The office of Nick Clegg MP, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has responded to my letter. You may recall that the entire point of my letter was to answer Clegg’s failure to cite the Nazi rocket attacks on Britain in 1944-5 as a precedent for what Israel has suffered for the last several years from Hamas. (The photo below shows a damaged building hit by V1 rockets in London in 1944.)
Britain’s response to those attacks was to intensify the strategic bomber offensive against Germany even though the Third Reich was in already in defeat and could not really defend itself against aerial bombardment. The vast majority of victims of those bombings were civilians, including thousands of women and children.
In my letter, I did point out the irony of the fact that Clegg’s predecessor as party leader actually helped plan the firebombing of Dresden – something which the Liberal Democrats today would almost certainly characterize as ‘disproportionate’ and even a ‘war crime’. But that is not what they thought at the time, when German V1 rockets were falling on London.
You’ll see that the letter I’ve received from Clegg’s office is boilerplate and makes no reference to any points I raised (such as at the very least dismissing the analogy I made). Click on ‘Read more’ to read the full text of their reply.
Dear Mr Lee
Thank you very much for your email to Nick Clegg MP regarding Israeli action in the Gaza Strip and Nick’s article in The Guardian. Nick has asked me to reply to you on his behalf.
I am very sorry that you disagree with Nick’s comments on the issue of Israeli actions in Gaza. I should clarify that Liberal Democrats were in no way questioning Israel’s right to security and we do understand that it faces a uniquely difficult predicament among liberal democracies. Nick has, furthermore, condemned Hamas’ rocket attacks and said that it “must turn its back on terrorism” in the article. We feel, however, that Israel’s current actions are not in its own best interests – this sort of action undermines the prospects for negotiation and for a settlement, which ultimately is the only way to guarantee peace for Israeli citizens. We have also advocated EU action to help broker peace and believe that an EU mission could help tackle the problems of weapons smuggling, helping to secure a much more proportionate and effective response to rocket attacks in the shorter term.
Thank you once again for emailing us.
Best wishes
Anna Brown
Correspondence Manager
Office of Nick Clegg MP
I would ask Nick Clegg to tell me why the EU didn’t send a mission to “tackle the problems of weapons smuggling, helping to secure a much more proportionate and effective response to rocket attacks” BEFORE Hamas resumed its rocket launching after they unilaterally decided not to renew the previous ceasefire. What Nick Clegg is proposing is akin to closing the barn door AFTER the horses ran away.
Dresden bombing most definitely was a war crime. Why the “” marks?
The authoritative ‘most definitely’ in your comment reminds me of those protestors who are absolutely certain that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. Are you an expert on international law? Which court of law ruled that Dresden was a war crime? Or forget that – did anyone, in any country, ever attempt to prosecute those who ordered or carried out the raid? Does the German government today consider it to have been a war crime? People throw around these terms as if they know something, when they clearly don’t. What we do know is that the idea that firebombing of Dresden was a ‘war crime’ originated with the Nazis, who also wildly exaggerated the number of casualties.
Was still a war crime.
And even Churchill himself regretted the act at a later date.
But Churchill never considered it a war crime.
Apologist
People throw around these terms as if they know something, when they clearly don’t. What we do know is that the idea that firebombing of Dresden was a ‘war crime’ originated with the Nazis, who also wildly exaggerated the number of casualties.
No, clearly some of us don’t know what we’re talking about. It was people in Britain, not the Nazis, that first described Dresden as a war crime. It was highly controversial even at the time. A sizeable number of backbench MPs – especially from Labour (and memorably including Nye Bevan) – criticised it in Parliament. They were joined by church leaders and various public figures (I’m sure they’d be dismissed as liberal intellectuals today – they probably were even then). Even members of the government itself – again, especially from Labour – were outraged by the operation and Bomber Command behind closed doors.
They were staunch opponents of any bombing of non-military targets, and even military targets in civilian areas (and this was at a time when it was pretty much a miracle if the plane was the right way up when the bomb bay doors opened – no surgical strikes and precision bombing available). Even before Dresden they had been criticising the whole campaign of bombing German cities as “terror bombing”, an unjustified act of revenge and an attempt to extract a penalty from the German people. It was in this debate that the bombing of Dresden was first described as a war crime.
Dresden remains extremely controversial to this day. I’ve no idea what Germany’s official stance is, but many German politicians, of various political persuasions, have called it a war crime over the years. It seems every time the Queen or Prime Minister visits Germany, there are calls for Britain to apologise, both from Germans and widely echoed in Britain itself. There were particular campaigns for an official apology following German reunification and during the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the bombing, again both by Germans and by Brits.
It has been held by the British left for a very long time, and more widely across the spectrum at least since I was a kid, that Dresden was indeed an Allied war crime, like the Katyn massacre and Britain’s subsequent cover-up (something that Churchill also later regretted, although again without ever accepting it as a war crime). Even amongst those who believe that the attack was justified, there is a strong current that, though the original death toll the Nazis came out with was undoubtedly an over-estimate for propaganda purposes, so the figure that later became officially accepted significantly under-estimated the total in order to absolve the Allies of guilt. There has been almost universal acceptance, almost since the event itself, that though it may not technically have been a war crime, it was a moral outrage.
Maybe we can agree on that latter point, then? That Operation Cast Lead may not technically have been a war crime. But it was, unambiguously, a moral crime.
Thanks for a thoughtful comment – even if I don’t agree with you.
Back in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the Dresden bombing, the locals put up posters around the city with an image of the destruction and the words (in German) ‘Thank you, Hitler’. And the line taken by the German government at the time was that moral responsibility for the loss of innocent lives in the belonged to the Nazis, not the British.
You may be right that in the Labour Party there was some opposition to the strategic bombing campaign – I don’t know.
There was certainly never a public inquiry, no one was ever indicted, and any talk of the British being war criminals remained just that – talk.
I recently read “Firestorm: The bombing of Dresden 1945”, a collection of essays most of which are quite critical, but several of which do provide new evidence of Dresden’s strategic importance at that stage in the war. I think that this is certainly a subject on which people can disagree.
What I do know – and this was the point I made in the original article – is that Nick Clegg’s predecessor as Liberal leader back then has been named as one of the architects of the Dresden raid, which I saw as ironic considering what Clegg said.