Operation Razzle
The operation Razzle were several attacks by the Royal Air Force in World War II , in which an attempt was made to destroy with discarded en masse fire plates, the German grain harvest and forest fires produce. The plan was drawn up in May 1940 by Winston Churchill's scientific adviser Lord Cherwell . Since September 1939 there have been similar plans to start forest fires under the code name “Bosom”.
The mostly gray or black burn platelets, shaped as pellets, were five by five centimeters in size, one millimeter thick and weighed five grams. In the center is a one-centimeter hole of having found phosphorus -soaked gauze was covered that a piece of yellow phosphorus contained. The first deployment took place on August 11, 1940 with 59 bombers, each with 50 Razzle containers, on fields and forests southeast of the Ruhr . Nine more missions followed in September and six in October. According to two memoranda of the Polish ambassador in Berlin Józef Lipski , such attacks were carried out in the summer of 1941 and March / April 1941 with improved means of fire-dropping.
According to Joseph Goebbels' diary entry on July 29, 1941, Goebbels instructed the party to take appropriate countermeasures.
In an interview with the Hungarian ambassador Count Sztojay on September 10, 1941, Hitler said :
“If he [Churchill] had to throw off small leaflets today that would become infected when exposed to sunlight, it would be a childish challenge; because he could throw 100,000 times as many incendiary bombs on England and the consequences would be devastating. "
Due to numerous flight accidents and the resulting protests by the crews, the attack procedure was discontinued. In late 1942, Imperial Chemical Industries offered the British government a chemical warfare agent to destroy crops.
literature
- Olaf Groehler : bombing war against Germany . Berlin 1990, pp. 330-332.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Elke Fröhlich (ed.): The diaries of Joseph Goebbels . Munich 1996, part II, volume 1, p. 142.
- ^ Andreas Hillgruber : Statesmen and diplomats with Hitler Frankfurt am Main 1967, p. 206.