Unpredictability in a War Situation

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Sir Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Churchill was a great lover of the glittering phrase more than a lover of the truth.

There is hardly any mention anywhere in Sir Winston Churchill's writings about the mass fire-bombing of the ancient city of Dresden at the end of the Second World War in which more civilians died than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Dresden was a civilian target, not a military target, and had escaped military attention all through the Second World war because it was non-strategic. Dresden was more famous for pottery than anything else.

The mass fire-bombing started at night and continued in three waves until a cyclone of flame reached high into the sky and sucked oxygen from all over the surrounding areas.

Nowadays we speak of weapons of mass destruction and of terrorism. The mass bombing of Dresden was pure terrorism. The war was almost at an end. It was a civilian city of old men and women and young women and children because all the able-bodied men were at the three front lines in the south, east and west. The city was filled with refugees fleeing the Soviet advance, eighty miles away.

It was Allied policy to strike at civilian population centres and all the great cities of Germany were fire-bombed and flattened. Almost 900,000 civilian Germans died in these mass bombing raids.

The few German raids on Coventry and London were paltry by comparison.

Air Marshall "Bomber" Harris denied responsibility for the bombing of Dresden for which he had been blamed by Churchill himself but in the end Churchill finally admitted responsibility. Harris took his orders directly from Churchill.

We cannot blame Churchill for the mass napalm fire-bombing of Tokyo, another non-strategic civilian city,where 83,000 civilians died and one million were left homeless.

The winners may hold a war crimes trial because it is believed that only the losers are guilty of war crimes. The winners are heroes and get all the glory.

In modern warfare, civilians are the main targets, especially women and children.

We imagine such terrible widespread destruction of civilian cities to be the work of madmen and psychopaths but when we listen to the powerful speeches and look at the kind smiling faces of men like Roosevelt and Churchill and their assistants we are puzzled.

It is said that psychopaths are attracted to power and are to be found in the top ranks of the military and in the political field and they especially enjoy the power of life and death over their fellow man. Well, of course that is how we see the criminal serial killer psychopath but not the benign politicians we admire and respect and look up to for leadership. Yet, they, too, have to make terrible decisions, however innocent they may appear.

Joe Bloggs