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Myths
War creates its own myths. Catastrophes such as the Dunkirk evacuation become heroic retreats, almost victories. A vanquished nation such as the Netherlands tries to compensate for the trauma in myths explaining the defeat – like the tale of the German paratroopers being disguised as nuns in 1940. Stalingrad did not break the German Army's back in the East: after Stalingrad, the German Army was still strong enough to successfully undertake major offensive operations. It was the battle of Kursk that marked the watershed: thereafter, the German Army did no longer carry out offensives, but continued defensive warfare – and very capably at that. If Stalingrad had still been called Volgograd then as it is again now, it might have become less famous…
One interesting myth I became involved in during the war was the biological warfare carried out by the Americans. You may be surprised, but that was why in 1943 schoolkids (including yours truly) were sent into the Dutch potato fields to collect Colorado beetles, of which there was a serious plague then. German propaganda correctly pointed out that Colorado beetles come from Colorado, which happens to be situated where? Yes, the USA, so obviously the dastardly American gangster pilots had dropped bushels of the beasties… I caught at least 20 of them, however!
But some myths have been created after the war, for political reasons. Throughout the war, we never used the words Fascism or Fascists. For the very good reason that we never had to deal with the Italian Fascists, but with the German Nazis. There were major ideological differences between the two, and it would have been much preferable had we been occupied by the Italians – for one thing, most of the Dutch Jews would have survived.
In all probability, this was a case of intentional obfuscation. After the war, the extreme Left, inspired by the Soviet Union, tried to claim having played the leading role in the resistance, conveniently glossing over the two years of whole-hearted co-operation with Germany, between the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 and the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. There was a slight problem, though: the Soviet Union called itself a Socialist (not a communist !) state (hence the second S in USSR) and Hitler's National Socialism also appeared to be a form of Socialism. This incidentally focused unwelcome attention on the marked similarity in humanitarian views of Stalin and Hitler, and therefore the extreme Left consistently talked of Fascism, not National Socialism – and this disinformation has turned out to be impossible to correct afterwards. Thus, the Berlin Wall (and the entire Iron Curtain) was called the "Antifascist Protective Wall" until it came down in 1989.
The sky as a theatre
In 1943 the sky became a grand spectacle for us. Thus far, the RAF had only come over at night (with a few exceptions), but gradually the USAAF also joined the fray, in daylight. At first these were not very large formations but they became larger as time moved on, especially in early 1944. This was a fantastic sight: scores of B17s or B24s, each with four contrails, visible from 40 miles away or so in bright sunlight. They were too high to see much detail, but nevertheless it was often clear that everything was not as it should be, especially for formations returning from Germany (the inbound route was never the same as the outbound). There were evident gaps in the Groups, some aircraft showed only three contrails, there were stragglers and parachutes suddenly blossoming, and occasionally an aircraft started to burn or went out of control. Although aircraft wrecks immediately attracted German guards, we did collect some mementos– the most intrigueing being fragments of perspex, "glass that burned".
The general impression among the younger generation now is that these formations came over frequently, perhaps once every two weeks or so, but that was not the case, of course. Routes varied and all in all I estimate that I've witnessed perhaps 4 or 5 such bomber streams altogether. In late 1944 the situation changed markedly and bomber streams became less frequent both by day and by night. As the entire German fighter control system in France had collapsed, the strategic bombers often used that route. Tactical air-to-ground attacks, shooting up trains, for instance, became increasingly frequent, however.
But by far my most memorable view of war in the sky was on the night of 13-14th July, 1943. During the summer vacations, we once more went to the South for 2 weeks – life still went on in a semblance of normality. The village was some 12 miles from the German city of Aachen, which on that night was the target of the last attack in the campaign that became known as the Battle of the Ruhr. My brother and I heard them coming and ran outside, where we were witnesses to a classic operation: Pathfinders, Illuminators, Backers-Up and finally the Main Force, 374 bombers in all, with "Christmas Trees", enormous photo-flashes, searchlights, flak grenades exploding and one or two burning aircraft going down.
On terror bombing
Even during the war, some voices were raised doubting the morality of strategic bombing. After the war, especially in the "progressive" Sixties, armchair moralists began to criticize the strategic bombing campaign against Germany on moral grounds, citing the heavy losses among the civilians.
That question is basically fallacious, it's not to be decided whether bombing is morally wrong, it's the issue of whether killing civilians in war by any method (the sword, pointblank shooting, naval gunfire etc.) is against the laws of war – given that war itself is an immoral activity.
For this particular dilemma, one might look for guidance in the Bible and consider texts like Deuteronomy 2:33-36, Deuteronomy 3:6, Deuteronomy 20:16 or Joshua 8: 24 and 8:28, to give but a few examples. Now don't misunderstand me: I have personally heard such texts quoted by very orthodox Christians when the bombing of Germany was being discussed. We knew rather well what was going on there because men that had been recruited for work in German industry decided to go into hiding when they came home on leave and told us of the bombing they had experienced. Texts like these were indeed quoted by reverends in their Sunday sermons and every churchgoer immediately understood what they were alluding to – and felt uplifted. This consultation of Scripture might thus easily lead to "what was good for the Hebrew children is good enough for me", or "Berlin deserves the same treatment as Joshua meted out unto the city of Ai". So the logical conclusion might then well be: "the above quotes from the Bible all describe acts that were carried out with the approval of a Higher Authority, so who's belly-aching about the fire-bombing of Tokyo in 1945?"
There is, therefore, a time-honoured tradition of indiscriminate killing in war, from the Bible to the Thirty Years' War and into modern times. The strategic bombing campaign by the British and Americans really got under way as late as 1942 and 1943 respectively, but it was merely a continuation of earlier practice. The tradition was started on 13th August 1913 by Franz von Hiddeson by bombing Paris and a small selection of subsequent improvements might read: Zeppelin bombings 1916, Gotha bombings 1917 (in both cases various British cities), Kondor Legion (various Spanish cities) 1937-1939, various British cities 1940-1941, Belgrade 1941 etcetera. So actually the Allies were latecomers.
The crucial point is that Clausewitz was wrong when he said that "war is the continuation of politics by other means". He spoke of political war between equals. Some conflicts, however, especially those nowadays, are not political, but ideological, where each party declares the adversary "subhuman", "infidels" or "Forces of Evil". Dzhengis Khan once told an emissary of a city he was going to destroy: "Ye must have been very evil that God sent one like me to punish thee". When the enemy is declared evil, we return to Biblical times and practices, and anything goes!
Bloopers
For a long time, therefore, the bomber streams were the only phenomenon nourishing our hope that someday the Nazi régime would come to an end. But unfortunately, sometimes things went wrong and civilians were bombed not by their enemies, but by those whom they hoped would deliver them from their enemies. Two of the most infamous such cases occurring in the Netherlands were:
February 22, 1944: the city of Nijmegen is bombed in clear weather by a formation of the USAAF. No military targets were present or hit, circa 800 civilians were killed. Some time later, I saw the large-scale devastation this had caused when I visited the city. With the vaunted Norden bombsight claimed to guarantee "precision bombing", the bombers did not only hit the wrong city, but even the wrong country.
March 3, 1945: the Bezuidenhout quarter of The Hague is bombed in clear weather by the RAF. The intended target was V2 launching sites in the woods about a mile away. Circa 550 deaths, some 400 missing, no military targets were present or hit. My grandmother lost all her possessions in that one. Such an attack on the mobile V2 launching stands would have been completely senseless anyhow, but there is no way in which the densely populated built-up area could ever have been mistaken for a forest. The British government offered apologies.
In both cases, the word "aiming error" is not applicable, "criminal negligence" is more like it.
End, part 8
War creates its own myths. Catastrophes such as the Dunkirk evacuation become heroic retreats, almost victories. A vanquished nation such as the Netherlands tries to compensate for the trauma in myths explaining the defeat – like the tale of the German paratroopers being disguised as nuns in 1940. Stalingrad did not break the German Army's back in the East: after Stalingrad, the German Army was still strong enough to successfully undertake major offensive operations. It was the battle of Kursk that marked the watershed: thereafter, the German Army did no longer carry out offensives, but continued defensive warfare – and very capably at that. If Stalingrad had still been called Volgograd then as it is again now, it might have become less famous…
One interesting myth I became involved in during the war was the biological warfare carried out by the Americans. You may be surprised, but that was why in 1943 schoolkids (including yours truly) were sent into the Dutch potato fields to collect Colorado beetles, of which there was a serious plague then. German propaganda correctly pointed out that Colorado beetles come from Colorado, which happens to be situated where? Yes, the USA, so obviously the dastardly American gangster pilots had dropped bushels of the beasties… I caught at least 20 of them, however!
But some myths have been created after the war, for political reasons. Throughout the war, we never used the words Fascism or Fascists. For the very good reason that we never had to deal with the Italian Fascists, but with the German Nazis. There were major ideological differences between the two, and it would have been much preferable had we been occupied by the Italians – for one thing, most of the Dutch Jews would have survived.
In all probability, this was a case of intentional obfuscation. After the war, the extreme Left, inspired by the Soviet Union, tried to claim having played the leading role in the resistance, conveniently glossing over the two years of whole-hearted co-operation with Germany, between the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 and the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. There was a slight problem, though: the Soviet Union called itself a Socialist (not a communist !) state (hence the second S in USSR) and Hitler's National Socialism also appeared to be a form of Socialism. This incidentally focused unwelcome attention on the marked similarity in humanitarian views of Stalin and Hitler, and therefore the extreme Left consistently talked of Fascism, not National Socialism – and this disinformation has turned out to be impossible to correct afterwards. Thus, the Berlin Wall (and the entire Iron Curtain) was called the "Antifascist Protective Wall" until it came down in 1989.
The sky as a theatre
In 1943 the sky became a grand spectacle for us. Thus far, the RAF had only come over at night (with a few exceptions), but gradually the USAAF also joined the fray, in daylight. At first these were not very large formations but they became larger as time moved on, especially in early 1944. This was a fantastic sight: scores of B17s or B24s, each with four contrails, visible from 40 miles away or so in bright sunlight. They were too high to see much detail, but nevertheless it was often clear that everything was not as it should be, especially for formations returning from Germany (the inbound route was never the same as the outbound). There were evident gaps in the Groups, some aircraft showed only three contrails, there were stragglers and parachutes suddenly blossoming, and occasionally an aircraft started to burn or went out of control. Although aircraft wrecks immediately attracted German guards, we did collect some mementos– the most intrigueing being fragments of perspex, "glass that burned".
The general impression among the younger generation now is that these formations came over frequently, perhaps once every two weeks or so, but that was not the case, of course. Routes varied and all in all I estimate that I've witnessed perhaps 4 or 5 such bomber streams altogether. In late 1944 the situation changed markedly and bomber streams became less frequent both by day and by night. As the entire German fighter control system in France had collapsed, the strategic bombers often used that route. Tactical air-to-ground attacks, shooting up trains, for instance, became increasingly frequent, however.
But by far my most memorable view of war in the sky was on the night of 13-14th July, 1943. During the summer vacations, we once more went to the South for 2 weeks – life still went on in a semblance of normality. The village was some 12 miles from the German city of Aachen, which on that night was the target of the last attack in the campaign that became known as the Battle of the Ruhr. My brother and I heard them coming and ran outside, where we were witnesses to a classic operation: Pathfinders, Illuminators, Backers-Up and finally the Main Force, 374 bombers in all, with "Christmas Trees", enormous photo-flashes, searchlights, flak grenades exploding and one or two burning aircraft going down.
On terror bombing
Even during the war, some voices were raised doubting the morality of strategic bombing. After the war, especially in the "progressive" Sixties, armchair moralists began to criticize the strategic bombing campaign against Germany on moral grounds, citing the heavy losses among the civilians.
That question is basically fallacious, it's not to be decided whether bombing is morally wrong, it's the issue of whether killing civilians in war by any method (the sword, pointblank shooting, naval gunfire etc.) is against the laws of war – given that war itself is an immoral activity.
For this particular dilemma, one might look for guidance in the Bible and consider texts like Deuteronomy 2:33-36, Deuteronomy 3:6, Deuteronomy 20:16 or Joshua 8: 24 and 8:28, to give but a few examples. Now don't misunderstand me: I have personally heard such texts quoted by very orthodox Christians when the bombing of Germany was being discussed. We knew rather well what was going on there because men that had been recruited for work in German industry decided to go into hiding when they came home on leave and told us of the bombing they had experienced. Texts like these were indeed quoted by reverends in their Sunday sermons and every churchgoer immediately understood what they were alluding to – and felt uplifted. This consultation of Scripture might thus easily lead to "what was good for the Hebrew children is good enough for me", or "Berlin deserves the same treatment as Joshua meted out unto the city of Ai". So the logical conclusion might then well be: "the above quotes from the Bible all describe acts that were carried out with the approval of a Higher Authority, so who's belly-aching about the fire-bombing of Tokyo in 1945?"
There is, therefore, a time-honoured tradition of indiscriminate killing in war, from the Bible to the Thirty Years' War and into modern times. The strategic bombing campaign by the British and Americans really got under way as late as 1942 and 1943 respectively, but it was merely a continuation of earlier practice. The tradition was started on 13th August 1913 by Franz von Hiddeson by bombing Paris and a small selection of subsequent improvements might read: Zeppelin bombings 1916, Gotha bombings 1917 (in both cases various British cities), Kondor Legion (various Spanish cities) 1937-1939, various British cities 1940-1941, Belgrade 1941 etcetera. So actually the Allies were latecomers.
The crucial point is that Clausewitz was wrong when he said that "war is the continuation of politics by other means". He spoke of political war between equals. Some conflicts, however, especially those nowadays, are not political, but ideological, where each party declares the adversary "subhuman", "infidels" or "Forces of Evil". Dzhengis Khan once told an emissary of a city he was going to destroy: "Ye must have been very evil that God sent one like me to punish thee". When the enemy is declared evil, we return to Biblical times and practices, and anything goes!
Bloopers
For a long time, therefore, the bomber streams were the only phenomenon nourishing our hope that someday the Nazi régime would come to an end. But unfortunately, sometimes things went wrong and civilians were bombed not by their enemies, but by those whom they hoped would deliver them from their enemies. Two of the most infamous such cases occurring in the Netherlands were:
February 22, 1944: the city of Nijmegen is bombed in clear weather by a formation of the USAAF. No military targets were present or hit, circa 800 civilians were killed. Some time later, I saw the large-scale devastation this had caused when I visited the city. With the vaunted Norden bombsight claimed to guarantee "precision bombing", the bombers did not only hit the wrong city, but even the wrong country.
March 3, 1945: the Bezuidenhout quarter of The Hague is bombed in clear weather by the RAF. The intended target was V2 launching sites in the woods about a mile away. Circa 550 deaths, some 400 missing, no military targets were present or hit. My grandmother lost all her possessions in that one. Such an attack on the mobile V2 launching stands would have been completely senseless anyhow, but there is no way in which the densely populated built-up area could ever have been mistaken for a forest. The British government offered apologies.
In both cases, the word "aiming error" is not applicable, "criminal negligence" is more like it.
End, part 8
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