The Bombing of Dresden - A Just War

Recent attacks on the World Trade Centre, New York, and the subsequent discussions worldwide concerning a possible ongoing “war” against terrorism bring to mind that usually disregarded of Jesus’ commandments, “Love thy enemy.”

For the first three centuries after Christ, most Christians steadfastly followed the principles of non-violence, which was seen as a direct expression of the nature of God. But when Constantine recognised Christianity as the established religion, the church that had stood up non-violently to the repression of the Roman Empire found itself strangely victorious.

What happened next was as if Satan, unable to defeat the church by violence, surrendered to the church and became its ward. The church, in turn, assumed the role of guardian to an empire eager for its support. Christianity collapsed into a religion of personal salvation in an afterlife jealously guarded by a wrathful and terrifying God – the whole system carefully managed by an elite corps of priests with direct backing from the state.

Once the church accepted the Empire as its protector, it became necessary to defend it by blessing war and persecuting other religions, as well as “heretical” Christians. From this arose crusades and inquisitions.

Christians, who still claimed to worship Jesus, if not all His commandments and principles of non-violence, then had to produce some kind of justification for war. This took the form of the so-called Just War Principle first penned by St. Thomas Aquinas, an Italian theologian and scholastic philosopher whose teachings have had an enormous influence on the Roman Catholic Church. Interestingly his achievements in developing arguments for the existence of God were indebted to both Aristotle, whose work he made acceptable in Christian Western Europe, and Arab philosophers.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, for a Christian to participate, a war has to fulfil seven principles:

1) A Just War can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified. 2) A War is Just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even Just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate. 3) A Just War can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defence against an armed attack is always considered to be a Just cause. Further, a Just War can only be fought with “right” intentions. The only permissible objective of a Just War is to redress the injury. 4) A war can only be Just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injuries incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable. 5) The ultimate goal of a Just War is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the War must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the War had not been fought. 6) The violence used in the War must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to obtain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered. 7) The weapons used in War must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of War, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justifiable only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.

Some wars can meet all these conditions. President Bush is proposing such a war now, even though his statement of “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” reeks of hypocrisy when considering that when it comes to the IRA, the American government is with the terrorists. They’ve even invited Gerry Adams to the White House! And for what purpose? So Clinton could secure the “Irish” vote.

How would Americans feel if we invited Osama Bin Laden to talks at Downing Street? A little peeved I should imagine, but there’s very little difference.

George Bush has asked governments around the world to “choose between the United States and the terrorists.” And that’s all very well. But he needs to lead by example and choose between the countries he’s now asking favours from and the terrorists America appears to support. Until he demonstrates that he’s able to deal with supporters of the IRA and the Sinn Fein in his own midst, his ability to persuade others is going to remain very much diminished.

I personally am all for standing shoulder-to-shoulder with America in its war against terrorism. I love the country, spent many years there and I love the people. But I do object to being told what to do and what to believe.

However, to all intents and purposes, this war, if it occurs, would certainly appear to be a Just War. As, at least from the British and American point of view, so was World War 11 ….. or was it?

Well, it was fought by Germany and Allied countries who were legal authorities. All forms of negotiation with Hitler and the Third Reich had failed. Germany was being attacked for invading other countries. The intention was to correct the evil which Germany was doing. The Allies felt that we had a reasonable chance of success and, indeed, we did win. And most of the fighting was limited to the armies concerned and to harbours and munitions sites.

On the surface this looks as though it was a properly constituted Just War. They were the bad guys and we were the goodies ….. or were we?

On February 13th 1945, World War 11 in Europe was nearly over. For all practical purposes Germany was already defeated. Italy, and Germany’s other European allies, had fallen by the wayside. The Red Army was rushing to occupy vast areas of what had been Germany in the East, while the allies of the Soviets, the British and Americans, were bombing what was left of Germany’s defences and food and transportation infrastructure into non-existence.

Dresden was a city of art, museums, theatres and sports stadiums. She was a city of artists and craftsmen, of actors and dancers, of tourists and merchants and the hotels that served them. She had no significant military or even industrial installations. And because of this, Dresden had become a city of children, of women, of refugees, and of the injured and maimed who were recovering from their wounds in her many hospitals.

These women and children, these wounded soldiers, these infirm and elderly people, these refugees fleeing from the Communist armies to the East, had come to Dresden because it was commonly believed at the time that Dresden would not be attacked. Its lack of strategic or military or industrial significance, and the well-known presence of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian refugees and even Allied prisoners of war, seemed to guarantee safety to the city. Surely, it was thought, not even a most powerful and determined enemy would be so depraved and sadistic, and so wasteful of that enemy’s resources, to attack such a city.

To repeat, there were no military objectives of any consequence in the city – its destruction could do nothing to weaken the Nazi war machine. British and American air warfare had left Dresden intact until this point.

Winston Churchill, as all are no doubt aware, was Britain’s prime minister at the time. He was also responsible for war strategy, especially regarding its political aims. Churchill’s goal in Europe was not only to destroy the military machine of Germany but to also stop the advance of the Soviet Union. With the latter in mind he decided to bomb Dresden.

Churchill, President Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin had just met to discuss the division of post-war Europe. Churchill’s goal in bombing Dresden was to impress the Soviets with the air power of the Western Allies and to make sure that the Red Army would seize a dead city.

The first wave of the attack consisted of about 2000 British bombers with additional support craft. They dropped over 3000 high explosives and 650,000 incendiary bombs (more commonly known as firebombs) on the centre of the city. Incendiary bombs were extremely effective in producing maximum loss of human life.

Despite the fact that they could clearly see the target area contained hospitals and sports stadia and residential areas of centre city Dresden, the bombers nevertheless obeyed orders and rained down a fiery death upon the unlucky inhabitants of that city on a scale which had never before been seen on planet Earth.

During the Blitz, 40,000 Londoners died during the course of four years. During that first attack on Dresden, hundreds of thousands of innocents were literally consumed by fire, an actual holocaust by the true definition of the word – complete consumption by fire. This firestorm was visible from a distance of 200 miles.

No pretence whatever had been made of selecting military targets.

The timing of the second wave was such as to ensure that a large quantity of the surviving civilians would have emerged from their shelters by that time, which was the case, and also in hopes that rescue and fire-fighting crews would have arrived from surrounding cities, which also proved to be true.

It is reported that body parts, pieces of clothing, tree branches, huge quantities of ash and miscellaneous debris from the firestorm fell for days on the surrounding countryside as far away as 18 miles. After the attack rescue workers found nothing but liquefied remains of the inhabitants of some shelters, where even the metal kitchen utensils had melted from the intense heat.

The next day, Valentine’s Day 1945, medical and other emergency personnel from all over Germany had converged on Dresden. Little did they suspect that yet a third wave of bombers was on its way, this time American. This attack had been carefully coordinated with the previous raid. 450 Flying Foresters and a support contingent of fighters arrived to finish the job at noon.

I quote from David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden:

“Just a few hours before Dresden had been a fairy-tale city of spires and cobbled streets ….. now total war had put an end to all that ….. The ferocity of the U.S. raid on February 14th had finally brought the people to their knees ….. but it was not the bombs which finally demoralised the people ….. it was the Mustang fighters, which suddenly appeared low over the city, firing on everything that moved ….. one section of the Mustangs concentrated on the banks of the Elbe river, where masses of bombed-out people had gathered ….. British prisoners who had been released from their burning camps were among the first to suffer the discomfort of machine-gun attacks.”

A fourth attack on Dresden concentrated its bomb load on the roads used by the fleeing population.

No fewer than 135,000 innocent victims (mostly women, children and older people) died, with some estimates as high as 300,000. More died in Dresden than in the well-known attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More destruction befell Dresden in two days than was inflicted on the whole of Britain during the entire war.

Apologists for the bombing point to Nazi Germany’s own crimes, of which there were certainly many. However, following the war’s end, the British and American occupiers were quick to allow all but the top Nazi leaders to play a role in Western Germany – to gain these “criminals” as allies against the USSR.

To reach the same political goal, both British and American rulers sacrificed more than 135,000 non-combatants with the bombing of Dresden.

In my humble opinion this broke the final condition of the Just War Principles – Only sufficient force must be used and civilians must not be involved. We should be very careful when we talk about a Just War because sometimes the waters tend to get a little muddied.

Just something to think about.