The Shotgun Blog
« The Greyhound Canada Fiasco | Main | Bernier on Freedom and Responsibility »
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Nonsense About World War II from an Unexpected Source
I really expected better of Michael Coren than this. Coren tries to refute certain "myths" about the Second World War. Unfortunately he does so by perpetuating a crop of genuine revionist myths.
The final provocation for France, Britain and Canada was the German invasion of Poland, which is deeply ironic in that once the war was won we gave the Poles to the Soviets, who had taught the Hitler mob how to steal, kill, lie and incarcerate.
Key words are "we gave the Poles to the Soviets." Hmm. Not exactly. The Red Army already controlled Poland and most of Eastern Europe. The effective concession of Poland to the Soviet sphere at Yalta was simply a formal admission of fact. Short of launching another full scale war against Soviet Russia, what could the Western power have done? Asked Stalin politely to leave? Russians have regarded Poland as part of their sphere of influence since the 18th century, when the country was repeatedly partitioned between them, the Prussians and Austrians. One of the positive upshots of Versailles was the remergence of Poland as a viable independent state in 1918. In many ways the joint invasion of Poland by Russia and Germany was an attempt to return to the status quo prior to the First World War.
As bad as the Soviets were, it was the western allies who bombed German cities with no concern for the civilian population while simultaneously condemning German barbarism.
Of course the allied airmen were heroic -- my father in Bomber Command being one of them -- but the policies of their leaders were immoral.
It seems that Coren is accusing the Western powers of perpetrating a war crime against German civilians. I say seems, he doesn't quite come out and say it. Making a comparison between the strategic bombing and the mass slaughter conducted by Stalin in the interwar period, certainly points in that direction. Strategic or "area bombing" is one of the most controversial episodes in the Allied conduct of the war. It must, however, be placed in context. The technology of the time would not have allowed "precision bombing" in its modern understanding. Being able to strike a specific target like a factory or railway yard, while not causing significant damage to nearby homes, schools and hospitals, with any serious chance of success, required bombers to fly at very low levels, making them easy targets for anti-aircraft guns. While accuracy improved remarkably during the war, it was not enough to allow Allied bombers to destroy strategic targets at safe altitudes.
In addition to destroying production facilities and infrastructure, one of the key objectives of British Bomber Command - which directed Canadians serving under both the RAF and RCAF - was to undermine German civilian morale. From the perspective of a nation that has never known Total War, and the comfort of seven essentially peaceful decades, the bombing of German civilians looks like nothing less than mass murder. Morale is an essential element of a nation at war. One of the reasons the British hanged Lord Haw Haw was because of his efforts to undermine wartime morale. The point was not to kill Germans, but to destroy German cities. It was to send a clear message from the Allied leadership to the German populace that they were losing the war, and losing it badly.
One of the most powerful factors in Hitler's rise to power was the myth of the November Criminals. Centered around the false belief that Germany didn't actually lose the First World War, that its army was never defeated in the field. The German public of 1918 knew practically nothing about The Hundred Days. By October 1918 the German Army had been decisively defeated. German soil, however, had not been occupied to any considerable degree by the time of the Armistice. The German public had not seen the horrors of the war, as had civilians in northern France and Flanders. Aside from wartime shortages of certain imported good, the average German in November of 1918 had experienced little of the suffering that German arms had imposed on their neighbours. Defeat came as a shock. Conspiracy theories quickly developed about the Second Reich being betrayed by the usual suspects: Communists, socialists, liberals and above all Jews. In May 1945 there was no doubt in the mind of anyone that Germany had lost, and had lost badly. Sheman's March to the Sea worked upon the same logic. As Sherman explained:
We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time, realized the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.
—Letter, Sherman to Henry W. Halleck, December 24, 1864.
Convince the civilian population that they have no chance to win, that the cost of continued resistance is destruction. This sounds brutal, yet it is the reality of fighting wars of national survival against skilled and determined enemies. The moral blame for the deaths of enemy civilians lies not with men like Curtis LeMay, Arthur Harris, and W. T. Sherman but the leaders of the enemy state.
More bombs were dropped on Germany in single weeks than the Nazis spewed at Britain during the entire conflict. The war could and would have been won without such indiscriminate violence.
Possibly. But how much longer would the war have lasted? Even had the Allies only focused on production and infrastructure, any large scale bombing campaign would have generated a vast number of civilian German casualties. Eschewing the targeting of production and infrastructure, the Germans would have been essentially unhampered in their ability to produce and deliver men and equipment to the front. That would have meant more dead Allied soldiers in Normandy, Belguim, the Neatherlands and the Rhineland. Possibly more of Europe would have fallen into Soviet hands, and all that would have entailed.
There was nothing indiscriminate, however, about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And the Americans bombed the Japanese, not to end the war but to warn the Soviets that they would be next if they tried to expand their empire into the western sphere of influence.
Major political and military decisions rarely have one justification. Warning the Soviets was certainly in the mind of American planners and President Truman. Paramount, however, was the enormous casualties that an Allied invasion of Japan would have sustained, to say nothing of the millions of Japanese would have been killed in such a bloodbath. After the very hard fighting of Okinawa and Iwo Jima, there was no reason to expect the homeland islands of the Japanese Empire to be defended with any less ferocity.
Nagasaki, by the way, was a centre of anti-war resistance.
What of it? In a totalitarian state dissenters are jailed or locked up.
The Nazis were always more of a threat than the Japanese but there was never any serious plan to use nuclear weapons against Berlin or Munich.
Well, of course not. The first atomic bomb was tested on July 16th, 1945. More than two months after the surrender of the Third Reich. There was also the real posibility that had an atomic bomb dropped on Germany been a dud, debris from the bomb might been yielded the Germans vital technological information. The argument that the Germans were a greater threat than the Japanese depends on your perspective. I doubt the Chinese or Australians would have agreed.
It was horrific then and horrific now that good people have to die for agendas rather than causes.
Which is high sounding enough. What does it mean? What's the difference between an agenda and a cause? Aren't causes pursued with agendas? Yes, the western Allies had plenty of items on their agenda, the first and formost was creating a free and peaceful world in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in human history. That was the spirit that embued the Atlantic Charter and post-war reconstruction of Germany and Japan. Given their historical context, the western allies were spectacularly successful. At the war's close educated opinion believed that another war was probably inevitable and that the world would collapse into poverty, tyranny and a new dark age. After a forty year Cold War more people are free and prosperous today than at any time in human history. As agenda items go, that's a pretty important one that's been checked off.
Posted by Richard Anderson on September 5, 2009 | Permalink
Comments
Anyone notice how Coren threw his own father under the bus? He accused him of being a war criminal. Nice! However, it's not the only relative thing in that column. There's enough moral relativism there for a family reunion.
It's nice to see that Ontarians still live in a muddled Trudeauist fantasy world. No wonder Ernst Zundel chose to live there.
Posted by: Zebulon Pike | 2009-09-05 12:29:33 PM
And so did you, Zeb.
Posted by: ebt | 2009-09-05 12:54:06 PM
I left voluntarily, more like escaping with my life. Zundel was forced to leave, eventually, long after he left his imprint on Toronto society.
Posted by: Zebulon Pike | 2009-09-05 1:03:02 PM
ZP, actually, Coren presented some quite "absolute" moral statements in his piece. Terror bombing is terror bombing, regardless who does it. Nothing relative there at all.
Probably no need to apologize (I wasn't there at the time), but it seems difficult to argue the moral justification for the terror bombing of e.g. Dresden.
It also seems difficult to explain or excuse the West's decision to immediately declare war upon the N-Socialist Germany but never on the S-Socialist Soviet Union, despite the latter's attack and subsequent terror on Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.
But Coren's atom bomb verbage is essentially crap - had the atom bomb been around in 1944, I am pretty sure it would have been used against the N-Socialists first (and then no bombs against Japan would have been necessary).
Posted by: Johan i Kanada | 2009-09-05 1:22:24 PM
I left voluntarily, more like escaping with my life.
Posted by: Zebulon Punk | 2009-09-05 1:03:02 PM
Escaped to Asswipe Alabama. A state with one of the lowest IQ's in the US. Da Punk must have fit in real well. Bwahahahahahahahha
Posted by: The Stig | 2009-09-05 2:27:26 PM
How easy it is to view history through the eyes of people living now, and who never have known the horrors of war. While we may hunt for and find things to criticise now, the question we evade while doing so is what exactly would we have advocated instead. Had most of the world not been in denial, Hitler and Nazi Germany could have been stopped at the beginning which would have prevented a whole lot of bloodshed. The same goes for Japan of that era. To compare the bombing of Dresden to the atrocities committed by the Germans is immoral, and usually what I have heard from Germans. It also ignores that the large majority of the German population was fully supportive of Hitler.
War is never a pretty sight and most of us would rather avoid it, but once it starts and you are under attack for your very existence the picture changes.
Posted by: Alain | 2009-09-05 3:27:10 PM
A letter sent earlier today to the Toronto Sun:
'Michale Coren writes ("A war built on lies", Sept. 5) that "the Americans [atomic] bombed the Japanese, not to end the war but to warn the Soviets". He also writes that "there was never any serious plan to use nuclear weapons against Berlin or Munich."
Mr Coren is dead wrong and has fallen victim to leftist revisionist historians. Before the two atomic bombs were dropped the Japanese were absolutely determined not to surrender on any terms acceptable to the United Nations (the official name of the anti-Axis alliance). Had the war continued the loss of both Japanese and American lives in the planned invasion of Japan would have far dwarfed those killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition hundreds of thousands, at a minimum, of the inhabitants of countries occupied by Japan--e.g. Korea, Vietnam, much of China--would almost certainly have starved. The economy of Japan's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was rapidly collapsing under allied blockade and the Japanese were commandeering more and more of increasingly scant resources for themselves. The death of tens of thousand of allied prisoners of war held in occupied territories was also likely.
The simple fact is that use of atomic bombs was the only way to end the war promptly; countless lives were saved. As for not planning to use atomic weapons on Germany, does Mr Coren really think the Americans and British would have had any scruples about that when their conventional bombing killed some 600,000 civilians?
The bomb was in fact developed largely out of fear that the Germans would get one first. The simple reality is that the war in Europe ended before bombs were produced. Had they been available before, say, April 1945 (by which time it was finally clear the war would end very shortly) they would most probably have been used to shorten the conflict.'
Mark
Ottawa
Posted by: Mark Ottawa | 2009-09-05 5:50:26 PM
Had most of the world not been in denial, Hitler and Nazi Germany could have been stopped at the beginning which would have prevented a whole lot of bloodshed.
Posted by: Alain | 2009-09-05 3:27:10 PM
I'll have to disagree with you on that assessment. It's easy in 2009 to look back and say what the Allies should have done after WW1 ended to bring Germany back into normalcy in world affairs, unfortunately the Allies pursued policies that would sow the seeds for a person like Hitler to emerge. From maintaining a food blockade in which 1000's of thousands of people died after Germany had surrendered, to unrealistic reparations which amongst other things gave France control of much of the German coal fields and industrial capability to Wilson's ideal of self determination (which applied to everyone except the Germans) which put millions of Germans under foreign governments. And lastly Hitler had never until 1938 actually invaded another country and by that time was secure. Had the Allies listened to the likes of Henry Cabot Lodge instead of Clemenceau and Foch it's possible the conditions that allowed Hitler to arise would never have occurred. The Allies after WW2 nearly made the same mistake with the Morgenthau Plan. Thankfully Truman understood the mistakes made after WW1 and was determined not to repeat them. Revenge might seem initially like a good policy but it rarely if ever achieves its long term goal.
Posted by: The Stig | 2009-09-05 6:06:06 PM
Stig, I do not disagree with you here. The denial (for lack of a better word) was when it became clear that Germany was rapidly rearming while Britain continued doing the opposite and then the lack of any serious action when Germany invaded and annexed Austria.
Of course as you state it is easy for us to speculate about it in 2009 and without actually having been there.
Posted by: Alain | 2009-09-05 7:53:08 PM
Of course they supported Hitler. He made all kinds of promises. He was going to pay their rent and put gas in their cars.
Sorry.
People of Germany, regular people, fell for Hitler lock, stock and barrel.
Posted by: GeronL | 2009-09-06 12:34:38 AM
'When the fueher says we are the Master Race, we go 'heil','heil' in the fueher's face.'
'And to love the fueher is a big disgrace, so we go 'heil, heil' in the fueher's face.'
Posted by: jeff franklin | 2009-09-06 6:02:13 AM
My understanding was that in fact, the Japanese had decided to surrender well before Hiroshima, but made the mistake of approaching the Soviet Union, the ally with whom they were not actually at war, to broker the negotiations. They had a rather naive sense of what an alliance was and how it worked. As a result, their entreaties wound up on Stalin's desk, where they sat untouched and untransmitted. Stalin was not convinced that the Japanese offers were sincere; more seriously, he had been browbeaten into agreeing to go to war against Japan very much against his will, and thought that if he acted to end the war before Russia entered it, he would look as if he was trying to weasel out of his commitment and would lose face with the allies. He actually cared about that.
The Americans suspected strongly (and rightly) that Japan was reaching the point where it could not continue hostilities, but they couldn't be sure, and in the absence of any sign of willingness to negotiate (such signs being concealed from them by Stalin), resolved to end the war as soon as possible by the means available.
The morality of the bombing of Germany was widely criticized at the time and after. It seems clear that it accomplished nothing and in retrospect cannot be justified. I entirely agree that it also cannot in retrospect be regarded as a war crime, because it was done with legitimate intentions, but otherwise Coren is right about this.
Posted by: ebt | 2009-09-06 12:46:55 PM
All of this is Monday morning quarterbacking, mostly by people who have virtually no background in history to even make a decent argument, is a waste of time. Just because you can speak your piece, doesn't mean you have to. (I have been studying and publishing World War II and military history for well over 40 years.)
An excellent historical accounting of why Japan chose to fight a war they could not win is "What Were They Thinking? A Fresh Look At Japan At War, 1941-45 by John D. Beatty and Lee A. Rochwerger (who between them have nearly a century of military history research and study; both are retired from the U.S. Army where they worked in the one part of the vast and variegated intelligence community that still requires original thought). Among their conclusions are: Peace overtures before 1945 often came from low-level Japanese officials not authorized to negotiate, offering terms none of the Allies would or could accept; Neither the atomic bombs nor the Soviet invasion of Manchuria compelled Japan's military leadership to seek peace; only the Emperor's decision drove them to surrender; The history of the Pacific War after 1945 was written to fit postwar needs, not always to tell the truth of what happened.
The book is available at Amazon and other online booksellers.
As for the atomic bombs, what's done is done. Get over it. Had they never been used against two targets, or if they had only been used against strictly military targets, we would not today know how horrific they really are. So far that reality has kept many an itchy trigger finger from "pressing the button" (although we now have a few nut cases that may just do it anyway).
Posted by: Ray Merriam | 2009-09-06 2:31:03 PM
Dresden is often used as an example of a non-military target. Germany relied heavily on its highly developed rail network. I think you will find that Dresden was a railhead.
Posted by: DML | 2009-09-06 6:44:21 PM
Dresden is often used as an example of a non-military target. Germany relied heavily on its highly developed rail network. I think you will find that Dresden was a railhead.
Posted by: DML | 2009-09-06 6:44:21 PM
Dresden had been almost untouched by bombing throughout the war due to its location and did contain significant numbers of factories producing military equipment. It was as you mention a major rail center. The interesting thing about the bombing was that other cities such as Hamburg actually had more tonnage dropped on them in the same amount of time. The only difference was the RAF and USAAF got it everything right.
Posted by: The Stig | 2009-09-06 7:07:40 PM
"The British High Command knew how few bomber crews would survive - it deliberately hid the truth. That's not all that was concealed. The crews and the public were told that the bombing targets were German factories and military installations. In fact in 1942 a secret plan was adopted. Germany would be crushed through the deliberate annihilation of its citizens. Few airmen would ever learn of that plan. They had joined to save democracy."
Secret plans? Deliberate annihilation of civilians? Horrible huh. Well, these are the tax-funded words from "Valor and the Horror", the CBC "documentary" from the early 1990s. According to the CBC, Canada committed atrocities by participating in World War II. Meanwhile, the word "Holocaust" does not appear once in the entire film, and the world "Jewish" appears only once in a totally unrelated context. (Yes Ontario - the Holocaust DID happen. Ernst was wrong and you believed him.)
Your tax dollars at work. Disband the CBC and Nazi Film Board immediately.
Posted by: Zebulon Pike | 2009-09-06 7:37:07 PM
Secret plans? Deliberate annihilation of civilians? Horrible huh. Well, these are the tax-funded words from "Valor and the Horror", the CBC "documentary" from the early 1990s.
Posted by: Zebulon Punk | 2009-09-06 7:37:07 PM
The CBC ombudsman commissioned David Bercuson and Sydney Wise to review The Valour and the Horror. The review was published by McGill - Queen's University Press in the mid 1990's. It runs around 150 pages. I would suggest that anyone who is interested in the subject either buy or download the review rather thank listing to a lunatic like Da Punk.
Meanwhile, the word "Holocaust" does not appear once in the entire film, and the world "Jewish" appears only once in a totally unrelated context.
Posted by: Zebulon Pike | 2009-09-06 7:37:07 PM
And why would the word holocaust or Jewish have to appear in a story of the bombing of Dresden unless you believe that they have to appear whenever WW2 is discussed.
Posted by: The Stig | 2009-09-06 8:50:20 PM
That comes awfully close to Holocaust denial. It is impossible to separate anything the Nazis did from their deliberate attempts to exterminate Europe's Jews. Failing to mention it at all is a gross mistake and renders the whole enterprise meaningless, as Bercuson and Wise demonstrated. The Valor and the Horror ought to have been banned for its blatant historical errors. The taxpayer deserves better.
Posted by: Zebulon Pike | 2009-09-06 9:02:16 PM
That comes awfully close to Holocaust denial.
Posted by: Zebulon Punk | 2009-09-06 9:02:16 PM
You had better watch it Punk.
Posted by: The Stig | 2009-09-06 9:38:29 PM
Are you denying that the Holocaust wasn't an important factor in the Nazi state and its war aims?
Posted by: Zebulon Pike | 2009-09-06 9:49:19 PM
...just a side note, but does anyone in here know that the Germans were not the ONLY ones to use gas chambers?
My grandparents (Hungarian) on my Mother's side were killed by gas chambers used by the Russians occupying Romania - (the Hungarian part of Romania - Transylvania) because my Mother escaped to the west.
Oddly enough, when I told this to Mr. Coren, he didn't believe that happened and brushed me off - one reason I don't listen to him.
In his defense, Hiroshima and revisionist cold war mentality is his weak point.
Posted by: tomax7 | 2009-09-07 9:10:29 AM
Funny coincidence. I watched a movie about Churchill, this morning. They made Harris out to be a sociopathic killer, for engineering bombing raids on German cities. Maybe Coren watched the same movie. I've noticed a lot of people getting their history lesson from movies.
Posted by: dp | 2009-09-07 9:40:02 AM
To all you Monday morning quarterbacks,I grew up in south east London,was bombed,strafed,watched the V1s pass and finally just missed by a V2 which leveled our area and took off our roof.Bomber Harris and his crews are heroes to many that lived thru WW2 so stop trying to rewrite history.So we killed Germans who were trying to kill us,war is hell be thankful if you missed it.Mr.Coren you are too young to remember but must have seen the bomb sites that still existed in the 60s.
Posted by: Goff Tayler | 2009-09-07 10:05:56 AM
dp: yes too many people get their history from the movies. In Canada the problem is worsened by the participation of the CBC and the National Film Board, whose grasp of history is appalling. They ignored the Holocaust in "The Valour and the Horrour" for example. Slavery receives almost no attention either, mostly likely by design from Toronto's white establishment. School textbooks ignore these topics too. Canadians deserve better history than what Ontario wants them to believe.
Posted by: Zebulon Pike | 2009-09-07 10:48:56 AM
Stalin and Hitler were both terrorists as far as I am concerned. Yes the Allies should have gone after the USSR and the Bolsheviks, but I suspect they were worried about the amount of casualties on the allied side.
Coren is nothing more than a liberal peddling socialist dribble.
I have lost all respect for him indeed.
Posted by: Merle Terlesky | 2009-09-08 9:06:05 PM
Curious if Ezra has any comments on his buddy pal Micheal Coren. Coren's article on WW2 is truly revisionist crap!
It is in fact border line anti-semitism on behalf of Coren to make the comparisons he did regarding the bombing of Germany by the Allies and making apologies for the Nazi war machine.
Will Ezra appear on his show again without commenting on this dribble??
Me thinks Ezra Ezra does not have the spine to take on Coren's crap! After all Coren is a good mouth piece for Ezra to let him appear on his show soooo many times.
Posted by: Merle Terlesky | 2009-09-08 9:54:46 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.