Professor harry elmer barnes a tireless exposer of historical myths

Whatever view be taken of Keitel’s fate, it certainly marked a turning point in history. Unsuspected by him and by his contemporaries in 1940 Nemesis was about to overtake the nations of Europe after so many centuries of indulgence with impunity in civil strife. The old standards, the old restraints, the old decencies, with so much else, were destined to disappear. Being done to death upon being taken prisoner was not included among the legitimate risks of soldiering at the time Keitel joined the army in 1901—unless, of course, one served against savages like the Dervishes or the Abyssinians. By, suffering death as a prisoner of war, Keitel achieved a far wider historical significance than he had achieved during his career. If and when the art of war becomes obsolete, his military achievements will be of interest only to antiquarians: his death by violence when a prisoner of war at Nuremberg in 1946 will be remembered as an event marking an important deviation in the development of human civilization.

As remarked above, the war of 1939-40 had, in itself, no outstanding characteristics. From outside, however, its course was dominated by an entirely new factor. Across the eastern frontier of Poland had arisen the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a gigantic quasi-Asiatic totalitarian military power with unlimited natural resources and a rapidly developing industrial system, “profoundly” (to quote General J. F. C. Fuller) “anti-Occidental in outlook.”¹

With this military colossus watching and waiting so near, civil war was no longer a domestic concern to be conducted at leisure, a mere matter of adjusting some frontiers and paying off a few old scores. Even the briefest civil war entailed serious consequences. Immediately hostilities had started, the U.S.S.R. set about realizing far-reaching plans for expansion at the expense of Europe. First, about one-third of Poland was annexed with bland indifference to the fact that Great Britain and France professed to be fighting to preserve the integrity of Poland. Then Finland, “sublime in the jaws of peril”, to quote Mr. Churchill, was attacked and subdued. Next, Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania were overrun and the leading members of the bourgeois classes liquidated or deported to the interior of Russia. With the collapse of France and the withdrawal of the British across the Channel, two urgent problems arose for the consideration of all Europeans—first, whether domination of Europe by the Soviet Union was too heavy a price to pay for the continuance of the civil war, and secondly, if this price was not too heavy, by what means was the war to be continued. Germany with a navy negligible in size could not send an army across the sea to invade Great Britain; single-handed Great Britain could never hope to invade Europe with an army strong enough to avoid its being immediately attacked and overwhelmed.

To put the problem in a nutshell: the essential rule of civilized warfare laid down that hostilities must be limited to the combatant forces. But, as from June 25th, 1940, the combatant forces were separated by the sea. How in such circumstances could hostilities be continued?

Hitler’s solution of this problem was an offer to negotiate peace. We need not consider whether this offer was sincere, since any other course from his point of view, would have been madness. He had achieved all and much more than all he had set out to achieve and Germany lay under the shadow of the Red Army.² Nor need we consider what terms he would have been willing to offer since his proposal was not even accorded a reply. In their speeches to the House of Commons justifying the silent rejection of Hitler’s peace offer both the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, followed the precedent set by the British Government during the First World War, and gave no indication of any basis upon which a peaceful settlement could be discussed.

But a sulky silence by Hitler’s opponents offered no solution to the problem as to how hostilities were to be continued and the war prevented from stagnating until boredom should overcome public opinion. Half a century before, the only means available would have been to launch a series of tip-and-run naval raids on the coasts of Europe. Now, however, the conquest of the air had provided a new method by which not only could boredom be combatted but a war psychosis created. The indiscriminate dropping of bombs at night on enemy centres of population would be bound, sooner or later, to call forth reprisals of a similar nature, and the resulting slaughter of innocent civilians could not fail to inflame warlike passions on both sides.

Certainly it is hard to imagine any other course of action which would have produced the result desired. The only drawback to this course was that the Luftwaffe at the moment was numerically much superior to the R.A.F. Hitler was threatening that, if the British air attacks on the German civil population continued, he would drop ten bombs on Britain for every bomb dropped on Germany. Consequently, the trials of the British civilian population would temporarily, at least, be severe if this policy were persisted in.

It is one of the greatest triumphs of modern emotional engineering that, in spite of the plain facts of the case which could never be disguised or even materially distorted, the British public, throughout the Blitz Period (1940-1941), remained convinced that the entire responsibility for the sufferings it was undergoing rested on the German leaders. Faith is prized by theologians as one of the three cardinal virtues and accepting the definition that “faith is believing what one knows isn’t so”, it can truly be said that never before had this cardinal virtue been displayed so steadfastly by so many for so long. The practical value of this steadfast faith for the war effort can hardly be exaggerated: the Blitz was unanimously accepted as proof positive of the innate wickedness of the Nazi regime and, as such, endured as something inescapable. General recognition of the fact that it could be brought to an end at any moment might well have had a decisive influence on the public attitude. Too high praise cannot, therefore, be lavished on the British emotional engineers for the infinite skill with which the public mind was conditioned prior to and during a period of unparalleled strain.

It was not until April, 1944, by which time the Luftwaffe had become paralysed from lack of petrol and the issue of the struggle was no longer in doubt, that the strict taboo on all mention of the facts was lifted in favour of Mr. J. M. Spaight, C.B., C.B.E., former Principal Secretary of the Air Ministry, who was permitted to publish a book entitled Bombing Vindicated. The title in itself came as a surprise, since few until then had any idea that any vindication for bombing was needed. In this book the man in the street learned for the first time that he had made an heroic decision on May 11, 1940. The man-in-the-street had, of course, no recollection of having made any decision, heroic or otherwise, on this particular date; in fact, he could not recall having made a decision of any kind for a very long time, since in a democracy decisions are not made by such as he, but by international financiers, Press barons, permanent officials and even, occasionally, by Cabinet Ministers. No wonder the man in the street was perplexed.

Mr. Spaight, C.B., C.B.E., resolved this perplexity in the following lyrical passage:

“Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity which it deserved. That, surely, was a mistake. It was a splendid decision. It was as heroic, as self-sacrificing, as Russia’s decision to adopt her policy of ‘scorched earth’. It gave Coventry and Birmingham, Sheffield and Southampton, the right to look Kiev and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol, in the face. Our Soviet Allies would have been less critical of our inactivity in 1942 if they had understood what we had done.”¹

In passing, the comment must be made that Mr. Spaight in this passage does much less than justice to the services rendered to him and his colleagues of the Air Ministry by the emotional engineers of the Ministry of Information. Without their aid, this splendid decision might well have led to disastrous consequences; it was entirely thanks to what he is pleased to term “propagandist distortion” that the inhabitants of Coventry, for example, continued to imagine that their sufferings were due to the innate villainy of Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision, splendid or otherwise, of the British War Cabinet was the decisive factor in the case. Had this suspicion existed, their reaction might have been somewhat different. Is it fair for the famous surgeon to sneer at the contribution of the humble anaesthetist which alone renders possible his own delicate operations? Without previous conditioning by the emotional engineer would the activities of the “block-buster” have been tolerated by public opinion?

Contemporary publications on the war may be scanned in vain for a clue why the date May 11, 1940, is in any way memorable. A very close search will, however, bring to light the fact, at the time obscured by far more sensational news, that on the night of May 11th, “eighteen Whitley bombers attacked railway installations in Western Germany.” Naturally this announcement when made aroused little interest since it was only claimed these installations had been attacked; it was not suggested that they suffered any injury thereby.

The full significance of this announcement, first disclosed nearly four years afterwards by Mr. Spaight, only appears after further investigation and reflection. Western Germany in May 1940 was, of course, as much outside the area of military operations as Patagonia. Up to this date, only places within the area of military operations or such definitely military objectives as the German air base on Sylt or the British air base on the Orkneys had been attacked. This raid on the night of May 11, 1940, although in itself trivial, was an epoch-marking event since it was the first deliberate breach of the fundamental rule of civilized warfare that hostilities must only be waged against the enemy combatant forces.

In default of any further details it must be left to the imagination to picture the eighteen bombers setting forth on the night of May 11th from their base with instructions to drop their bombs when they found themselves over Western Germany in the hope that some of them might land on railway installations. To achieve this modest purpose they would have to cross the battlefront, extending from the North Sea to Switzerland, which had suddenly blazed into frantic activity as the German armies hurled themselves to the attack from the Zuider Zee to the Maginot Line in Lorraine. As nothing to the contrary has been recorded, it may be assumed that the eighteen bombers all returned safely and that some of their bombs damaged something somewhere. To the crews of these bombers it must have seemed strange to fly over a battlefield where a life and death struggle was taking place and then on over country crowded with columns of enemy troops pouring forward to the attack, in order to reach the peaceful countryside of Westphalia on the off-chance that some of their bombs dropped there would land on railway installations. The value of their contribution to the great battle in which the fate of France was being decided must indeed have seemed to them obscure. Yet without realising it they were turning a major page of history. Their flight marked the end of an epoch which had lasted for two and one-half centuries.

How many times during this long period must Mars have sadly reflected on the words of King Draco the Great in Anatole France’s Penguin Island: “War without fire is like tripe without mustard: it is an insipid thing.” What use the great conquerors of the past could have made of these new-fangled flying machines. They themselves had achieved much certainly, but how sadly they had been hampered by the limited powers of destruction at their disposal. We may picture the shadowy figures of the great conquerors in the days when war had really been war as admiring and envious spectators of the doings of those eighteen bombers on that memorable May night: against a background of prosaic twentieth century railway installations we can imagine the grim forms of Asshurnazirpal and Sennacherib stroking their square-cut, curled and scented beards with dignified approval; the squat figure of Attila, the King of the Huns; the awe-inspiring shape of the great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan, and the forms of his successors, Hulagu, whose destruction of the irrigation system of the Euphrates Valley was so thorough that what for thousands of years had been one of the most prosperous parts of the earth became a desert, the mighty Tamerlane, and a score of others. To these men, at least, the limitless possibilities of this new method of achieving an ancient purpose would have been clear.

These possibilities, however, were at the time realized by few. It was not until much later that it became necessary to find justification for such horrors as took place on that night when the most densely populated parts of Hamburg became a roaring furnace in which thousands of men, women and children were throwing themselves into the canals to escape the frightful heat. The stock apology then put forward was that it was only a reprisal for the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam. Mr. Spaight dismisses this argument with the contempt it deserves. “When Warsaw and Rotterdam were bombed,” he points out, “German armies were at their gates. The air bombardment was an operation of the tactical offensive.”¹ Captain Liddell Hart accepts the same view. “Bombing did not take place,” he writes, “until the German troops were fighting their way into these cities and thus conformed to the old rules of siege bombardment.”²

“Bombing Vindicated” is a remarkable book: in fact, an amazing book having regard to the date when it was written.³ Mr. Spaight is not content merely to admit that upon Britain rests the responsibility for starting the practice of bombing civilian populations, but insists that to Britain must be awarded the entire credit for conceiving and carrying into effect this practice. He derides (p. 149) the suggestion rather half-heartedly put forward at the time by the Ministry of Information that “the whole majestic process had been set in operation” because an unidentified plane had dropped some bombs on a wood near Canterbury. Nor will he admit the splendid decision of May 11, 1940, “was unpremeditated”. On the contrary, he insists hotly (p. 38), that this decision can be traced “to a brainwave which came to British experts in 1936,” when the Bomber Command was organized—“The whole raison d’être of Bomber Command,” he tells us (p. 60), “was to bomb Germany should she be our enemy”. Further, he says it was obvious that Hitler realized that this was Britain’s intention in the event of war, and that he was, in consequence, genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement “confining the action of aircraft to the battle zones”. Finally, he agrees that Hitler only undertook the bombing of the British civilian population reluctantly three months after the R.A.F. had commenced bombing the German civilian population, and expresses the opinion (p. 47) that after it had started Hitler would have been willing at any time to have stopped the slaughter—“Hitler assuredly did not want the mutual bombing to go on.” The reader will find the facts of the case set out with frank jubilation by Mr. Spaight in the above-mentioned book, and with the objective detachment of a veteran historian by Captain Liddell Hart in his Revolution in Warfare. They are repeated by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris in his book, Bomber Offensive (1947) by that time much tinged by a marked petulance arising from the dawning realization of the far-reaching consequences of the precedent created by “the splendid decision of May 11, 1940”. And truly it is a disturbing precedent for the inhabitants of a small, densely populated island, now that all the military might, air prowess, and boundless resources of Asia have become no further distant than the Oder.

Air Marshal Harris joins with Mr. Spaight in pouring contempt on the shortsightedness of professional soldiers throughout the world, and in particular in Germany, for not perceiving in the years before 1939 that the heavy bomber would be a far more effective weapon against civilians than against combatant forces. The issue for what purpose an air force should be designed to serve was hotly debated in Britain immediately after the First World War. Germany had been disarmed but France had emerged from the struggle with the largest air force in the world and was bitterly aggrieved at British opposition to her plans for annexation in the Middle East. The question was, what type of plane would Britain need in the event of another war? The professional soldiers in the War Office naturally took the traditional view; the chiefs of the newly created air force, unhampered by tradition, took an entirely novel view. In 1923 Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, exactly summarized the point at issue when he wrote, “The Army policy was to defeat the enemy army; our policy was to defeat the enemy nation.”

Far from planning a Blitz, Air Marshal Harris declares that Germany lost the war because, when compelled in September 1940 to carry out the Blitz, she found that the generals who dominated the Luftwaffe and regarded the bomber as merely a form of long-range artillery for use in battle, had neglected to equip the Luftwaffe with heavily armed bomber planes designed for a Blitz. “The Germans,” writes Air Marshal Harris, “had allowed their soldiers to dictate the whole policy of the Luftwaffe which was designed expressly to assist the army in rapid offensives.… Much too late in the day they saw the advantage of a strategic bombing force … the outcome was the German Army had to be deprived of air cover and air support on every front to provide some defence for Germany against independent strategic action in the air.”⁴

Mr. Spaight puts the matter in a nutshell when he writes (p. 144): “In Germany and in France the air arm never cut adrift from the land arm: it was tethered to the Army in these countries. In Britain it was free to roam.” To this it may be replied that orthodox military opinion holds that it is the duty of a soldier to fight and not to roam. “For Germany,” Mr. Spaight continues, “the bomber was artillery for stationary troops dug fast into the Maginot Line; for Britain, it was an offensive weapon designed to attack the economic resources of the enemy deep within his country.”

It is important to note that the “splendid decision of May 11, 1940” was put into effect “General Gamelin notwithstanding”. “The French General Staff,” remarks Mr. Spaight sadly (p. 70), “had all along a conception of air warfare broadly similar to that of the German General Staff and divergent from that of the British Air Staff. They viewed with the greatest misgivings any plan by which bombers were to be used for attacks on German industry, and did not hesitate to say so. In their considered opinion the main, indeed the only, use to which a bombing force should be put was to extend the range of artillery supporting armies in the field.”

From every point of view Air Marshal Harris’ book, Bomber Offensive, is a much less illuminating work than Mr. Spaight’s Bombing Vindicated. Writing in the same spirit, his tone is much more subdued. Substantially, however, he is in complete agreement with Mr. Spaight. He also attributes the failure of the Blitz to the shortsightedness of the Luftwaffe chiefs in not providing themselves in peace time with long-distance bomber planes designed for attacks on an enemy civilian population, an omission, he declares, which lost Germany the war. Had the Germans been able to persist in their attacks, he writes, London would unquestionably have suffered the terrible fate which over took Hamburg two years later. But in September 1940 the Germans found themselves “with almost unarmed bombers … so that in the Battle of Britain the destruction of the German bomber squadrons was very similar to shooting cows in a field.”

Only with regard to the justification of attacks from the air on civilians can the Air Marshal be said to go one better than the Principal Air Secretary. When reproached for the inhumanity of this form of warfare, he tells us complacently, it is his practice to confound his critics by quoting to them a British Government White Paper which estimates that the blockade of Europe by the British Navy between 1914 and 1918 “caused nearly 800,000 deaths, mainly women and children,” while, on the other hand, indiscriminate bombing by the R.A.F. between 1940 and 1945 probably did not in his opinion kill more than 300,000. He assures us that this retort invariably left his critics dumfounded and abashed.

Certainly this is a novel line of argument which, if it ever secured acceptance in criminal law, would lead to strange consequences. For example, a person accused of a single murder could by this argument claim acquittal on the ground that there have been cases of persons guilty of wholesale murder.

In passing it may be noted that the Air Marshal’s estimate of the civilian casualties resulting from the British air offensive against Germany is far below the figure now generally accepted. At the Manstein Trial in Hamburg in 1949 the figure of 250,000 was put forward as the probable total of casualties from one air raid, that on Dresden on the night of February 13th, 1945. While declaring that the casualties in this raid will probably always remain a subject for speculation, General Hans Rumpf, after a careful examination and analysis of all the available evidence, comes to the conclusion that in Germany between 1940 and 1945 some 600,000 were killed and 800,000 were wounded in air attacks—see his Das war der Bombenkrieg, (Gerhard Stalling Verlag, Oldenburg, 1961, page 114).

Messrs. Spaight and Harris speak with the authority of a Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry and of an Air Marshal respectively. The facts which they set forth are not open to question by persons who lack the expert and inside knowledge which they possess. Yet some may find it hard to credit their interpretation of these facts. According to their joint testimony, prior to 1939 the General Staffs of Great Britain, Germany and France were composed entirely of elderly professional soldiers whose brains, rendered senile by routine and red tape, were in capable of grasping so obvious a fact that if bombs were showered from the air upon an enemy power’s chief centres of population, its war effort would be affected. Only in the British Air Ministry, and then only thanks to a memorable “brain-wave” in 1936, did this fact dawn, with the result that for three years before the outbreak of war Britain alone was planning accordingly. As a result of the opposition of the French General Staff, it was not until May 11, 1940, that the Bomber Command was permitted to fulfil the purpose for which it was built. Thereafter it was free “to roam”—with consequences with which we are all familiar.

It may seem presumptuous but, it is submitted, there is an alternative interpretation which has escaped the attention of Messrs. Spaight and Harris. The men who had risen to the leadership of the General Staffs of Great Britain, Germany and France may not have been congenital idiots unable to perceive the obvious; they may have fully realized the effect which could be produced by bombing an enemy civilian population and yet have deliberately ruled out the adoption of this policy as contrary to the first principle of civilized warfare. In taking up such an attitude they would only have been following the example of the statesmen of all the nations of Europe for the preceding two hundred years. Frequently tempted to depart from it to gain manifest but temporary advantage, European statesmen since the time of Louis XIV had consistently maintained the principle that hostilities must be confined to the combatant forces of the belligerents. They did so because they realized that civilization is a fragile structure, inevitably subjected to severe strain even by a war limited by strict rules—by mere “fooling with war” as Mr. Spaight calls it. The exclusion of non-combatants from the scope of hostilities is the fundamental distinction between civilized and barbarous warfare. All other restraints had followed naturally from acceptance of this first principle. If it were abandoned, all else would quickly disappear. Subconsciously, at any rate, it may have been realized by them how thin and fragile was the partition separating civilized man from the passions of the jungle: how civilization itself might not survive the release of the dark forces which would be set free by warfare waged in the manner of primitive times. Victory would then indeed be barren.