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A Chacun Son Boche:

The Allied Push On Berlin, 1917

 

 

by Chris Oakley

 

Part 13

 

 

 

 

 

Summary: In the first twelve chapters of this series we followed the events leading from the capture of vital German military papers in 1914 to the folding of the Second Reich in 1917; the Versailles- Geneva peace treaty that ended the First World War; the Spanish flu epidemic that wiped out much of the human race in the first months after the war was over; the establishment of the League of Nations and Woodrow Wilson’s failed attempts to get the United States into the League; the American shift towards isolationism during the 1920s; the start of the Great Depression; the rise to power of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy; the resurgence of Communism in 1930s Russia; the start of World War II; the Soviet campaign in Poland in the spring and summer of 1939; the Allied landings in mainland Italy; the fall of Mussolini; the start of Field Marshal Montgomery’s campaign to liberate Austria; German resistance to Allied efforts to cross the Rhine River; the start of the final breakdown in US-Japan relations following the Japanese invasion of mainland China; the Allied breakout along the Rhine in the spring of 1940; the creation of the Polish Home Army of Liberation; the Anglo-French push on Berlin; the final collapse of the Third Reich; the escalation of the Home Army’s guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation forces in Poland; the last urgent diplomatic efforts to prevent armed conflict between Japan and the United States; the Munich war crimes trials; the early stages of Soviet planning for the eventual invasion of Germany; the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan in the summer of 1941; the destruction of Japan’s main carrier fleet at Midway; and the final collapse of of Anglo-Soviet diplomatic ties in early 1942. In this installment we’ll look at the Soviet air raid on Frankfurt-an-den-Oder which thrust Great Britain into open war with the Soviet Union.

******

If June 22nd, 1941 was America’s “day of infamy” in the Pacific conflict with Japan, one could regard August 8th, 1942 as Britain’s “day of infamy” in the Anglo-Soviet conflict. At 6:00 AM Berlin time that morning Joseph Stalin, angered by a border incident a few days earlier in which British soldiers stationed in Germany had exchanged fire with Soviet occupation troops in Poland, ordered Soviet bombers based in western Poland to raid British military bases near the city of Frankfurt-an-den-Oder as a warning to the Churchill government in London about what it could expect from Moscow if it dared militarily oppose Soviet plans for the future of Europe. The possibility German civilians might be killed in the process didn’t seem to faze Stalin in the least; in fact, given the Soviet ruler’s almost pathological distrust of the West in general and Germany in particular, it’s not all that hard to imagine him viewing such casualties as a necessary cost for intimidating the Anglo-French coalition into complying with his desire for Soviet domination of continental Europe.

     It was 6:43 AM, hardly three-quarters of an hour after Stalin had first issued the attack order, when the first wave of Soviet air force bombers entered German airspace. The AA guns defending Allied bases near Frankfurt-an-den-Oder barely even had time to take aim at the approaching Soviet warplanes before the air was rent by the heat and roar of multiple bomb blasts; local civilians still sleeping in their beds at that hour were jolted awake by the explosions and the desperate wail of air raid sirens. A Berlin Radio correspondent who had originally come to the city to interview the leading candidate in its upcoming elections for burgomaster(mayor) gave a running by- the-minute account of the bombing to his listening audience, and it was to say the least a heartrending report. His anguished cries of “Mein Gott, mein lieber Gott”(My God, my dear God) as a cluster of Soviet bombs hit Frankfurt-an-den-Oder’s main elementary school are still vivid in the German collective memory decades later.

     The RAF fighter squadrons in the area did their best to try and repulse the attackers, but the Soviets had achieved almost complete surprise and the bombers were able to conclude their murderous task with very little interference from the British-- and even less from the French, whose own fighters didn’t even have time to taxi out of their hangars before Soviet bombs blew them to pieces. 98 percent of the aircraft committed to the Frankfurt-an-den-Oder attack returned safely to their home airfields, and those few aircrews who were lost to enemy action were lionized by official Kremlin media as heroes of the Soviet motherland.

     Casualties from the Frankfurt-an-den-Oder air raid were, as Winston Churchill said in his official report to Parliament on the attack, “of such a number as to shock one’s soul and stagger one’s imagination”. 100,000 people were killed in the attack, at least a third of them German civilians. In one fell swoop the RAF lost close to 85 percent of its combat air strength in that area; French Armee de l’Air units based near the city fared even worse, losing close to 98 percent of their pre-attack combat aircraft inventory.

      The military attaché with the recently reopened U.S. embassy in Berlin met with British and French air force officers that night for a first-hand look at the damage the Soviet attack had inflicted on Frankfurt-an-den-Oder, and what he saw greatly appalled him. In his official report to Washington about the bombing he told the U.S. State Department: “Not since Sherman sacked Atlanta have American eyes seen a city so thoroughly and senselessly ravaged in time of war....whether or not the Reds specifically intended to kill large numbers of German civilians, such deaths were most certainly a major consequence of the bombing.”         When newsreel images of the dead German civilians were shown in U.S. movie theaters, it sparked a wave of anti-Soviet protests and rioting in every major American city. In at least one primarily Polish urban neighborhood in the Midwest it led to a spasm of ethnic violence as several people of Russian descent were assaulted or even lynched in horrific actions which by modern legal standards would be classified as hate crimes. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, given his staunch anti-Communist political views, was reluctant to commit his agency’s resources too deeply to investigating such attacks, leaving local and state police authorities to do most of the initial probing of these cases; it was only White House threats of being fired from his job that finally prompted Hoover to commence an FBI inquiry into the attacks.

******

      Before Big Ben’s chimes tolled 1:00 PM in London on August 8th, Parliament had been convened in extraordinary session and Churchill had summoned his top cabinet ministers to 10 Downing Street to get their assessment of what the Soviet air attack on Frankfurt-an-den-Oder meant as far as British security interests in Europe were concerned. The ministers’ conclusion was swift and unanimous: the Soviets had committed an act of war against Great Britain that couldn’t be ignored. And since a number of French air Bases had also been hit in the attack, it thus constituted an act of unprovoked aggression against the Anglo-French alliance under existing treaties between the European allies.

      Around 2:30 PM London time Churchill appeared before the House of Commons to deliver his official account of the Soviet raid on Frankfurt-an-den-Oder. In a voice simmering with barely contained fury, the British prime minister denounced the air raid as “an act of naked savagery of which we have not seen the like in this world since the days of Genghis Khan”. That he could make this assertion in the midst of a decade of war which had already seen all kind of barbaric acts is yet another measure of the devastation the Soviet air force inflicted with the bombing raid.

      In Washington, the British ambassador to the United States met with President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to debrief them on the details of the Frankfurt-an-den-Oder raid. While the war against Japan in the Pacific was the White House’s top priority at the time, Roosevelt and his advisors agreed that something had to be done to help the British resist Soviet aggression-- especially considering that the alternative was to watch Stalin’s war machine roll unopposed all the way to the Normandy coast.

      Accordingly, the President signed an executive order approving an increase in U.S. military aid to Great Britain; by the time the White House secretarial staff filed it in their archives, millions of BBC listeners were hearing Prime Minister Churchill announce to his fellow countrymen that the British government had declared war on the Soviet Union.

******

       The Frankfurt-an-den-Oder air raid and its consequences had one effect neither the British government nor the Soviets had ever anticipated-- it triggered a permanent rupture in ties between the British left and the Soviet Communist Party. Even before the attack relations between the British socialist movement and the CPSU had at best been awkward; after the attack, they were downright hostile. On the morning after the air raid, British Communist Party stalwart and longtime Stalin loyalist Harry Pollitt stunned both his supporters and his foes by delivering a blistering speech condemning the Soviet bombing as “a cruel act of genocide” and “an unforgivable betrayal of the most sacred basic principles of socialism”. His condemnation of Stalin was even harsher, blasting his former idol as “evil made flesh” and urging his fellow Marxists to turn their backs once and for all on the Soviet dictator. It was the most dramatic reversal of a human being’s mindset since Paul of Tarsus’ fabled conversion on the road to Damascus.

       The French left were considerably more divided than their British counterparts in their reaction to the Frankfurt-an-den-Oder attack. The mainstream French Communist Party was careful to make only standard public comments sympathizing with the families of the dead, but many of the younger and more radical leftist factions in France openly supported the Soviets’ decision to bomb Allied bases on German soil and in some cases called for Stalin to do likewise to Allied military posts within France itself-- civilian casualties be damned. That attitude earned them both the contempt of millions of their fellow Frenchmen and scrutiny from French and British security agents, who rightly viewed these radicals as a potential domestic terrorist threat. With the French government having declared war on the Soviet Union just minutes after the British did so, the Western Allies now found themselves fighting two parallel wars in Europe-- one against the Soviet armies massed on the German-Polish frontier, and another against Marxist agents provocateurs on France’s own home soil....

******

       The last graves had barely been dug for those killed in the Frankfurt-an-den-Oder air raid when the skies over the German border started roaring with the sound of Red Army tank and artillery fire. The time was 1:38 PM and the date was August 12th, 1942, barely four days after the bombing. British and French ground commanders on the border were unsure if this signaled the actual beginning of Stalin’s invasion of Germany or was simply a probing attack to determine the strength of the Allies’ ground defenses, but one thing was certain beyond doubt-- the situation in central Europe was about to get very ugly very fast...

 

 

 

To Be Continued

 

 

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