Bombing + Air Raid Defense

Bombardment of civilians in undefended cities far away from the front lines is an atrocity, yet it was common practice during World War II. Read here about the history, conduct, and consequences of this war crime, as well as the various attempts to protect the civilian population from death falling from the skies.



Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris (1892-1984) led British Bomber Command for the greater part of World War II. He is widely regarded as one of the most controversial figures of the war. This article discusses the career path that enabled Harris to become commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, as well as the morality of area bombings practiced by Harris during World War II.

The industrial complex erected by the German government on a Polish army base at Auschwitz (now Oświęcim, Poland) has long been labelled a “death camp” on the strength of the great numbers of people forcibly sent there as part of extensive ethnic-cleansing programs and as laborers as World War II …

Arthur R. Butz was born and raised in New York City. In 1965 he received his. doctorate in Control Sciences from the University of Minnesota. In 1966 he joined the faculty of Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois), where he is now Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In addition to …

Why I Survived the A-Bomb by Akira Kohchi. Costa Mesa, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1989, hardbound, 230 pages, photographs, $19.95, ISBN 0-939484-31-5. Why I Survived the A-Bomb is a moving memoir of Akira Kohchi's boyhood in war-time Hiroshima, and of the city's devastation on August 6, 1945. The heart …

Deputies of the German National Democratic Party (NPD) created a scandal when they walked out during the moment of silence at the Parliament of Saxony in Dresden, when they were supposed to hang around to memorialize the deaths of Jews and others at Auschwitz. This was the latest "publicity stunt" …

Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust Post Office Box 439016 / MCD P-111 San Diego CA 92143 Tel (San Diego): 619.687.1950 On the Internet: http://www.codoh.com 28 August 1997 Walter Reich, Director United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Washington D.C. 20024 Dear Dr. Reich: Some months ago I came across materials …

The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? edited by Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Hardcover. 350 pp. Bibliography, index, illustrations. Given the belief that Auschwitz was a unique slaughterhouse in which a million, or several millions, were gassed and burned, …

Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley “Bomber” Harris died on 5 April of this year, at the age of 91. As Air Officer Commanding in Chief Bomber Command from February 1942 until the end of the Second World War, he was in charge of Britain’s massive “area bombing” campaign directed against German …

In August 1944 the historic walled city of Saint Malo, the brightest jewel of the Emerald Coast of Brittany, France, was almost totally destroyed by fire. This should not have happened. If the attacking U.S. forces had not believed a false report that there were thousands of Germans within the …

This story is from The Australian (Nothing new for us, but good to see today in the mainstream press.) http://tinyurl.com/kx5b3a7 GERMANY is to open its first museum dedicated to bomber offensives of World War II that will lay bare how the Allies attacked civilian areas. Only now, with survivors of …

Joachim Hoffmann, Dr. phil., served as a historian with the Military History Research Center of the German armed forces, 1960-1995, and is author of the recently published study, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg. This item appeared as a reader's letter in the September 1997 issue of the Swiss magazine Schweizer Soldat. For some …

Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive 1939–45 by Max Hastings. New York, The Dial Press/James Wade, 1979. 469 pp with Notes, Appendices, Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 0-8037-0154-X. One of the most controversial campaigns of the Second World War was the bombing offensive against Germany. British, …

In a secret wartime memorandum recently made public, Winston Churchill told his advisers that he wanted to "drench" Germany with poison gas. Churchill's July 1944 memo to his chief of staff Gen. Hastings Ismay was reproduced in the August-September 1985 issue of American Heritage magazine. "I you to think very …

Following is a Japanese report on the fire-bombings of Japan. "America has revealed her barbaric character before in the terror bombings of civilian populations in Hamburg, Berlin, and other German cities, in her destruction of priceless cultural monuments in various parts of Europe, in her sinking of innumerable hospital ships, …

While I was visiting the revisionist activist, researcher and publisher Vincent Reynouard in France, I used the opportunity to visit Utah and Omaha Beach, especially the German “Batterie de Crisbecq/Marcouf.” Even 5 days after the landing of the Americans in 1944, the battery was still operational, causing the Americans a …

This is the week that whoever is in charge of such things decided to make the earth tremble, and the sea to rise, and for great tsunamis to swamp several tens of thousands of unsuspecting people in various countries in Southeast Asia. The television screens are full of it. It's …

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Displays Standard German Air-Raid Shelter Door, Describing it as the Door to a "Gas Chamber" At left: The door at the concentration camp Majdanek from which the USHMM made the replica which is now on display in Washington D.C. At right: The real function of …

Sheldon Richman is senior editor at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and the author of Separating School & State, published by The Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF). This essay is reprinted from the September 1995 issue of Freedom Daily, published monthly by the FFF, 11350 Random Hills Rd., Ste. …

by David Irving, Focal Point Publications, England, 2011. 144pp. The first new book by British iconoclast David Irving since 2008’s Banged Up is The Night the Dams Burst. For those of us who have been waiting for the third installment of Churchill’s War or the long promised biography of Reichsführer-SS …

With British armored forces only hours away from finishing World War II, Heinrich Himmler ordered approximately 10,000 weak and sick prisoners from the concentration camp Neuengamme and its satellite camps to be transferred to three ships parked in the Bay of Lübeck. The three ships were the Deutschland, the Thielbek …

"In Memoriam!" Introduction A few years ago the argument began to emerge that the various gastight fixtures of the Birkenau crematoria were best explained in terms of protection against chemical warfare. The first exploration in this area was by Arthur R. Butz of Northwestern University, whose "Vergasungskeller" article of July …

The imperfect translations which follow convey clearly enough the meaning of three documents recently forwarded by an anonymous source from Russian archives of captured German WWII documents to Samuel Crowell. They give details of logistical problems encountered in the building of hundreds of air-raid shelters at Auschwitz-Birkenau in April through …

Nicholas Strakon is the pen name of the editor of Dispatches from The Last Ditch, a newsletter. (P.O. Box 224, Roanoke, IN 46783. $42 for twelve issues. Free sample available on request.) "Who Bombs Children?" and "The Bombardier's Song" are reprinted from the April-May 1995 issue. After the Oklahoma City …

The further one seriously studies history, and particularly the World War Two period, the more striking is the disconnect between what is popularly believed and what actually happened. Perhaps the reading public continues to shrink, not only in the United States but around the world, while information and opinion are …

[stamp] PRIME MINISTER'S PERSONAL MINUTE [stamp, pen] Serial No. D. 217/4 [Seal of Prime Minister] 10 Downing Street, Whitehall [gothic script] GENERAL ISMAY FOR C.O.S. COMMITTEE [underlined]    1. I want you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas. I would not use it unless it could …

At left: The door at the concentration camp Majdanek from which the USHMM made the replica which is now on display in Washington D.C.At right: The real function of the door and thousands more like it is shown in a widely distributed German ad for bomb-shelter doors and window covers, …

16 March 1981 PBS Television"The Blitz" Sirs: Rarely have I come across a television broadcast more vicious in intent and more warped in execution than your recent "Blitz on Britain." As a survivor of the mass air raid executed against my native city of Prague, Bohemia, on the Christian Holy …

www.legalienate.blogspot.com by Samuel Crowell, Nine Banded Books, Charleston, W. Va., 2011. 401pp. Indexed. Reading Samuel Crowell's, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes is a little like stumbling across the first perfectly sane inmate in an insane asylum years after being (wrongly) committed. Coming after prolonged inundation in clashing dogmas, the …

The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes: And Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understandingby Samuel Crowell, Nine Banded Books, Charleston, W. Va., 2011. 401pp. Indexed. In the mid-1990s Holocaust revisionism began to reach new audiences through the Internet. Until that time most revisionism was largely confined to various …

Dresden 1945: The Devil's Tinderbox by Alexander McKee. New York: E.P. Duffon, Inc., 1982, 1984, with maps, photographs, index, $18.95, ISBN 0-525-24262-7. The destruction of the virtually undefended German city of Dresden by bombers of the Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Force, in mid-February, 1945, remains one of …

The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes: And Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding by Samuel Crowell, Nine Banded Books, Charleston, W. Va., 2011. 401pp. Indexed. The account of the Holocaust that reigns today is itself a historical phenomenon. Many who have given its content close attention and …

As Holocaust historians concede, hard evidence for mass killings in Second World War gas chambers has proven to be elusive. After an extensive search, especially of wartime German wartime records held in Polish archives, French author Jean-Claude Pressac acknowledged in his detailed 1989 study, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the …

On August 6, 1945, the world dramatically entered the atomic age: without either warning or precedent, an American plane dropped a single nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion utterly destroyed more than four square miles of the city center. About about 90,000 people were killed immediately; …

Gregory P. Pavlik wrote this essay as an editor for The Freeman, published monthly by the Foundation for Economic Education (30 S. Broadway, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533). It is reprinted from the September 1995 issue. Pavlik is also editor of the 1995 work, Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John T. Flynn. …

A long-suppressed report written in June 1945 by the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Service shows that American military leaders made plans for a massive preemptive poison gas attack to accompany an invasion of Japan. The 30-page document designated “gas attack zones” on detailed maps of Tokyo and other major Japanese …