Vol. 8 No. 18 · 23 October 1986
pages 11-13 | 5234 words

Terrorism

Ian Gilmour

Britain’s Civil Wars: Counter-Insurgency in the 20th Century by Charles Townshend
Faber, 220 pp, £14.95, June 1986, ISBN 0 571 13802 0
Terrorism and the Liberal State by Paul Wilkinson
Macmillan, 322 pp, £25.00, May 1986, ISBN 0 333 39490 9
Terrorism: How the West can win edited by Benjamin Netanyahu
Weidenfeld, 254 pp, £14.95, August 1986, ISBN 0 297 79025 0
Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism by Franklin Ford
Harvard, 440 pp, £24.95, November 1985, ISBN 0 674 68635 7
The Financing of Terror by James Adams
New English Library, 294 pp, £12.95, July 1986, ISBN 0 450 06086 1
They dare to speak out: People and institutions confront Israel’s lobby by Paul Findley
Lawrence Hill (Connecticut), 362 pp, $16.95, May 1985, ISBN 0 88208 179 9

American foreign policy since 1945 has often been a force for good. Much of ‘the free world’ has felt the need of US protection, and some of it has been grateful. In recent times, however, many people have come to regard the United States as a power as dangerous as any other. In reaction to the quietism of the Carter era, American foreign policy has become ultra-activist in both word and deed. This has gone down well with the voters. American public opinion was intensely proud of the successful invasion of the tiny island of Grenada. There was similar exaltation when the resources of the Sixth Fleet proved capable of forcing down an unarmed Egyptian airliner. And after some of Colonel Gadaffi’s military installations were bombed, together with five embassies and the killing of 39 civilians, there was almost universal jubilation. There is a dangerous process whereby the Administration stirs up American public opinion, and public opinion in turn spurs on the Administration to further military adventures. US foreign policy usually needs a target, and American public opinion a crusade. With the USSR, Reagan’s ‘evil empire’, too powerful to take on directly, Gadaffi has succeeded Stalin, Mao, Nasser, Castro and Ho Chi Minh as the current hate figure. Terrorism is now the vogue evil, and anti-terrorism the fashionable crusade, and few stop to consider the wisdom of the course the US is pursuing.

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Letters

Vol. 8 No. 22 · 18 December 1986

From Frede Hojgaard

SIR: In his review of a number of books on terrorism (LRB, 23 October) Ian Gilmour mentions one of his authors, Benjamin Netanyahu, using ‘the RAF’s hitting of a hospital in Copenhagen in 1944’ as an example of ‘a bombing going tragically wrong’. The tragedy in fact occurred in 1945, and what was hit was a primary school.

In the winter of 1944-45, the Gestapo in Copenhagen were on the verge of breaking up the Resistance organisation on Zealand, greatly helped by Danish informers who had infiltrated the movement. Through their representatives in London the Resistance leaders requested the RAF to bomb the Gestapo Headquarters in the centre of Copenhagen in order to destroy the Gestapo files on members of the organisation. The attack came on 21 March 1945 at midday and was carried out by 18 Mosquito bombers escorted by 28 Mustang fighters. The planes flew in at a very low altitude and released their bombs in such a way as to hit the lower storeys of the building. The attack was a complete success: the building was destroyed and all the Gestapo files with it.

The joy felt in Copenhagen and elsewhere in Denmark at the destruction of the dreaded Gestapo Headquarters was marred only by the tragedy which followed. As the aircraft had to fly very low, one of them accidentally hit a tall signal mast in the Central Railway Station and crashed into the French School, a Roman Catholic primary school run by nuns, at a time when classes were in progress. Some of the bombers in the last wave of attack, seeing the fire and smoke resulting from the crash, mistook the school for the target and dropped their bombs on it; some also hit the surrounding residential area. Although casualties were low compared to air bombardments generally in the Second World War, they were felt to be frightful in the circumstances: 112 people killed, of whom 88 were schoolchildren, and 304 wounded. The RAF had 12 airmen killed and one taken prisoner. The RAF officer who commanded the action visited the school after the war and laid a wreath at the site, expressing the sorrow and regret of the surviving airmen.

Frede Hojgaard
Copenhagen

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