• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 115 0

casualty lists, whether of soldiers or civilians. At the time of the Normandy landings he dreaded a heavy loss of life and did his utmost to devise means of minimizing the casualties among the landing forces. Before the landings he confided to an American visitor, John J. McCloy, Roosevelt’s Under-Secretary for War: “If you think I’m dragging my feet, it is not because I can’t take casualties; it is because I am afraid of what those casualties will be.” Churchill went on to explain to McCloy that many of his contemporaries had been killed in what he called the “hecatombs” of the First World War, and that he himself was “a sort of ‘sport’ in nature’s sense as most of his generation lay dead at Passchendaele and the Somme.” Churchill added: “An entire generation of potential leaders had been cut off and Britain could not afford the loss of another generation.”

During the pre-Normandy preparations, Churchill was uneasy about the heavy Anglo-American bombing of railway marshalling yards and railway bridges in northern France because of the high French and Belgian civilian casualties. When the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, insisted that this bombing was essential if the landings were to go ahead, Churchill put the matter to Roosevelt. Churchill stressed that the civilian casualties, sometimes several hundred in a single raid, were too high and that some limit should be set, per raid. If the estimate of civilian deaths was above a certain number, Churchill advised, the raid should not take place. Roosevelt declined to set any limit, however, and the raids continued. In all, more than five thousand French and Belgian civilians were killed, but the effective disruption of German communications in a great arc around the beachhead was a boon to the Allied landings—and to the eventual liberation of France and Belgium. Churchill commented to Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, the British air commander-in-chief and Eisenhower’s deputy, “You are piling up an awful load of hatred;” but, with Roosevelt’s intervention, Churchill’s hesitations had to be set aside.

In 1940 Churchill had authorized the bombing of German cities—then on a small scale—as the one means of waging war on Germany, whose armies were masters of Europe. As the British, and later Anglo-American, bombing raids intensified, he was uneasy at the high civilian casualties and became an advocate of targeted strategic bombing, as opposed to “terror” bombing. The subsequently controversial Anglo-American bombing raid on Dresden was approved not by Churchill but by the British Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, during Churchill’s absence on his way to the Yalta Conference at the beginning of February 1945. When Churchill was given the first detailed account of the raid, he was appalled, minuting to the Chiefs of Staff Committee: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, although under other pretexts, should be reviewed.” The destruction of Dresden, Churchill added, “remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforth be more strictly studied.” Only later did he learn that it was an urgent Soviet request to disrupt accelerated German troop movements through Silesia that had led to the bombing raid on Dresden.

Reflecting on the first half of the twentieth century, and on the destructiveness of aerial bombardment by all sides during the Second World War, Churchill commented in 1953: “On the whole I would rather have lived through our lot of troubles than any of the others, though I must place on record my regret that the human race ever learned to fly.” The pervasiveness of aerial destruction, and the destructiveness of all forms of warfare, was, despite Churchill’s hesitations and those of many others, a cruel but integral part of modern war. Churchill had seen the horrors of war at first hand and had written much about it since his time as a soldier at the