Lest We Forget: The Hidden History of British War Crimes in World War II

As the British state celebrates the 80th anniversary of the so-called Victory in Europe, the real truth about WW2 is being buried under an avalanche of one-sided reporting. Lost under this rock pile of patriotic bilge is any sense of the true carnage of war in general and the horrendous war crimes committed by Britain in particular.

This is not a question of fact checking but of fact selection which deliberately discards or conceals weighty historical facts that would at least tip the narrative in a different direction. The BBC are past masters at this art of concealment in which all of the mainstream media are now complicit.

The carnage of war 

From the highpoint of Empire in the late 19th century  and the start of the Boer War in 1899, the following 100 years leading to the Gulf War of 1990 witnessed no fewer than 20 wars. According to the Imperial War Museum in London, a minimum of 187 million people lost their lives as a direct result of war from 1900 to the present day. A good number of those fatalities was accounted for by the 27 million people who lost their lives in the former Soviet Union during WW2.  

Out of this total number, several million more civilians - the majority of them Germans, Japanese and Koreans - were victims of US and British war crimes in WW2 and thereafter in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. This was not a matter of collateral damage but part of a conscious and systematic scorched earth policy which continues to this day in Gaza.

As a result, for every British civilian adult and child killed as a result of the Nazi blitz on British cities, there were ten more who died from British and Allied bombing of German and Japanese cities. The ratio itself is not the most remarkable issue. More shockingly, it is the fact that the British and Allied aerial blitzkrieg was modeled using the Nazi prototype.

The British and Allied holocaust 

Central to this highly choreographed celebration of WW2 is a condemnation of the Nazi holocaust and genocide against the Jewish population in Germany and other parts of occupied Europe. The horrors of this holocaust and the scale of its brutality and inhumanity are undeniable. 

However, just as this is weaponised today to justify the barbaric slaughter being perpetrated against the Palestinian people, it is also used as a smokescreen to conceal the holocaust from hell inflicted by the Allies upon the German and Japanese civilian populations during WW2 

From the time of the celebrated Dam Busters assault on German dams during WW2, through to the Korean War, both Westminster and Washington used tens of thousands of tons of mass incendiary explosives, resulting in the obliteration of dozens of cities and the extermination of millions of unarmed civilians. It was a holocaust in every respect, a genocidal campaign of deliberate mass slaughter rained down from the skies. 

The justification and rationale for this is a matter of historical record.

In May 1941 the UK director of Air Intelligence, Group Captain F W Winterbotham, urged a bombing campaign that would target,  

“the livelihood, the homes, the cooking, heating, lighting and family life of that section of the population which, in any country, is least mobile and most vulnerable to a general air attack—the working class.” 

The Nazi modeling of this cold, calculated genocide was measured on a specific scale of destruction provided by the blitzkrieg of 1940 when the city of Coventry was hit by 515 German bombers carrying a variety of heavy-duty incendiary bombs dropped indiscriminately over the city. The raid accomplished such a scale of destruction that Joseph Goebbels later used the term coventrieren ("coventried") when describing similar levels of destruction of other enemy towns.  

In addition to applying the same murderous tactics, and on a far wider scale, British Bomber Command also aped the Nazi terminology. When calculations were made of the ratio between weight of bombs and expected deaths among German workers, the measurements were given as “1 Coventry,” “2 Coventries,” and so on; an attack on the scale of “4 Coventries” was expected to yield 22,515 German deaths. 

Echoes of Gaza 

It was this which underpinned the strategy developed by Arthur “bomber” Harris as head of Bomber Command.   The terror bombing he argued,  

“should be unambiguously stated” as “the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany ... the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale” 

The sinister intentions behind this were noted by the right-wing historian, Max Hastings who wrote:  

“He [Bomber Harris] believed there were no shortcuts to victory. It was necessary to concentrate all available forces for the progressive, systematic destruction of the urban areas of the Reich, city block by city block, factory by factory, until the enemy became a nation of troglodytes, scratching in the ruins.” 

The apocalyptic intent of this was certainly known to everyone within the wartime coalition and is illustrated by Richard Overy in his superb book The Bombing War:  

“This had allowed [Air Chief Marshall] Portal in November 1942 to present the chiefs of staff with the grisly prediction that Bomber Command in 18 months could kill 900,000 Germans, seriously injure another 1 million, destroy 6 million homes and dehouse 25 million people.” 

Apocalypse now: Hamburg and Dresden  

Amongst the wholesale slaughter of innocents in Germany, the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden, stood out as the cruelest and most murderous assaults of all.  

The incineration of Hamburg was codenamed Operation Gomorrah, invoking the name of the biblical city destroyed with sulphur and fire, rained down by a wrathful God. In this instance the avenging angel appeared in the form of the RAF and, after just one hour,it succeeded in devastating the city and its inhabitants with 2,284 tons of bombs, including an average of 17,000 incendiaries for every square kilometre.  

It was July 1943 and the raids continued for 10 days. For their sin of being German, 45,000 people perished in a vast firestorm that destroyed 60 per cent of the city’s houses and apartments; 24 hospitals and 277 schools were also incinerated.  

Such was the intensity of the incendiary bombing that large sections of the city became transformed into crematoria where the body count could only be measured by the amount of ash left on the floor. 

 The bombing of Dresden claimed fewer casualties but was even more shocking for its calculated brutality. Dresden was considered one of the world’s most beautiful cities because of its architectural and art treasures. It had also become a refugee centre providing shelter for hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing from the Russian offensive in the East. As the war was nearing its end in 1945, few people believed that Dresden could possibly be a target for carpet bombing.  

On the night of February 13, the British Bomber Command hit Dresden with a fleet of 800 bomber aircraft, dropping some 2,700 tons of bombs, including large numbers of incendiaries. The U.S. Eighth Air Force followed the next day with another 400 tons of bombs and carried out yet another raid by 210 bombers on February 15.  

The number of civilian casualties resulting from this carnage was estimated to be in the region of 25,000 – 35,000, the vast majority being women, children and the elderly.  

One witness later recalled the apocalyptic scene:  

“There was an indescribable roar in the air ….... The thundering fire reminded me of the biblical catastrophes that I had heard about in my education in the humanities. I was aghast. I can’t describe seeing this city burn in any other way. The color had changed as well. It was no longer pinkish-red. The fire had become a furious white and yellow, and the sky was just one massive mountain of cloud.” 

An RAF memo issued to airmen on the night of the attacks described their intentions as follows:  

“Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester is also the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westward and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas.......... The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.” 

Overall, the Allied holocaust in Germany claimed 600,000 lives, including 76,000 German children. A million people were seriously injured, with millions more suffering “minor” injuries. In the space of 3 years between 1942-1945, 61 German cities, were bombed to smithereens; 3.6 million homes were destroyed and 7.5 million people were made homeless. With an estimated 50–60 percent of the urban area of Germany being completely obliterated, the casualties could have been far higher. 

By comparison, the number of civilian casualties resulting from German bombing of Britain was approximately 60,000, of which 7,600 were children.  

The nightmare did not end there. Far from it. Carpet bombing of civilian targets had now become de rigeur in the Allied war strategy. 

Slaughterhouse 2: Japan 

The whole world knows of the shameful mass murder inflicted by Washington’s unprovoked nuclear attack on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Acting with the direct and unqualified consent of Westminster, and with no advance warning that might have afforded some opportunity for evacuation, the bombs devastated both cities, killing up to an estimated 220,000 civilians in the immediate aftermath of the attack.  

As subsequent documentary evidence has demonstrated, this had nothing  whatsoever to do with bringing the war to an earlier end.  Japan was already on its knees, in large part due the carpet bombing which had been carried out prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Even General Curtis LeMay, the commanding general of the Pacific bombing campaign against the Japanese, and one of the most bloodthirsty men in military history, stated in September 1945:  

“The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”  

LeMay knew what he was talking about, for it was he who planned and executed the carpet bombing of Japan both prior to and following the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By mid-June, two months before the atom bombs were dropped, Japan's six largest cities, including Tokyo, had been devastated and some 40% of the built-up areas of 66 cities had already been destroyed, with civilian casualties well in excess of those who would get nuked in August. It was this butchery which convinced him that Japan was ripe for surrender. 

Taken as a whole, the Allied bombing campaign against Japan resulted in approximately 330,000 to 500,000 civilian deaths. The most devastating single attack was the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, which alone killed an estimated 88,000 to 100,000 people.  

The genocidal intention behind all of this - that is to say, the deliberate slaughter of a large part of the Japanese population – was clearly stated. It was tacitly admitted by General Le May who declared at the time:  

“If we lose, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” 

It is in this context that we should view the butchery in Gaza. This is not something which is peculiar to Israel, but rather a product of modern imperialism whose constant and savage quest for expansion and hegemony has institutionalised extermination as a central component of modern warfare.  

The celebrations around VE day and the 1918 armistice are not just an unbridled display of rank hypocrisy and patriotism They are orchestrated for the very real purpose of glorifying old wars, the better to prepare for new ones.  

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