Название: Parachute to Berlin
Автор: Lowell Bennett, Alan Bennett
Издательство: Casemate
Год: 2023
Страниц: 256
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub, mobi
Размер: 10.2 MB

The vivid account of a war correspondent shot down over Germany and taken prisoner.

Bennett was one of several journalists to fly a night raid over Berlin in November 1943. This is the vivid testimony of an American journalist shot down over Berlin. After he was captured in Berlin, he was taken on a tour of Germany and shown what the civilian population was being subjected to. Bennett spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft I, where he started the newspaper POW WOW, secretly read by 9,000 prisoners. Bennett's experiences led him to condemn the Allied policy of systematically bombing civilian population centers.

The Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 highlighted the numerical deficiencies of the RAF. When the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam in May, the RAF began daylight raids against Nazi Germany, which retaliated in July with bombing various British towns, then escalated to the Blitz terror bombing on major UK cities in September. Over a period of nine months, known as the Battle of Britain, an estimated 23,000 British civilians died—including 1,200 civilians in Coventry—and 32,000 were wounded by German bombs.

At the start of the RAF war against Germany, Bomber Command pilots were specifically instructed to avoid attacking civilian targets. Daylight bombing proved such a high risk to flying personnel it was abandoned in favor of night raids. This resulted in a much higher ratio of civilian deaths and injuries, euphemistically known today as “collateral casualties.”

Over the next three years Britain’s air fleet made huge technological gains, enabling the Avro-Lancaster bombers to fly over greater distances, carrying up to 5 tons of bombs on each plane. During the war the RAF would drop close to a million tons of bombs over Germany. The USAAF, which actively engaged in 1942, dropped a further 623,000 tons. Over the duration of the war the RAF lost 57,000 aircrew killed in combat. Most were young men with university degrees, as required for the highly sophisticated technical skills required for flying the planes.

According to the West German government in October 1956 there were 635,000 civilian deaths during the air war in Germany and the annexed territories, 500,000 killed by strategic bombing and 135,000 from air raids in the 1945 flight and evacuations on the Eastern Front. Allied air raids over France killed 60,000 civilians, including an attack with incendiary bombs by 347 RAF bombers on the French coastal city of Royan on January 4 and 5, 1945, that killed over 400 civilians and 47 Germans with no destruction of military facilities.

In February 1942, RAF Marshal Sir Arthur Harris was appointed Commander in Chief of Bomber Command. Known at the time as “Bomber Harris,” he favored the controversial policy of “area bombing” over “precision targeting,” which resulted in a far higher number of civilian casualties, precisely what my father denounces in his book. Arthur Harris received Churchill’s support, but he obtained no official recognition on retirement in 1946, to the anger of many RAF personnel who had fought under his orders and who felt betrayed.

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