The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 1

An aerial picture of the bombing of Rotterdam by the German Luftwaffe. It marks the start of strategic bombing, with an unprecedented 900 civilians killed. The attack on Tokyo on 9−10 March 1945 by American bomber forces claimed the lives of 88,000. (BArch, n.d.)

All these numbers abstract the notion of human suffering, but there are many stories that

have not been told:

A British tank officer glimpsed some tiny figures beside a wood half a mile away, from

which a German half-track had just emerged. He fired a few rounds of high explosives

from his gun, then followed up with a long burst of Bess machine-gun fire. Trees caught

fire. He saw survivors start to move across the tanks, hands held high. “To my horror,

they were civilians,” wrote William Steel-Brownlie, “followed by a horse and cart on

which were piled all kinds of household goods. They were children, a boy and a girl,

holding hands and running as hard as they could over the rough ploughed earth. They

came right up to the tank, looked up at me, and the small boy said in English, ‘You have

killed my father.’ There was nothing I could say. (Hastings 2004, 501)

The savagery, ruthlessness, inhumanity and lack of compassion in modern wars were

fuelled by a new form of racism, characterised by supremacist connotations. Not only was

this a breeding ground for the Holocaust, but it also found its way onto the battlefield − most

notably in the eastern and pacific theatres:

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