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The real 9/11: Allies kill 12,300 German civilians in 1944

You want me to make a judgement?

Here's mine:

Who ****ing cares?

War is hell.

WWII was a single giant atrocity from beginning to end. To judge the propriety of WWII tactics and strategy from my 2013 armchair would be anachronistic and tantamount to historical retardation.

Do I consider it a "war crime" that the Allies targeted and killed civilians?

Sure.

You'd have to be a ****ing sociopath not to.

But it was one war crime in a sea of war crimes.

And we learned from it.

I don't fault Allied planners or flyers for what they did. It was the best they were able to do at the time. As I said earlier, they should have been able to do better. The evidence was there that it was a horrible strategy and completely useless in its horribleness, but somehow they missed the evidence, probably caught up in a wave of institutional momentum, bureaucratic groupthink, and "fight the last war" short sightedness.

Not a great deal unlike the Army I served in 20 years ago, and probably not a great deal unlike the Army that's out warfighting today.

The only argument or "debate" I'm making in this thread is: If you're of the mind that the Allies did not deliberately target and kill civilians as part of the war plan - you're wrong.

Judging people with hindsight is always questionable. Then again, I have never heard that argument being applied to any German even living during that time. Think of a random average German, born in 1900, who lived through the nazi era without ever speaking up against the government out of fear. Or, say, a Wehrmacht soldier who decides to shoot down a group of captured partisans, because there is no prison camp he can take them to, taking them along with his unit would severely weaken their capability to fight, and if he lets them go, they will get reinforcements and attack his unit. Would you also say that those two hypothetical people should not be judged with hindsight? I'm not sure.

To get back to the allied air planners, I think the "you can't blame them" argument does hold up to a certain point, and it is understandable that at some point in that war, the bombing of civilians seemed necessary. For example I would not blame the allies for the bombing of Hamburg, horrible as it was. But if you look at the bombing of Würzburg in March 1945, towards the end of the war, and then look at General Anderson's quote saying that such bombings were not meant to shorten the war but to teach the civilian population a lessen, the idea that they had good intentions but couldn't do better sort of breaks down. Why automatically assume that they did not genuinely like to kill "The Germans", out of a simple desire for revenge or because they had heard about the the horrible things "The Germans" did in the concentration camps? Were they
caught up in a wave of institutional momentum, bureaucratic groupthink, and "fight the last war" short sightedness
or was there a sort of hate and bloodlust in there which we usually prefer to associate only with Germans or Japanese people of the time?
 
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For some reason, i just don't find myself caring for most any of the German population in that time period. You can argue they were civilians, whereas i see mostly nazi sympathizers who could care less what was happening in the concentration camps. Apparently the RAF lost about a dozen planes too, so i don't know if there was return fire, but this was by then total war - all civilians being "the enemy" - acknowledged as such by both sides. Berlin was getting bombed daily, as was London.

Also if you look at the lead up to this event, it seems they tried other raids in the past and failed, going back a full year. In other words, the town knew these raids were happening and it was a sustained battlefield of sorts. How is that comparable to 9/11/2001?
 
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Hitler learned a valuable lesson in the end. Don't start trouble, won't be none. It's too bad that we no longer fight wars to win them. Now we wage sanitized wars with rules of engagement that put our soldiers in unnecessary peril.

Since when is it morally justifiable to bomb people who had nothing to do with the villians decision to punish the decision .... that is LITERALLY terrorism ...
 
Since when is it morally justifiable to bomb people who had nothing to do with the villians decision to punish the decision .... that is LITERALLY terrorism ...

What does morality have to do with war? The object of war is to kill people and break things. The winner dies less and keeps their things. Morality has nothing to do with it.
 
What does morality have to do with war? The object of war is to kill people and break things. The winner dies less and keeps their things. Morality has nothing to do with it.

If you're taking morality out of war then you loose the whole justification for war.

If you go to war to stop a monster from doing morally abhorant things, but then in the war nothing is sacred and there is no morality, and any monstrocity is justified becuase you're "at war" then what's the point of justification of war.

Morality matters either ALWAYS or never.
 
If you're taking morality out of war then you loose the whole justification for war.

If you go to war to stop a monster from doing morally abhorant things, but then in the war nothing is sacred and there is no morality, and any monstrocity is justified becuase you're "at war" then what's the point of justification of war.

Morality matters either ALWAYS or never.

The reason for war may be moral, war itself is amoral.
 
The reason for war may be moral, war itself is amoral.

No, morality DOES still exist in war, you don't get to torture children in a war situation because it might make the enemy surrender faster.
 
No, morality DOES still exist in war, you don't get to torture children in a war situation because it might make the enemy surrender faster.

Mankind has set rules by which war is supposed to be fought. You can't use chemical weapons. You can however take conventional weapons and kill the same people you could kill chemically and blow them up. You can try to twist the logic anyway you want. You can't torture kids but if you drop a bomb on an orphanage, it's collateral damage. War is amoral.
 
Mankind has set rules by which war is supposed to be fought. You can't use chemical weapons. You can however take conventional weapons and kill the same people you could kill chemically and blow them up. You can try to twist the logic anyway you want. You can't torture kids but if you drop a bomb on an orphanage, it's collateral damage. War is amoral.

Wait if war is amoral, then why cna't I torture kids? Because of some rules that man has made, if war is amoral, then on what are those rules made? If war is amoral then why SHOULD I follow those rules at all?

If we are going by the rules of war, then carpet bombing a city purposefully killing civilians is a war crime ...
 
Wait if war is amoral, then why cna't I torture kids? Because of some rules that man has made, if war is amoral, then on what are those rules made? If war is amoral then why SHOULD I follow those rules at all?

If we are going by the rules of war, then carpet bombing a city purposefully killing civilians is a war crime ...
You are entitled to your opinion. During Vietnam soldiers regularly shot children because they were used to carry explosives into American forces. War is hell. It's also amoral.
 
I don't really understand the apparent need to pretend that the aerial bombings of civilian populations weren't terrible actions in and of themselves. Take Dresden: a culturally rich town was completely incinerated by RAF and US Army Air Force, literally burning anyone above ground to a crisp. There were American POWs present in Dresden - Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote a novel based on the bombing, was one of them.

I don't judge the planners, though. The cliche goes that hindsight is 20/20; it is too easy to criticize the Allied generals for the bombings, but it is important to keep in mind that they had only limited access to information that we now take for granted, and that they thought their plans were the best possible scenarios as a result, perhaps even necessary. Comparing the bombings to the Holocaust or Nazi aggression is absurd. Horrors committed for the sake of a greater cause and arising from purely strategic decisions cannot be compared to horrors committed based on sadism or bigotry.
 
I don't really understand the apparent need to pretend that the aerial bombings of civilian populations weren't terrible actions in and of themselves. Take Dresden: a culturally rich town was completely incinerated by RAF and US Army Air Force, literally burning anyone above ground to a crisp. There were American POWs present in Dresden - Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote a novel based on the bombing, was one of them.

I don't judge the planners, though. The cliche goes that hindsight is 20/20; it is too easy to criticize the Allied generals for the bombings, but it is important to keep in mind that they had only limited access to information that we now take for granted, and that they thought their plans were the best possible scenarios as a result, perhaps even necessary. Comparing the bombings to the Holocaust or Nazi aggression is absurd. Horrors committed for the sake of a greater cause and arising from purely strategic decisions cannot be compared to horrors committed based on sadism or bigotry.

As far as I've seen, nobody on this thread compared the allied bombings to the holocaust, and we all agree that WW2 was won by the right side.

Of course we always have to be careful when judging anyone with hindsight. If it turned out that the allied planners really thought that with their bombing of civilians, they would save lives on balance and significantly shorten the war, I agree with you. If bombing civilian populations seemed like the only reasonable way to fight and this method was used with regret, but considered genuinely necessary to win WW2, the planners should be honored, not blamed.

If however it turns out that towards the end of the war, cities were bombed for reasons of revenge, for the cynical idea of teaching "moral lessons" to civilian populations, or because the allied methods of wiping out civilians in residential areas had just been fully developped in 1945 and the planners would have found it a pity to miss the opportunity to fully put them into practice, the allied war planners are simply mass murderers and should rot in hell, though still one or two storeys above the murderers from the SS.

Since there is evidence for the latter, some of which I quoted in this thread, I consider the allied air planners mass murderers. That I consider that a fairer and more careful judgement than the sort of judgements which are routinely passed over the entire German population of the time. The allied planners of those days are dead. So unless people still insist on celebrating Arthur Harris, Frederick Anderson and the likes as heroes and their deliberate killing of civilians as successes, it's over.
 
You are entitled to your opinion. During Vietnam soldiers regularly shot children because they were used to carry explosives into American forces. War is hell. It's also amoral.

Yes ... was that moral or immoral what those soldiers did? Or just "whatever"
 
It was self preservation. War is amoral.
 
It was self preservation. War is amoral.

Easy for you to say. Unless you were in the armed services, most of our wars have had basically no negative impact on our lives.

How does self-preservation come into play when napalming entire villages or throwing Vietnamese into mass graves?
 
Easy for you to say. Unless you were in the armed services, most of our wars have had basically no negative impact on our lives.

How does self-preservation come into play when napalming entire villages or throwing Vietnamese into mass graves?

War is hell, and the purpose of war is to kill people and break things. Governments may go to war out of a sense of moral superiority but once they engage in war, the actions of war are to produce a desired outcome. Fighting war is about winning or defense. The actions in war are amoral. Nations have set rules by which wars should be fought and they may have the appearance of being grounded in morality but functionally there is no difference in killing people with chemical weapons or killing them with bullets or bombs. Nuclear weapons aren't restricted by the Geneva conventions, many nations have them. How could you possibly judge Trumans decision to bomb Japan with nuclear weapons? Thousands were killed but enough were killed and enough things were broken that the war ended. How does morality apply? My opinion is that it doesn't and war is amoral.
 
War is hell, and the purpose of war is to kill people and break things. Governments may go to war out of a sense of moral superiority but once they engage in war, the actions of war are to produce a desired outcome. Fighting war is about winning or defense. The actions in war are amoral. Nations have set rules by which wars should be fought and they may have the appearance of being grounded in morality but functionally there is no difference in killing people with chemical weapons or killing them with bullets or bombs. Nuclear weapons aren't restricted by the Geneva conventions, many nations have them. How could you possibly judge Trumans decision to bomb Japan with nuclear weapons? Thousands were killed but enough were killed and enough things were broken that the war ended. How does morality apply? My opinion is that it doesn't and war is amoral.

I see a "moral war" as meeting these criterion:

1. The cause of the war has to be sufficiently just - no wars for conquest or on behalf of a corrupt puppet government.
2. The belligerents should only inflict as much death and destruction as is necessary to win the war. Therefore, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are necessary and morally justified, but 9/11, Srebrenica, and My Lai aren't.
 
I see a "moral war" as meeting these criterion:

1. The cause of the war has to be sufficiently just - no wars for conquest or on behalf of a corrupt puppet government.
2. The belligerents should only inflict as much death and destruction as is necessary to win the war. Therefore, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are necessary and morally justified, but 9/11, Srebrenica, and My Lai aren't.

Well, that's a nice little bow to wrap around a bag of crap. War is never that neat. As individuals we can make moral judgements but functionally none of us have the background or information to judge with any moral authority. Mi Lai may have been punishable for the actions of Lt Calley and they may have been uncivil and even unnecessary by standards held by those sitting on the sidelines. For the men and women doing the heavy lifting in the name of their countries war is not something understood in the largest context. For them,who have been trained to kill with a sense of patriotism, it's personal.
 
Well, that's a nice little bow to wrap around a bag of crap. War is never that neat. As individuals we can make moral judgements but functionally none of us have the background or information to judge with any moral authority. Mi Lai may have been punishable for the actions of Lt Calley and they may have been uncivil and even unnecessary by standards held by those sitting on the sidelines. For the men and women doing the heavy lifting in the name of their countries war is not something understood in the largest context. For them,who have been trained to kill with a sense of patriotism, it's personal.

The moral sloth present in this post is astounding. "Nobody can judge anyone else" is a lazy, relativist argument that could be used to justify anything.

Are we allowed to judge the men who carried out the September 11 attacks? Is it arrogant and pretentious of us to criticize the SS guards at concentration camps?
 
The moral sloth present in this post is astounding. "Nobody can judge anyone else" is a lazy, relativist argument that could be used to justify anything.

Are we allowed to judge the men who carried out the September 11 attacks? Is it arrogant and pretentious of us to criticize the SS guards at concentration camps?

Equally present in your post is your feeling of moral superiority. I cannot judge the actions of someone trained to kill by their government, their belief in the justness of their task or the result of their actions.

Don't confuse terrorism with war, understanding that war's happen between nations. In war, civilian deaths are called collateral damage. I'm not advocating collateral damage but I am claiming that in war it happens and it's existence is outside a normal moral structure. It's why in war, killing people gets you medals, between civilians it gets you prison.
 
I see a "moral war" as meeting these criterion:

1. The cause of the war has to be sufficiently just - no wars for conquest or on behalf of a corrupt puppet government.
2. The belligerents should only inflict as much death and destruction as is necessary to win the war. Therefore, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are necessary and morally justified, but 9/11, Srebrenica, and My Lai aren't.

You know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two (!) nuclear bombs, right? I mean, nukes. On cities. On populations. With no other purpose than killing civilians. And you also know that the nuclear contamination is going to affect the people there for centuries, I assume? And you also know that Japan was under Soviet threat after the Soviet declaration of war and would rather surrender to the Americans than to the Soviets - which is why Japan surrendered, not primarily because of the nuclear bombs.

What has to happen for people to justify not just bombing but actually nuking civilians and thinking of that as meeting the principle of minimal damage to civilians? It was a bloody massacre and not something to declare a "necessary evil". If the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki declared it a necessary evil, I would respect that. But it should be their privilege. Not that of people like me or you who have not been affected by it.
 
You know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two (!) nuclear bombs, right? I mean, nukes. On cities. On populations.
I am aware of that, yes. If it wasn't necessary to win the war in retrospect, it likely was in terms of the information available at the time
With no other purpose than killing civilians.
Actually, I think a factory of some sort was in Nagasaki.

Keep in mind that the role of a civilian in the war effort back then was far, far greater than it is now. Entire populations were mobilized in order to make and preserve goods for the armies of the nations involved. That makes them a more legitimate target, if only slightly so, than they would be today.
And you also know that the nuclear contamination is going to affect the people there for centuries, I assume?
The people who planned the attack didn't know that.
And you also know that Japan was under Soviet threat after the Soviet declaration of war and would rather surrender to the Americans than to the Soviets - which is why Japan surrendered, not primarily because of the nuclear bombs.
Again, this is hindsight. Japan could very well have been attempting to play Stalin against the United States to cement their own future and continue their genocidal expansionism.

What has to happen for people to justify not just bombing but actually nuking civilians and thinking of that as meeting the principle of minimal damage to civilians? It was a bloody massacre and not something to declare a "necessary evil". If the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki declared it a necessary evil, I would respect that. But it should be their privilege. Not that of people like me or you who have not been affected by it.

We would have likely undertaken a land invasion of Japan, costing many more lives and leaving the whole of Japan worse off than just nuking two cities.

People don't get to decide whether or not something is a necessary evil just because they were negatively impacted by it. As I indicated to sawdust earlier, it is good to have some perspective on these matters - but the perspective of the victims is overshadowed by the combination of real and perceived necessity.
 
You know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two (!) nuclear bombs, right? I mean, nukes. On cities. On populations. With no other purpose than killing civilians. And you also know that the nuclear contamination is going to affect the people there for centuries, I assume? And you also know that Japan was under Soviet threat after the Soviet declaration of war and would rather surrender to the Americans than to the Soviets - which is why Japan surrendered, not primarily because of the nuclear bombs.

What has to happen for people to justify not just bombing but actually nuking civilians and thinking of that as meeting the principle of minimal damage to civilians? It was a bloody massacre and not something to declare a "necessary evil". If the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki declared it a necessary evil, I would respect that. But it should be their privilege. Not that of people like me or you who have not been affected by it.

I'm not sure I follow. I've never in my life heard someone argue that the Atomic Bombings weren't horrific and terrible, but that is a world away from saying they were unnecessary. There are perfectly cogent arguments (coincidentally I would dispute the factual assertions you made vis a vis the Soviets) to make supporting the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan and from that point you get the term 'necessary evil' which is neither an incorrect or immoral one to use.
 
I am aware of that, yes. If it wasn't necessary to win the war in retrospect, it likely was in terms of the information available at the time

Actually, I think a factory of some sort was in Nagasaki.

Keep in mind that the role of a civilian in the war effort back then was far, far greater than it is now. Entire populations were mobilized in order to make and preserve goods for the armies of the nations involved. That makes them a more legitimate target, if only slightly so, than they would be today.

The people who planned the attack didn't know that.

Again, this is hindsight. Japan could very well have been attempting to play Stalin against the United States to cement their own future and continue their genocidal expansionism.



We would have likely undertaken a land invasion of Japan, costing many more lives and leaving the whole of Japan worse off than just nuking two cities.

People don't get to decide whether or not something is a necessary evil just because they were negatively impacted by it. As I indicated to sawdust earlier, it is good to have some perspective on these matters - but the perspective of the victims is overshadowed by the combination of real and perceived necessity.

It isn't even hindsight, it isn't true. Japan was not at all on the verge of surrendering to the Soviet Union, nor was the Soviet Union in any position to invade the Home Islands even if they had the inclination. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the loss of the Kwantung Army certainly demoralized the Japanese government but it has become a contemporary myth that it led to their capitulation.
 
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