 'The filthy Hun. Let the bastards die like the rats they are,' wrote Lancaster wireless operator John Byrne in late 1944.



Others had qualms about pounding residential areas. Bill Utting, an Australian who took part in the Dresden raid, said he 'felt disgust when I learnt of the numbers that had been killed. I was very, very sorry, but it was too late then'.



But the overwhelming attitude of the airmen was that they were helping to destroy the Nazi war machine.



They were right to feel that way. I would argue that, for all the ethical condemnation it has attracted, the bombing offensive was essential in defeating Germany.



The greatest moral crime of all would have been to abandon the campaign to hit back at the Reich, for that would have prolonged the war, and consequently the Nazis' genocidal oppression.



'Fires in the sky meant the end of

war must be near'

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The strategic air offensive brought the war to German homeland, weakening its ability to carry on the fight. Thanks to the RAF's heavy bombers, the Reich was forced to divert colossal resources into air defences. By 1944, two million Germans were engaged in anti-aircraft duties, while a third of all artillery production was devoted to antiaircraft guns, when such weaponry was in desperately short supply.



A fifth of the non-agricultural German workforce was required to deal with consequences of bombing, such as clearing rubble, laying railway tracks or repairing damaged structures. One Nazi study in January 1945 revealed that, due to the bombing, the German economy had produced 25 per cent fewer tanks than planned, 31 per cent fewer aircraft and 42 per cent fewer lorries.



The air campaign also meant deepening misery for Germany's population.



'The people are beginning to suffer what is called bunker fever and inability to work,' revealed a report by the intelligence branch of the SS in January 1945.



As the attacks persisted, support for the Nazi regime crumbled. Interrogated by the Allies after the Nazis' surrender, Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, admitted that the attack on Dresden was the most demoralising raid of the war.



Alternatively, the bombing by Lancasters brought hope to the victims of German tyranny. 'The fires in the sky, a huge red glow - it was like heaven for us. We knew the end of the war must be near,' recalled Ben Halfgott, a Jew imprisoned in a concentration camp near Dresden.



The RAF's Lancasters gouged out the industrial heart of Germany. The campaign spelt ruin for the Reich's war economy and military capability. And in the end, despite the civilian death toll, that was the greatest moral triumph of all.



Lancaster: The Second World War's Greatest Bomber by Leo McKinstry (£20, John Murray). To order at £18 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.





