Published On: Tue, Sep 14th, 2021

Secret Casualties of World War Two: How UK Government wanted civilian death in German air raids

If Simon Webb is unconventional when he reports in his book, Secret Casualties of World War Two, that at times during German bombing raids on Britain, more casualties were had from British Army anti-aircraft fire falling back to earth than from the weapons of the enemy, then it’s just because he’s choosing to report what is the sort of inconvenient plain fact that court history will not touch with a barge pole. He is perhaps controversial when he claims that the death, in tens of thousands, from “friendly fire” was as a result of a UK Government policy to discourage civilians from leaving the big cities and their war work in the industries based there, because here he would be broaching the subject of the trade-off made, which is going to form a topic for this article, whereby civilians would be killed so that the UK Government could stay in a war that Germany didn’t want to wage upon it. Of course, being absolutely conventional, Webb doesn’t appear to think that UK Government had any other option but to fight, and certainly – as far as this author has read Webb’s book – only fractionally gets into the full extent of an appalling and murderous scandal and crime.

As mentioned, the author has read Webb’s book to a certain point sufficient to be prepared for the production of the first article in a series (to be added to as the reading continues), and so not yet knowing about it, won’t comment on why the populations of Britain’s industrial cities did not flee into the country – except to say that he has gained an impression in the course of wider research that the presence of anti-aircraft batteries generated a false sense of security – so they promise to be culprits again.

On the other hand, what can be discussed at this time is how it was known by strategists that anti-aircraft batteries were useless at stopping bombing operations, and how it is clear that a decision must have been made in UK Government to make that trade between the injury and death of civilians and the destruction of their property by British Army shells, and the survival of a war machine at risk from inevitable German bombs.

And as alluded to, at this stage at least, Webb appears to be a conventionalist because he seems to think that civilian deaths were only unnecessary because other ways and means of defence were not opted for by a UK Government that made the most cynical of decisions. Appearing to think that Germany attacked the skies of Britain in preparation for an invasion – which could never happen – Webb doesn’t appear to have cottoned on to the fact that the civilian deaths of which he is so upset were fundamentally unnecessary because of how right up to the so-called Blitz, Germany was open to a “white peace”, as evidenced by her handling of Britain with kid gloves during the course of the war as it had endured thus far. In fact, when Germany attacked British aerodromes in the opening phase of period which is now termed “the Battle of Britain”, it was surely in the name of a defensive doctrine, which features in the information from Webb’s book that is going to be discussed in this article, and that Britain, in court history, gets a free pass for.  It is perhaps not Webb’s fault if he falls into the track made by the repeated furrowing by countless court historians that have caused great mischief by representing Germany’s actually quite careful form of “attack as best part of defence” as an outright offensive act.

It will be for another occasion to be more controversial than Webb, and expound at length upon how the real ulterior motive for deploying large anti-warship artillery in the midst of Britain’s towns and cities (from whence it could fire into the air with only the remotest chance of hitting an airplane, but was always more certain to deal out catastrophe at the other end of the parabola traced out by its ammunition) was that UK Government actively looked for British civilian death from terrible barrages by British Army anti-aircraft forces.

In fact, it is to be controversial enough in this article to say that, before one gets into the issue of deliberate death using anti-aircraft weapons, it was bad enough that the UK Government invited the bombing of British civilians at all. This was certainly done as part of UK Government’s strategy to survive as a player in a war that it had already lost until the USA could be brought to bear against Germany. But all this is still beyond a fundamental wrongdoing by UK Government regarding its manipulation of what would be inevitable German bombing against Britain’s military industrial complex irrespective of how it came about. Webb fully immerses his reader in this concept by introducing what will be news to many about the apparently innocent act of “blackout” being in fact a deadly menace (there was a rise in pedestrians being hit by traffic, for instance), and the issue of blackout, which was about having a population follow a preposterous rule in a way that we of the Coronohoax fake pandemic era can recognise, where all lights on the ground had to be extinguished, leads us into the matter where this article, at lasts, wants to settle.

Blackouts never stopped the Germans from bombing British cities, but what they did do was force the Germans to bomb civilians instead of war machinery – they camouflaged what UK Government didn’t want the Luftwaffe to hit, when its planes were still able to proceed to their general targets by moonlight reflecting off of bodies of water. Indeed, Webb actually outright states that the blackout was a deliberate act to have the Germans bomb civilians.

Although Webb – at least at this stage of the author’s reading – doesn’t follow to it, the natural conclusion one can make is that anti-aircraft guns were placed in and around cities and towns for exactly the same reason, to wit, to force the Germans to bomb civilians by i), making the Luftwaffe fly high where the gunpowder fuzes in the artillery shells didn’t work properly, if at all (we’ll look at this some more in a future instalment of this series), and ii), making the Luftwaffe fly at night so that it was harder to detect the general vicinity of the incoming bombers by eye. Both of these outcomes meant that it would have been harder to deliver a bomb in a precise manner. Thus was Britain’s war machine camouflaged.

To reiterate, it was the received thinking that “the bomber always got through”, as Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons in 1932, borne out of experience in the First World War and the intervening years to the Second, that meant that the options for UK Government were either it didn’t go to war in the first place, or it made a quick peace after the predicament of being bombed had come about, or it sacrificed thousands of civilians – at least this is how one might view it purely from the pre-9/11 perspective. The death of those civilians were actually integral to a strategy based on a real understanding, that UK Government showed every indication of possessing, of how populations could be motivated for the benefit of the conduct of a war by being bombed on top of having received the right sort of conditioning, or training, through propaganda. It was about utilising most profitably a certain inevitability.

For a long time after bombing from the air became a military tactic in various wars fought before the First World War involving Turkey and various other states, it was posited by prophesiers that bombing alone could cause a country to lose a war because of how its population could be made to become demoralised. This is why, combined with the idea that there was no stopping an enemy bomber, a certain doctrine for air warfare emerged whereby to defend itself, a country would have to attack and bomb the enemy more effectively than the enemy could deliver its own bombs: the Trenchard Doctrine.

Famously, however, the Spanish Civil War gave a last minute lesson before the Second World War, and the main act for mass bombing of civilian centres, to teach watchful government’s interested to learn that bombing civilians could in fact galvanise a population into being more adamantly determined to fight. The Germans surely had this in mind because part of their softly-softly approach with Britain was the limitation, set out by Hitler in edicts that we can still read about today, of civilian casualties at the outset of the German bombing campaign.

Arguably, UK Government also knew about the galvanisation of a population through bombing, and thus enraged the Germans and stung them into a fight (four months before the Blitz, but on the very day after Churchill had been installed as a regime front that would operate on the British people to have them fatalistic, if not entirely defiant), by bombing the city centre of Munchen-Gladbach, and then five days later, launching the first “hundred-bomber” raid on the Ruhr on 15th May, 1940. This provocation is something that has been discussed previously in the FBEL articleOnce, Collect Scrap Metal; Now, Wear A Mask: When Is UK Government Going To Pay For Its Crime?, where Germany’s reluctance to fight Britain is also covered. Interestingly, the author is not alone in recognising that the UK Government provoked the Battle of Britain and the Blitz; Webb: “It makes a nonsense of the whole accepted story of the bombing of Britain when we discover that it was the British who began bombing cities and that the Germans did not retaliate in kind for months”. (p53/54).

If one would like to propose that all the UK Government was doing when it provoked Germany was its own execution of the Trenchard Doctrine, this can be countered by pointing out that in fact the UK Government relied on the other doctrine against bombing from the air, which involves fighter defence.

This was a doctrine that appears to have had a lot less support going into the Second World War, presumably because of the lack of development of planes that could intercept bombers. However, in a late surge, Britain developed the Spitfire and Hurricane, two of the best of their type of plane in the world. What else is the claim of victory, by UK Government, in the Battle of Britain, than a signal that it was the fighter defence doctrine that proved to be the superior one? These days, countries like Syria, using Russian technology, are merely deploying the same doctrine – and really quite effectively – where simple robots, essentially, are used to deliver their “craft” into bombs and bombers as the means to bring the vessels and explosives down, instead of a piloted fighter ploughing machine gun fire into its target to bring about the same result.

Of course, it wasn’t to protect civilians that UK Government would rely on a fighter defence doctrine. It would be another asset in protecting the capability to wage war. And we can see how the concern to pursue a fighter defence doctrine had been motivated in those in establishment circles who had influence in the matter. There was great talk on the British side, even before the 1930s, of huge numbers of casualties from enemy bombs. The criminal H.G. Wells was at the vanguard of this in various publications, with civilians being forced onto the roads by Martians, or populations just being bombed back into an Armageddon scenario, and in the Commons, a couple of years after Baldwin’s speech, another one who should be dug up and urinated on, Churchill, would say: “We must expect that under pressure of continuous air attacks upon London at least three or four million would be driven out into the open country” (p38).

Here, of course, we have it revealed to us what was the cause of vexation: the prospect of no one to man the assembly lines, or none organised enough to do it, and we are reminded of Webb’s claim that anti-aircraft batteries were for keeping civilians in the cities.

Moreover, we notice, of course, that none of the prophesying of doom acted as a preventative warning that UK Government would heed (in fact nothing would, because UK Government had given Poland guarantee so that German demands regarding Danzig could be rejected,  therefore UK Government engineered the war and wanted it). In fact, from this perspective, it would appear that UK Government and its agents, at the outbreak of war, had for a long time been preparing British civilians to be acquiescent about their sacrifice – and, naturally, having them remain in situ and at war work (to avoid the catastrophe for UK Government that Churchill envisioned) was part of this manipulation.

Meanwhile, innocent usage, at least as claimed, of the Trenchard Doctrine could offer plausible deniability for what UK Government was really up to: provoking Germany to engage in a field of combat which she would ultimately find to be futile and expensive, and would have to almost fully withdraw from (i.e. the end of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz- giving the UK Government a propaganda, not military, victory [see footnote 1]), and in the meantime, the British population, battered by the anti-aircraft gun augmented raids, had been presented with proof of what UK Government had been telling it – that Germany was a murderous foe wanting to destroy the country – when it wasn’t true. It was a big ruse to keep Britain in the war until the Americans joined, and it cost thousands of civilian lives, more about which (in terms of quantity and causation) to come in future episodes.

Here’s food for thought until next time. The two doctrines for defence against bombers were the Trenchard and the fighter defence. Not in either were anti-aircraft guns required.

 

More reading:

1. In 9/11 Season, More On How “Nineteen Eighteen Four” Tells Of UK Government Shelling Its Own Citizens During World War II (link).

2. Lessons From Nineteen Eighty Four: A Prelude To A Series On The Deliberate Wartime Shelling Of British Civilians (link).

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  1. Theguvnor says:

    ‘The two doctrines for defence against bombers were the Trenchard and the fighter defence.’
    Are they the Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine of contemporary times?