The German military had a unit that analyzed where bombs fell in order to determine what the allied strategic bombing campaigns were targeting. Some bombing patterns were so scattered the Germans had a hard time figuring out which city was being aimed at much less what buildings.
I don’t know if you’re being serious but any rational military plan would target currently active enemy soldiers first.
The talk about warfighting and aerial bombing manuevers is interesting, but it’s kind of a sidetracking the thread topic.
I would imagine that the schools in Germany and Japan would prioritize focus on academic subjects that were immediately relevant - i.e., medicine, technical trades, math, physics, electricity, etc.
I’m also curious about Soviet students, during Barbarossa.
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There was fighting on UK soil: The Channel Islands were taken fairly early. While the Brits had evacuated their military forces, the Germans did not learn of this for a bit so they bombed some places before landing. Very one sided. They held the islands until after the surrender.
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A number of islands that are constituent parts of Japan saw fighting. Most notably Okinawa but also Iwo Jima and many others. The last of these islands were returned in the 1970s. At the end of the war the Russians also took South Sakhalin Island and 4 Kuril Islands. They continue to hold them.
As to schoolchildren, if the local infrastructure was still working the schools kept open if at all possible. Once a city was flattened, then things got problematical. Most smaller cities and towns weren’t damaged.
My Dad was in school in Japan during the war so I just asked him to describe his experience in regards to your questions. He mentions that his memory ain’t the best (he just turned 86), so bear that in mind.
Short answer:
School carried on more or less as normal as possible, throughout the war. The younger you were, the less disruption there was to your education. Those in High School and University suffered the most disruption and had long-term consequences due to lack of proper classes.
Detailed answer:
He was in grade 5 at the outbreak of the war and they were immediately moved to a farm about 150km outside of Tokyo. Apparently this was not necessarily typical of all schools. His was a private Christian-run school and he believes they were among the first to leave the major population centers. The public schools did eventually evacuate too, but not right away and not all of them.
Mornings were dedicated to classroom study. Afternoons were farm work with the animals and crops. He can’t recall if any of the food grown was used towards the war effort or just for the school. However, it might be that a portion of the food grown was sent elsewhere because he recalls being perpetually hungry in the last years of the war. They were reduced to just a few crops and they ate pumpkin morning, noon and night. To this day he refuses to eat pumpkin and usually starts swearing if I accidentally offer him anything made from pumpkin.
His older brother was in Middle School and was sent to work in a printing firm around the age of 14. Dad seems to think this was fairly typical in that Middle Schoolers, between the ages of 14-16, were given a few hours of daily classroom work, and then sent to perform light duty in stores and companies that could use the labor to fill in for adults who had been drafted into the military.
High School students were sent to work in factories, possibly with some classroom work, but Dad is uncertain as he had no direct experience with that.
University students also did some work in the factories but had daily classroom work. The undergraduate programs were cut short to a maximum of two years, after which you would be drafted into the military.
Being out in the countryside, away from the bombing, school life was stable and, aside from the food issues, kind of fun. Dad was always interested in the outdoors (he ended up working in the Forestry service for most of his life), so farm life was agreeable to him.
I would think that parents would want their kids to be away at school and out of danger. Dad has no good answer because his parents, especially his father, were typical stoic Japanese that never revealed their feelings to him.
There seems to have been several consequences to the Japanese educational system.
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Spending years on the farm exposed them to a great deal of practical skills and learning experiences that they would never have gotten in a pre-war classroom. Dad credits his knowledge of gardening, carpentry and cooking to the war-time curriculum.
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His brother and his classmates also learned some interesting skills while working in shops and offices. My uncle learned a great deal about printing presses and how that business operated. They never would have been exposed to these things before the war.
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The university students suffered greatly in terms of education. Apparently the curriculum was cut down so much that those that returned to the academic life, post-war, had a great deal of difficulty struggling to catch up. Those that did finish a degree were notably more deficient than the pre-war students and this became a real problem. Many war-time students, who went on to become teachers and leaders, were just not as good as those that had had a normal education. Dad ended up going to university in England because his Japanese professors simply didn’t know that much. There was some sort of reformation to deal with this issue but Dad doesn’t know any details.
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And the largest change to the Japanese educational system was that the pre-war school system was abolished and replaced with the U.S. system under American occupation.
Again, this is all anecdotal from my elderly father so don’t take it as 100% accurate, but he had direct experience with much of it.
Prongo
I generally agree except British bombing had a serious effect on the German public before 1944. The Hamburg firestorm for example killed over 40,000 in the summer of 1943, in one raid about as many civilians as the Germans had killed in Britain in the whole of their bombing campaign in 1940-41. In both countries there was a notable psychological effect of bombing well before 1944, it just wasn’t generally the effect the attackers sought of destroying civilian morale. But it did cause a significant number of people to move out of cities in both countries, and especially to send children to live in the countryside.
It’s true the Anglo-US bombing campaign didn’t greatly reduce German war making potential till 1944, in part because of limited effectiveness against physical facilities and above referenced lack of intended result on morale, though also in part because the Germans did such a poor job of mobilizing their economy for war prior to 1944 that they could keep making gains to offset the damage from bombing in case of some war items until the fall of that year.
And it’s also true that bombing of the Japanese Home Islands was minor until 1945 (the Doolittle Raid in 1942, then nothing till small scale B-29 raids from China from June 1944; the B-29 campaign from the Marianas started that November, but the vast majority of bomb tonnage was dropped in 1945, and the campaign against cities mainly from March of that year). When that campaign got going though and spread among the various big cities then to the middle sized ones by the summer, it had a major effect on urban life, around 12% of the population became homeless beside casualties, in a matter of a few months. Life in rural Japan was not directly affected except western parts where US tactical a/c could reach from Okinawa in the closing weeks of the war.
Fabulous, SDMB-like response…thanks!
The typical post-apocalyptic scenario (Mad Max or similar anarchy) relies on a catastrophe that strikes very quickly and destroys much of the infrastructure of the country - so there is no higher authority to enforce laws or track down perpetrators. The Axis countries would be just the opposite - the entire countryside was crawling with soldiers; waves of bombing would take out people randomly, but in each case much of government and the military squads survived; enough to ensure nobody decided to act outside the law. Indeed, law under wartime was likely far harsher - no messing around with juries and testimony. Camps like Dachau were also used for common criminals too, especially early in the war. When martial law applied, summary execution was an option. The destruction except at certain pitched battles never got to the point of total destruction. (After all, even with Berlin reduced to rubble, there were still groups of German soldiers fighting back.)
Plus, post-apocalyptic Australia or America is a huge, sparsely populated land. Germany and Japan were very densely populated by comparison. And where law and order prevailed, most likely so did school; until ground fighting got so close it was advisable to stay indoors. I suppose the only other issue would be a shortage of schoolteachers. I assume toward the end they were all women or retirees.
Why is a school a particularly good aiming point?
If you can see a SCHOOL, you can see the whole city. You must be bombing in daylight, which Bomber Command did not do for most of the war. But when they ddid why would they need to see a school? The city would be plainly obvious.
[QUOTE=ftg]
. There was fighting on UK soil: The Channel Islands were taken fairly early.
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The Channel Islands are not part of the United Kingdom.
My ex-wife’s parents were just a few years younger but their experiences were very similar.
Both of them grew up in Tokyo and everything was relatively normal until the firebombings. My ex-MIL grew up in the eastern, older part of Tokyo, the area burned out in the first great firebombing. While escaping the flames, they went one way and survived, their neighbors went another way and all died.
My ex-FIL lived in another part of town and they were firebombed on another time. They had a dugout bomb shelter with a light cover over it. One of the napalm bombs came through the roof and as the oldest son, he took it out and threw it in the street before it exploded.
The MIL was send with her siblings out into the country to live with relatives. This was done with many, many children. Note that this was relatively late in the war as compared to children in Britain who were sent out during the Blitz in 1940.
Another friend, a woman in Nagasaki, was in junior high and was working in a factory when that bomb was dropped. Her education stopped at sixth grade.
Japan only has mandatory education through junior high, even now, so many kids like her did not advance after the war ended. I would suspect that more girls would be affected.
In 1941, the Butt Report into bombing accuracy, the first from outside the RAF, showed that Bomber Command’s practice of allowing individual crews to plan their own route to the target and identifying it, was resulting in most bombs being dropped on open countryside or targets of no military importance. Of those crews who claimed to have successfully identified the target and bombed it, (themselves a minority) only one third had bombed within five miles of it, itself a fairly generous measure of success. After these conclusions, which were so unpalatable that some senior Air Marshals flatly rejected them, considerable effort was put into forming a Pathfinder Force which would accurately locate the selected aiming point, and mark it with flares, and keep on marking it throughout the attack, whose duration would be as short as possibly consistent with achieving the object. The Main Force would bomb on the markers and if smoke or fog obscured them then skymarkers on parachutes would be used to back them up.
‘Creepback’ due to early release was a recognised phenomenon, and the release point would be placed beyond the desired impact point to allow for it - on a good raid it might be no more than a few hundred yards, on a bad raid with high casualties it might extend back several miles.
Speaking of strategic bombing, towards the end of the war teenagers were used as the bomber’s nemesis - flak operators - in Germany, can’t remember where I read this recollection, from a German who was 14/15 and tasked with operating a flak gun with a crew of similar aged boys, they went into a cinema to see a film with lots of violence in and were turfed out by the manager who shouted at them “This is not for children!”, which they then hung on a sign around their flak cannon.
Then there was the Volksturm which recruited children as young as 12 (!) as frontline combat troops, see a Hitler Youth member being awarded the Iron Cross Second Class in East Prussia, March 1945.
On the experience of education in the Third Reich, this site has some fascinating recollections, particularly on the totalitarianism that invaded every aspect of German life from teachers being informed on to indoctrinational rituals;
“As the teacher entered the class, the students would stand and raise their right arms. The teacher would say, For the Führer a triple victory, answered by a chorus of Heil! three times… Every class started with a song. The almighty Führer would be staring at us from his picture on the wall. These uplifting songs were brilliantly written and composed, transporting us into a state of enthusiastic glee.”
Schools usually have a playground adjacent, often taking up a whole block. And the whole school-playground area will be dark at night, unlike the nearby blocks of houses/apartments, which will have lights showing in many of them. Just from looking out the window of a commercial airliner, the dark spaces of schools & parks stood out quite clearly from the air.
But what stood out even more was geographic features like rivers, lakes, & hills. I think WWII bombers used those as landmarks much more than buildings.
Well, the exact line is going to be subjective - certainly the earlier bombings did have effects, but before 1944 there wasn’t the constant, pervasive bombing that disrupted day to day life in a way similar to an army invading. Also in 1943 there was still a widespread belief that Germany was going to come out of the war OK, it wasn’t until later that decision makers started to think of Germany as a defeated power rather than a conqueror facing setbacks. No one but the delusional expected a complete victory, but a lot of people in Germany still thought that a negotiated peace with Germany retaining its independence and at least pre-1939 conquests was a likely outcome, especially if wonder weapons like rockets and new tank designs shocked the Allies.
In today’s peacetime conditions sure, but during WW2 in both Germany and the UK, cities were under blackout specifically to make it harder for bombers. So everything would’ve been dark at night, not just parks and playgrounds.
I have difficulty believing that RAF bombers used German schools as aiming points, not because of morality - Harris and other Bomber Command officers came up with the euphemism “dehousing” for a strategy that intended to destroy residential districts, but because schools would be damned hard to see from 20,000 feet at night in blackout conditions.
I know when I fly, I identify schoolgrounds at night in American cities by the baseball diamonds. But I doubt German schools had those, and under blackout conditions, I’m not sure what would make them identifiable under the conditions RAF bombardiers would have operated under over Germany in the 1940s. I would feel much more convinced if anyone would provide a cite for that.
I wish I still had a copy of The Clash of Wings - Amazon.com - I read it years ago, and I think there was a chapter or two on the strategic bombing campaign in Europe that would shed light on this issue.
In Japan, schoolchildren were involved in a certain amount of compulsory labor, late in the war.
If the Brits used schools as bombing targets, perhaps it is because the students would not be there at night.
It was true of Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. His seminary class was drafted as ‘flakhelfer’ though he was a bit older, 16, in late 1943.
By the fall of 1944 the Luftwaffe flak arm comprised around 1.1mil personnel but ~450k were non-Luftwaffe including 220k Home Guard, Labor Service and male high school auxiliaries, 128k female auxiliaries and around 100k foreign volunteers (like Italian Fascists) and POW’s, mainly Soviet. And around 1/3 of the Luftwaffe personnel were over 49 or previously medically disqualified for military service. Also to be considered was that a significant portion of the flak was still deployed at the fronts supporting ground units, and those batteries tended to be composed of relatively prime manpower, so crews in the Reich’s strategic defenses were even more heavily composed of auxiliaries. From “Flak” by Edward B. Westermann.
The Nazis trusted Russian POWs to shoot at Allied aircraft?