Like a forest regrowing after a fire, or a wound healing over after an injury, Europe has largely re-knitted and repaired itself after the devastation of World War II, now about three quarters of a century ago.
Still, when my family and I have traveled to Italy, Austria, Germany and other countries, I have not found it hard to discover what used to be, and how it has changed.
The vagaries of language and the challenges of my sweaty feet have been some of my musings for this newsletter. But something more serious has been on my mind for a while here in Prague: the actions of the United States in Europe in World War II, particularly our relentless bombing of cities.
In Naples a year ago, I visited the church of Santa Chiara in the oldest part of the city. There were pictures of what the basilica used to look like, before a bomb blew up within it. It was then rebuilt in a cleaner, less decorative style. In Vienna, we visited a flak tower that once aimed bullets at American bombers. It had been converted into an aquarium. And in Dresden, just two hours away up river from Prague, I saw a very old city now largely made up of a more sprawling urbanism of highways and free-standing buildings. It’s not hard to guess that something very different used to be there.
The Allies bombed European cities for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, as when Americans largely destroyed the walled city of Saint-Malo in France, the destruction of the city was a side effect of trying to defeat the German soldiers holed up there.
But what has occupied my thoughts is the intentional bombing of civilians and cities, mostly in Germany but also in some other countries, simply to kill the civilians and destroy the cities.
Between 1940 and 1945, the allied powers, particularly the British and then the Americans, bombed virtually every city in Germany, and killed an estimated half million people, say sources I’ve looked at. In Germany the cities included Stuggart, Berlin, Würzburg, Dessau, Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Hanover, Nuremberg and Chemnitz, to name just a few. An book review in the Guardian quotes the author as estimating 600,000 people were killed, including 76,000 children, and that 160 German cities destroyed at least in part.
The British started this campaign after more strategic bombing failed. Later, the Americans pitched in too. I tend to focus on American actions because, well, it’s my country.
Were these bombings war crimes? This has been on my mind for the last few years, in part because I’m here in Europe. Some would say not, because after all, we were on the right side of history. We defeated Hitler and the Nazis, who were unquestionably on the wrong side of history.
But does being the good guys overall excuse all actions?
The argument for these bombings being war crimes is that the Allies were intentionally targeting civilians. They were trying to kill as many Germans, and sometimes Italians and Austrians, as possible. It is what is now called terror bombing. They judged the Germans collectively guilty, a troublesome concept.
Another reason this is on my mind is more topical. There has been a lot of discussion of charging President Vladimir Putin of Russia with war crimes for his actions in the Ukraine. The International Criminal Court has issued warrants for Putin’s arrest for the forcible removal of children. Many have said Putin should be charged with war crimes for the intentional bombing of civilians in cities, such as Kyiv, and for targeting essential infrastructure in an effort to starve or otherwise hurt civilians. Both of these are war crimes under various treaties and conventions.
This is fine with me. I strongly back supporting and helping Ukraine in its war against Russia, who invaded it and were and are the aggressors. And I support holding those accountable who commit war crimes.
But when I read news reports speculating about Russian war crimes, I do wonder why there isn’t even a passing mention of The United States doing the same thing. The World War II bombings first come to mind. But then I think about Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and other wars. In Vietnam I have read that more than a million Vietnamese civilians were killed. I don’t know how many were killed by American bombs, but I suspect a healthy percentage.
I am influenced by a book I read called The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945, written by a historian Nicholas Stargardt. He tried to show how Germans experienced the war. The bombing was a big part of their experience.
I have long sympathized with people of London suffering under the German bombing campaign. Feeling any empathy for someone in Stuttgart was a new emotion.
Some people will quickly engage in some Whataboutism and say: what about the Holocaust? What about the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews? Doesn’t that excuse the Allied civilian bombing? And what about the German bombing of cities, such as Rotterdam and London?
I don’t believe war crimes work that way or should work that way.
They particularly don’t work that way when an act has nothing to do with the wrong act on the other side. When the British began the terror bombing of German cities, the mass execution of Jews largely hadn’t begun. And when they had begun, the bombing were not an attempt to stop them. The extent of the murder of the Jews wasn’t known until the end of the war. I suppose you could say every effort in the war was trying to beat the Germans, and thus stop all the criminal acts of their leaders, and is therefore excusable. But by this logic everything is permitted. Which I don’t think is where we want to end up.
Some otherwise very astute people miss this. I was struck by an essay in the Atlantic magazine by Cynthia Ozick,, a writer whose work I have read for years in The New Yorker.
Ozick told a moving story of how when she was a college student in the late 1940s, she began a correspondence in German with a former German soldier, Karl Gustav Specht. They were pen pals. Ozik was struck by how perceptive and sensitive he was. He would become after the war a prominent sociologist. But the correspondence ended when the German implicitly raised the subject of the allied bombing by sending her pictures of the destruction visited on his city, Cologne. To Ozick, a Jew, Specht was showing his insensitivity by not understanding that any destruction of his city was more than counterbalanced by the murder of the jews.
“How could a man of learned intelligence, of elastic perception, have fallen into so terrifying a contradiction?”, she asks in the essay.
But I saw no contradiction in Specht’s apparent position. He was not saying that “atrocity cancels atrocity,” as Ozick accuses. To me, he was simply saying we have suffered too. And perhaps unjustly.
I concluded Ozick was the one who was insensitive. She spends a good chunk of the essay recounting the horrors of the holocaust. But the civilian bombing of Cologne and other cities had nothing to do with stopping the Holocaust, except in the most general of terms. That Ozick can’t see that shows her insensitivity, despite her own “learned intelligence.” Her position appears to be one crime justifies another.
The bombing of European and particularly German cities accelerated in the last year of the war. According to one source, sixty percent of all the bombs on Germany fell in the last nine months of the war.
One troublesome explanation I found for this is that the Allies were basically trying to get their licks in before the war ended. They wanted to kill as many Germans as possible, to teach them a lesson, and possibly have fewer Germans around to start wars in the future.
In looking into this, there are arguments that the bombing of civilians in World War II was not technically illegal yet. There were international treaties governing war, but they had mostly been written and signed before airplanes were invented or widely used. Even if that is so, that doesn’t prevent us now from talking about the bombing of European cities from a more current perspective.
I should say what I hope is obvious, that I’m not defending the Nazis. I’m not saying the Americans and the Allies weren’t overall on the right side of history. I’m not trying to take away from the valor of those who fought against the Nazis and their fascist friends. I’m also not even working to condemn the bombing of European cities. What bothers me is that they are ignored. They are dropped down the memory hole, as George Orwell would say.
I am also not considering the American war in the Pacific, including the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the firebombing of Tokyo. There are similar questions to be raised there, but the context is different and I’m not living in Asia.
Here’s the rub: If those charges against Putin are to have any validity, we need to have clear-cut standards that are applied equally. If we judge Putin guilty of war crimes for intentionally bombing civilians, we should at least mention we did the same thing not so long ago.
I believe the concept of war crimes has helped humanity progress. It’s not just a feel-good exercise or virtue signaling. War itself for the purpose of conquering territory has been judged illegal since at least 1945. And it’s now thought that has had a real impact. The international rules against torture have had impact, even if the United States unfortunately violated them under President George W. Bush.
It was surprising to me to read there was some effort to head off the bombing of German cities. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, not now well regarded because of his concessions at Munich, “In June 1938, . . . issued the following instructions to British Bomber Command in the event of an outbreak of war with Germany:
“1. It is against international law to bomb civilians as such and to make deliberate attacks on the civilian population.
“2. Targets which are aimed at from the air must be legitimate military objectives and must be capable of identification.
“3. Reasonable care must be taken in attacking those military objectives so that by carelessness a civilian population in the neighbourhood is not bombed.”
Winston Churchill took over from Chamberlain. It was under Churchill's watch that the British began targeting civilians. I don’t know if he encouraged these actions or was talked into it.
When I lived there in Norfolk in the 1990s, I was friends with an older man who had been a bomber pilot in World War II. He said he still felt guilty about bombing Vienna around Christmas . He also said he never expected to survive the war. I’m glad he did. I think one can feel genuine sympathy and respect for this man, while still questioning whether bombing a largely civilian city was necessary or right. (Although in the case of Vienna, there were apparently more industrial targets there.) I think we have to realize that it’s not only demons or sociopaths who engage in war crimes. It’s us. And this, oddly enough, should help us collectively see and enforce laws against war crimes. You don’t have to be a bad guy to commit them.
So I guess I’m done here. This was a grimmer subject than usual. But I feel I should let you, my readers, into what’s going on inside my head while here in Europe, from the sweet, to the savory, to the bitter.
The Sun Keeps on Coming
I continue to marvel at how the hours of daylight expand as we head toward summer. I predict by mid June we will make it to more than 16 hours of sunlight a day, which means less than eight hours of darkness per night.
Tummy Time
Although I’m a believer in only eating at meal times, so as to increase the appetite and the pleasure of those meals, I occasionally want a lighter lunch.
Light is hard to do here in Prague. Three times in the last week, I ended up eating much more than I wanted. It’s simply hard to find lighter fare here.
The first time last week it was getting on toward 2 pm and I still had not eaten lunch. I didn’t want to eat too much, because I knew I was preparing a larger meal for dinner. So the only thing I could think of was stopping in the restaurant downstairs for what in my mind was the equivalent of a hot dog.
What came was an enormous thing. Excellent. Just not very light.