The long suppressed story of the worst massacre in the history of the w
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Apocalypse At Dresden
By R. H. S. Crossman
Esquire Magazine, November 1963
If the British Commonwealth and the United States last a thousand
years, men may say that this was their darkest hour.
Were all the crimes against humanity committed during World War II the
work of Hitler's underlings? That was certainly the impression created
by the fact that only Germans were brought to trial at Nuremberg.
Alas! It is a false impression. We all now know that in the terrible
struggle waged between the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht, the
Russians displayed their fair share of insensate inhumanity. What is
less widely recognized - because the truth, until only recently, has
been deliberately suppressed - is that the Western democracies were
responsible for the most senseless single act of mass murder committed
in the whole course of World War II.
The devastation of Dresden in February, 1945, was one of those crimes
against humanity whose authors would have been arraigned at Nuremberg
if that Court had not been perverted into the instrument of Allied
justice. Whether measured in terms of material destruction or by loss
of human life, this "conventional" air raid was far more devastating
than either of the two atomic raids against Japan that were to follow
it a few months later. Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of
Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed; and the area of total destruction
extended over eleven square miles.
As for the death roll, the population, as we shall see, had been well
nigh doubled by a last-minute influx of refugees flying before the Red
Army; and even the German authorities -- usually so pedantic in their
estimates -- gave up trying to work out the precise total after some
35,000 bodies had been recognized, labeled and buried. We do know,
however, that the 1,250,000 people in the city on the night of the
raid had been reduced to 368,619 by the time it was over; and it seems
certain that the death roll must have greatly exceeded the 71,879 at
Hiroshima. Indeed, the German authorities were probably correct who, a
few days after the attack, put the total somewhere between 120,000 and
150,000.
How was this horror permitted to happen? Was it a deliberate and
considered act of policy, or was it the result of one of those ghastly misunderstandings or miscalculations that sometimes occur in the heat
of battle? There are many who will say that these are academic
questions belonging to history. I do not agree. Of course, what
happened at Dresden belongs to the prenuclear epoch. But it has a
terrible relevance to the defense strategy which the Western
democracies are operating today. If the crime of Dresden is not to be
repeated on a vaster scale, we must find out why it was committed.
That, at least, has been my feeling, and there are two special reasons
which have prompted me to go on investigating the facts for so many
years. In the first place, I was myself involved in a quite minor
capacity in the decisions which preceded it. When the Germans overran
France in 1940 and the Chamberlain Government in London was replaced
by the Churchill Government, there was a purge in Whitehall.
Unexpectedly I found myself recruited to a secret department attached
to the Foreign Office, with the title "Director of Psychological
Warfare against Germany." My main task was to plan the overt and
subvert propaganda which we hoped would rouse occupied Europe against
Hitler. But I soon found myself caught up in a bitter top-secret
controversy about the role of bomber offensive in the breaking of
German morale.
The Prime Minister was haunted by fears that the bloodletting of the
Somme and Passchendaele in World War I would have to be repeated if we
tried to defeat Hitler by landing and liberating Europe. So the Air
Marshals found it easy to persuade him that if they were given a free
hand they could make these casualties unnecessary by smashing the
German home front into submission. What Hitler wreaked against London
and Coventry, our bombers would repay a thousandfold, until the
inhabitants of Berlin, Hamburg and every other city in Germany had
been systematically "de-housed" and pulverized into surrender. To
achieve this, the Air Marshals demanded that top priority in war
production should be given not to preparations for the second front,
but to the construction of huge numbers of four-engined night bombers.
Eagerly Sir Winston Churchill accepted their advice, with the backing
of his whole Cabinet. The only warning voices raised were those of a
number of very influential scientists who, by means of careful
calculations, threw serious doubt on the physical possibility of
wreaking the degree of destruction required. Their mathematical
arguments were reinforced by the studies we psychological warriors had
made of British morale in the blitz. Assuming, wisely as it worked
out, that the German people would behave under air attack at least as
bravely as the British people, we demonstrated that the scale of
frightfulness our bombers could employ against German cities would
almost certainly strengthen civilian morale, and go stimulate the war production that it was intended to weaken.
Early in 1941, these arguments were finally swept aside, and Britain
was completely committed to the bomber offensive. By the time it
reached its first climax in the raid on Hamburg, however, I had been transferred to Eisenhower's staff. I was happy, first in North Africa
and then in SHAEF, to work with an Anglo-American staff who did not
trouble to conceal how much they detested the hysterical mania for
destruction and the cold-blooded delight in pounding the German home
front to pieces displayed by the big-bomb boys. Indeed, one of my
pleasantest memories is the attitude General Walter Bedell Smith
displayed a few weeks after the Dresden raid. Sir Winston had accused
"Ike" of being soft to the German civilians and ordered him to use
terror tactics in order to panic them out of their homes and onto the
roads, and so to block the German retreat. No one contradicted Sir
Winston, but as soon as his back was turned, we were instructed to
work out a directive that would prevent him getting his way.
On V.E. Day, when I flew back to Britain in order to stand as a Labour Candidate in Coventry, I assumed with relief that my concern with
bombing was over. But I was wrong. Within years, Coventry -- the main
victim of the Luftwaffe -- had "twinned" itself with Dresden, the main
victim of the R.A.F. And when Germany was divided and it became
difficult for Westerners to go behind the Iron Curtain, I had a
standing invitation to visit Dresden as the guest of its Lord Mayor. I
have done so frequently, and on each occasion I have tried to match
the inside experience of bombing strategy I acquired during the war
with firsthand information from its victims "on the other side of the
hill." I have also checked the published accounts of the destruction
of Dresden available in Western and Eastern Germany, against the
official History of the Strategic Bombing Offensive published only two
years ago in Britain. These researches have left me in no doubt
whatever how Dresden was destroyed, why it was destroyed, and what
lessons we must draw from its destruction.
The prelude to the bombing of Dresden was sounded by the Russian
communique of January 12, 1945, which announced that the Red Army had
resumed its offensive all along the front, and was advancing into
Prussia and Silesia. This news could hardly have been more
embarrassing, either to General Dwight D. Eisenhower whose armies were
still recovering from the humiliating effects of General Karl von
Rundstedt's Christmas offensive in the Ardennes, or to President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill who were now
preparing for the Yalta Conference due to start on February 4. Since
the post war settlement was bound to be discussed with Josef Stalin in
terms not of principle but of pure politics, Sir Winston felt that the impression created by the Red Army's occupation of Eastern Europe and
advance deep into Germany must somehow be countered. But how? The
obvious answer was by a demonstration right up against the Red Army of
Western air power. What was required, he decided, was a thunderclap of Anglo-American aerial annihilation so frightful in the destruction it
wreaked that even Stalin would be impressed.
January 25 was the day when the decision was taken that resulted in
the blotting out of Dresden. Until then, the capital of Saxony had
been considered so famous a cultural monument and so futile a military
target that even the Commander in Chief of Bombing Command, Air
Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, had given it hardly a thought. All its flak batteries had been removed for use on the Eastern front; and the
Dresden authorities had taken none of the precautions, either in the strengthening of air-raid shelters, or in the provision of concrete
bunkers that had so startlingly reduced casualties in other German
cities subjected to Allied attack. Instead, they had encouraged rumors
that it would be spared either because Churchill had a niece living
there, or else because it was reserved by the Allies as their main
occupation quarters. These rumors were strengthened by the knowledge
that no less than some 26,000 Allied prisoners were quartered in and
around the city, and that its population had doubled to well over a
million in recent weeks by streams of refugees from the East.
All this Sir Winston knew on January 26. But early on that winter
morning he had learned that the Russian Army had crossed the Oder at
Breslav and was now only sixty miles from Dresden. Angrily he rang up
Sir Archibald Sinclair, his Secretary of State for Air, and asked him
what plans he had for "basting the Germans -- in their retreat from
Breslav." Sir Archibald, whose main function it had been to protect
Bomber Command from public criticism by a series of lying assurances
that scrupulous care was taken to bomb only military targets, remained
true to type. He prevaricated over the phone and next day replied that
in the view of the Air Staff "intervention in winter weather at very
long range over Eastern Germany would be difficult." To this the
Premier replied with a memorandum so offensive in its controlled fury
that the Minister and the Air Staff, never noted for their moral
courage, were stampeded into action. At once, orders were given to
concert with the American Eighth Air Force a plan for wiping out
Leipzig, Chemnitz and Dresden. Sir Winston and his staff left for
Yalta, where it became only too clear that the Premier's forebodings
were justified. Strengthened by his victories, Stalin pressed his
political demands upon a President now weakened and very near his
death, and a Prime Minister isolated and ill at ease. When suggestions
were made that the Western bombing should be used to help the Red Army
advance, the Russian generals were chilly and unresponsive.
Nevertheless, Sir Arthur Harris had already selected Dresden, now only
sixty miles from the front, for destruction. And day by day, Sir
Winston hoped that he would be able to impress Stalin with the
demonstration of what Allied air power could achieve so near the
Russian allies. But the weather was against him. The conference broke
up on the eleventh, and it was only three days later -- long after the conference when it could no longer have any effect on the negotiations
-- that the R.A.F.'s spokesman in London proudly announced the
destruction of Dresden.
We must now turn back and see what the airmen had been planning. Sir
Arthur Harris was quick to seize the opportunity presented by the
Prime Minister's insistence that Bomber Command must make its presence
felt in Eastern Germany. Since 1941, by a slow process of trial and
error, which had cost him many thousands of air crews, he had
perfected his new technique of "saturation precision bombardment."
First, daylight operations over Germany had been discarded as too
costly; then, with raiding confined to nighttime target bombing, after
a long period of quite imaginary successes, had been abandoned as too
wildly inaccurate. The decision was taken to set each city center on
fire and destroy the residential areas, sector by sector.
In this new kind of incendiary attack, highly trained special crews
were sent ahead to delineate a clearly defined target area with marker
flares, nicknamed by the Germans "Christmas trees." When this had been
done, all that remained for the rest of the bomber forces was to lay
its bomb carpet so thickly that the defense, the A.R.P., the police,
and the fire services would all be overwhelmed.
This fire-raising technique was first used with complete success in
the great raid on Hamburg. Thousands of individual fires conglomerated
into a single blaze, creating the famous "fire-storms" effect, first
described by the Police President of the city in a secret report to
Hitler that soon fell into Allied hands:
"As the result of the confluence of a number of fires, the air above
is heated to such an extent that in consequence of its reduced
specific gravity, a violent updraft occurs which causes great suction
of the surrounding air radiating from the center of the fire... The
suction of the fire storm in the larger of these area fire zones has
the effect of attracting the already overheated air in smaller area
fire zones... One effect of this phenomenon was that the fire in the
smaller area fire zones was fanned as by a bellows as the central
suction of the biggest and fiercest fires caused increased and
accelerated attraction of the surrounding masses of fresh air. In this
way all the area fires became united in one vast fire."
The Hamburg fire storm probably killed some 40,000 people:
three-quarters by carbon-monoxide poisoning as a result of the oxygen
being sucked out of the air; the rest by asphyxiation.
As soon as he heard that permission had been given to destroy Dresden,
Air Marshal Harris decided to achieve this by a deliberately created
fire storm, and to increase the effect he persuaded the Americans to
split the available bombers into three groups. The task of the first
wave was to create the fire storm. Three hours later, a second and
much heavier night force of British bombers was timed to arrive when
the German fighter and flak defenses would be off guard, and the
rescue squads on their way. Its task was to spread the fire storm.
Finally, the next morning, a daylight attack by the Eighth Air Force
was to concentrate on the outlying areas, the new city.
Two-pronged attacks had been successfully carried out during 1944
against a number of German towns. The three-pronged attack employed at
Dresden was unique and uniquely successful. The first wave, consisting
of some two hundred fifty night bombers, arrived precisely on time and
duly created a fire storm. The second force -- more than twice as
strong and carrying an enormous load of incendiaries -- also reached
the target punctually, and, undisturbed by flak or night fighters,
spent thirty-four minutes carefully spreading the fires outside the
first target area. Finally, to complete the devastation, some two
hundred eleven Flying Fortresses began the third attack at 11:30 a.m.
on the following morning. Without exaggeration, the commanders could
claim that the Dresden raid had "gone according to plan." Everything
which happened in the stricken city had been foreseen and planned with meticulous care.
So far, we have been looking at the Dresden raid from "our own side of
the hill" -- considering the point of view of Mr. Churchill, concerned
to create the best impression possible on Stalin at the Yalta
Conference, and of Air Marshal Harris, eager to demonstrate the
technique for creating a fire storm. But what was the impact on the
Dresdeners? Inevitably the raid has created its own folklore.
Thousands of those who survived it now live in Western Germany, each
with his own memory to retail to the visitor. In Dresden itself, the
city fathers have now established an official Communist version, of
which the main purpose clearly is to put the main blame on the
"American imperialists" (we are solemnly told, for instance, that the
R.A.F. was directed to special targets in the city by an American
capitalist whose villa on the far side of the Elbe is now a luxury
club for favored Communist artists). Nevertheless, anyone who bothers
to read the books published in both Germanies and to compare the
stories he hears from Communist and anti-Communist witnesses soon
discovers that not only the outline of events but the details of the
main episodes are agreed beyond dispute.
Dresden is one of those German cities which normally devotes Shrove
Tuesday to Carnival festivities. But on February 13, 1945, with the
Red Army sixty miles away, the mood was somber. The refugees, who were
crowded into every house, each had his horror story about Russian
atrocities. In many parts of the city, and particularly around the
railway station, thousands of latecomers who could find no corner in
which to sleep were camping in the bitter cold of the open streets.
The only signs of Carnival spirit, when the sirens sounded at 9:55
p.m., were the full house at the circus and a few gangs of little
girls wandering about in fancy dress. Though no one took the danger of
a raid very seriously, orders must be obeyed and the population just
had time to get down to its shelters before the first bombs fell at
nine minutes past the hour.
Twenty-four minutes later, the last British bomber was on its way back
to England, and the inner city of Dresden was ablaze. Since there were
no steel structures in any of its apartment houses, the floors quickly capsized, and half an hour after the raid was over the fire storm
transformed thousands of individual blazes into a sea of flames,
ripping off the roofs, tossing trees, cars and lorries into the air,
and simultaneously sucking the oxygen out of the air-raid shelters.
Most of those who remained below ground were to die painlessly, their
bodies first brilliantly tinted bright orange and blue, and then, as
the heat grew intense, either totally incinerated or melted into a
thick liquid sometimes three or four feet deep. But there were others
who, when the bombing stopped, rushed upstairs. Some of them stopped
to collect their belongings before escaping, and they were caught by
the second raid. But some 10,000 fled to the great open space of the
Grosse Garten, the magnificent royal park of Dresden, nearly one and a
half square miles in all. Here they were caught by the second raid,
which started without an air-raid warning, at 1:22 a.m. Far heavier
than the first - there were twice as many bombers with a far heavier
load of incendiaries - its target markers had been deliberately placed
in order to spread the fires into the black rectangle which was all
the airmen could see of the Grosse Garten. Within minutes the fire
storm was raging across the grass, ripping up some trees and littering
the branches of others with clothes, bicycles and dismembered limbs
that remained hanging for days afterward.
Equally terrible was the carnage in the great square outside the main
railway station. Here, the thousands camping out had been reinforced
by other thousands escaping from the inner city, while within the
station a dozen trains, when the first sirens blew, had been shunted
to the marshaling yards and escaped all damage. After the first raid
stopped, these trains were shunted back to the station platforms --
just in time to receive the full force of the bombardment. For weeks,
mangled bodies were littered inside and outside the station building.
Below ground, the scene was even more macabre. The restaurants,
cellars and tunnels could easily have been turned into effective
bombproof shelters. The authorities had not bothered to do so, and of
the two thousand crowded in the dark, one hundred were burned alive
and five hundred asphyxiated before the doors could be opened and the
survivors pulled out.
The timing of the second raid, just three hours after the first, not
only insured that the few night fighters in the area were off their
guard, but it also created the chaos intended and effectively
interrupted all rescue work. For many miles around, military
detachments, rescue squads and fire brigades started on their way to
the stricken city, and most of them were making their way through the
suburbs when the bombs began to fall. Those who turned back were soon
swallowed up in the mad rush of panic evacuation. Most of those who
proceeded toward the center perished in the fire storm.
The most terrible scenes in the inner city took place in the
magnificent old market square, the Altmarkt. Soon after the first raid finished, this great square was jam-packed with panting survivors.
When the second raid struck, they could scarcely move until someone
remembered the huge concrete emergency water tank that had been
constructed to one side. This tank was a hundred by fifty yards by six
feet deep. There was a sudden stampede to escape the heat of the fire
storm by plunging into it. Those who did so forgot that its sloping
sides were slippery, with no handholds. The nonswimmers sank to the
bottom, dragging the swimmers with them. When the rescuers reached the
Altmarkt five days later, they found the tank filled with bloated
corpses, while the rest of the square was littered with recumbent or
seated figures so shrunk by the incineration that thirty of them could
be taken away in a single bathtub.
But perhaps the most memorable horror of this second raid occurred in
the hospitals. In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a
hospital city, with many of its schools converted into temporary
wards. Of its nineteen hospitals, sixteen were badly damaged and
three, including the main maternity clinic, totally destroyed.
Thousands of crippled survivors were dragged by their nurses to the
banks of the River Elbe, where they were laid in rows on the grass to
wait for the daylight. But when it came, there was another horror.
Punctually at 11:30 a.m., the third wave of bombers, the two hundred
eleven American Flying Fortresses, began their attack. Once again, the
area of destruction was extended across the city. But what the
survivors all remember were the scores of Mustang fighters diving low
over the bodies huddled on the banks of the Elbe, as well as on the
larger lawns of the Grosse Garten, in order to shoot them up. Other
Mustangs chose as their targets the serried crowds that blocked every
road out of Dresden. No one knows how many women and children were
actually killed by those dive-bombing attacks. But in the legend of
Dresden destruction, they have become the symbol of Yankee sadism and brutality, and the inquirer is never permitted to forget that many
choirboys of one of Dresden's most famous churches were among the
victims.
For five days and nights, the city burned and no attempt was made to
enter it. Then at last the authorities began to grapple with the
crisis and to estimate the damage. Of Dresden's five theatres, all had
gone. Of her fifty-four churches, nine were totally destroyed and
thirty-eight seriously damaged. Of her one hundred thirty-nine
schools, sixty-nine ceased to exist and fifty were badly hit. The
great zoo which lay just beyond the Grosse Garten had been struck in
the second raid, and the panicked animals had mingled with the
desperate survivors. Now they were rounded up and shot. Those who
escaped from the prisons, when they too were blown up, had better
fortune: they all managed to get away, including a number of brave
anti-Nazis.
But some things had survived destruction. The few factories Dresden
possessed were outside the city center, and soon were at work again.
So too was the railway system. Within three days, indeed, military
trains were running once again right through the city, and the
marshaling yards -- untouched by a bomb -- were in full operation. It
was as though an ironical fate had decided that the first fire storm deliberately created by mortal man should destroy everything worth
preserving, and leave untouched anything of military value. In their
salvage work, the Nazis relied on some 25,000 Allied prisoners of war, concentrated in and around the city. Dresden, as was known very well
in London and Washington, was not only a hospital city but a
prisoner-of-war city -- still another reason why the authorities
assumed it would not be attacked. Faced with the appalling scenes of
suffering, the prisoners seemed to have worked with a will, even after
some of their fellow-prisoners had been shot under martial law for
looting.
What Dresdeners chiefly remember of these first days after the raid is
the disposal of the bodies. Throughout the war, German local
authorities had been extremely careful to show great respect for
death, enabling relatives wherever possible to identify and to bury
their own dead. At first, this procedure was followed in Dresden. But
weeks after the raid there were still thousands of unopened cellars
under the smoldering ruins, and the air was thick with the fog and
sweet stench of rotting flesh. An S.S. commander made the decision
that the daily procession of horse-drawn biers from the city to the
cemeteries outside must be stopped. If plague was to be prevented, the
rest of the corpses must be disposed of more speedily. Hurriedly, a
monstrous funeral pyre was constructed in the Altmarkt. Steel shutters
from one of Dresden's biggest department stores were laid across
broken slabs of ironstone. On this macabre gridiron, the bodies were
piled with straw between each layer, soaked with gasoline and set
ablaze. Nine thousand corpses were disposed of in this way, and eight
cubic meters of ash were then loaded into gasoline containers and
buried in a graveyard outside the city, twenty-five feet wide and
fifteen feet deep.
If it was expected in either London or Washington that the destruction
of Dresden, despite its negligible military significance, would at
least shatter German morale, this hope was soon to be disappointed --
thanks to Paul Joseph Goebbels' skillful exploitation of the disaster.
For days, the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin poured out, both in its
foreign and in its home services, a stream of eyewitness accounts of
the stricken city, backed up by moralistic attacks on the cold-blooded
sadism of the men who created the fire storm. In his secret
propaganda, Dr. Goebbels did even better by leaking to the neutral
press a fictitious top-secret estimate that the casualties had
probably reached 260,000. As a result of this Nazi propaganda
campaign, the German people were convinced that the Anglo-American
forces were indeed bent on their destruction. And their morale was
once again stiffened by terror of defeat. Disturbed by the success of
Dr. Goebbels' propaganda, the airmen decided to call a press
conference on February 16 at SHAEF. As a result of the briefing, given
by a British Air Commodore, Associated Press cabled a special dispatch
all over the world, announcing "the long-awaited decision to adopt
deliberate terror bombings of German population centers as a ruthless
expedient of hastening Hitler's doom." The correspondents added that
the Dresden attack was "for the avowed purpose of heaping more
confusion on Nazi road and rail traffic, and to sap German morale."
When this dispatch reached London, it was immediately censored on the
ground that officially the R.A.F. only bombed military targets, and
the attribution to it of terror raids was a vicious piece of Nazi
propaganda. In the United States, where the dispatch was widely
publicized, the embarrassment caused to the Administration was acute,
since the Air Force spokesmen had seldom failed to point out the
difference between the indiscriminate R.A.F. night attacks and the
selective and precise nature of the daylight bombing carried out by
the Eighth Air Force.
In order to stop awkward questions, General George C. Marshall then
gave a public assurance that the bombing on Dresden had taken place at
Russian request. Although no evidence was produced either then or
since for the truth of this statement, it was accepted uncritically
and has since found its way into a number of official American
histories.
But suppression was not sufficient to stem the rising wave of public
protest. Coming as it did when the war was virtually over, the wanton destruction of the Florence of the North and the mass murder of so
many of its inhabitants was too much, even for a world public opinion
fed for years on strident war propaganda. The publication of a lengthy
report by a Swedish correspondent caused a revulsion of feeling.
Within a few weeks, this revulsion against indiscriminate bombing had
affected even Sir Winston Churchill. Up till now, the critics in the
British Parliament of area bombing had been a small derided minority.
Suddenly, their influence began to grow, and on March 28, Sir Winston
in response to this new mood, wrote to the Chief of the Air Staff,
beginning with the remarkable words: "It seems to me that the moment
has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the
sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed." Since the Premier had taken the lead in demanding the
switch from target to area bombing and had actively encouraged each
new advance proposed by Air Marshal Harris in the technique of air obliteration, this memorandum could hardly have been less felicitously
phrased. It provided damning evidence that so long as terror bombing
was popular, the politicians would take credit for it; but now that
public opinion was revolting against its senseless brutality, they
were only too obviously running for cover and leaving the air force to
take the blame.
So outraged was the Chief of the Air Staff that on this occasion he
stood up to Sir Winston, forcing him to withdraw the memorandum, and
to substitute for it what the official historians - who narrate this
incident in full - have described as "a somewhat more discreetly and
fairly worded document."
But in Britain at least the damage had already been done. From that
moment, Bomber Command, which for years had been the object of
adulation, became increasingly discredited, and the nickname of its
Commander in Chief changed from "Bomber" Harris to "Butcher" Harris.
Although the bomber crews, suffered far the heaviest casualties of any
of the British armed services, no campaign medal was struck to
distinguish their part in winning the war. In his victory broadcast of
May 13, 1945, Sir Winston omitted any tribute to them, and after the
Labour Government came to power, Earl Attlee was just as vindictive.
In January, 1946, he omitted their Commander in Chief from his victory
honors list. Sir Arthur Harris accepted the insult loyally, and on
February 13 sailed to exile in South Africa.
The Eighth Air Force was treated more gently, both by the politicians
in Washington and by the American public. Its airmen received their
share of campaign medals, and to this day it has never been officially
admitted that by the end of the war they were bombing city centers and residential areas as wantonly by day as the R.A.F. was by night. There
was, however, an important difference between the public image of the
two Air Forces. The British Cabinet, having secretly decided to
sanction indiscriminate terror bombing, concealed this decision from
the British public and therefore compelled Bomber Command to operate
under cover of a sustained and deliberate lie. In the case of the
Eighth Air Force, self-deception took place of lying. Instead of doing
one thing and saying another, the myth was maintained that on every
mission the Flying Fortresses aimed exclusively at military targets,
and this is still part of the official American legend of World War
II. It was because it was impossible to square this legend with what
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