Before embarking upon today's brief ramble through the applications of physics, I should confess to a small but significant personal bias. I am, in general, opposed to the blowing up of people with nuclear bombs, except where all of the alternatives have been exhausted; and even then only after the most careful consideration. On to business.
Oliver Kamm writes in today's Times a brief rant on the subject of this publication by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; as you would imagine, he is against it. (Unaccountably he somehow forgot to link to the CND piece, but it is easy to find on their home page.) His complaint, so far as he has one, is this:
CND's sole cited source for its historical claims is a long-debunked thesis of 40 years ago.
The claims to which he refers (p1 of the CND leaflet):
Conventional wisdom has it that the US dropped the nuclear bombs in order to minimise casualties, claiming that a ground war would have killed many more people. However, historical records have shown that Japan was in fact trying to surrender at the time. Dwight Eisenhower, commanding general of US forces in Europe in World War II and President of the US from 1953-1961, said, ``Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of face. It was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing.''
The Eisenhower quote is footnoted as a reference to Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam -- Kamm's `long-debunked thesis'. But Oliver, I think, is interpreting this as the citation for the whole paragraph, which continues,
The annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a defining moment in global warfare and marked the emergence of the US as the world's dominant super power, a position secured by its unchallengeable nuclear might and its preparedness to wield it. This is the only time that nuclear weapons have been used in war.
Does the fact that a statement, perhaps, is attached to a citation of a book which a person considers to be a `long-debunked thesis' make it wrong? Let us consider the thing point by point:
Conventional wisdom has it that the US dropped the nuclear bombs in order to minimise casualties, claiming that a ground war would have killed many more people.
Conveniently for us, Oliver provides his own citation for this point -- and, after all, whose wisdom could be more conventional than his?
However, historical records have shown that Japan was in fact trying to surrender at the time.
CND quotes Eisenhower on this point, but we can do better. From Richard Rhodes's (recommended) The Making of the Atomic Bomb we have, (pp 684--685)
US intelligence had intercepted and decoded messages passing between Tokyo and Moscow instructing Japanese ambassador Naotake Sato to attempt to interest the Soviets in mediating a Japanese surrender.
You can read some of the correspondence in translation at nuclearfiles.org (or in a library...). As Rhodes says, Sato was asked to interest the government of the USSR to mediate a negotiated peace; this wasn't really on, and Sato said so. The United States did not shift in its demand for ``unconditional'' surrender (i.e., surrender under the conditions in the Potsdam declaration -- roughly: occupation and withdrawal from the territories invaded by Japan; but the Emperor to keep his throne), but it is certainly true that Japan had a go at surrendering on its own terms in July 1945 -- before Truman made the final order to use the bomb (on the 24th, according to Rhodes).
Dwight Eisenhower, commanding general of US forces in Europe in World War II and President of the US from 1953-1961,
said, ``Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of face. It was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing.''
If you search for that statement on the web, you'll mostly find it cited by CND-style peace organisations, but Eisenhower really said it. (See Newsweek, 11th November 1963.)
The annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a defining moment in global warfare
This statement has no meaning.
and marked the emergence of the US as the world's dominant super power,
a position secured by its unchallengeable nuclear might and its preparedness to wield it.
This is the only time that nuclear weapons have been used in war.
So, where does this leave us? Oliver claims that,
[CND's] treatment of the subject consists in denouncing as a lie the notion that the US dropped the nuclear bombs in order to minimise casualties, claiming that a ground war would have killed many more people.
The reference to `lies' is in the heading above the paragraph quoted: ``Dispelling the lies''. The CND author doesn't state their thesis explicitly, but it's clear enough by implication: a settlement with Japan could, they claim, have been achieved by accepting a negotiated surrender -- which Japan made some effort to offer -- with the result that fewer people would have been killed than would have been killed in the atomic bombings.
Now, there are solid reasons to think that that's not a very plausible counterfactual. But Oliver (`excluded middle'?) Kamm doesn't address them. Instead he shoots off on a tangent, quoting a US Army study on the likely number of casualties which the US would have suffered in an invasion of Japan (very large, not surprisingly). This isn't germane to the point; the thesis in the CND document is that both the bombings and a ground invasion could have been avoided.
He does continue to comment that,
In 1998, the Japanese historian Sadao Asada demonstrated, after assessing newly released documents about the surrender, that the dropping of both bombs was crucial in strengthening the position of those within the Japanese Government who wished to sue for peace.
-- but this, of course, isn't relevant to the thesis, which is about a possible conditional surrender before the bombings.
Of course, if you want to address the question of why a negotiated surrender before the bombings was pretty unlikely to interest the Allies, you get into the (interesting but difficult) question of whether the bombs should have been dropped at all. Instead Oliver signs off with,
The charge that the bombs were dropped for cynical reasons of US realpolitik is ahistorical.
Maybe so. It also isn't a claim made by the subject of Kamm's rant.
Comments
Posted by Robin Grant, Tuesday, 16 August 2005 23:11 (link):
I wonder what Mr Kamm would think of these comments:
The Committee of Operations Analysts ... was convinced it had cracked the scientific puzzle of how to generate holocausts whose "optimum result" would be "complete chaos in six Japanese] cities killing 584,00 people."
If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not worked, the United States had a plan for winning the war against Japan that involved massive use of chemical weapons.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Thursday, 18 August 2005 21:52 (link):
I'd recommend that everybody read Mike Davis and Errol Morris's Firebomb: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Incendiary Bomb (cited in the first piece you link).
Wartime scientists came up with a lot of very nasty stuff; for instance Fermi, Teller and Oppenheimer's plans for the bulk manufacture of radioisotopes to drop on German farmland, with the intention of poisoning those who ate food grown there: (from The Making of the Atomic Bomb, again)
In fairness this planning, like the Manhattan project itself, was motivated originally by the fear that the Germans might have come up with the same thing, and this demanded the same weapons be developed by the Allies. But... (from Firebomb):
Posted by Dan Hardie, Friday, 19 August 2005 15:35 (link):
You quote seven sentences from Davis and Morris, including one which would earn a first-year undergraduate a fail grade in any decent university: 'By November 1942, when thousand-bomber night raids had become common over western Germany...' Common, eh? And in November 1942? Would it interest you to learn that there were precisely three (3) 'thousand bomber night raids' in the whole course of the war, which took place between 30 May and 25 June 1942? (See http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/bombercommand/millenium.aspx )
It would need a lot of effort to write a sentence more inaccurate than the one you quote. Here's one contender: 'Chris Lightfoot only talks about subjects which he knows about, and when pontificating on history he relies on the peer-reviewed writing of serious historians'.
If you're relying on a book written by a pair of idiots who don't even have a basic level of knowledge of 'their' subject, does that not give you a little pause for thought? If you're going to get moist and tearful about the evil Churchill and his war on innocent German civilians, etc, I recommend that you take time out from reading the diatribes of under-informed Marxists like Mike Davis and get round to reading genuine scholars, who publish on the Second World War in Europe if a) they can read German and b) they have conducted research in the archives. (Note: this involves more than reading a few pages of the Gilbert companion volumes on Churchill, and then flipping through a few secondary sources, as Davis and Morris did.)
I'd recommend Richard Overy- in particular 'The Air War' and 'Why the Allies won'. You might also sit down and read Gerhard Weinberg's 'A world at arms', which every historian I know considers the most reliable history of the Second World War. Now it's possible that you'll read them and still come away damning Strategic Bombing, but it is a fact that both these historians- particularly Overy- believe that Strategic Bombing did shorten the war against Hitler.
Summary of Overy: In 1942, the idea that the British, still less the American, Army was capable of landing and remaining in France was a fantasy, but the war had to be prosecuted. The U-Boats had to be beaten, but that was a defensive struggle. The North African campaign was a peripheral theatre of war. So Churchill plumped for strategic bombing. And strategic bombing worked: it first diverted a critical portion of German fighter strength and artillery away from the Eastern- and later the Italian and Northwest European- fronts. After that it quite rapidly distracted and then destroyed the Luftwaffe, whose support of German ground troops had been crucial to Hitler's victories of 1939-42. After mid-43, the Germans never again had air superiority in any theatre over the Allies -the only exception being a few days in the Arnhem and later Bulge fighting, when poor weather affected the areas where the Allies had airbases. When German troops had the benefit of air support, they generally beat Soviet troops, and almost always wiped the floor with British and American forces. Given the performance of German troops against British and American forces even without air superiority, had they had control of the air the war would have lasted at least a year longer- probably two. There might have been fewer dead German civilians in 1946 or 1947, but there would certainly have been more dead non-German civilians, since the fighting would have been done in their countries.(German troops were also very happy to deprive local civilian populations of food, whereas the uncivilised British introduced bread rationing in 1946 because Attlee and Bevin took the admirable decision to ship grain to Germany to prevent famine.) There also would have been a lot more dead Jews, which worries me even if Sir Iqbal Sacranie wouldn't mind too much. Strategic bombing's effects were lessened by Speer's dispersal efforts, but if you get round to reading his memoirs, you will find that Speer himself credited bombing with shortening the war.
(You may try the old line about the RAF's bombing being inaccurate and criminal and the USAAF's being careful and targeted. Please don't. Beating up the defenceless stops being fun after a while.)
I've studied the period and you clearly haven't, and FWIW I'm convinced by the arguments in favour of Strategic Bombing. If you read the books I mention above and aren't convinced, fine. But until you've made an effort and done some reading not restricted to the halfwitted polemics of a couple of nitwits, don't pretend that your prejudices against, say, Winston Churchill have any basis in historical fact.
(If I get the time I will also deal with the frankly moronic level of comments re Japan here. Brief taster: Anyone who thinks that a demand for the 'unconditional surrender' of Japan was cruel and unjustified needs to find out about a)the history of a small, obscure country named China, esp. in the years 1931-45, as well as the history of places like Korea; b)needs to find out about something called the 'Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere' and c)needs to explain why any American President should have permitted Japan to keep its God-Emperor, its Armed Forces and its nutso feudal-militarist constitution intact, ready for a second assault on the subject peoples of Asia. The Lightfoot brand of 'internationalism' means whining about the Americans whilst not actually bothering to learn the history of any foreign countries.)
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 19 August 2005 16:11 (link):
Nice rant. Here are some of the false statements in it:
Perhaps you fancy addressing what I actually wrote?
Moving on, the air superiority question is interesting but doesn't really answer the question of whether strategic bombing was an optimum allocation of resources (leaving aside any moral and ethical issues). For instance, do you think that concentration on industrial cities rather than oil facilities was appropriate? And what about the allocation of aircraft to Bomber Command rather than to Coastal Command?
Posted by Dan Hardie, Friday, 19 August 2005 16:25 (link):
Oh dear. There's almost a return to adult reasoning in your last paragraph, so I'll deal with that separately. But for the rest:
Shorter Chris Lightfoot: Gross factual inaccuracy is unforgiveable in John Lott but acceptable in a couple of idiots accusing Winston Churchill of savagery; that I faithfully trot out their nonsense does not constitute evidence of prejudices against Winston Churchill; and anyway (at this point Chris magically becomes seven years old) *the gross factual inaccuracy of Davis and Morris doesn't count because it isn't made IN A BOOK* (sticks out tongue, stamps foot).
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 19 August 2005 16:36 (link):
I've never written about John Lott.
And I say that... where?
I don't think that pointing out that much of what Bomber Command did in the Second World War was extremely unpleasant makes me `prejudiced' against Churchill. I do, however, think that it's very important not to gloss over that unpleasantness, which is why I quoted that bit.
No, my point was that you incorrectly claimed that a 7,000-word article was a book, suggesting a rather flimsy grasp on the facts. But does factual inaccuracy not count when it's you that's making it?
Posted by Dan Hardie, Friday, 19 August 2005 17:34 (link):
Okay, correction: Shorter Chris Lightfoot: gross factual inaccuracy is unforgiveable in critics of the Lancet article but okay in a couple of Marxist halfwits peddling trash which I find agreeable.
Sorry, had you mixed up with Tim Lambert. Now that I've confessed to the error of mixing you up with a blogger who writes better prose and reasons more intelligently than yourself, will you get round to admitting that you quoted two idiots who stated that 1,000 bomber raids were 'common' in 'November 1942' and that they were inaccurate in every respect? Or where you come from, does 'common in November' mean 'occurred three times five or six months previously and never occurred again'?
Original Lightfoot quotation from Davis/Morris ('architects... writing figuratively')' 'Churchill was able to boast to FDR about the heroic quotas that the RAF had pledged to produce: nine hundred thousand civilians dead, one million seriously injured, and twenty-five million homeless.' Mention of Churchill boasting about dead civilians: one. Ass-covering Lightfoot comment: 'I don't think that pointing out that much of what Bomber Command did in the Second World War was extremely unpleasant makes me `prejudiced' against Churchill.'
Anyone not quite as illiterate as yourself will actually note that endorsing two factually inaccurate fools- oh, pardon me... two 'architects writing figuratively' accusing Churchill of 'boasting' about civilian deaths, and making no attempt to check that claim or to question the word 'boast' does indeed amount to prejudice. But maybe I'm wrong, and you show the same disregard for historical accuracy with no need for prejudice. Fair enough: you're a prejudiced cretin or an unprejudiced one, it's much the same.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 19 August 2005 17:50 (link):
Could you explain what you claim my prejudice against Churchill is? You have assembled what you claim to be a good mound of evidence for it, so you ought to have identified it pretty closely by now; but you have not stated what it actually is -- merely your supposition that it exists. So what is it?
Posted by Dan Hardie, Monday, 22 August 2005 16:21 (link):
I have already noted above that I imputed prejudice to you, as the only reasonable explanation for your foolish remarks about Churchill, but that I'm quite happy to accept that you acted just as stupidly but without any specific prejudice. You quoted a factually inaccurate article by two LA Marxists who have done no archival research on Strategic Bombing, and approvingly quoted their assessment that Churchill had 'boasted' about large-scale German civilian deaths. You then defended your citation, and, specifically, their use of the word 'boast'. That's clear evidence that you despise Churchill's actions in re Strategic Bombing. As I have stated above, and as your limited grasp of English prevents you from reading, you either agree with weakly-founded pejorative judgements about Churchill because you are prejudiced against him, or you agree with weakly-founded pejorative judgements about Churchill not because you are prejudiced against him, but simply for the hell of it. Quoting oneself is dreary, but I'm obliged to do it since you are incapable of remembering what has been said: 'maybe I'm wrong, and you show the same disregard for historical accuracy with no need for prejudice. Fair enough: you're a prejudiced cretin or an unprejudiced one, it's much the same'.
And I will note that I do, quite honestly, believe that what you have written on this thread is cretinous, but I would never dream of saying the same about your writings on, say, ID cards. Why do you imagine that the history of World War Two in Europe is so simple that it can be picked up from a silly article by two men who have done no peer-reviewed work at all on the subject? I've done you a favour: I've given you a reading list. Now do what I've suggested and read some serious history by actual historians. I bet you won't- insecure men hate to admit they might have been wrong.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 22 August 2005 16:54 (link):
But I haven't made any remarks about Churchill -- indeed, the only occurence of his name in this page is in a quotation from somebody else's work.
Well, it obviously isn't `clear evidence' of that -- for instance, I might think that German civilian deaths were a jolly splendid thing and that Churchill had every right to boast about them.
It's not really relevant to the argument, and for all I know you're actually trying to provoke me into telling you my opinions by making various eccentric accusations about them, but as it happens I don't `despise' Churchill's actions regarding strategic bombing. I certainly don't know or claim to know whether the strategic bombing campaign was the best option open to him and to Britain in 1939-1945 under a set of reasonable constraints (things like wanting to win the war decisively as quickly as possible), but that isn't the same thing at all.
I think what's happened here is that you assume that because I have quoted two sentences of an article I must therefore agree with some big package of opinions which you associate with its authors. In fact I quoted that passage because I thought the article was well-written and interesting (I, for one, did not know about the history of `German Village' at the Dugway Proving Ground), and that brief passage illustrated rather well the point that I made in my comment: that the circumstances of war caused people on the Allied side who felt themselves to be entirely reasonable and civilised people -- and who in most cases were -- to invent and justify the use of increasingly ghastly means of waging that war, including radiological warfare and extensive firebombing. As you have pointed out, part of the Davis/Morris statement is factually wrong. My fault for quoting it. But I don't think that invalidates my point. (Thought experiment: suppose the sentence in question had begun, ``By November 1942, when large night raids had become common...'' instead -- what would your reaction have been?)
(I'm not all that interested by your suppositions about what I might or might not have read, by the way. You've cited a number of different sources, always accompanying your citation by a statement that I cannot possibly have read the relevant book, in order to pursue an argument which addresses only incidentally the subject of my post. Essentially you've come along and decided that you're going to have an argument with me about strategic bombing in the Second World War, despite having no evidence that I disagree with you on the subject, or even have any specific opinions on it at all. I remain slightly baffled as to why.)
Posted by Dan Hardie, Monday, 22 August 2005 17:16 (link):
'Essentially you've come along and decided that you're going to have an argument with me about strategic bombing in the Second World War' - no, essentially I've decided that if you're going to talk about a subject of which you are ignorant, I am going to point out your ignorance. Don't like it? Don't shoot your mouth off on things you know nothing about.
'Well, it obviously isn't `clear evidence' of that -- for instance, I might think that German civilian deaths were a jolly splendid thing and that Churchill had every right to boast about them.' OK, before now I said that either you were saying foolish things about Churchill because you were prejudiced against him, or saying foolish things about him for no reason. Now you're proposing a third option: that you approve of Churchill because he, like you, exulted in the slaughter of civilians. I think the time has come for you to put on the white facepaint and red nose, don't you?
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 22 August 2005 17:54 (link):
You made a specific statement: that my statement A implied the truth of your supposition B. But as I've explained, your statement was incorrect (and trivially so). You can huff and puff and talk about clown faces all you like, but that doesn't make your claim any less wrong.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 22 August 2005 18:29 (link):
But the funny thing is, until you came along, I hadn't written anything directly about strategic bombing in the Second World War, because that wasn't the subject of my post. I wrote a short piece about a logical fallacy in an Oliver Kamm rant (which itself referred to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki); and in a comment about radiological warfare, I quoted a couple of sentences from an article which referred to the general subject. It's that last to which you've taken objection. You haven't written anything at all about the subject of my original post -- everything you've written here is addressed to the quote I made from the Davis/Morris article. You've also dragged in a whole lot of stuff about strategic bombing (some very interesting, hence the occasional bits of real discussion interspersed with all this tedious bad-tempered stuff) but almost all of it is irrelevant to the original subject at hand!
Posted by Dan Hardie, Wednesday, 31 August 2005 19:29 (link):
Sorry I've been away- unavoidable family business. You've got worse.
'But the funny thing is, until you came along, I hadn't written anything directly about strategic bombing in the Second World War, because that wasn't the subject of my post.'
Fact: On Thursday 18 August at 21:52 you posted a lengthy comment to your own post entirely concerned with 'strategic bombing in the Second World War'. When you wrote that, I hadn't 'come along'. The following afternoon, I posted my first comment in this thread, replying to the comment on Strategic Bombing that was written by...er... you.
You can't even have read your own comments on your own website before saying 'until you came along, I hadn't written anything directly about strategic bombing'.
If the clown's hat fits, wear it. Sorry, I'm embarrassed for you.
Posted by Pete Stevens, Thursday, 1 September 2005 10:39 (link):
If I'm not mistaken, doesn't that comment refer to
A proposed plan to bomb with Strontium-90 with the intention of causing mass casualties. (Paragraphs 2-5)
A statement (now shown to be incorrect in magnitude) about causing mass casualties by widespread bombing. (Paragraph 7)
Several statements from normally nice people stating that mass slaughter of germans was a good thing. (Paragraphs 5 and 8)
Chris uses this to back up his earlier statements that lots of people in the second world war on both sides came up with quite uncivilised, and nasty behaviour. Whilst it it true that bombing in the second world war is mentioned in his comment, it is a considerable stretch to state that this was a comment directly about strategic bombing. The main content was about nasty and unpleasant behaviour, not about strategic bombing.
In your response to this, you demonstrated that not only that you were unable to identify which quotes came from which book in Chris's comment, your extensive use of argument by authority with yourself as the authority and your frequent unjustified use of personal insults towards Chris.
Just in case you have difficulty following this - here some quotes from your comment to back up my statement :
"You quote seven sentences from Davis and Morris, including one which would earn a first-year undergraduate a fail grade in any decent university" <-- your inability to read Chris' initial comment correctly.
"It would need a lot of effort to write a sentence more inaccurate than the one you quote. Here's one contender: 'Chris Lightfoot only talks about subjects which he knows about, and when pontificating on history he relies on the peer-reviewed writing of serious historians'." <-- your unecessarily insulting tone towards Chris
"I've studied the period and you clearly haven't, and FWIW I'm convinced by the arguments in favour of Strategic Bombing." <-- your use of argument by authority with yourself as the authority. Could be paraphrased as "I'm clever than you about this so there."
In summary, given you have demonstrated your inability to read the initial comment, that of the eight paragraphs in Chris's comment only one mentions bombing incidently, the independent observer is left with the conclusion that the clown hat probably fits Dan Hardie.
Posted by Liz Upton, Thursday, 1 September 2005 10:52 (link):
I'm glad I'm not alone in being completely bemused at this argument; Dan does not seem to be addressing what *anybody*, not least Chris, has written.
Ad hominem attacks (which, if you google for Dan's name, you'll find in profusion; he seems to make a bit of a hobby out of this sort of thing) are hard to counter sensibly. I would draw Dan's attention to this, and hope that he chooses a more lucid form of argument if he wants to continue this. I await his response with bated breath, fully expecting to be told that I'm under twelve, a fascist, and wearing some kind of unconventional headgear.
Posted by dan hardie, Sunday, 4 September 2005 23:42 (link):
I hope Chris L does read the books, or some of them, that I have recommended. I think the substantive discussion is pretty much dead now, but I'd be interested to see what CL makes of Overy or Weinberg. Further reading recommendations available by email.
Re: calling people fascist. I once- offline, in somewhere called the real world- called an NCO a fascist, since he voted for the BNP, advocated the deportation of all British Muslims and had a Fallschirmjager tattoo on his right arm. Otherwise, I have posted blog comments deploring the use of the words 'Fascist', 'concentration camp guard', 'Hitler' and 'Nazi', to mean 'person who disagrees with me', explaining that I think this is a degradation of language and thought. I suppose Liz's reversal of the truth in this matter might be due to honest stupidity, rather than rhetorical distortion, but it's not a terribly interesting question.
Otherwise, Liz and Pete believe that I'm not worth arguing with but that Chris was entirely right to post 13 comments arguing with me. Better sycophants, please.
Back in a fortnight. Good luck with googling me, and leave lots of nice comments.
Posted by Liz Upton, Monday, 5 September 2005 10:38 (link):
Not at all - I am always up for a good, meaty argue. I'm just not up for one where the people I'm arguing with don't stick to certain rhetorical norms. Repeated use of 'You're all idiots, and I'll be back in two weeks' is not something they teach at your average secondary modern debating society, as far as I'm aware, but it's a form of words you've used twice. My understanding is that they'll also teach you that to launch into your half of a conversation with 'You idiot!' will usually prevent the other person from having an awful lot of interest in the meat of what you say. They'll be more interested in the 'You idiot!' bit. I know I am. I suppose it's an interesting tactic for distracting attention from weak argument, but I can't think that that's what you're trying to do.
I apologise for characterising you as somebody who counters with shouts of 'fascist'; I will admit that I'd not read an awful lot of what you said with the necessary rapt attention because my eye somehow slid off what you'd written the sixth or seventh time you called somebody a fool. It appears that I should have characterised you as somebody who counters with shouts of 'Marxist', which is, of course, a rhetorical tactic entirely different from shouting 'fascist', and not a degradation of language at all; I am terribly sorry if this made you uncomfortable.
Back to the point. I find what you are writing intriguing, simply because you demonstrate knowledge of and interest in the subject while twirling, twirling, twirling in a phlegmy soup of personal attack, failure to read what Chris was actually talking about in the first place, assertion of your own authority and an awful lot of self-regarding nitwittage. I would actually like to know what you think of the logic in Oliver Kamm's piece on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which I believe was what we were discussing here originally. Can we please bypass the post in which you call me stupid again and move on to one where you actually address the points Chris made in the original article? I would honestly be interested to hear what you have to say about it.
Posted by Pete Stevens, Saturday, 10 September 2005 19:25 (link):
Could you back this up please? In particular,
Why am I a sycophant?
At what point did I state that Chris was entirely right to post 13 comments arguing with you?
You characterisation of me that I think you're not worth arguing with is close, I merely believe you are incapable of arguing - in particular actually addressing any of the points contained in the comment to which you reply.
Posted by Dan Hardie, Friday, 19 August 2005 16:55 (link):
Re your last paragraph about Strategic Bombing, writing which would have been a better use of your time than quoting blame-Churchill trash from that fool Davis:
I told you to read Overy and Weinberg and I still do. Noble and Frankland made the anti-bombing case better than you will ever be able to, and a large part of Overy's work is basically an argument with them. Martin Middlebrook wrote histories of the attempts to shut down specific industrial sectors of the German economy. Oil: the chief sources of German oil (eg Ploesti) were out of the range of Allied bombers until late '43 or, in some cases, '44 or even '45. By the time they were attacked seriously they didn't have the dislocating effects anticipated, partly because the Germans used less oil than the Allies believed, partly because of failure of the raids (see next point). Attacks on specific targets such as oil, or ball-bearings factories, usually failed because the Germans were able to concentrate fighter and AAA resources in limited areas, an option not available to them when defending against a wider Strategic bombing campaign.
The massive expansion of Allied shipping was not limited by the bomber buildup- you will find no archival references from '42 or 43 of American planners finding their shipping plans limited by resources directed to bomber factories, whilst on the British side it's worth asking whose side the shipyards were on. Corelli Barnett quotes Bevin saying in '43, in 'The Audit of War', that he had never denied labour resources to the shipyards and never got the output from them that had been promised.There were bottlenecks in both plane and ship production, and diverting resources from the one to the other would not have removed those bottlenecks.
Re Bomber and Coastal Command: heavy and medium bombers could be and were used successfully in a tactical as well as a strategic mode in Europe after the defeat of the U-Boats, to stymie the French rail system during D-Day and to attack armoured formations. Large numbers of Sunderland flying boats - the key aircraft in the anti-U-boat struggle- would have had no post-U-boat application; Liberators and other medium-heavy bombers were used in the Battle of the Atlantic, but there was only a limited use for them and lack of that particular kind of aircraft was certainly not a problem beyond mid-42.Defeating the U-Boats was not simply a question of chucking extra resources at shipping plus Coastal Command. The U-boat campaign was pretty much a see-saw, with one side and then the other combining tactical and technical resources to beat the other for six months at a time. We beat the U-Boats when all the ducks were lined up in a row: unprecedented production in the US shipyards, at the same time as unprecedented production in US bomber factories; a competent US and Royal Navy with functioning and agreed procedures; supremacy in the code and short-wave-radar struggles; a German economy unable to produce larger numbers of U-Boats, or train more crews: which had at least something to do with the desperate need to build fighter planes and 88 guns, and train fighter pilots, in order to prevent the burning of the German cities.
I won't say Overy's views are necessarily 100% correct. I do say that the views of someone who claims that '1,000 bomber night raids' were 'common' in 'November 1942' are as useful as those of anyone who analyses birth rates in terms of how quickly storks can fly to cabbage patches. You approvingly quoted garbage by Davis and Morris, and you don't have the guts or the brains to admit it.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 19 August 2005 18:00 (link):
Re. oil -- OK; was an effective campaign against oil facilities really a practical impossibility given the technology of the time? Or just unsuitable for the types of aircraft and tactics which were actually employed? And what about the alternative of attacking transport infrastructure within Germany (as occured in late 1944, with effective results on, e.g., the distribution of coal)?
OK, but factories and material which could have been building Sunderlands or other ASW aircraft were employed building heavy bombers (something like 750 Sunderlands were built in total, as compared to about 7,400 Lancasters). Why was there only a `limited use for' the land-based bombers? Halifaxes, B17s and B24s were widely used to cover the mid-Atlantic gap, but Bomber Command had many more such planes. Would not diversion of more of these aircraft to Coastal Command have shortened the Battle of the Atlantic?
Posted by Dan Hardie, Monday, 22 August 2005 16:44 (link):
Will you damn well read what I have written and also read some serious history, you silly, pompous man. The Battle of the Atlantic was not, repeat not a mono-causal event in which victory was solely or mainly delayed by the failure of the UK or US to devote greater numbers of Halifaxes and Liberators to the U-Boat war. For much of the war, the use of aircraft against U-Boats was of zero or limited utility since the U-Boats were capable of detecting aircraft once they had surfaced using radar, and since the larger planes were ineffective against U-Boats at night, when most attacks were carried out. To repeat what I have already written: the triumph in the Battle of the Atlantic came as a result of simultaneous improvements in co-ordination, command, ship production, code-breaking, radar and sonar technology and a large number of other factors. Gosh, isn't it impressive what one can learn about the war from books? Not that you'd know.
'And what about the alternative of attacking transport infrastructure within Germany (as occured in late 1944, with effective results on, e.g., the distribution of coal)?' In late 1944: after three years of strategic bombing which had almost destroyed the Luftwaffe. And on transport infrastructure- and coal - which meant train marshalling yards, (German transport was rail rather than road based), smack in the middle of densely populated urban areas, and on ports, and on coal-mining towns, chiefly in the Ruhr: which led to massive civilian casualties. Gosh, Chris, maybe you should, like, read something about Strategic Bombing: then maybe even you will realise that there were some pretty hard choices facing, say, Winston Churchill in the Second World War, choices that would have been hard even if the wisdom of Davis, Morris and Lightfoot had been available to him.
'oil -- OK; was an effective campaign against oil facilities really a practical impossibility given the technology of the time?' No, well spotted, Chris, it wasn't: the RAF and USAAF ran a deliberately ineffective campaign against Ploesti and similar targets because they enjoyed kiling their own aircrews. There were tactics available to them which would have shortened the war and ended the slaughter of their own men, but they deliberately didn't use such tactics because Harris and Spaatz wanted to wipe out every man under their command. You damned idiot. Go away and read the books I have mentioned: you may still be a fool but you'll be a better-informed fool.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 22 August 2005 17:49 (link):
Um. Forcing a U-boat to dive was useful even if it enabled it to escape an immediate attack (since submerged U-boats were much slower than those travelling on the surface, and consumed limited battery power; and obviously their guns could not be used when submerged). Numerous U-boats were sunk by B-17s and B-24s (in each case more than by Sunderlands), and a few by Halifaxes. Even when an aircraft could not attack a U-boat directly it was a much more effective tool for searching for submarines than were surface ships (1942 research estimated a search rate of 75 square miles/hour for a RADAR-equipped destroyer, 1,000 square miles/hour for aircraft with meter-wave RADAR, and 3,000 square miles/hour for centimeter-wave RADAR).
Now, most of the ships which were sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic were sunk in areas where air escort was not usually provided for convoys. But air escorts were rather effective against U-boats (something like 43% of U-boats sunk were sunk by escorting ships and aircraft). It is by no means clear that supplying additional aircraft to extend air escort even to convoys in mid-Atlantic would have paid off in terms of sinkings prevented and U-boats destroyed, but I don't think you can dismiss it as easily as that.
I.e., without the preceding three years' bombing, the attacks on transport infrastructure could not have been made effectively? But surely that would have been true whatever the nature of the previous bombing?
It's fairly obvious that aiming at transport infrastructure would result in civilian casualties! That doesn't mean it would necessarily have been a bad idea (though I think you believe that I do think that, for reasons still unclear).
Nice use of sarcasm...
... and reasoned, well-informed criticism too.
Sigh.
Posted by Dan Hardie, Wednesday, 31 August 2005 20:00 (link):
Minor point re sore losers: Lightfoot in comments, whingeing about me: 'Nice use of sarcasm...' Lightfoot in the post, slagging off Oliver Kamm: 'His complaint, so far as he has one... whose wisdom could be more conventional than his?...(sarcasm continues)' Listen: don't write a post dripping with sarcasm and then complain if someone else pays you back in the same coin. Or rather, go ahead and do so, but don't be surprised at people laughing at the big baby who can dish it out but not take it.
Point re the argument on Strategic bombing: Your original comment on Strategic Bombing (which, despite your own ridiculous attempt to claim otherwise, was posted before I had written anything on this thread) was an approving citation of various silly judgements such as ``the readiness, by the British, of all people, to stop at nothing when waging war. Civilized constraints, all considerations of morality, were abandoned.'' We're now into discussion of the - really rather difficult- questions raised by the Strategic Bombing campaign. And yet you can't even acknowledge that if one accepts that there were difficult questions involved in deciding whether, and how, to bomb Nazi Germany, talk of the British abandoning 'all considerations of morality' is clearly foolish. And please don't give me that 'I was just quoting, doesn't mean approving'. Give your comment as a comprehension exercise to any class of bright sixth formers and they will reply that in context you clearly were approving, since you introduced no contrary points of view and made no criticisms. Point re reading: you can't come out and say 'okay, I haven't read the sources you refer to. Fair play, maybe I should'. So instead you dress it all up behind a lot of bluster like 'I'm not all that interested by your suppositions about what I might or might not have read, by the way. You've cited a number of different sources, always accompanying your citation by a statement that I cannot possibly have read the relevant book, in order to (continues at length)...'
Specifically historical points: 'I.e., without the preceding three years' bombing, the attacks on transport infrastructure could not have been made effectively? But surely that would have been true whatever the nature of the previous bombing?'
The nature of the previous bombing would have necessarily been massive, untargeted, mainly night-time attacks on cities. The USAAF spent billions of dollars on daytime aiming systems that didn't work unless there were no fighters around; daytime bombing also demanded the development of a daytime escort fighter: and both the targeting systems and the fighters were utterly beyond the economic resources of a near-bankrupt Britain at the time that the Strategic Bombing campaign started. This is pretty much Military History 101: do some damn reading.
You haven't come up with any refutation of my point that the RAF and USAAF commanders were not wilfully ignoring oil or other strategic targets, but rather came to a judgement that attacks on them would be ineffective. You've ignored the entirely germane question of the impossibility of attacking Ploesti until late in the war, and the question of why the ball-bearing factory attacks - precisely targeted, etc- failed. You have ignored my point (full disclosure: not *my* point, but the point made by the military historians of whose work you are so blissfully unaware) about the Battle of the Atlantic being a complex struggle which was not extended as long as it was because of a simple shortage of Coastal Command planes, and you are clearly unaware that airborne radar systems used by the RAF were frequently ineffective due to the development of radar-detection systems by the Kriegsmarine: as I pointed out many days ago, victory in 1943 was due, among many other factors, to Anglo-American supremacy in the development of centimetric radar to a point where the U-Boats were unable to use detection systems adequately. This- like the massive development of US shipbuilding, like the near-simultaneous success of Bletchley Park and failure of the German B-Dienst, like the development of common systems by the US and Royal Navies- was a key factor in the May 1943 Atlantic victory and was entirely independent of anything that happened with the number of aircraft assigned to Coastal Command.
You haven't, again, addressed my point that Churchill believed at the time- almost certainly accurately- that he could not simply fight a defensive campaign in the Atlantic and a peripheral campaign in N. Africa at a time of huge Soviet losses and so felt obliged to commit to Strategic Bombing. I could recommend excellent references on Churchill's relations with Stalin and FDR, but why should I do so? You'll just shrug and pretend that you've read them while not quite saying that you definitely have.
Posted by Eben, Thursday, 1 September 2005 00:21 (link):
God damn it Dan Hardie, you really come across as a complete imbecile. For the past couple of weeks I've had to put up with your ad hominem tomfoolery in the comments of a blog which I usually enjoy. Now, I've known Chris for a while, and it's pretty clear that he
Now, Google suggests that you've trodden pretty softly on the world* so, setting aside my distaste for credentialism, can you please tell me why I should value your opinion over Chris's. I mean the question in all seriousness.
* outside the world of angry blog-commenting ("let me be the first Londoner to say that I am looking forward to a mass-casualty bombing attack on an American city" anyone?)
Posted by dan hardie, Sunday, 4 September 2005 23:07 (link):
Lots of obsessives Googling me. How flattering. Yes, when a silly girl named 'Majikthise' on Kevin Drum's site made a 'joke' about London being bombed (joke in its entirety: 'Boom town- all puns intended') I made the point that anyone making a similar 'joke' about bombing a US city would be greeted with disgust. Point stands, I think: anyone want to make a 'joke' about New Orleans? Perhaps 'Eben' can emerge from behind his pseudonym to do so.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 5 September 2005 00:37 (link):
Posted by Eben, Monday, 5 September 2005 01:08 (link):
Heh. It's really more of a nym. I blame the parents.
Interesting that I didn't get an answer to my question though. I wonder if it has one?
Posted by Eben, Monday, 5 September 2005 01:12 (link):
Btw, put us out of our misery with respect to Overy. I refuse to believe that you've resisted the purchase of a book with such an enticing title for eight whole years.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 5 September 2005 00:33 (link):
(Briefly -- can you use the <blockquote>...</blockquote> tags, as shown at the bottom of the `post comment' page -- doing so would make your citations of other material rather clearer.)
Hardly a complaint. After all, I said it was a nice use of sarcasm!
Well, there is a distinction between bombing a target which is in a city, and bombing residential areas specifically. And there are (e.g.) transport targets outside cities (bridges and tunnels being probably the most vulnerable). Allied aircraft were not wholly unsuccessful in attacking either, especially once more accurate night bombing techniques were introduced (the Pathfinder force, GEE, OBOE, etc. -- eventually these achieved a -- claimed -- accuracy of a few hundred meters, certainly good enough to make a meaningful distinction between an attack on a specific target such as a railway yard or a factory, and general area bombing of the district in which that target lay); each of those techniques could have been employed earlier, especially given the use of their (admittedly more primitive) German equivalents in 1940-1.
Again, I'm not sure of your evidence for of what I am, or am not, `clearly unaware'; certainly your assertions in that field frequently suffer from being entirely wrong. You are correct that U-boats carried detectors for the meter-wavelength ASV RADAR originally carried by Coastal Command aircraft; as I said, this did not make the aircraft useless in the antisubmarine rôle, partly because forcing submarines to dive was better than nothing (though, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, certainly not as effective a way to prevent attacks on shipping as was destroying them).
(It's also worth saying in response to your suggestion that there was no real tradeoff in resource allocation between Bomber and Coastal commands that the deployment of centimetric RADAR equipment on aircraft was exactly an example of such a tradeoff: bombers were fitted with the `H2S' centimetric bombing RADAR before ASV sets based on the same technology were made available, and -- given that bombers, by necessity, operated over enemy territory and therefore the centimetre-wave sets fairly swiftly fell into German hands -- we were lucky that the Germans took as long as they did to fit their submarines with detectors for the 10cm signals.)
Hyperbole. It obviously wasn't `entirely independent' -- or are you saying that the Battle of the Atlantic could have been won wholly without air support from land-based 'planes?
I assume that in fact your claim is that allocating machines to Coastal rather than Bomber Command would not have been an economic use of resources in terms of tonnage of shipping saved?
Posted by Dan Hardie, Sunday, 9 October 2005 20:02 (link):
Have spent the last few weeks away from a decent library, and (most of the time) from internet connections. Insulting small minds is, I suppose, a vice, but then we all need to have a vice or two. Serious answer to Chris L on historical matters will follow shortly.
Eben is apparently a nym rather than a pseudonym: I was led to this grave error by an entirely reasonable assumption that no parent could be so cruel to its offspring . Elizabeth is very cross indeed that I describe Mike Davis as a 'Marxist'. She must turn her fearsome wrath upon Davis, I fear, since he describes himself as a Marxist.
Elizabeth is also one of those risible snobs who seek to insult their interlocutors by saying they must have attended a secondary modern school. (Note to Americans: between 1944 and the early 1970s British children were separated by a single exam at the age of 11, with those who passed, chiefly middle class children, attending 'grammar schools' and those who didn't, chiefly working class children, attending 'secondary moderns'. People who despise the working class find it amusing to laugh at secondary moderns, most of which were abolished a very long time ago.) I never, alas, attended a secondary modern, but did end up at Oxford University. It's really rather retro to trot out the old 'secondary modern' insult, almost as if one were to be told 'your family keeps coal in the bath'. And how splendid that such a person should write these words in the course of a sycophantic defence of a nominally left-of-centre blogger.
Posted by Eben, Monday, 10 October 2005 23:44 (link):
Don't feed the troll. But it's fun to feed the troll.
Elizabeth is very cross indeed that I describe Mike Davis as a 'Marxist'. She must turn her fearsome wrath upon Davis, I fear, since he describes himself as a Marxist.
I think I see where you're getting confused. You're not being irritating by leveling unfounded accusations of Marxism at Davis. You are being irritating by accurately citing his (basically irrelevant) Marxism in the hope that your readers may draw some nebulous (but presumably unfavourable) conclusions about his general fitness as a commentator or, if you're lucky, human being.
You need to read the conversational terrorism page that Liz pointed you to a while back; it may help you to lift your game.
Elizabeth is also one of those risible snobs who seek to insult their interlocutors by saying they must have attended a secondary modern school.
Christ, read the original post. She was impugning the education generally offered by secondary moderns, not the poor sods on whom it is inflicted. And of course this is a fine, upstanding (indeed pretty much canonical) left-of-centre thing to do.
Posted by Dan Hardie, Tuesday, 11 October 2005 14:53 (link):
Dishonest balls, again. What your halfwitted- and contemptibly snobbish- spouse wrote was:'Repeated use of 'You're all idiots, and I'll be back in two weeks' is not something they teach at your average secondary modern debating society, as far as I'm aware, but it's a form of words you've used twice.' Sympathy for pupils of secondary moderns: none. Instead we get braying snobbery and attempts at implying one's interlocutor a)went to a secondary modern and b) is a clearly inferior person for having done so. Look, educational snobbery directed at me is going to have to constitute a put-down of Balliol and its History tutors- historical topics being those currently under discussion- so the vacuous Upton couple are going to have to raise their game from 'bet you went to a Second-aaary Mod-eaarn'.
Davis's Marxism, by the way, is of the cretinous variety known as 'Third Worldism'. Get him off the topic of California's ecology and he is not a serious scholar, unlike Marxists such as C.L.R. James or Edward Thompson, but rather a hack polemicist who sincerely believes that the UK and the USA are essentially genocidal states. (See, passim, his 'Late Victorian Holocausts'.) His lack of knowledge and his juvenile world view are indeed relevant to assessing his statements about the Second World War. If one were compiling a list of 1,000 or so historians with useful things to say about that war, Davis's name would not be on it, which is why someone citing him as an authority deserves mockery.
Eben's inability to read simple English sentences is rather touching, but if he ever corrects it he will find that I have noted, not once but several times, that Davis has never published any peer-reviewed work on the Second World War, unlike the sources I have quoted above. Taught a little basic literacy- perhaps at a secondary modern, which could hardly do a worse job than whichever fee-paying academy he attended- Eben will also be able to read that I have discredited the 'facts' presented by Mike Davis and have gone on to do the same to the theses presented by Chris Lightfoot- taking care to cite sources as I do so.
Given a choice between believing the work of a man with no knowledge of strategic bombing who has been caught out in some very obvious errors, and believing the works I cited by specialists in the field, what does Eben do? He asks himself who his buddy Lightfoot quotes and nods his head in frenzied agreement, like one of those stuffed dogs you used to see in the back of cars.
Posted by Pete Stevens, Tuesday, 11 October 2005 15:36 (link):
Dan,
You state that Eben attended a fee paying academy. As the you state you provide sources, and the comment policy requires you do, could you provide a source to back up that claim?
As a final note, isn't it a bit bizarre to proceed with
"Stop being nasty you horrible snobs. I went to Oxford you know."
Posted by Pete Stevens, Tuesday, 11 October 2005 15:39 (link):
"As the you state you"
should read
"As you state you"
It is merely a typo.
Posted by Eben, Tuesday, 11 October 2005 15:40 (link):
Here endeth my participation. I think, all things considered, that my work here is done.
Posted by Evil interloper, Tuesday, 11 October 2005 20:49 (link):
Let's see how long this stays up without deletion, shall we? Christ, you ought to realise something's wrong when you can only win an argument with the delete key. A quick reply to the sycophants' chorus, who haven't managed to come up with any substantive arguments and seem to be rather proud of the fact.
Eben is not only a cyber-stalker but apparently wishes to boast about this sad habit. Okay. Pete Stevens is upset that I tell snobs that state school alumni make it to Oxford. Tragic.
Neither Pete nor Eben nor Liz have come up with a single argument about the Second World War beyond adolescent chants of 'Chris is right, always'- which takes on a certain pathos when set beside Chris L's reasonably frequent admissions that actually, he might have been wrong about this or that specific question. I've now given you all a rather good introductory reading list on the history of the air war, 1939-45. I seriously doubt that you'll read any of it, but I do rather suggest that in future you restrain yourselves from pretending expertise on subjects of which you know absolutely nothing.
Posted by Pete Stevens, Wednesday, 12 October 2005 12:24 (link):
Dan, I repeat myself.
"Eben went to a fee-paying academy".
State your source or retract your comment.
Posted by Dan Hardie, Sunday, 9 October 2005 20:12 (link):
Shall we go round the mulberry bush one more time? I've been posting replies every few weeks. This has been unavoidable. It's also annoyed one or two people, which means that I shall now do it out of choice. I note that not one of the arguments you have come up with even comes close to being a defence of the proposition that the Allied Strategic Bombing campaign meant that 'Civilized constraints, all considerations of morality, were abandoned.' But I do enjoy discussing the Second World War.
1)'Allied aircraft were not wholly unsuccessful in attacking either, especially once more accurate night bombing techniques were introduced (the Pathfinder force, GEE, OBOE, etc. -- eventually these achieved a -- claimed -- accuracy of a few hundred meters, certainly good enough to make a meaningful distinction between an attack on a specific target such as a railway yard or a factory, and general area bombing of the district in which that target lay); each of those techniques could have been employed earlier, especially given the use of their (admittedly more primitive) German equivalents in 1940-1.' The 'claimed accuracy of a few hundred meters (sic)' was just that: a claim. The Americans made this claim throughout the war for their bombsight and it simply never translated into operational practice: you could hit within a few hundred metres of a target if you were a top notch bombardier operating without the hindrance of ground fire or enemy fighters, flying slowly and at low altitude, in perfect weather conditions. A few Mosquito crews got good enough to achieve the same results, again if there were no flak or enemy fighters around. Otherwise- as has been noted a wearying number of times in the literature, most recently in Hastings's excellent 'Armaggedon'- the results of American 'precision' and British 'area' bombing were largely or wholly indistinguishable if you were a civilian living in the bombed area.
2) '(It's also worth saying in response to your suggestion that there was no real tradeoff in resource allocation between Bomber and Coastal commands that the deployment of centimetric RADAR equipment on aircraft was exactly an example of such a tradeoff: bombers were fitted with the `H2S' centimetric bombing RADAR before ASV sets based on the same technology were made available, and -- given that bombers, by necessity, operated over enemy territory and therefore the centimetre-wave sets fairly swiftly fell into German hands -- we were lucky that the Germans took as long as they did to fit their submarines with detectors for the 10cm signals.)'
H2S and Coastal Command's Air-Surface-Vessel radar sets were both based on centimetric radar. H2S was a much simpler system: it provided bomber crews with a rough outline - a sketch map, if you like- of the main features of the ground over which they were passing, and, just like a map, its purpose was to allow the navigators to work out were they were to within a few miles. It wasn't accurate enough to use as a bombing aid. ASV had a much more difficult task to perform: it had to locate small enemy vessels on the surface of some of the world's roughest water.
John Terraine, in 'Business in Great Waters'- one of the two or three key books on the U-Boat war, which you will no doubt neither confirm nor deny having read- notes that ASV radar was ready in prototype in 1937 and capable of detecting U-boats ten miles distant- ie two years before the beginning of the war Britain had a functioning ASV radar set. At this stage Bomber Command were not requesting centimetric radar and did not do so until late 1940. ASV radar could and should have been issued to Coastal Command but was not: Terraine thinks largely because Coastal Command officers did not appreciate its potential, and because Dowding at Fighter Command, and Tizard, then in charge of the technical effort, placed a higher priority on developing centimetric radar for Airborne Interception purposes, since, before late 1940, the British were scared by German bombers far more than by German submarines. (This was the use of radar to enable night fighters to 'see' and shoot down the enemy in darkness). It simply isn't true to say that the technical development of centimetric radar for anti-submarine purposes was down to Bomber Command, since in the first five years of British radar development Bomber Command simply weren't asking for centimetric radar. The technology existed several years pre-war and the failure to introduce it was due to competition from Fighter Command and down to Coastal Command's own failure to request development. AI centimetric radar was developed in prototype at the same time by the same research team and was in operational use by late 1940.
Terraine, following Corelli Barnett in 'The Audit of War', does note that when Coastal Command belatedly realised that ASV radar might be helpful and requested its mass production, there was difficulty due to Bomber Command's simulaneous demand for centimetric radar for H2S. But both Terraine and Barnett do not see the Coastal Command/Bomber Command competition as the main cause of shortages of centimetric radar, but rather pin the blame on the chaotic state of the British electronics industry. Barnett opines, and is quoted approvingly by Terraine, that 'the major wartime cause of the (centimetric radar) crisis was that from 1939 onwards this newest technology had suffered from a galloping attack of the classic British industrial disease- fragmentation of resources and effort, overlaps in product designs, batch production virtually by hand, utter want of standardisation of parts and components'. He notes that in radio production (and there's no need to think that radar production was any different) British 'output per man-hour in 1935 was less than a quarter of the American figure'.
So: no truth in the assertion that Bomber Command competition hampered the development of Coastal Command centimetric radar; a half-truth in the assertion that Bomber Command competition hampered the supply of Coastal Command centimetric radar, but the plain fact is that the demands of both commands could easily have been met had Britain, in time of war, manage to have a few electronics factories running at, say, half the productivity standards of their American counterparts. Of course the crisis in centimetric radar supply didn't last long because we asked the Americans to manufacture centimetric radar for us: which they did in massive quantities.
3)Coming up next is a very poor argument from you: it's either an honest mistake or dishonest arguing. Given the way you've been arguing in the rest of this thread, one regretfully assumes the latter.
You 'quote' me as saying '... the May 1943 Atlantic victory [was] entirely independent of anything that happened with the number of aircraft assigned to Coastal Command.' And, having erected the straw man, knock it courageously down: 'Hyperbole. It obviously wasn't `entirely independent' -- or are you saying that the Battle of the Atlantic could have been won wholly without air support from land-based 'planes?'
What I actually said was:'...victory in 1943 was due, among many other factors, to Anglo-American supremacy in the development of centimetric radar to a point where the U-Boats were unable to use detection systems adequately. This- like the massive development of US shipbuilding, like the near-simultaneous success of Bletchley Park and failure of the German B-Dienst, like the development of common systems by the US and Royal Navies- was a key factor in the May 1943 Atlantic victory and was entirely independent of anything that happened with the number of aircraft assigned to Coastal Command.' A literate 14-year old reading this could tell you that I never asserted that victory in the Battle of the Atlantic was entirely independent of the number of aircraft in Coastal Command. The literate 14-year-old would go on to note that I said that many of the factors which led to victory- and I gave four examples, covering shipbuilding, signals intelligence, centimetric radar and US-UK co-operation- was entirely independent of Coastal Command's strength. Which they were.
4) A very silly argument from you re my saying that Churchill put resources into Strategic Bombing because he believed that he couldn't fight only defensive (Atlantic) or peripheral (North African) campaigns after Hitler's assault on the USSR: 'It's perfectly possible that the answer to the question I posed is ``yes, the strategic bombing campaign was the optimal allocation of available resources, because ...'' or, ``no it wasn't, because ...,'' or ``no it wasn't, because ..., but it was necessary to do it anyway to maintain relations with the USSR'', but I think it's a bit of a stretch to conflate the first and third of those.'
Let me spell this out. Throughout 1941 and even 1942, there was grave doubt - among the British, Americans and even the Soviets themselves- that the USSR would survive Hitler's attack. Churchill did not, therefore, primarily commit resources to attacking Germany with bombers 'to maintain relations with the USSR'. He did it because it was the only way he had to divert and destroy German resources which would otherwise be used against the Soviet Union, which was in danger of being destroyed. References to this are to be found passim in such books as Weinberg's 'A world at arms' or Robin Edmonds's 'The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in peace and war'. Of course you'll start pouting and sulking if I suggest that you should read these books. So I won't.
Posted by Chris Williams, Thursday, 13 October 2005 16:07 (link):
Chris L's statement that all morality went out the window is clearly an overstatement. But Dan H's position - which appears to be that the Bomber Offensive was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, is frankly equally problematic. Unless of course Dan is merely setting out the case against Chris L, rather than attempting to place the Offensive in context. But even if he is doing that, he is creating a very one-sided impression.
Some easily-accessible quotes (ie, ones that I don't have to leave the room to get. There are more.):
'In a broadcast on 27 April 1940, the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Samuel Hoare, declared "We will not bomb open towns. We will not attempt to defeat the Germans by terrorising their women and children. All that we will leave to the enemy."' - Edgerton, _England and the Aeroplane_, p. 63.
So - before area bombing was adopted, it was condemned as immoral. Once it was adopted, moral obligations were raised to it from within Parliament, by those who supported the war effort:
'[Archbishop] Temple spoke out strongly against 'reprisals' . . . But Churchill, from the summer of 1940, accepted the idea' - Calder, _People's War_ p. 566. '[Bishop Bell on] May 10th 1941, ... called the night-bombing of non-combatants "a degradation of the spirit for all who take part in it".' ibid p. 558.
And those responsible for it at the highest level admitted to qualms:
"Cherwell wrote: `It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us ... fairly kindly by the standards of the day and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing ... Will they say ... that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.'" - Pearce, review of _A Moral History of the Twentieth Century_ by Jonathan Glover [_History Today_, Feb 2000].
The Bomber Offensive was effective in defeating nazism. Whether it was more effective than doing something else with the resources (including, but not limited to, 55,000 highly-trained, educated and motivated aircrew) is another matter. Whether the undoubted moral failings of the Offensive add up to a price that was too high to pay is another again. Neither of these two matters is closed, and it's misleading to suggest that they are.
A quibble: Barnett is untrustworthy, I'm afraid (see: J. Tomlinson: 'Correlli Barnett's history: the case of Marshall Aid' in _Twentieth Century British History_, Vol. 8 Issue 2 (1997) pp. 222 - 238). In any case, I don't accept that just because US productivity in the radio manufacturing industry was far higher than UK productivity, the same would necessarily be the case with radar. Radios were simple consuer goods, produced in their millions (especially in the US, exaggerating learning curve effects). Radar was a couple of orders of magnitude more complex, and radar sets had far shorter production runs. US productivity in radar production _might_ have been 4 times UK productivity, but radio production gives us no clues in the matter.
Posted by Dan Hardie, Monday, 17 October 2005 21:08 (link):
One last post, in response to Chris Williams's decent, and properly sourced, argument- something that was regrettably beyond the sycophants' chorus. I suggest that anyone wanting to tell me that my arguments are wrong, or that state school pupils should be gassed, does so by email.
'Dan H's position - which appears to be that the Bomber Offensive was for the best in the best of all possible worlds....' No, the world that existed between 1939 and 1945 was not 'the best of all possible worlds', as I have never asserted and as even Pangloss might admit- something to do with all that war and genocide. The Strategic Bombing offensive may arguably have been the least worst policy from a number of awful options.
Bishop Bell opposed bombing: yes, so what? I don't take my views on the morality of, say, homosexuality from any of the Christian churches- do you? He was ineffectually involved with the German Foreign Office 'resistance' and never had to make any decision about how Hiter should be fought. Doubtless you know that the 'reprisal' bombings of Berlin a)began at the height of the Battle of Britain and b)were at least a contributory factor in Hitler and Goering's disastrous (for them) decision to discontinue their bombing attacks on RAF airfields and attack London instead.
Hoare opposed bombing: again, so what? If you're citing Hoare with approval you're obliged to admit that Hoare -in 1940! -opposed any aerial action against Germany beyond the dropping of leaflets, that he had no ideas on strategy beyond sitting behind the Maginot Line, that he was perhaps the most fervent of the prewar appeasers, and that he- like Halifax and the Duke of Windsor- was packed off overseas as soon as Churchill could decently do so, almost certainly in order that there be no coterie of senior politicians in London sympathetic to the compromise peace that Hitler was offering.
Re Barnett, the article you cite is not original but is merely rehashing excellent criticisms of his views on the Marshall Plan, and the spending priorities of the Attlee Govt., first made by Jose Harris in 1987, in the Proceedings of the British Academy. Relevance to Barnett's criticisms of individual British industries: none. I went through 'Audit of War' pretty thoroughly with James Foreman-Peck, my Econ History tutor, and I would say Barnett is regrettably sound on the failings of British industry.
Back, one last time, to the morality of Strategic Bombing. Any policy which had as its goal the destruction of Hitler's strategic capacity cannot be said to have 'ignored all considerations of morality', at any rate if you know who Hitler was and what he did. It is a proper matter for debate as to whether Strategic Bombing was the best use of available resources. We had to take offensive action against Hitler after we were thrown off the Continent in 1940- the more so after 'Barbarossa'. North Africa involved a small fraction of Hitler's fighting divisions; the Battle of the Atlantic was a vital but defensive campaign, and again one to which Hitler did not devote large resources, until late in the war.
Offensive action against Hitler after 1940 meant one of two things: bombing, or a landing in France. Given the gross inefficiency of the British Army, and the excellence of German ground forces, together with the hideous logistical difficulties involved in any cross-Channel invasion, it is hard not to feel that Churchill made the right decision- to bomb Germany whilst postponing any invasion until American forces had arrived in huge numbers. The RAF, for all its faults, at first matched and then exceeded the combat efficiency of the Luftwaffe, despite having had the smallest interwar budget of any of the three fighting Services. The British Army was a hopelessly ineffective organisation in 1940- not because resources were being thrown at Bomber Command (they weren't, then) but because the Army had not seriously addressed the problems of modern war. After 1940 the Army had enormous resources, comparatively little of which went on actual fighting, and it still learned terribly slowly. It rather looks like the RAF was the right horse to back.
If you want evidence of wartime doubts about strategic bombing, you can forget about the mediocre Hoare and Bell and cite Churchill's reaction to watching footage of the 1943 bombing of German cities: 'Are we beasts, that we do such things?' It's a good question. (The fact that Churchill asked it, and the way that he asked it, are sufficient refutations of Mike Davis's silly and ignorant characterisation of Churchill.) We did kill huge numbers of German civilians- and huge numbers of French, Belgian, Dutch and Italian civilians too, although for some reason there is less of an audience in those countries for the thesis that the RAF were war criminals.
My own view, for whatever it is worth, is that the Second World War was pretty much unique: we faced an enemy so implacable and so radically evil that a policy which killed a huge number of civilians might have been morally justified, if it was, at any given time, the most militarily effective use of resources. I think Strategic Bombing played the key role in destroying the Luftwaffe and an important role in the diversion or destruction of other German military resources, and that, at any rate until late 1943, it was indeed the best possible use of Britain's available resources.
Whether the Strategic Bombing Campaign was perfectly managed at all times, and whether better results couldn't have been obtained - yes, there is a debate in the literature on that. But such a debate has no bearing whatsoever on the stuff originally cited, with clear approval, by Chris Lightfoot: the adolescent remarks of Davis and the senescent hyperbole of Taylor.
Posted by dsquared, Monday, 17 October 2005 21:37 (link):
The phrase "Strategic Bombing" usually refers to the (mainly American) campaign of bombing German factories, as surveyed by the "Strategic Bombing Survey" which JK Galbraith was a part of. The British campaign was a different thing from "Strategic Bombing".
Posted by Dan Hardie, Tuesday, 18 October 2005 13:40 (link):
Dsquared, I had said I would post no more comments, but this is embarrassing balls. As thirty seconds' research would have told you, the RAF's official history of their own bombing campaign is entitled 'The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939-1945' (by Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, HMSO, 1961). Every single historian of the air war has followed this terminology. The difference between British and American bombing was not that one was strategic and one mainly was not, or that one hit factories and the other mainly didn't, but that the British mainly bombed by night and the Americans by day- for full explanation of why, see above. It is untrue that the bombing of factories was mainly American, and no reference will tell you otherwise. 'Strategic bombing' basically meant that the air forces tried to knock Germany out of the war, or seriously damage her warfighting capacity, independently of the actions of other fighting services, and was started and continued by the RAF. 'Tactical bombing' was hitting military targets in support of ground or naval forces.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 5 September 2005 00:49 (link):
That's a perfectly reasonable argument, but isn't quite relevant to the question of allocation of resources, which is where we started this. It's perfectly possible that the answer to the question I posed is ``yes, the strategic bombing campaign was the optimal allocation of available resources, because ...'' or, ``no it wasn't, because ...,'' or ``no it wasn't, because ..., but it was necessary to do it anyway to maintain relations with the USSR'', but I think it's a bit of a stretch to conflate the first and third of those.
Posted by Dan Hardie, Friday, 19 August 2005 16:12 (link):
Just to clarify things for clever-foolish types, CL quotes seven sentences *by* Morris and Davis, and few more sentences *from* their book but written by Oppenheimer...
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 19 August 2005 16:14 (link):
No, as a cursory reading of the text would have told you, the former quote, including the Oppenheimer statement, is from Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
Posted by Dan Hardie, Friday, 19 August 2005 16:31 (link):
Indeed. So Morris and Davis actually perpetrate two gross howlers in only two sentences, which is even more impressive proof of their ignorance. But you aren't going to admit error in quoting such a pair of deadbeats, since mistakes don't count if they're not in a book. Or something.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 19 August 2005 16:43 (link):
`Gross howler' (a) was the claim that thousand-bomber raids were `common' in 1942 -- I'll give you that one, though I dare say some might defend it on the basis that they're architects and writing figuratively. (Equally, one might argue that over the summer of 1942 there weren't all that many raids over Germany -- and 3 was quite a large fraction of the total. But that's a fairly uninteresting semantic rabbit-hole.)
What's (b)? Are you saying that Churchill didn't boast to Roosevelt as stated? Or that Taylor didn't write the sentence attributed to him? Or that there's some further, hidden, meaning there which I can't divine but you believe is wrong?
Posted by Dan Hardie, Friday, 19 August 2005 17:18 (link):
Taylor did write the sentence attributed to him, and his work on bombing (eg in 'English History') is a straight reprise of Webster and Frankland (Taylor did no original research past about 1962, and that was his dodgy work on war origins) and (for the umpteenth time) has been strongly contraverted by the likes of Overy- which is why, you dumb fool, I am doing you the favour of giving you a short reading list. 'Are you saying that Churchill didn't boast to Roosevelt as stated?' I'm saying that Churchill made estimates of military action against the Nazis when writing to Roosevelt, and that I'm not, unlike you, going to use the ridiculous terminology of a factually-challenged Marxist propagandist. I don't have his letters to FDR in front of me, but I will dig them out this weekend, whereas you, no doubt will come up with some other creative defence of Davis. I have to admit I like what you managed this time:
'I'll give you that one, though I dare say some might defend it on the basis that they're architects and writing figuratively.'
Oh, that's classic. You argue a case, support it with a quotation from Mike Davis (and maybe Morris) and now you're saying it doesn't matter what they said because, now you come to think of it, they don't know what the hell they're talking about? They're architects, they can say what they want? Tell you what, I'll defend every mistake you've made on the basis that you're a computer programmer, or something, and writing figuratively. I'll defend every false statement that Blair makes about Iraq on the grounds that he's a commercial barrister, and... this could go on forever, no?
'(Equally, one might argue that over the summer of 1942 there weren't all that many raids over Germany -- and 3 was quite a large fraction of the total. But that's a fairly uninteresting semantic rabbit-hole.)' Jesus that's silly. The junk you quoted referred to November 1942, which is a pretty odd kind of summer. To spell things out for those wilfully feigning illiteracy: 1,000 bomber raids were not common in November 1942. They did not even occur in November 1942. They occurred three times- actually a very small fraction of the nightly raids- in May and June 1942. Two authors who claim, in as many words, that 1,000-bomber night raids were common in 1942 are wrong as to a) the date and b) the frequency of the raids, and their value as experts on the bombing campaign is zero. Anyone who quotes them as authorities on World War two bombing is a fool.
(But it doesn't matter because they're architects, and writing figuratively. Priceless.)
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 19 August 2005 17:45 (link):
As I say, not a very interesting semantic rabbit-hole. But if you insist... There were 21 night raids over Germany by Bomber Command in May and June 1942 (source); three were `thousand bomber' raids (of which only one actually included more than 1,000 aircraft), while six involved fewer than ten aircraft. So the `thousand bomber' raids constituted 14% of all night raids, 20% of large night raids, and something like 60% of sorties. I would not say that that was ``a very small fraction''.
(You seem, by the way, to be having trouble distinguishing my opinions from those of people I quote. Really, you would do better to read much more closely what I have actually written, and to stop supposing that I have the views that you imagine I do, unless you have some reasonably good evidence to infer it.)
Posted by Dan Hardie, Monday, 22 August 2005 15:59 (link):
Right: very limited time so will not be posting here again until Weds pm.
But briefly:
To follow you down the tedious semantic rabbit hole: your point holds if 'summer 1942' means May and June but not July and August. What world do Lightfoots live in? One in which a European summer ends on 1st July? And you achieve your figure for 'raids' by discounting all intruder operations, minor' operations and minelaying missions. A weaselly tactic, since aircraft were lost in large numbers on all these operations and counted just the same as any other operation on bomber crews' all-important operational mission logs.
'OK. You're claiming that the statement that, regarding strategic bombing of Germany, Civilized constraints, all considerations of morality, were abandoned. has been controverted. But you haven't said how.'
This is flat-out dishonesty allied to intellectual laziness. I gave a you a reading list (including at least one very anti-bombing campaign reference) and summarised, at some length, Overy's arguments that the Strategic Bombing campaign was necessary to defeat Hitler. I submit that 'we need to do this to beat Hitler' is indeed a 'consideration of morality'- and if you can't see that your 'I'm a fool' act is getting ever more extreme.
To be honest, I find it hard to accept that the second of your above arguments could have been made in good faith. You realise you - and Davis- don't know all that much about Strategic Bombing, you didn't have a clue that there was a sound body of scholarship supporting the decision to use Strategic Bombing, and to cover your embarrassment you are ranting.
You could spend the next couple of days, or weeks, or whatever, posting comments trying to pick holes in this or that argument. You won't have much joy, because your argument is based on ignorance, whereas mine isn't. But if you were sensible, you would stop wasting some time imagining that you can learn anything about the Second World War from Mike Davis (to be sure, a specialist on the ecology of Los Angeles)- and, instead, read some of the books that I've thoughtfully recommended for you. You haven't read Weinberg, have you? Or Overy? You would rightfully sneer at me if I cooked up a post on, say, retinal identification databases on a basis of no knowledge- so why do you have the witlessness to imagine that you can comment on the Second World War knowing little or nothing about it? Do yourself a favour and read some of the books I have told you about. If you want further reading after that, email me.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 22 August 2005 17:01 (link):
I stated `raids over Germany' because that's what the original comment referred to.
-- ah, OK. But that's not a constraint: it's a description of a trade-off. And on morality, aren't there still (and weren't there then) people who believe that `the end does not [always] justify the means', and that therefore `we need to do this to beat Hitler' cannot be used to justify any action?
Posted by Dan Hardie, Monday, 22 August 2005 17:20 (link):
First you berate me for not controverting Taylor's (silly and excessive) statement that 'Civilized constraints, all considerations of morality, were abandoned.' I point out that this isn't so. You now say that there are some people for whom `the end does not [always] justify the means'. Since you don't and can't claim that these people's views constitute 'all considerations of morality', I think you're going to have to agree that this isn't a defence of Taylor's statement.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 22 August 2005 17:59 (link):
No, and I didn't state that it was. You implied that the Taylor statement was a `gross howler' which had been `contraverted': i.e. that it was in the same class as the factual error you have identified in the same quotation, and equally wrong. But you haven't provided any evidence of that -- not very surprisingly, since as a moral statement it is essentially a statement of a person's opinion.
Posted by dan hardie, Sunday, 4 September 2005 23:52 (link):
'You implied that the Taylor statement was a `gross howler' which had been `contraverted'....'No, I said that Davis & Morris had made two gross howlers, and identified them. I objected to Taylor's moral judgement, and separately said that his 'work on bombing' had been controverted - Taylor wrote about bombing in English History 14-45, and his historical judgements were indeed controverted. But we both know this already, don't we? Come on, read the books.
Posted by Nick Vale, Thursday, 18 August 2005 08:01 (link):
It wasn't just Ike who had doubts, see http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm for a lot of other qualms. The usual reason given for the US using the bombs was not so much to end the world war, more to ensure Russia didn't get out of hand in post-war Europe by scaring the bejasus out of them ('Atomic Diplomacy', see http://members.aol.com/bblum6/abomb.htm for many more details). Clearly it scared the Russians enough for them to redouble their efforts into making their own bomb, which they succeeded in doing by, er, 1948, to the horror of the West.
It's also interesting that the Japanese were trying to open peace talks using the Russians as intermediaries. Given the Western Powers' apparent fear of post-war Russia, perhaps it's not surprising the US et al didn't want to give Russia any kudos for helping finish the war in the east
Posted by Dan Hardie, Tuesday, 11 October 2005 20:49 (link):
Let's see how long this stays up without deletion, shall we? Christ, you ought to realise something's wrong when you can only win an argument with the delete key. A quick reply to the sycophants' chorus, who haven't managed to come up with any substantive arguments and seem to be rather proud of the fact.
Eben is not only a cyber-stalker but apparently wishes to boast about this sad habit. Okay. Pete Stevens is upset that I tell snobs that state school alumni make it to Oxford. Tragic.
Neither Pete nor Eben nor Liz have come up with a single argument about the Second World War beyond adolescent chants of 'Chris is right, always'- which takes on a certain pathos when set beside Chris L's reasonably frequent admissions that actually, he might have been wrong about this or that specific question. I've now given you all a rather good introductory reading list on the history of the air war, 1939-45. I seriously doubt that you'll read any of it, but I do rather suggest that in future you restrain yourselves from pretending expertise on subjects of which you know absolutely nothing.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 11 October 2005 20:53 (link):
Explanation re. the first paragraph of Dan's comment -- I banned Dan from commenting temporarily (for ~45 minutes) earlier in a foolish attempt to calm things down slightly. So, that didn't work, then, eh? Anyway, with that I think I'm going to leave this, since it's all got much too bad tempered for me.
Posted by Rob, Tuesday, 23 January 2007 19:01 (link):
Just passing through here, but I can't help observing that Dan Hardie, who seems to be (or to consider himself to be) adept at responding to valid criticisms of his comments has still never substantiated his claim that Eben went to a "fee-paying academy".
He has, I observe, made ad hominem remarks concerning Eben's name. Does he, then, know what it is? I must confess that my first assumption was that it was a contracted version of E. Ben something-or-other, which would fall outside any definition I know of "pseudonym", being merely a variant reading of his name. Or a contraction of Ebenezer. A "nym", in fact, just as Eben described it. However, Dan never makes allegations without being prepared to cite evidence for them, so: what is Eben's actual name, which you find so ridiculous that you insult his parents for giving it to him?
Finally, he describes Eben as a "cyber-stalker" on the basis of his having Googled "Dan Hardie". Gosh, Dan, I just Googled "Oliver Kamm" to see, in fact, whether any parts of a recent correspondence I was involved in had made it to the upper pages. (They hadn't.) That's how I ended up here. Does that make me a "cyber-stalker"? Or is it that Eben linked to the aforementioned search? I will grant that on following his link my eyes began rapidly to glaze over, but having a strange idea as to what makes interesting reading is not, I think, cause for abuse. You clearly imagine that your comments are worth reading; while I differ from that opinion, I wouldn't insult you for posting them. So my last question is: what exactly did Dan mean by "cyber-stalker"?
Three unanswered questions. I don't suppose I'll be back to read the answers, but then I don't imagine there will be any answers.
And just to clarify matters, I take no sides in the basic argument over bombing policy, being no expert on history, ye ken. However, the unpleasant style of Dan Hardie's comments does not predispose me to pay much attention to the substance thereof. Whether his learned his debating style at Balliol or Bash Street is no concern of mine. That he learned it badly should be a concern of his.
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