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By Root 1579 0

Nonetheless, the camp inmates – many of whom would have been killed – desperately wanted the camps to be bombed. When the nearby IG Farben factory was attacked and forty Jews and fifteen SS were killed, the inmates inwardly celebrated, despite the nearly three-to-one ratio of deaths between oppressed and oppressor. The War Refugee Board officially called for the bombing of Auschwitz on 8 November 1944, drawing a comparison with the RAF Mosquito precision bombing of Amiens prison that February, during which 258 inmates had escaped, although 100 had died. By then it was almost too late, as the last gassings in the camp took place on 28 November, a mere twenty days later. With the autumn weather in southern Poland providing only patchy opportunities for bombing from bases many hundreds of miles away, good visibility was necessary for the kind of precision attacking that would be needed, very far removed from the kind necessary merely to bomb the nearby industrial plants. The post-war suggestion that de Havilland DH-98 Mosquito bombers should have attacked Auschwitz – no one came up with any such scheme during the war – has been exploded by a United States Air Force Historical Research Center archivist, Dr James H. Kitchens III, who has pointed out that ‘flying over 620 miles in radio silence, crossing the Alps in some semblance of cohesion at low altitude, then sneaking through German air defenses with enough fuel to make a coordinated precision attack on five [gas chambers and crematoria] targets and return home beggars belief.’74

What might well have happened, given the inaccuracy of even so-called precision bombing – only 34 per cent of bombs dropped by the USAAF fell within a thousand feet of their targets – was that the gas chambers would have survived whereas thousands of innocents in the nearby huts would have perished. For this reason, some Jewish groups in Britain and America specifically opposed the bombing of the camps.75 The decision not to attack was thus not a war crime, or a culpable moral failure – as some allege – nor even the dismal failure of the imagination that it might seem to modern eyes. For the past three decades aerial photographs of Auschwitz have been published which were taken by an Allied air crew on 25 August 1944 and which clearly show, once enlarged, the positions of the gas chambers and crematoria and even a line of people making their way to their deaths. It is therefore widely assumed that the Allied air forces could have destroyed the facilities with relative ease. In fact, however, these photographs were printed from the negatives for the first time only in 1978, and during the war the technology was not available to enlarge the photographs to the extent that the group of people would have been identifiable. The leading expert on Second World War photo-intelligence, Colonel Roy M. Stanley, has stated that ‘This 1978 photo analysis contains an understanding and correlation of what was happening on the ground that would have been impossible for a 1945-vintage interpreter.’76

The supply of the Warsaw Uprising by air had been costly to the RAF: in twenty-two missions over six weeks to mid-August 1944, thirty-one out of 181 aircraft had failed to return. The British Foreign Office, as one of its officials minuted, was opposed to operations that ‘would cost British lives and aircraft to no purpose’.77 Various Foreign Office officials had reason to be ashamed of their notes on files, such as that of Armine Dew, who wrote of the Red Army’s treatment of Romanian Jews in September 1944: ‘In my opinion a disproportionate amount of the time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews.’78 Nor was that an isolated example.

The American Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, rejected an appeal to bomb the gas chambers and crematoria on the grounds that it ‘could only be executed by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant