by DoDo
Fri May 16th, 2008 at 10:21:03 AM EST
Today, Britain celebrates a war crime that involved mass murder.
You bet you don't read that in the headlines: Flypast for Dambusters anniversary - Yahoo! News UK
A Lancaster bomber swooped over a Peak District reservoir to mark the 65th anniversary of the Dambusters raid.
The historic Lancaster - similar to the one used by the RAF's 617 Squadron to successfully bomb two German dams in 1943 - flew three times along the Derwent valley as the centrepiece of a thrilling flypast. The Derwent dam was used by the Dambusters to train ahead of their mission to destroy three dams in Germany's Ruhr valley.
65 years ago, Operation Chastise was propagandized big already when the surviving bomber planes returned home. A decade later, it was anchored into the body of national mythology with the popular war movie The Dam Busters. Five more decades later, a documentary reinforced the public's captivation with the Dambusters myth.
I leave the boyish fascination with the technical feats and airmen bravado that was necessary to achieve this 'feat' to all the anniversary news reports. Let's look instead at some issues mentioned only passingly.
First of all, this mission was in the long tradition of attacking civilian installations of the enemy as a resource war, with willful disregard of results for the civilian population (practised with even more consistency by the Nazis, but with a real long and unbroken tradition in colonial warfare).
The daring mission wasn't without victims...
Of the three targeted dams, those of the Eder and Möhne rivers were successfully hit. The water of the Eder Dam killed about 70 people while it flowed across villages and the city of Kassel. The toll was much worse as the Möhne Dam's water flowed down the Möhne and Ruhr rivers: two weeks after the attack, 1,579 corpses were found (the last total found in archives), but 56 German citizens were still missing; five days later, the missing list still had 34 Germans, as well as 155 foreigners.
As the last figure indicates, most of the victims weren't even German civilians! Of the 1,579, 1,026 were POWs and forced-labourers drowned in various camps along the river.
Worst hit was the city of Neheim (now part of Neheim-Hüsten) at the confluence of the Möhne and Ruhr rivers, where over 800 people perished, among them at least 526 female forced-labourers from the Soviet Union, held at the labour camp named Gemeinschaftslager Neheim.
While BBC et al now grudgingly take notice of the victims in their articles, the power of the myth also leads to obfuscation over its strategic results. For, rather than crippling the German military industry, this attack made it stronger for the rest of the war. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, so let me explain.
The attack did result in great infrastructure damage and a big power outage for the industry, ameliorating which took weeks to months, and lots money, material and manpower. However, the attack remained unique, there were no follow-ups. Thus it acted as a wake-up call: the war industry is vulnerable to air attacks!
What followed were the first moves to hide and spread production facilities, and setting up a factory damage repair "quick reaction force". This happened under the central direction of Minister of Armaments Albert Speer (who expressed his bafflement over the lach of follow-up attacks in his memoirs), and heavy participation of Organisation Todt, the giant Nazi construction firm set up by Speer's late predecessor on the post.
Already the dams were repaired with 4,000 workers, almost all forced labourers, whom the OT commanded over from the construction of the Western Wall. By late September, most of the reconstruction work was done - and the organisation to quickly alleviate further bombing damage was in place.
:: :: :: :: ::
For full disclosure: I heavily edited the English Wikipedia article on the attack a few months ago. My main source then as now was a long article by Ralf Blank for the regional page Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, in German.
