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

[Sherman123]

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.

That is incredibly lazy. No one can have an opinion on anything unless they were literally there to act as observers? There is always the x-factor of what high stress and extraordinary situations do to people but that isn't an exclusion clause for people who don't want to say gunning down a few hundred people wasn't an atrocity. Hell I heard the Serbs at Srebrenica had a really tough year fight it out in Srpska, so really who am I to judge with 'moral authority' what they did?

 

[Sanddune]

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

Why make that assumption? The cold war was beginning. So there was a motivation to show the Soviets that the US could, and did not have any inhibitions to use the nuclear bomb. I'm not saying that's the only reason why it was done. I'm not even saying it's impossible that the allies would have considered it necessary to win the war. What I'm saying is with or without a military necessity, it likely would have been done as long as the war was still going on. Also, why two bombs and not just one bomb?

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

Now you're getting cynical.

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.

With that argument, you could justify anything. You could even justify nuking places - oh wait a minute, you actually are.

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

If that really is true, it's because they simply didn't care. You simply need to know the order of magnitude of the half life of the isotopes involved. Any physicist of the time could have told them.

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.

Japan was evil, yes, and they did commit massacres. But they were not nazi Germany. If a holocaust had been going on, and those bombings, unlike the bombings of places like Würzburg and Darmstadt, were really considered militarily necessary, I would immediately agree. But there was no holocaust going on to justify something like that in proportion. Moreover, the US would have had other options. If they had told the Japanese, if you don't surrender, we're going to drop nuclear bombs, tf they had done a very public bomb test on an uninhabited island, as a warning, it would have been a different issue. None of that happened. Why? Because the US wanted to show the Soviet Union that it had no inhibitions to drop such bombs on people.

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 can't leave out the perspective of the victims.

 

[Sherman123]

Why make that assumption? The cold war was beginning. So there was a motivation to show the Soviets that the US could, and did not have any inhibitions to use the nuclear bomb. I'm not saying that's the only reason why it was done. I'm not even saying it's impossible that the allies would have considered it necessary to win the war. What I'm saying is with or without a military necessity, it likely would have been done as long as the war was still going on. Also, why two bombs and not just one bomb?




Now you're getting cynical.



With that argument, you could justify anything. You could even justify nuking places - oh wait a minute, you actually are.




If that really is true, it's because they simply didn't care. You simply need to know the order of magnitude of the half life of the isotopes involved. Any physicist of the time could have told them.



Japan was evil, yes, and they did commit massacres. But they were not nazi Germany. If a holocaust had been going on, and those bombings, unlike the bombings of places like Würzburg and Darmstadt, were really considered militarily necessary, I would immediately agree. But there was no holocaust going on to justify something like that in proportion. Moreover, the US would have had other options. If they had told the Japanese, if you don't surrender, we're going to drop nuclear bombs, tf they had done a very public bomb test on an uninhabited island, as a warning, it would have been a different issue. None of that happened. Why? Because the US wanted to show the Soviet Union that it had no inhibitions to drop such bombs on people.



You can't leave out the perspective of the victims.

A few points:

1. The decision to use nuclear weapons in Japan was not primarily motivated by the Soviet menace and we have reams of documentation to support that point. At the time (August 1945) there was only a limited faction in the Truman government that was ferociously concerned with the Soviets, more to the point few in the government believed that the use of atomic weapons would bring rapid capitulation from Japan. The 'Soviet Theory' is a relatively new innovation largely trumpeted by those who have a negative opinion of the decision. It is plausible that it was viewed as an ancillary benefit, but it certainly was not the root motive.

2. A common conception and one that is wrong. I wonder if it is rooted in Western conceit but yes Japan was in fact as cruel and evil as Nazi Germany. At the time of the atomic bombings the Empire of Japan was lord and master over most of South East Asia, Indonesia, huge portions of China, Korea, Taiwan, and holdings across the Pacific. What had it done in these places? Enforced a doctrine of totalitarian Imperial rule co-mingled with racial supremacy. Nearly 30,000,000 Filipino, Vietnamese, Indonesia, Chinese, Korean, Malayan, etc citizens were slaughtered by the Imperial government. Some in combat, but most due to artificial famines, mass executions (Singapore's middle class Chinese population was exterminated after 70,000 of them were machine gunned), conditions of intolerable slavery, chemical & biological experimentation and bombings, and monstrously so much more.

The Allies had a moral obligation to end the war as swiftly as possible to liberate the millions still suffering under Japanese rule. Even after the war ended thousands were still dying every month as the after effects of malnutrition and exhaustion took their toll.

3. Most fundamentally misunderstand radioactivity. Half-life is not a scary word, it merely refers to the time necessary for an isotope to fall to half of its original/normal value. Potassium K-40 has a half life of 1.248×10^9 but you still eat bananas. The radioactive risk to places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki decreased dramatically very quickly. Generally speaking the immediate risk from nuclear radiation (your ionizing radiation) drops by the rule of seven, that is radiation decays at a corresponding factor of 10 for every measurement of seven starting at one hour after the detonation. So after seven hours you get a 90% reduction from where it was at the first hour. You can extrapolate this rule successfully for a reasonable period of time and within a few weeks most places would be safe to travel in unprotected. There are a million other variables that nuclear nerds on this board could probably tell you about, but that is a good general outline.

tl;dr there is a reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bustling cities today not nuclear graveyards.

 

[Sherman123]

As an addendum: In his memoirs Truman wrote: "There were many reasons for my going to Potsdam, but the most urgent, to my mind, was to get from Stalin a personal reaffirmation of Russia's entry into the war against Japan, a matter which our military chiefs were most anxious to clinch. This I was able to get from Stalin in the very first days of the conference."

This does not sound like a President consumed with heading off the Soviet Union, quite the opposite. The reality is that the Cold War was still distant in the minds of many in August 1945.

 

[Chatter]

Perhaps if Hitler and the Germans hadn't bombed the hell out of the UK we wouldn't have retaliated in such a manner later in the war, but whole cities such as Coventry were destroyed, whilst over 1.5 million homes were destroyed by the Luftwaffe in London during WW2. I don't think that the Germans who slaughtered 6 million Jews and starved million of Russian civilians to death to death amongst other such atrocities have that much room for complaint in terms of reaping what they sowed.

In terms of mass carpet bombing, America dropped more bombs on Vietnam and Cambodia than were dropped during the whole of WW2 and they also used Chemical and Biological weapons in the shape of Napalm and Agent Orange, leaving a legacy of suffering within Vietnam that exists to this very day. Whilst after 9/11 the invasion of Iraq and subsequent bombing is estimated to have killed many hundreds of thousands of civilians.

BBC News - London surgeons help 'children of Agent Orange'

 

[MadLib]

Don't confuse terrorism with war

Trust me, I'm not. In fact, if the purpose of war is, as you say, to break as many things and kill as many people as possible, then terrorism isn't exclusive to war, it epitomizes it.

 

[sawdust]

Trust me, I'm not. In fact, if the purpose of war is, as you say, to break as many things and kill as many people as possible, then terrorism isn't exclusive to war, it epitomizes it.

Except war happens between nations and terrorism is violence not sanctioned by governments but by unsanctioned groups against people. It's just definitions I know but words mean things.

 

[MadLib]

Except war happens between nations and terrorism is violence not sanctioned by governments but by unsanctioned groups against people. It's just definitions I know but words mean things.

War isn't always something that happens between nations. If that were the case, any violent revolution, insurrection, or rebellion in history wouldn't be considered a war without foreign involvement.

 

[sawdust]

War isn't always something that happens between nations. If that were the case, any violent revolution, insurrection, or rebellion in history wouldn't be considered a war without foreign involvement.

Now we are splitting hairs. One's person revolution is anothers war. There's a war on drugs if you want to play word games.

 

[Sanddune]

Perhaps if Hitler and the Germans hadn't bombed the hell out of the UK we wouldn't have retaliated in such a manner later in the war, but whole cities such as Coventry were destroyed, whilst over 1.5 million homes were destroyed by the Luftwaffe in London during WW2. I don't think that the Germans who slaughtered 6 million Jews and starved million of Russian civilians to death to death amongst other such atrocities have that much room for complaint in terms of reaping what they sowed.

Except that the Germans who were slaughtering Jews were mostly not in the cities but in death camps in Poland operating the gas chambers. Which the allies did not bomb precicely because they did not care. Just like many of the contemporary civilians in Germany and the rest of Europe. If you apply your argument only to those Germans who did the killings, I'd probably even agree. But no, a civilian does not lose his or her right to live because of his or her dictatorial government's actions.

In terms of mass carpet bombing, America dropped more bombs on Vietnam and Cambodia than were dropped during the whole of WW2 and they also used Chemical and Biological weapons in the shape of Napalm and Agent Orange, leaving a legacy of suffering within Vietnam that exists to this very day. Whilst after 9/11 the invasion of Iraq and subsequent bombing is estimated to have killed many hundreds of thousands of civilians.
BBC News - London surgeons help 'children of Agent Orange'

Why change the topic, Chatter?

Regarding the documentary: the BBC's recurrent theme of "look how lovely we Brits truly are compared to everyone else" is hilarious. I saw a BBC documentary on forced labour of German POWs in Britain after the end of WW2. Not that I'd expect any national guilt on that from the Brits, but by focussing on the kindness of some individual Brits, the whole thing was actually turned into a grotesque show of national self-congratulation. With that constant diet of British families giving christmas presents to German POWs, British surgeons helping Asian kids, British people doing so many good things in a world of evil - it is no wonder that you get a few Brits who truly "know" that their countrymen are better people than others and miss the point that in a country of 50 million or so, you would find enough nice people to make such documentaries.

 

[MadLib]

Except war happens between nations and terrorism is violence not sanctioned by governments but by unsanctioned groups against people. It's just definitions I know but words mean things.

Now we are splitting hairs. One's person revolution is anothers war. There's a war on drugs if you want to play word games.

:lamo

In any case, there's no reason that conventional warfare shouldn't be held to the same moral standard as terrorism.

 

[Bodi]

A look at the real 9/11, of 9/11/44, where the Royal Air Force carried out the premeditated mass murder of 12,300 German civilians (60,000+ homeless) at Darmstadt. Darmstadt was of no industrial importance and chosen because the wooden houses made easy targets and were more flammable. An act of extreme savagery indeed.

:lol: That is some pretty funny stuff!

 

[sawdust]

:lamo

In any case, there's no reason that conventional warfare shouldn't be held to the same moral standard as terrorism.

According to who? War is amoral. War is violent conflict between nations. All the other uses of the word war are simply word play.

 

[Graffias]

:lol: That is some pretty funny stuff!

Funny to sociopaths maybe.

 

[Chatter]

Except that the Germans who were slaughtering Jews were mostly not in the cities but in death camps in Poland operating the gas chambers. Which the allies did not bomb precicely because they did not care. Just like many of the contemporary civilians in Germany and the rest of Europe. If you apply your argument only to those Germans who did the killings, I'd probably even agree. But no, a civilian does not lose his or her right to live because of his or her dictatorial government's actions.

The Germans didn't just kill in camps, they forced millions of Russians in to starvation, surrounding whole cities, in fact 22 million Russians died and the vast majority weren't in camps. Whilst Germany rained down bombs and later V-Rockets on Britain when she had the upper hand and tried to starve the British in to submission through a U-Boat campaign against merchant and military shipping. Perhaps we should have just left you to the Russians, who had plans far worse than just bombing and would have been quite happy to put all Germans against a wall and shoot them. You seem to have a very poor grasp of history.

The Blitz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BEYOND HORROR: They ate cats, sawdust, wallpaper paste...even their own babies. Leningrad's agony as the Nazis tried to starve it into submission: LENINGRAD: TRAGEDY OF A CITY UNDER SIEGE 1941-44 BY ANNA REID | Mail Online

Regarding the documentary: the BBC's recurrent theme of "look how lovely we Brits truly are compared to everyone else" is hilarious. I saw a BBC documentary on forced labour of German POWs in Britain after the end of WW2. Not that I'd expect any national guilt on that from the Brits, but by focussing on the kindness of some individual Brits, the whole thing was actually turned into a grotesque show of national self-congratulation. With that constant diet of British families giving christmas presents to German POWs, British surgeons helping Asian kids, British people doing so many good things in a world of evil - it is no wonder that you get a few Brits who truly "know" that their countrymen are better people than others and miss the point that in a country of 50 million or so, you would find enough nice people to make such documentaries.

The German and Italian POW's were not badly treated and were certainly not forced in to labour during or following the war, indeed the terms of the Geneva Convention to which Braitain was a signatory stipulated that prisoners of war should not be forced to work while in captivity. However, given the choice, many German prisoners of war chose to work rather than sit around the camp doing nothing. Those that chose to worked on farms - harvesting, digging ditches or repairing fences, in the construction industry - rebuilding homes damaged by bombing, or clearing bomb damage. At the end of the war prisoners were aassessed with regard to continuing loyalty to Nazi ideals. Those that showed continuing loyalty remained in captivity. By the end of 1947, around 250,000 German POWs had been repatriated, but 24,000 (nearly 10%) decided to stay in Britain in order to make a new life for themselves rather than go home. The last German POWs were repatriated in November 1948. Hardly the terrible slavery or bad treatment especially when you compare their treatment to those captured by the Russians on the Eastern Front.

World War Two - German Prisoners of War

And since you seem to enjoy BBC Documentaries so much here's one on the bombing of Coventry in November 1940



And here's a short film from October 1940 entitled 'London Can Take It' which is narrated by American journalist Quentin Reynolds who was reporting from London at the time and which pays tribute to London and its people during the Blitz on the capital. The film's huge impact at the time, especially in the USA, makes it of important historical significance.

 

[Sanddune]

The Germans didn't just kill in camps, they forced millions of Russians in to starvation, surrounding whole cities, in fact 22 million Russians died and the vast majority weren't in camps. Whilst Germany rained down bombs and later V-Rockets on Britain when she had the upper hand and tried to starve the British in to submission through a U-Boat campaign against merchant and military shipping. Perhaps we should have just left you to the Russians, who had plans far worse than just bombing and would have been quite happy to put all Germans against a wall and shoot them. You seem to have a very poor grasp of history.

Chatter, first of all, it's not "me" and it's not "you". You can say whatever you want about the holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, or the "Blitz" without attacking me, and I can say whatever I want about the bombing of German cities without attacking you. I'm not going to limit my perspective.

My point is that the murderers from the SS and parts of the Wehrmacht were mostly not in the cities. Some Germans reaped what other Germans sowed. Your way of justifying the RAF's deliberate killing of civilians by criminalizing the German people of the time and saying that any killed German deserved to die is poor taste. Why are you speculating about what the Stalinaist Soviet Union would have done? They were in Germany and they did whatever they wanted to do. And yes, if you add it up it was worse than the bombings. I'm not saying it was wrong of the British military to occupy Germany, I'm just saying that some bombings, and the same is true for the German bombings, should not have happened.

The German and Italian POW's were not badly treated and were certainly not forced in to labour during or following the war, indeed the terms of the Geneva Convention to which Braitain was a signatory stipulated that prisoners of war should not be forced to work while in captivity. However, given the choice, many German prisoners of war chose to work rather than sit around the camp doing nothing. Those that chose to worked on farms - harvesting, digging ditches or repairing fences, in the construction industry - rebuilding homes damaged by bombing, or clearing bomb damage. At the end of the war prisoners were aassessed with regard to continuing loyalty to Nazi ideals. Those that showed continuing loyalty remained in captivity. By the end of 1947, around 250,000 German POWs had been repatriated, but 24,000 (nearly 10%) decided to stay in Britain in order to make a new life for themselves rather than go home. The last German POWs were repatriated in November 1948. Hardly the terrible slavery or bad treatment especially when you compare their treatment to those captured by the Russians on the Eastern Front.

That part I agree with. I wasn't actually judging the way the British treated their POWs, but the way the BBC made an "oh look how lovely we Brits are" show out of it was rather funny.

World War Two - German Prisoners of War

And since you seem to enjoy BBC Documentaries so much here's one on the bombing of Coventry in November 1940



And here's a short film from October 1940 entitled 'London Can Take It' which is narrated by American journalist Quentin Reynolds who was reporting from London at the time and which pays tribute to London and its people during the Blitz on the capital. The film's huge impact at the time, especially in the USA, makes it of important historical significance.

[/QUOTE]

Yes it's admirable what people sometimes do when necessary. For instance, there were people in Germany who risked their lives by spending bombing nights in old churches and extinguishing any fire that came, to preserve some of the world's cultural heritage. And I could talk about unsung heroes who shot down British marking bombers which caused the bomber fleet to hit an area of fields and miss the city center that they were heading for. Thereby saving thousands of lives which would have been senselessly wasted otherwise. I could talk about a large Berlin underground network of people housing and giving food to Jews who were in hiding - and all of it being futile because Sir Arthur Harris had decided to bomb civilians. You see, with countries of the size of Britain or Germany, it's always a question of which side, which aspect you portray.

 

[Chatter]

Chatter, first of all, it's not "me" and it's not "you". You can say whatever you want about the holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, or the "Blitz" without attacking me, and I can say whatever I want about the bombing of German cities without attacking you. I'm not going to limit my perspective.

My point is that the murderers from the SS and parts of the Wehrmacht were mostly not in the cities. Some Germans reaped what other Germans sowed. Your way of justifying the RAF's deliberate killing of civilians by criminalizing the German people of the time and saying that any killed German deserved to die is poor taste. Why are you speculating about what the Stalinaist Soviet Union would have done? They were in Germany and they did whatever they wanted to do. And yes, if you add it up it was worse than the bombings. I'm not saying it was wrong of the British military to occupy Germany, I'm just saying that some bombings, and the same is true for the German bombings, should not have happened.

And my point being that the Germans themselves sought to attack civilian populations, and British troops on the whole were not stationed in British Cities. The Germans targeted a host of British Cities and tried to bomb and indeed starve the British in to submission, and if they had invaded no doubt would have slaughtered and enslaved the population of Britain. What happened on the 14th November 1940 over Coventry was a turning point and largely dictated how the Germans themselves would be treated later in the war.

In terms of the Russians they did kill, rape and murder there way across Eastern Germany, and hated the Germans with a passion, which is hardly surprising. The fact that the British RAF actually used what the Germans did to British Cities such as Coventry as a template to respond seems to escape you, and furthermore the RAF only dropped around one third of the bombs dropped on Germany by the United States Forces, with American cities being largely undamaged during WW2. Do I blame the Americans for bombing Germany, no I don't and nor do I for bombing Japan including the atomic bomb attacks, indeed I am grateful to the Americans for their help and support during WW2. As I am sure if the Germans had been allowed to succeed most of the population of Britain would have either starved to death or have been enslaved or slaughtered.

Yes it's admirable what people sometimes do when necessary. For instance, there were people in Germany who risked their lives by spending bombing nights in old churches and extinguishing any fire that came, to preserve some of the world's cultural heritage. And I could talk about unsung heroes who shot down British marking bombers which caused the bomber fleet to hit an area of fields and miss the city center that they were heading for. Thereby saving thousands of lives which would have been senselessly wasted otherwise. I could talk about a large Berlin underground network of people housing and giving food to Jews who were in hiding - and all of it being futile because Sir Arthur Harris had decided to bomb civilians. You see, with countries of the size of Britain or Germany, it's always a question of which side, which aspect you portray.

I am quite sure there were good people in Germany, just as there were in Russia or during the Blitz in London, however the Germans themselves exhausted any sympathy we would have had for them earlier in the war by their campaign of carpet bombing British cities and later their V-Rocket campaign, and once the true extent of the holocaust was known nobody really had any sympathy towards these people any more, in fact most people just had utter repulsion. This same is true of the Soviets who detested the Germans, who were responsible for the deaths of 22 million Russians. Nobody is saying that the bombing or what happened in the latter part of the war was particularly valiant but the truth is any sympathy for the Germans including their civilian population had long since evaporated due to their own actions earlier in the war. The current generation may with hindsight find the bombing of German cities rather less palatable, however they weren't the generation who suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany, who often lost everything they owned, who lost loved ones or who endured rationing and hardship.

 

[Bodi]

Funny to sociopaths maybe.

You don't even know what I think is funny... and that makes it even more funny! :lol:

 

[Sanddune]

And my point being that the Germans themselves sought to attack civilian populations, and British troops on the whole were not stationed in British Cities. The Germans targeted a host of British Cities and tried to bomb and indeed starve the British in to submission, and if they had invaded no doubt would have slaughtered and enslaved the population of Britain.

This starving into submission thing happened on both sides in the world wars. I never said that the German bombings of British cities were any better.

The fact that the British RAF actually used what the Germans did to British Cities such as Coventry as a template to respond seems to escape you.

No, actually it doesn't, on the contrary. It's an interesting point because as far as I heard the Coventry raid (and the "blitz" in general) strengthened the resolve of the British people. Yet the RAF bombed civilians to weaken the resolve of the German people. Of course, the outcome was the opposite. Maybe not all but much of this was predictably senseless killing of German civilians, and on top of that a waste of human and technical resources on the British side.

and furthermore the RAF only dropped around one third of the bombs dropped on Germany by the United States Forces, with American cities being largely undamaged during WW2. Do I blame the Americans for bombing Germany, no I don't and nor do I for bombing Japan including the atomic bomb attacks, indeed I am grateful to the Americans for their help and support during WW2. As I am sure if the Germans had been allowed to succeed most of the population of Britain would have either starved to death or have been enslaved or slaughtered.

What we've been talking about all the time is bombings which weren't actually necessary to stop the German military.

I am quite sure there were good people in Germany, just as there were in Russia or during the Blitz in London, however the Germans themselves exhausted any sympathy we would have had for them earlier in the war by their campaign of carpet bombing British cities and later their V-Rocket campaign, and once the true extent of the holocaust was known nobody really had any sympathy towards these people any more, in fact most people just had utter repulsion. This same is true of the Soviets who detested the Germans, who were responsible for the deaths of 22 million Russians. Nobody is saying that the bombing or what happened in the latter part of the war was particularly valiant but the truth is any sympathy for the Germans including their civilian population had long since evaporated due to their own actions earlier in the war. The current generation may with hindsight find the bombing of German cities rather less palatable, however they weren't the generation who suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany, who often lost everything they owned, who lost loved ones or who endured rationing and hardship.

The German SS made many people lose their sympathy for the German civilians, because it's all Germans. It's the error of collective thinking and collective judging that is the problem here. And it is worthwile contemplating for a moment that because of that way of thinking, a few hundred thousand extra people died that could have lived on. Now what do we do with this today, with a distance of 70 years? I'd say, something better than falling back into the old WW2 era way of thinking and judging people.

Did you live back then? I'm asking because you keep saying "we" and you seem very personally involved.

 

[Chatter]

This starving into submission thing happened on both sides in the world wars. I never said that the German bombings of British cities were any better.

As soon as Germany surrendered, the allies went all out to help the German's with food and aid. In terms of starving in to submission, I don't recall the Germans starving to the same extent as the Russians and Germany wasn't an island like Britain which relied on maritime imports which were cut off by German U-Boats.

No, actually it doesn't, on the contrary. It's an interesting point because as far as I heard the Coventry raid (and the "blitz" in general) strengthened the resolve of the British people. Yet the RAF bombed civilians to weaken the resolve of the German people. Of course, the outcome was the opposite. Maybe not all but much of this was predictably senseless killing of German civilians, and on top of that a waste of human and technical resources on the British side. What we've been talking about all the time is bombings which weren't actually necessary to stop the German military.

Firstly the RAF didn't bomb alone, the Americans dropped twice as many bombs on German cities as we did, and secondly cities such as Dresden were seen as of economic, industrial and military importance and Harris's objective was to destroy the German military and industrial base in order to shorten the war and to save allied lives. This was something Harris made very clear when asked about the bombing, and exactly the same was true of the Germans in the early stages of the war, who wished to destroy Britain's industrial, economic and military might through the blitzing and carpet bombing of industrial cities, ports, shipyards and other locations of note. The allies were merely trying to shorten the war and save the lives of troops, the Germans on the other hand were trying to conquer the world and ethnically cleanse it. It was up to the Germans as to when they surrendered to the allies and were helped, if we had surrendered earlier in the war we would have faced a very different proposition.

The German SS made many people lose their sympathy for the German civilians, because it's all Germans. It's the error of collective thinking and collective judging that is the problem here. And it is worthwile contemplating for a moment that because of that way of thinking, a few hundred thousand extra people died that could have lived on. Now what do we do with this today, with a distance of 70 years? I'd say, something better than falling back into the old WW2 era way of thinking and judging people.

Did you live back then? I'm asking because you keep saying "we" and you seem very personally involved.

The German Luftwaffe, the U-Boats, the SS, the concentration camps, the starving of the Russians, the mass genocide and holocaust, there were numerous reasons for not having any sympathy for the German plight towards the end of the war. As for living back then, no I didn't but my family did, my Grandad was in the Royal Navy and served on Atlantic and Arctic Convoys helping to destroy German U-Boats, and he helped kill Germans. In terms of Harris's thinking, he considered it saving allies lives and shortening the war and would have argued that an extra few hundred thousand allied soldiers came home because of it.

I ... assume that the view under consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things

 

[Chatter]

Actually I stand corrected, the RAF nearly dropped as many bombs in the European Theatre during WW2 as the Americans did. It's also worth noting that there was a high rate of attrition in such warfare and many British and American lives were lost during such bombing missions and I am sure the same can be applied to the Luftwaffe crews.

Strategic bombing during World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[joG]

A look at the real 9/11, of 9/11/44, where the Royal Air Force carried out the premeditated mass murder of 12,300 German civilians (60,000+ homeless) at Darmstadt. Darmstadt was of no industrial importance and chosen because the wooden houses made easy targets and were more flammable. An act of extreme savagery indeed.

And you think that such attacks were not justified?
Odd. I think it was totally okay.

 

[joG]

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.

I am afraid, you are totally right.

 

[joG]

This starving into submission thing happened on both sides in the world wars. I never said that the German bombings of British cities were any better.

No, actually it doesn't, on the contrary. It's an interesting point because as far as I heard the Coventry raid (and the "blitz" in general) strengthened the resolve of the British people. Yet the RAF bombed civilians to weaken the resolve of the German people. Of course, the outcome was the opposite. Maybe not all but much of this was predictably senseless killing of German civilians, and on top of that a waste of human and technical resources on the British side.

What we've been talking about all the time is bombings which weren't actually necessary to stop the German military.

The German SS made many people lose their sympathy for the German civilians, because it's all Germans. It's the error of collective thinking and collective judging that is the problem here. And it is worthwile contemplating for a moment that because of that way of thinking, a few hundred thousand extra people died that could have lived on. Now what do we do with this today, with a distance of 70 years? I'd say, something better than falling back into the old WW2 era way of thinking and judging people.

Did you live back then? I'm asking because you keep saying "we" and you seem very personally involved.

I know a lot of Germans that argue like that. I guess it makes them feel better to think that others were also bad. I personally think it stupid, because they then look as if they still did not understand. But somehow they don't see that. Probably as a result of so many people infected by that bug in Germany. But that is understandable in a country, where practically everyone at that time was implicated in mass murder and every taxpayer made it possible in his own small way.

 

[joG]

Chatter, first of all, it's not "me" and it's not "you". You can say whatever you want about the holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, or the "Blitz" without attacking me, and I can say whatever I want about the bombing of German cities without attacking you. I'm not going to limit my perspective.

My point is that the murderers from the SS and parts of the Wehrmacht were mostly not in the cities. Some Germans reaped what other Germans sowed. Your way of justifying the RAF's deliberate killing of civilians by criminalizing the German people of the time and saying that any killed German deserved to die is poor taste. Why are you speculating about what the Stalinaist Soviet Union would have done? They were in Germany and they did whatever they wanted to do. And yes, if you add it up it was worse than the bombings. I'm not saying it was wrong of the British military to occupy Germany, I'm just saying that some bombings, and the same is true for the German bombings, should not have happened.



That part I agree with. I wasn't actually judging the way the British treated their POWs, but the way the BBC made an "oh look how lovely we Brits are" show out of it was rather funny.

Yes it's admirable what people sometimes do when necessary. For instance, there were people in Germany who risked their lives by spending bombing nights in old churches and extinguishing any fire that came, to preserve some of the world's cultural heritage. And I could talk about unsung heroes who shot down British marking bombers which caused the bomber fleet to hit an area of fields and miss the city center that they were heading for. Thereby saving thousands of lives which would have been senselessly wasted otherwise. I could talk about a large Berlin underground network of people housing and giving food to Jews who were in hiding - and all of it being futile because Sir Arthur Harris had decided to bomb civilians. You see, with countries of the size of Britain or Germany, it's always a question of which side, which aspect you portray.[/QUOTE]

I think it is silly to argue that the bombings were wrong. The German population had elected the man that wanted Lebensraum and had written so in his book. It was part of the war effort. It was paying for that effort. It was building bombs or feeding the slaves that were building the bombs. I have no sympathy for the snivelling arguments I hear from Germans all the time.