Why was Coventry 'coventriert'?

[tcolvin]

Bruce and Kutscha.

I say Lübeck was not a legitimate target because Harris wrote that Lübeck “went up in flames" because "it was a city of moderate size of some importance as a port, and with some submarine building yards of moderate size not far from it. It was not a vital target, but it seemed to me better to destroy an industrial town of moderate importance than to fail to destroy a large industrial city".

Lübeck was attacked because it would burn. In Harris' words, “Lübeck was built more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation”. The Official History stated that the choice of Lübeck showed “the extent to which a town might become a target mainly because it was operationally vulnerable”.

Harris was right about everything except his belief that area bombing could end the war by collapsing civilian morale and thereby reducing war production.

However, I need to apologise to Kutscha. Lübeck did contain a U-boat yard. Flender Werke AG, was one of 19 yards in 11 cities making U-boats. Flender manufactured 3.6% of the total (42 out of a total of 1153 U-boats). So Harris was technically correct that Lübeck had “some submarine building yards of moderate size not far from it”.

Harris was correct only technically because neither the submarine yard nor the port was either targeted or hit. His mention of these genuine military targets was disingenuous because he did not target them. In Lübeck, “damage to the German war effort was very slight”, according to John Terraine in 'The Right Of The Line”. “A factory making oxygen apparatus for U-boat crews was completely destroyed, together with 8 others of less importance”.

The conclusion is that the existence of iron ore unloading facilities and a U-boat yard was a rationalisation needed for public consumption, especially in the USA which rejected area bombing, and to motivate the bomber crews. I cannot believe Harris and Churchill believed that traumatising civilians would reduce war production, since both of them could visit Coventry to see for themselves that production steadily increased after a short-term reduction.
On the other hand they could and did delude themselves into believing that since area bombing was all that they could do to end the war, then it must be capable of ending the war.
The wish was father to the thought.

Tony

[Bruce Dennis]

Originally Posted by tcolvin

Bruce and Kutscha...
The conclusion is that the existence of iron ore unloading facilities and a U-boat yard was a rationalisation needed for public consumption, especially in the USA which rejected area bombing, and to motivate the bomber crews. Tony

Hello Tony,
The facts you cite preceding the above quote prove Lübeck was a legitimate target. See my earlier post for the specific attraction of this target. Harris believed in his policy, as was required from any senior officer, and Churchill supported him because BC was the best tool available anywhere for hitting the Axis. I have many issues with both Churchill and Harris, but surely neither can be said to be deluded because they believed in area bombing; yet to be proven wrong, perhaps, but delusion is hardly an apt description of their mindset at the time.

Regards,
Bruce

[tcolvin]

Bruce.

I don't follow you.
It was illegal then, and is so today, to target civilians.
But factories making war material, and ports importing war material, just as ships carrying war material, were all, AFAIK, legitimate targets within the rules of law (the Geneva Convention).
The mediaeval centres of Coventry and Lübeck were not legitimate targets per se, as defined by the Geneva Convention.
So I do not follow your logic that "Lübeck was a legitimate target".

Germany and the UK were not legitimate targets, but both contained legitimate targets. The problem was that neither the GAF, nor Bomber Command, nor the VIII USAAF could hit these legitimate targets, so they went after the only thing they could hit - city centres, and rationalised that civilian morale was being degraded so the war would be ended without the need to fight battles on the ground.

Don correctly argued that the armament works in Coventry were legitimate targets (and as we have seen they were actually targetted) and he suggested that the destruction of the inner city of Coventry was collateral damage. I think in a court of law the GAF would probably be absolved from the charge of targetting civilians in Coventry.

Flender Werke and the iron ore unloading facilities in the port of Lübeck, and the factory making oxygen breathing apparatus for U-boat crews, were legitimate targets. But these were not targetted. Harris in fact targetted the flammable inner city, and the tactics were chosen in order to induce a firestorm.

Harris and Churchill were exultant with their success in producing a firestorm in Lübeck. Ditto Goering and Hitler after coventrieren Coventry, which raises a doubt about their real motives, but these were relatively early days when fire-raising techniques were still in their infancy.

I don't see how anyone can argue that the destruction of Lübeck was not clearly a war crime.

Tony

[Bruce Dennis]

Originally Posted by tcolvin

Bruce.

I don't follow you.
It was illegal then, and is so today, to target civilians.
...
I don't see how anyone can argue that the destruction of Lübeck was not clearly a war crime.

Tony

Tony,
You have obviously seen orders passed to the squadrons specifying aiming points in the enemy port of Lübeck or you wouldn’t be able to state your case so conclusively: would you mind sharing the contents of these orders with us?

Thanks in advance,
Bruce

[tcolvin]

Certainly I can give you my sources.

I have not seen the specific orders for Lübeck, but I do know the content of the Directive of February 14, 1942 which covered Lübeck, and the minute from the Chief of Air Staff to the Deputy Chief on February 10, 1942, (both quoted in Denis Richards & Hilary St G. Saunders, Vol 2, page 124, and footnote 1).
The Directive stated that, "the general aiming point was not to be a particular factory, but the most heavily built-up district".
Footnote 1; "In view of later controversy over Harris' interpretation of this directive, it is worth quoting the following minute from the Chief of Air Staff to the Deputy Chief on February 10, 1942: 'I suppose it is quite clear to the C.-in-C. that aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not for instance the dockyards or aircraft factories where these are mentioned'. The D.C.A.S. replied that he had specifically confirmed this point with Bomber Command by telephone".
The technique involved in Essen and Lübeck was the same. "An advance force would drop flares for fifteen minutes, relying entirely on Gee, and ignoring visual impressions in order not to be misled by decoys. Two minutes after the first flares went down, other aircraft of the attacking force would start bombing with incendiaries, taking as their aiming point the big square in the old town. After fifteen minutes the main force would begin to arrive, and would pile down its bombs on the fires already burning. The tactics, in other words, were to be a form of pathfinder/fire-raiser technique; but whatever the Luftwaffe had shown us of these methods in the autumn of 1940, (ie Coventry) was to be far surpassed. For even if the town was completely obscured by cloud, Gee it was thought , would ensure that at least one bomb would find its mark." (Source again page 124, Richards & Saunders).

Tony

[Bruce Dennis]

Thanks for that. I must point out that while you have quoted well known evidence to prove that there was a directive to target builltup areas within target cities/towns, that wasn’t the question that was raised by your earlier post: you said Lübeck wasn’t a legitimate target. For the reasons I touched on in post #10, Lübeck was emphatically a legitimate target. You replied that it was chosen because it would burn: like just about everywhere else in Europe, it was an old town and it burned. Attacking this port town, a vital conduit for Swedish high-grade iron ore for the German armaments industry, was clearly not a war crime.

Regards,
Bruce

[tcolvin]

I see your point, Bruce, but cannot accept it.
The phrase used by BC for Lübeck - port-town - is disingenuous, and the cause of our problem.
Lübeck comprised an Innenstadt that was targetted solely because it would burn, and quays along the opposite bank of the River Trave. The quays would not burn, and were therefore not targetted, but that was where the iron ore was offloaded into trains and barges. These were a legitimate target - see the attached photo.
Burning out the Innenstadt would not and could not reduce the imports of iron ore by one kg, or damage or delay the building of one U-boat. BC knew this and thereby committed their war crime.

And, by the way, it is untrue to say that just about every town in Europe was old and flammable.
Harris' big problem was how to create firestorms in non-flammable cities like Berlin, Essen and Wilhelmshaven. For it was only with a firestorm that he got a big bang for his buck.

I know about Wilhelmshaven - it was where I went to school. Wilhelmshaven was a legitimate target because it built the Tirpitz and then built Type VII U-boats and Type XXI sections that were assembled into U-boats in Vegesack and Hamburg.
Wilhelmshaven was a Victorian town, built of hardened brick called Klinker, and BC had no way of making it burn. It was raided about one hundred times, and was the first town attacked by Bomber Command (September 4, 1939) and the first German town attacked by the VIII USAAF (Memphis Belle and all that on January 27, 1943).
The area in the centre of Wilhelmshaven around the shipyard was 90% destroyed by HE. But not one day of production in the shipyard was lost. The shipyard was only lightly damaged and easily repaired.
But the interesting point is that the exchange rate between civilians and aircrew was favourable to the civilians; 358 civilians and 94 military died in Wilhelmshaven for a total of 452 German dead, with 1,125 wounded, out of a total population of 120,000 in 1939 and 70,000 in 1944. But 406 RAF and 450 US aircrew for a total of 856 aircrew perished while dropping 19,046 tons during 5,668 sorties. I have no figure for wounded aircrew.

This phenomenon was due to the fact that Wilhelmshaven was prepared for war and accepted as a legitimate target by both sides. Every German had a place in a bomb-proof Hochbunker from 1943 onwards; it was a non-flammable town; plenty of water and Kriegsmarine labour was available for fire-fighting; and the Flak and fighter defences were very strong.
The result was that it took BC 42.1 tons of bombs to kill one person in Wilhelmshaven, compared with only 138Kg of bombs needed to kill one person in Dresden and 750Kg in Lübeck. The average for Germany was 2.5 tons, and for the UK 830Kg.

Tony

[Don Pearson]

If the population surrounding an industrial target was also the predominant labor source for said target, would it still be a crime to target them? It may sound callous, but targeting skilled military workers seems the equivalent of destroying the drill press where he works. The same as not only shooting down aircraft, but ensuring the death of the pilot and crew.

Don

[PeterVerney]

Let us face it, we are comparing chalk with cheese. Judging by todays standards just possibly some of these actions were war crimes.

At the time we had the precedents of history, i.e the bombing of defenceless British cities by the Zeppelins and Gothas in WW1 and Guernica, Rotterdam, etc., etc., by the Luftwaffe in WWII. As a child at the time I heard bombs whistle over our roof to explode less than 100 yards away, underwent 20mm cannon shells knocking holes out of our walls as we ate breakfast, felt the roof lift off from the blast of a nearby V1.
We had been brought up with the mantra "The only good German is a dead one" and when we heard about Lubeck, Dresden, et al we said "Bloody good job" and wanted to hear that news every day. The current apologies and excuses are just mawkish.

[Nick Beale]

More in today's Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009...blitz-old-city