Mosquitoes: and Dresden

I would like to cast readers’ memories, or minds if the reader is younger than seventy years old, to the afternoon of September 7th, 1940. For this was the day that the Blitz began. The Blitz began at about 4:00 in the afternoon on September 7, 1940, when German planes appeared over London. For two hours, 348 German bombers and 617 fighters targeted the city, dropping high-explosive bombs as well as incendiary devices. Later, guided by the raging fires caused by the first attack, a second group of planes began another assault that lasted until 4:30 the following morning. In just these few hours, 430 people were killed and 1,600 were badly injured. 

The first day of the Blitz is remembered as Black Saturday.

Beginning on Black Saturday, London was attacked on 57 straight nights. Between Black Saturday and December 2, there was no 24-hour period without at least one “alert”—as the alarms came to be called—and generally far more. Nine were registered on three separate occasions, and from the start of the Blitz until November 30 there were more than 350 alerts. 

The nights of November 3 and 28 were the only occasions during this period in which London’s peace was unbroken by siren or bomb. After the first week of September, although night bombing on a large scale continued, the large mass attacks by day, which had proved so costly to the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, were replaced by smaller parties coming over in successive waves. On occasion, forces consisting of as many as 300 to 400 aircraft would cross the coast by day and split into small groups, and a few planes would succeed in penetrating London’s outer defences.

The Germans expanded the Blitz to other cities in November 1940. The most heavily bombed cities outside London were Liverpool and Birmingham. Other targets included Sheffield, Manchester, Coventry, and Southampton. The attack on Coventry was particularly destructive. On November 14, 1940, a German force of more than 500 bombers destroyed much of the old city centre and killed more than 550 people. The devastation was so great that the Germans coined a new verb, “to coventrate,” to describe it. In early 1941 the Germans launched another wave of attacks, this time focusing on ports. Raids between February and May pounded Plymouth, Portsmouth, Bristol, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Hull in England; Swansea in Wales; Belfast in Northern Ireland; and Clydeside in Scotland.

This steady onslaught brought home to the British people what sort of barbarian their Country was fighting against, long years before the actual INHUMANITY of that ideal, expressed with typical Teutonic dispassion as ‘THE FINAL SOLUTION’ was uncovered with the discovery of the Death camps of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor and Dachau. Born in the September of 1940, I can just about recall, as a very small boy, sleeping in the steel skeleton of a Morrison shelter, built by my Dad in our front room in Newcastle: where my mother, my two brothers and my grandma sought some refuge from those bombs so liberally sown by Hitler’s Luftwaffe all those decades ago.

So, with typical British understatement, it was decided that ‘sauce for the goose was, indeed, sauce for the gander’ in the manner that British, and of course American bombers, once built, manned, armed, were sent to deliver that same deadly sauce back to the ‘Thousand Year Reich, under the ideal that ‘it was far better to give than to receive’.

I write this because the life and wartime experiences of Ken Oatley, the last survivor of the Mosquito Men were lived again in the Telegraph. Ken’s actions, as the navigator who directed his pilot and plane towards his target in Dresden; he described as ‘just part of the job’. But even the Telegraph quietly insults the memory of those brave men and boys who flew and fought their bombers through the  deadly combination of Nazi Luftwaffe Night-fighters and the equally deadly and highly effective Anti-Aircraft Gun barrages; by calling the raid ‘Infamous’.

This is of course following the lefty-liberal thinking that the bombing of Dresden was the result of a campaign of cruelty towards the innocents of Dresden, including many thousands of refugees fleeing from the oncoming Red Army. The city itself was supposed to be thought of as the  the “German Florence” on the Elbe, was home to famous collections of art, porcelain collection, prints, scientific instruments, and jewellery; and to attack Dresden was a ‘cultural Crime’. The 500-strong force of Lancaster bombers brought death and fire to the streets of Dresden, certainly: but that level of explosives was presumed to remind Germany of the memory of the deaths of 19,000 Americans killed in Hitler’s ill-fated ‘Battle of the Bulge’ in the Ardennes. 

The U.S.A.A.F. stoked the embers with another 400 tons of incendiaries, because the Allies were desperate to stop the Wehrmacht to regroup within Germany’s border if they eased on their pressure. The U.S. Army alone had suffered almost 140,000 casualties from December to January 1945 and 27,000 in the week prior to the Dresden bombing alone—the heaviest losses in the Western Allies’ war against Hitler.

Kurt Vonnegut, an American POW, was in Dresden during the raid, and wrote of witnessing whole underground rooms full of dead Germans who had suffocated because the firestorm had burnt all the oxygen at street level. The British author David Irving would claim in his 1963 book, The Destruction of Dresden, that the bombing was “the biggest single massacre in European history.” In part to prevent right-wing ideologues from exploiting wide-spread speculations about the death toll, the city of Dresden set up an historical commission in 2004 to produce more precise data with historical, military, forensic and archeological research. In 2010, it published a revised estimate of 22,700 to 25,000 dead. I seem to recall that David Irving was also a Holocaust Denier, and received a criminal conviction, so I reckon we can casually dismiss Irving’s 200,000 dead as more than a mathematical error.

So while the Dresden bombing was a terror campaign that dealt a devastating assault on civilians and cultural sites, it was part of a war in which such tactics had been widely—and grimly—deployed. Less than three months later, and eight days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker, the German High Command signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces. 

No, I reckon the Telegraph writers did themselves a disservice to both the British and American bomber forces as they struck at just another target, and to collate a patriot such as Ken Oatley obviously was; with the lefty ideals which produced the very thinking which labelled Dresden’s firebombing and flattening as given in the words  “Those who have unlearned how to cry,” lamented Nobel Prize recipient and Prussian dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, “will learn it afresh on the destruction of Dresden.” 

Try telling the inhabitants of Coventry that the Luftwaffe’s nighttime blitz attacks was just ‘War’, whilst also stating that the bombing of Dresden was a cultural crime of enormous proportion. Somehow, I do not believe that the surviving inhabitants of Coventry would even consider that. The only thing which counted, in those dark days before we, the Allies could respond exactly as the Nazis had done to us, was the idea that ‘The Only Good German Was a Dead German’.