Allied Crimes During World War II
Aby April 11th, 2007
It is generally acknowledged in Europe and United States that Hitler and his forces committed the worst massacres in human history. For an internationalist who grew up learning history in different country and from different perspectives, I learned a very significant thing – there is no absolute truth in history. The history that one learns is often coloured by the victors in the society or nation where their version of history is written. It is selective, manipulative and uses psychological factors like social sanction to approve one’s ideology over the other. For example, in Europe and United States, the Nazi holocaust is given a lot of hype and social taboo effect while similar scale of crimes by Allied victors is largely ignored. I’m writing in brief about the major Allied crimes during World War 2, the part of history which shows the dark side of Allied countries, mainly US and UK during World War II - from a neutral and humanistic viewpoint.
Bodies sprawled around the city after Dresden firebombing
Dresden Massacre – It is considered as the largest single act of mass murder in the 20th century, carried out on 13th February 1945 at Dresden, a cultural city of Germany. Over 300000 people including men, women and children refugees were burned or gassed to death in firebombings by Britain and United States. The exact number is not known because of the presence of 1.2 million refugees in the city but a close estimate was made by the Germans from the body counts. The raid of 14 hours was carried with repeated bombings after short intervals ending with US Mustangs destroying all rescue vehicles, hospitals and Red Cross zones to ensure no survivors escaped. 16000 acres of land were destroyed in one night. As the perpratators of this horrific massacre were victors, there was no trial after the incident. To add an insult to injury the German corpses were piled up, photo shoots made and shown to Anglo-US media as ‘Auschwitz massacre of Jews’. The authenticity of these photographs came into scrutiny by the Red Cross and news agencies covering the Dresden massacre, on various grounds. As a damage control, it was made a social taboo and even a legal offence in some countries to question the Holocaust figures. For more details about the Dresden Massacre click the link here.
Hamburg Massacres – Carried out throughout 1943, more than 50000 civilians were killed by Bomber Harris, who was authorised by Churchill to bomb civilian locales. On questioning on the morality of bombing civilians by his cabinet, Churchill quoted “Now everyone’s at it, it’s simply a question of fashion - similar to that of whether short or long dresses are in”. A technique called ‘Shock and Awe’ , similar to Blitzkrieg was used which caused casualties in many ways – not just by burns, but also from smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning and asphyxiation, as the oxygen is sucked out by the conflagration. R.H.S. Crossman, a cabinet minister under Winston Churchill authorized the mass murders as he wanted to pound the Germans civilians into submission. Source –> History Net
Tokyo Firebombing – At least 100000 people were massacred in Tokyo bombing by US on March 1945. Incendiary bombs, made of a mixture of thermite and oxydising agents (sometimes including napalm) burned 200 km2 of the Japanese capital. The fires were so hot they would ignite the clothing on individuals as they were fleeing. Many women were wearing what were called ‘air-raid turbans’ around their heads and the heat would ignite those turbans like a wick on a candle. In the context of war, the large number of Japanese civilians killed by strategic bombing was seen as acceptable by the American administration. Curtis LeMay, commander of the Tokyo bombers quoted after the World War 2: “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.” (The same Curtis Lemay was honoured and became a General during Vietnam War and known for this notorious quote “We should bomb Vietnam back into the stone age.“)
Aftermath of the atomic holocaust on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945
Hiroshima Atomic Bombing - 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima by a U-235 Nuclear Bomb names ‘Little Boy’ in August 6, 1945. People were vapourised instantly and the floor melted to glass due to the extreme heat generated by nuclear fission. The few survivors were crippled for life and their genetic defects caused their descendants to be genetically defective and deformed. After the Hiroshima bombing, President Truman announced, “If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.”
Nagasaki Atomic Bombing – On the morning of August 9, 1945 Nagasaki was destroyed. 80,000 civilians were instantly killed by the US Atomic Bomb ‘Fat Man’. The bomb caused the temperature of Nagasaki city to rise to 7000 degrees C and a wind of 1000 kph. An unknown number of survivors from the Hiroshima bombing made their way to Nagasaki and were bombed again. Casualties followed days after the bombings and most of the city’s 150000 survivors had a grisly death in the next 10 years. Their offsprings were subject to genetic aberrations.
It must be noted that an overwhelming majority of Americans agree that the atomic bombings of Japan are justified or even necessary. They argue that these mass massacres were needed “to hasten the end of the war” and to avoid a theoretical casualty figure that a land based invasion would have supposedly caused. The fact that a conditional surrender of Japan was already underway is conveniently ignored, in favour of claims that favour the Anglo-American justification. (The same Americans would be vehemently outraged if anyone were to presumptively suggest that the 11 September 2001 attacks could somehow be justified.)
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- Comments(12)
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I hate to being constantly reminded of the Holocaust when we did such crimes in WW 2 to be ashamed of.
The extract below suggests that, in quoting figures as high as 300000 dead in Dresden, you may be perpetuating Nazi propaganda. I guess as “the liberal” you don’t really want to do that. The extract is from the “Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II” wikipedia entry (with references, which admittedly I haven’t followed up yet, but will do). I too had believed what I’d heard about Dresden being the “biggest massacre in history” but it looks more likely that Hiroshima, Tokyo and probably even Nagasaki were bigger.
In addition I’d like to say this. Definitely it’s worth bearing in mind that the Allies knowingly killed civilians on a massive scale. Nobody’s hands are clean. But I think that while recognizing that, we should still draw a distinction between that kind of act (in which, whether the means consituted a war crime or not, the motivation was to win, and hence end, a war) and the war crimes of the Nazi regime itself (carrying out a systematic and prolonged extermination of civilians in one’s own country and conquered territories, to the total of millions). The two should not be compared. There are many levels separating them in the hierarchy of evil.
– Begin quotation from wikipedia “Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II” as at 2007-07-03 –
Earlier reputable estimates varied from 25,000 to more than 60,000, but historians now view around 25,000–35,000 as the likely range[26][27] with the latest (1994) research by the Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert pointing toward the lower part of this range.[28]
…
There have been higher estimates for the number of dead, ranging as high as 300,000. They are from disputed and unreliable sources, such as the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels, Soviet historians, and David Irving, the once popular but now discredited self-styled ‘historian’… who retracted his higher estimates.[33]
26 Dresden im Luftkrieg: Vorgeschichte-Zerstoerung-Folgen by Götz Bergander.
27 The Bombing of Dresden in 1945: Falsification of statistics, by Richard J. Evans
28 Friedrich Reichert, Verbrannt bis zur Unkenntlichkeit: Die Zerstoerung Dresdens 1945, Dresden: Dresdner Museum, 1994.
33 The Dresden Raids letter to the Editor from The Times 7 July 1966 a correction to “The Destruction of Dresden” by David Irving London: William Kimber, 1963. In this letter Irving, who had previously used figures as high as 250,000 admitted the confirmed casualty figures were actually 18,375, expected to rise to 25,000 including when those not registered in the city were taken into account. Despite the admission of his mistake contained in the letter, he has still used figures as high as 100,000 in articles and books on his own website fpp.org, some written as late as 2004.
I get reminded of Napoleon’s quote “History is nothing but a set of lies made by victors and generally agreed upon” . Yet in the case of Dresden, due to its massive nature we have varying versions of history and we need to look into facts and plausible theories rather than rely on blind faith on what could be said as “Allied propagada”. As we know, casualties in wars are constant but their quotes depend on the side you take. If I choose to vilify the Allied powers, the figure for Dresden could go as high as 600000 - 800000 considering about 1.2 milliong civlians were on the city, mostly refugees who have fled from the horrors of Red Army of Soviet Union you can check details from the sources linked in the article above. Fearing for getting labelled ‘Nazi’ and denying actual casualties would make me as bad as the proponents of this massacre. The horrors of Dresden is not only the firebombing raids but also the attacks on medics, rescuers and survivors by machine gunning them to destroy witnesses. Angela’s Eyewitness Account - Time Witness
And the Allied claim of 25000 civilians based on mere body counts is simply illogical, we see double standards in here and an attempt to vilify the opponents crime while cloaking one’s own. While in the count of Nazi holocaust casualties the method to get the number used is (pre wartime Jew population - post wartime Jew population) which by itself is statistically inaccurate as a lot of Jews have faced wartime casualties or fled to other countries. It is naive to take the quoted figure of Allied forces like US and UK without taking into consideration, the political propaganda. After all they use Holocaust as a justification of not taking action against the Israelis who have been carrying out their own genocides in Palestine.
And by the way I have no intention to spread Nazi propaganda but fear of being labelled Nazi is not an excuse to accept the anti-Nazi side and get mired in their propaganda. And as for ‘liberal’, the site name is more of a sarcasm in reponse to an American lady who considered me a ‘liberal democrat’ for my internationalist views. For details, you may check out the Testimonials page in this site. My political beliefs are my own and my views do not have to conform to social standards unless they make sense.
You’re right about mixing historical arguments - to use the holocaust as a justification for further evil is crazy. It sickens me how people see things in black-and-white, when there’s no reason we can’t accept simultaneously that the Nazis committed evil, the Allies committed evil, and the Israelis have committed evil. I still maintain, however, that what the Nazis did was orders-of-magnitude worse. By that I don’t just mean in terms of numbers of dead, but on that subject I think the historical consensus on the magnitude of the holocaust has been worked out with the pre-war exodus and military casualties taken into account, the former being well-documented and the latter being at most a small fraction.
Re Dresden, I already have the sinking feeling I’m going to get nowhere here, but for some reason I’m compelled to get drawn into this at least one more time.
“If I choose to villify….” Well, sure. If you choose in advance which angle to present, and then look for stats to support it, then you can pluck any figure you like out of the air. But you didn’t originally cite 600-800k in your article, and for good reason: there’s no source to back it up. “Check details from the sources linked:” re Dresden you must mean the rense.com article. Unfortunately that doesn’t tell us where its figures come from either—and it’s written in a very propagandist style, with a big imbalance of emotive language over fact, much more so than yours. As such it’s not much of a source.
The fact we’re even debating this shows that you are right about another thing: much of history is written by people with some or other axe to grind. Blogs doubly so. But while the Napoleonic quote has a cool cynical ring of truth about it, I’d say it’s not true of all historians. For what it’s worth, I don’t *want* to believe anything in particular. I believed Kurt Vonnegut when he wrote that Dresden was bigger than Hiroshima. And now I don’t. Now I think his figures probably came from highly questionable sources. Show me something *convincing* and I might believe again. In any case I’m with you in not wanting people to gloss over these massacres, or to think they are somehow justified by Coventry or Pearl Harbor, or even by the Holocaust itself.
What sources do we have? You can say 800k based on pure conjecture, 300k and cite Goebbels, anywhere from 100k to 250k and cite Irving, or 30k and cite Reichert. Who has which axe to grind? I guess one would have to look carefully into Reichert’s motivations as well as his methodology. For the other two, I know enough about their motivations to believe their figures were inflated.
Definitely with you on the making sense thing.
The allied powers feel no remorse for these crimes because 8 out of 10 of them are bigots who are too busy blaming the Nazis for all world war deaths to draw attention off their own crimes. Both the allies and axis were evil, they care all for their own greed.
So wait, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor I bet they weren’t trying to destroy the US, just make them surrender to “reasonable demands.”
@ ericoak - Are you trying to say Pearl Harbour is a justification of atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima? I hope not, as it would highlight you as someone totally alien to World War history. There were much more casualties and battles between US and Japan in the World War 2 which have nearly neutralised Japan’s crimes. In the end Japan wanted to surrender to US and end the war in return for sovereignty of the Japanese territory. But the US had other plans of course…
You misinterpreted what I said. I was saying all the Japanese wanted to do was surrender, but that isn’t what they were looking for when they bombed us in the first place. They attacked us! After they lost they wanted to just surrender. I wasn’t saying Pearl Harbor was justification, I was saying it was justification to want to completely conquer them, just like what happened to the Nazi. They didn’t just let them surrender like World War I. The Allies took over the whole country.
Guys I don’t think there is anypoint arguing with Americans on their war crimes. Frankly they just don’t care, they want to believe they are always right, whatever they do, even if it means they have to wipe off the human race from the rest of the world. It makes them no better than the Nazis, the Nazis believed their ideals too and thought they were protecting themselves by killing the semitic race. Deep down, almost every American has a genocidal side, it just take a good justification and prodding to bring it out. One has to look back in history to understand that and it also helps if you talk with an American and see how he relishes when it comes to wars and killing.
Agent Elfond
To state what you did about Americans being no better than Nazis and that every American has a genocidal side and that we relish wars and killing has to be the most idiotic and ignorant statement I have ever heard. Americans are typically generous, charitable and supportive of peace and freedom. What the fight for is freedom and though not perfect (far from it) we would never make a statement as hateful and distorted as you have.
Nobody is saying that the Nazi’s did not commit war crimes. However, the fact of the matter is that the USA did.
On a personal note, my grandfather died in Dresden. There were documented logs that he had already saved 53 Jewish men, women and children at this point. I hope you are ashamed if you use the Holocaust to justify Dresden. I actually don’t even know what to say about those who do. 130000 Germans did not DESERVE to die. 0 Germans DESERVED to die in Dresden. Maybe at the Nuremberg Trials. Not in horrible agony as a result of being burned to death. Would you have agreed to firebombing Dallas in the 1930’s due to all the civil rights violations? Or are you one of those Christians that says they hate fascists like the Nazis, then turn around and denounce gay marriage and are secretly (or sometimes not so secretly) racist?
Probably the worst example of hypocrisy in world history was the Nuremberg trials.The fact that Russia, America, and Britian considered themselves fit to hold the moral high ground at the end of that appaling war is truly amazing.How can anybody justify the slaughter of millions of innocent civilians soley on the grounds that they were misfortunate enough to be born in the axis countries.German war crimes are consistently broadcast as the worst in human history.But does not that “honour”go to the Soviet Union.And why oh why does one of the worst and most disgusting crimes in world history almost never get a mention.The mass rapes of millions of women and children by the Red Army.And how many German civilians were done to death after the war ended,their only crime again being their nationality.Many Many on the Allied side should also have been hanged at the end of the war and the fact that they were not just made the trials of the Axis leaders and soldiers nothing more than an exercise in revenge and hypocrisy.In international law as in all law.Nobody should be above it.