8th Air Force vs. Lufthansa?
John Dupre'
aircraft if they ran across them? Was there the equivalent of
unrestricted warfare as there was against shippng? Did Lufthansa or
other German airlines even maintain scheduled routes during the war?
GFH
Why not? The USA declared unrestricted u-boat warfare against the
Japanese from day 1.
GFH
Rich Rostrom
Why ask about the 8th AF in particular?
The RAF was a much greater threat to
German aviation for most of the war,
well before the USAF was present in the
ETO in any significant strength.
I don't know what the rule on civilian
aircraft was; I do know that the Germans
regularly attacked BOAC passenger planes
flying between Britain and Portugal. At
least one was shot down, a DC-3 which
was carrying actor Leslie Howard.
As for Lufthansa's wartime operations:
I would suppose that Lufhansa continued
some of its operations in 1939-40: flying
to Italy, Scandinavia, and the Balkans:
Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Istanbul, There
might even have been service to Moscow.
Flights to Sweden may have continued for
quite a while. After the fall of France,
I think there was air traffic to Spain
and Portugal, and IIRC there were a few
flights from Spain to Brazil. There was
probably also service to Istanbul.
However, by 1943 the German fuel situation
was becoming critical and Allied aircraft
were penetrating Axis airspace from all
directions. Few German civilian travelers
could afford airfares. Under those conditions,
I think commercial service pretty much stopped.
Geoffrey Sinclair
news:bd863115-1e71-4c75...@q31g2000vbi.googlegroups.com...
> Did 8th Air Force fighter pilots specifically target Lufthansa
> aircraft if they ran across them?
No. It was a German aircraft, it was a target.
> Was there the equivalent of
> unrestricted warfare as there was against shippng?
Yes. Airliners were shot down. You had to be a rather important
person to fly in a civilian airliner in WWII in Europe.
> Did Lufthansa or
> other German airlines even maintain scheduled routes during the war?
Yes, according to Antony Kay the last scheduled Lufthansa flight of
WWII was an Fw200B-2 D-ASHH, from Barcelona to Berlin, on
14 April 1945. It was lost a week later trying to return.
Geoffrey Sinclair
Remove the nb for email.
Duwop
wrote:
> On Nov 11, 12:16 pm, "John Dupre&#39;" <jdupre5...@aol.com> wrote:
> Why ask about the 8th AF in particular?
I was more taken aback at the attempt to compare naval and aerial
transport.
One has been around for millennia and has almost as much history,
tradition and laws behind it.
The other had existed for less than a decade.
One moved at 12 knots.
The other at 200 MPH.
No way to interrogate and stop an airplane, where that was possible
with shipping.
Why not ask about the protection (or lack) of international trains or
ground freight and compare those to how oceanic shipping was treated.
Dave
fair game for land and naval forces forever. With the advent of air
power the bombing of civilians started in the Great War and we see it
continue in the Spanish Civil War and the Japanese war in China. An
enemy civilian airliner was no safer than an enemy merchant ship or an
enemy urban population. As for stopping to check papers I think this
was something sailors considered because of their respect for other
seafarers and for the sea. In the days of sail, a privateer or warship
could fire on a merchantman and obtain submission. This worked under
steam until the ships fired back.
Michele
news:3c603c40-4aa6-47f8...@b25g2000prb.googlegroups.com...
Nothing of the sort, actually.
The rules for how to handle merchant, civilian ships with the flag of an
enemy country do not depend upon the "respect for seafarers", as you
"think". In the 1939-1945 time frame, they rested on the Hague Conventions
of 1907 and on the London Naval Agreements of 1935-36. it was a very
specific and detailed set of rules that many of the combatants in WWII had
freely chosen to undertake.
At the beginning of the war, a warship encountering a cargo ship of the
enemy should have ordered it to stop and would then have been allowed to
capture it, manning it with a prize crew and taking it to a friendly port,
or to sink it if that was not possible. In both cases it had the duty to
make sure that the crew - merchant seamen, civilians - were safe. The
warship would be allowed to engage the cargo ship only if a) it attempted to
evade or, b) it undertook hostile deeds.
These were the rules.
Unrestricted submarine warfare became a necessity, and basically it was
retroactively acknowledged, within limits, as the new rule, for a very
specific reason: that during that war, virtually all merchant ships were
expected to offer resistance against submarines. Many had mounted weaponry.
All were under orders to try and ram a sub if they were confronted by it at
close range while emerged. And most had the most dangerous weapon of them
all, a radio, and were expected to signal the sub's position. All of these
were developments that the previous rule made little allowance for.
Of course, unrestricted submarine warfare has little to do with the
situation at hand. It has been brought up as an attempt to draw a moral
equivalence between the US submarine warfare and the German submarine
warfare. Which is impossible because, just to name the most egregious
systematic war crime by the German submarine service, the German subs were
at times under orders to sink without warning _neutral_ merchant vessels.
The US unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific did not include such
orders and did not risk attacking neutrals.
No such rules existed with reference to aircraft. There was no law about
civilian aircraft. The very concept of civilian aircraft was very flimsy -
just about any aircraft big enough to carry passengers or cargo could be
converted into a bomber, or at least into a military transport aircraft, and
any aircraft fast enough to carry urgent mail could be converted into a
fighter or recon aircraft.
These are precisely the ruses under which the Germans built the Luftwaffe.
Note how Mr. Sinclair mentions the last civilian flight by Lufthansa was
carried out with a "Fw 200". That's a Condor without guns and with a
different paint job. Earlier on, the Lufthansa civilian aircraft were, among
others, Ju 52s.
Note that while there was no specific law of war about civilian aircraft,
there was a law that could be applied. Art. 23, Hague Convention IV 1907,
specifies that property of the enemy can be destroyed if the necessities of
war so dictate.
Targeting civilian persons on purpose would still have been a war crime.
Targeting a property of the enemy was allowed, if this was dictated by the
necessities of war, and any civilians on board would be collateral damage.
By the same token, nobody ever considered, in the 1939-45 time frame, a war
crime attacking railway trains over enemy territory, even when they were not
carrying military supplies or units. Such attacks were not intended to
target the civilian passengers or civilian personnel of freight trains. They
were intended to destroy critically important enemy property, the train.
The bombing of cities is yet another issue and the laws of war allowed that,
if they were defended.