Cyprus Mail 11 June 2023 - by Alper Ali Riza
If it is a war crime, it has strong echoes of Britain’s bombing of Rhur valley in WWII
For unreconstructed Anglophiles like myself Dambusters was a heroic British operation in WWII that inspired a film in 1955 in celebration of the Royal Air Force’s raid on three dams in the Ruhr valley in Germany in 1943, set to great music that is still popular in Britain.
In the memorable words of the Smirnoff vodka advertisement in the 1980s, I thought that Dambusters was a film with memorable music until I discovered it was a war-crime.
The true story behind the film was that of the ingenious British scientist who designed the bouncy bomb to drop on the German industrial heartland in the Rhur valley that was serviced with electrical power by three dams. The idea was that bouncy bombs would be dropped on the approach to the dams downstream and bounce their way to their target, explode and breach the dams and flood Nazi Germany’s military industrial powerhouse.
It was also about the bomber crews that flew the missions, 53 of whom did not return. The crews of the Lancaster bombers that took part flew dangerously low to drop their payload at an angle sharp enough to ensure the bombs bounced on impact and many crashed or were shot down in the process. Naturally, the film keeps you in suspense about the fate of the bomber crews and not on the civilians on the ground who perished as a result of the flooding caused by the destruction of the dams – 1500 died including prisoners of war.
No discussion on the morality or legality of the operation occurs in the film, although during the war, missions with extensive collateral civilian loss of life were justified by some legal experts on the ground that strictly civilians engaged in the enemy’s military industrial production were not civilian targets protected by international humanitarian law.
The raid took place in 1943 after the Battle of Britain in 1940 when the German Luftwaffe bombed Britain with scant regard for the civilian population. Winston Churchill had warned the Axis powers that the Brits were not made of sugar candy. “We shall never descend to the German or Japanese level, but if anybody likes to play rough we can play rough too. Hitler and his Nazi gang have sown the wind, let them now reap the whirlwind,” he said in a speech in Canada in 1941.
And he meant it because the destruction of the dams in the Rhur valley was nothing compared with the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and the firestorms and the death and destruction they caused, not to mention the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan by the Americans in 1945 with British approval.
International humanitarian law has moved on since WWII – at least in theory. These days attacks on infrastructure installations such as dams and civilian nuclear electrical plants are prohibited civilian targets because they unleash dangerous forces that cause severe civilian losses. Attacks on them are war crimes unless the installations are directly used for military purposes not protected by the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Protocols as civilian installations.
The breach that caused the Khakhovka dam in Ukraine to flood the surrounding area last week would only be a war crime if it was blown up deliberately, which is important because there have been suggestions that the dam was in a bad state of disrepair before it collapsed. If that is shown to be true it would mean that any liability would be a civil wrong with a criminal sting but not a war crime.
The Ukrainians insist the Russians blew it up and the Russians that it was the Ukrainians and as usual the first casualty of war is truth. Eventually, the truth will out and already western scientists claim they recorded a seismic event in the area at about the time the dam was breached, the nature and size of which points the finger at Russia. However, it is best to suspend judgement until the fog of war clears and events are judged according to unbiased sources.
Time will tell, but in the meantime this war is killing too many young men from both Ukraine and Russia and destroying too much of Ukraine to have been worth it for either side. The Russians blundered on the likely success of what they continue to call a special operation, ignoring the fact that special operations do not last longer than a few days. But the Ukrainians also miscalculated the cost-benefit of divorcing Russia for the West. Disengaging from Russia if you were previously thought of as Russian was always going to be punished as an unforgivable betrayal even if irrational and cruel to Ukraine.
However the destruction of the dam at Khakhova is proof that this war is pointless and that the loss of life and the destruction it has caused harms both Ukraine and Russia. The war has gone on far too long and the West is sanctimoniously engaged in wilful inertia while adding oil to the fire instead of trying to extinguish it.
Nato and the EU have now taken the absurd position to wait until the Ukraine’s counter-offensive plays out during which thousands of young men will be killed as sacrificial lambs to the slaughter. And for what? There will probably be a stalemate and all the young men from both sides will have died in vain.
Russia and Ukraine need to abandon the bravado and braggadocio that informs their decision-making and sit down and talk peace in the cold light of day and agree a ceasefire immediately or they will waste the lives of a whole generation of young men like in the First World War when “lions were led by donkeys” to their death for a few metres of battlefield land.
Alper Ali Riza is a king’s counsel in the UK and a retired part time judge
