Welcome to A2K, miikyaapii, and thanks for your response.
I must admit that it really better to burn babies and barbeque women of other nations than let this happen to one's own.
(Just bad luck that a couple of my relatives were among those.)
Miikyaapii
I take it you live in a town or city that has never been bombed. Welcome to A2K btw.
Was the bombing of Dresden "an atrocity to mankind"?
Walter was correct in stating the official count of the Dresden victims is 35,000.
It was not 135,000 or as the holocaust denier David Irving claimed, 250,000. If the difference is of no matter, then there is no difference between 5,000 or 250 . This is not to minimize the horrific bombing, but to put the bombing in an accurate context.
There is a book about Irving is called "Lying About Hitler" by Richard Evans. Irving claimed he was libelled by the historian Deborah Lipstadt. She accused him of falsification and manipulation of the historical record. Irving sued her and Penguin books.
David Irving wrote about forty history books. His most famous book
is "The Bombing of Dresden." He claimed that 250,000 civilians were killed in the bombing of Dresden. One of the chapters of Richard Evan's book deals with that claim. Now, Evans was appointed to be the "expert witness" for the libel trial and he spent two years preparing for the trial.
German historians generally accept a much lower death count from the bombing -- about 35,000. Evans says it is odious to debate the issue.
Here's the wild card! The best way of dealing with Irving's version of the destruction of Dresden was found in 1985 by his German publishers, who appended to the title page of Irvng's book (The Destruction of Dresden) a little description, "a novel."
Irving lost his libel suit and the trial utterly destroyed his reputation as a genuine historian.
Nontheless, the killing of about 35,000 people in a hellish bombing is horrible enough. Ir does not need hyperbole to make it so.
Billy
35 or 250
'000 the actual figure is immaterial. Was it a war crime in your view? That is the question.
I think it was, although I don't expect anyone to be charged.
But it would be appropriate in my view for Britain and the USA to acknowledge that much of the bomb damage inflicted on Germany, particularly in 1945, was unnecessary and to express regret.
I don't know the exact definition of "war crime" but definitely some of those bombings where absolutely unnecessary for winning this war. Dresden was, as far as I know, just an act of revenge. It was no town of strategic value.
Steve, It was a different time when the allies bombed Germany toward the end of WWII. For those families who lost loved ones during the war, most will answer in the positive. I would also think that most Brits would answer in the postive - even today. IMHO, the more critical question is were we justified in killing over 3,000 innocent Iraqi's to get rid of Saddam? c.i.
I agree with you ci
In 1945 Britain was well into its 6th year of war. It was a different time. But with hindsight (a luxury not available at the time) I think what the allies did to Germany was wrong, although the policy and the technical ability of city destruction was by that time so well developed that probably no one could stop it. It had a momentum of its own.
Regarding Saddam. No I think the war was unnecessary and illegal, but I will acknowledge some good things have come out of it ...just don't press me too hard right now on what those might be!
But I am glad Saddam has gone, and I think the war was fought about WMD, in particular nuclear weapons, but not for those Saddam possessed (he had none) but for the nuclear weapons Iraq would in time, under the Ba'athist regime, develop.
Just found a very interesting webside about
Winston Churchill and Dresden
That is an interesting website Walter. However being an educational tool, it gets kids to think about whether Churchill was villain or hero and doesn't actually give a verdict itself, as far as I can see.
That's correct, Steve, - and certainly ("special") some teacher may be glad as well that you recognized that! :wink:
Steve, i feel certain that was a more than sufficient consolation to all the survivors present who lost family and friends . . .
Arthur Harris and Sons, House Removers simply got a little out of hand because they were so peeved--marvelous rationalization.
(Which is not to say that i ignore American responsibility for this kind of thing.)
Some photos of the destruction are to be seen on this BBC-site:
In Pictures: German destruction
The local press in Kassel reported on an aside about a tv-film, which was shown for the first time yesterday in Kassel at this event:
lots of remarkable buildings, which only were slightly damaged, have been knocked down - to be replaced by "modern buildings" in the 50's style.
Here i go again:
The central question of this thread is whether or not the allied bombing campaign is a war crime. More specifically, it refers to the bombing campaign from January to April, 1945. This is a critical period. For references, i would direct your attention to The First and the Last, a war memoir by Adolf Galland, who headed the Luftwaffe fighter branch at the end of the war, and to The Second World War, by Winston Spencer Churchill (i take it you all will know who that is), as well as Decision over Schweinfurt : the U.S. 8th Air Force battle for daylight bombing, by Thomas M. Coffey. This last is very revealing, as it is a policy study of the United States Army Air Force's decisions about daylight bombing, which differed radically from the area bombing practiced by the Royal Air Force.
I will begin with a caveat that i am not here to pick on the Brits. Americans displayed a virulent racism toward the Japanese, and practiced area fire bombing against Tokoyo at the same time as they touted and practiced "precision" daylight bombing over Germany.
In his book on the Second World War, Churchill flatly states that the bombing of Germany was an act of revenge. The initial raids against Berlin, carried out at night by an RAF unprepared for a long and massive air campaign were conducted more to boost morale at home than in any hope of having a serious effect on the German war effort. The German technique of terror bombing with JU 87's and JU 88's was a horrible debacle for them when they attempted it against the British at the opening of the Battle of Britain. The British radar system picked them up immediately, and suffered only minimal damage from those raids, which were directed against the radar system. British fighters such as the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane made minced meat of what were outdated fighter-bombers whose usefulness even in close support roles was limited due to poor performance. They were useful against the Poles, and in the early portions of the Russian campaign because of German air superiority. Against an opponent prepared to contest air superiority, it was a suicide mission.
So the Germans switched to attacking British air fields. Many of these, as well as many aircraft production facilities, were located in Kent, Sussex and Surrey. This was natural, these were the areas of the country with the best flying conditions over the course of a year. Similarly, many early USAAF bases had been located in Texas, and other parts of the South and Southwest. But this made them vulnerable to attacks from northern France. The British, by Churchill's account, were very nearly on their knees in the fighter battles over southern Britain in September 1940, when a frustrated Hitler (not knowing how close the sensible Luftwaffe plan to destroy Britain's fighter resources had come to success) ordered nighttime raids over London. Originally, these raids were intended to hit the dock areas in the east end of the city, and therefore, the poor of London suffered more than others. The Germans also targeted Sheffield, which made good military sense, as it was the heart of the British Steel industry.
But neither the British nor the Germans had ever had a precision bombing doctrine, and neither had a bomb sight of the reliability of the Norden bomb sight device the Americans later introduced. Hitler, as had many "military thinkers" (he only deserves the title because he forced his idiocy on OKW), was much taken with an Italian author's theory of terror bombing on large scale (forget his name). More importantly, a British scholar, Lanchester, had written in 1915 that the object of aerial bombardment should be to: "overwhelm the fire-extinguishing appliances of the community" [under attack, so that a] "city may be destroyed in toto." After the Sheffield raid, the British wanted revenge. I have used the expression "Arthur Harris and Sons, House Removers." This was coined by bomber crews in the RAF, and was a grisly, ironic joke about what they were doing. The British extracted their revenge by area bombing in large industrial cities such as Essen or Dusseldorf, or communications centers such as Hamburg, and Churchill reports that the theory was that factory workers who get no sleep, or who are driven from their homes, will not be effective at work. This is, of course, a disgusting fig leaf which fails to cover the horrible death and destruction wrought.
Early in the war, British intelligence services rounded up every German agent in their country. (This is their boast, at any event, and no one has ever produced documentary evidence to contradict the claim.) Many were "turned," and used to transmit false information to German Abwehr. Churchill describes how false damage reports were sent to the Germans by this means, which showed bombing to have been west of the intended target-the effort was intended to cause the Luftwaffe to bomb further east, and thereby miss their targets. It didn't work too well with the bomber crews of the Luftwaffe, because they could see where their bombs were falling, even if not with precision at night. But it was very effective in causing false targeting with the V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs. By contrast, the unintended fire storm effect caused by high explosive bombing following incendiary raids by the British meant that tonight's targets were often lit by fires still burning from last night's raids. Once the RAF discovered how quickly fires started by incendiary bombs spread when HE bombs were subsequently dropped, they made it a technique. Walter's link to the BBC pictures will give you a pretty grisly idea of what fire storms did to cities in Germany.
By contrast, the American doctrine was to practice daylight, precision bombing. There is a very good book on the development of the Boeing 299, which became the B-17, but i don't, unfortunately, have a reference for you with me. It was originally named the flying fortress, not because of its armament (the original model had no machine guns), but because the USAAF was trying to get funds in tight money times in the 1930's, and claimed their new bomber could defend the U.S. coast line better than the Navy-hence, a flying fortress. In fact, the USAAF under MacArthur's command in the southwest Pacific eventually developed sufficient expertise in bombing individual ships to prove the claim. In Europe, the 8th Air Force intended to use such precision bombing to cripple German industry with daylight raids. The first big raid was sent against Schweinfurt, the home of Germany's ball- and roller-bearing industry (crucial to a war machine reliant upon sophisticated, "overbuilt" tanks, submarines and airplanes), and against the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg. The losses were appalling to 8th Air Force planners, and the entire daylight bombing program was put on hold. They determined that the raids were a failure. This is ironic, because Albert Speer, who was then the Reich's minister for production visited Schweinfurt after that first raid, and estimated that 65% of German ball- and roller-bearing production had been lost for three months.
During the Vietnam War, leftist historical scholars who opposed the bombing of North Vietnam jumped on these sorts of misguided assessments to contend that strategic bombing didn't work. They ignored the collateral effects on the German transportation system, and the death of civilian industrial production which quickly strangled German agriculture and the railway system. Building tanks doesn't do much good if you can't get them from the factory to the front. The Germans were obliged to decentralize their production, and with the heavy damage to transportation systems, this simply further delayed the delivery of things like ball-bearings, engines, generators, etc., which were crucial to the assembly of armored fighting vehicles, aircraft and submarines. In fact, the American daylight raids became even more effective with the advent of the P51 Mustang. In a television interview, Chuck Yeager said: "What the Spitfire could do for 40 minutes, the Mustang could do for eight hours." Adolf Galland confirms the effect of this aircraft, pointing out that Mustangs could escort the bomber streams from Aachen to their target (P47 Thunderbolts, massive, nearly indestructible and dangerous, were short-ranged, and escorted the bombers from Britain to Aachen, and then picked them up at Aachen to escort them home), and when they had turned the bombers over to the Thunderbolts, turned and spent hours shooting up German highways, railroads, air fields-any target of opportunity. He relates that a common experience was for a German fighter pilot to be heading for his home field, nearly out of fuel, with a Mustang on his tail, willing and able to spend hours more in the air. When Goering was asked when he knew the war was lost, he replied: "When I saw the first Mustang over Berlin."
In early 1944, Eisenhower got approval for his "transportation" plan. This switched allied bombing resources to attacks on French and German railways, highways and bridges. It was very effective, and quickly ran out of targets. By the late spring of 1944, they bombers were largely churning up the debris. Rommel, ever astute, looked at the bombing patterns and predicted that the invasion would be in Normandy (see The Rommel Papers, edited by Frau Rommel and B.H. Liddell Hart). By that time, Field Marshall Alexander had advanced far enough north in Italy, that USAAF resources there began bombing Austria and Germany, and the arrival of the Mustangs made it a much safer proposition.
In the period to which Steve refers, January to April, 1945, the Americans were running out of targets for daylight raids. What little effective German production remained had been driven underground, and nothing moved on the highways or railways in daylight-even the night time was very dangerous. The British returned to nighttime area bombing after the Normandy invasion. Given that very little production was being accomplished in the Ruhr or the Saar, and that many of the workers there were now POW's or forced laborers from eastern Europe, any theory about keeping workers awake would have been laughable, had the human tragedy not been so horrendous.
Just about once a month, if not more often, some joker here at A2K repeats Napoleon's old chestnut that history is written by the victors. This is patently false, but what is more ironic, is that the victors often provide the evidence of their own reprehensible actions. It is only necessary to research the scale of the human tragedy in German, and then read Churchill's The Second World War. Most of the reason for not describing this bombing campaign as a war crime has a very schoolyard ring-they started it, they did it first. I would be proud, for my part, if the United States officially apologized to the Japanese for the fire-bombing of Tokoyo. That the Japanese may not have made all the apologies many think they should make has nothing to do with the rightness of our admitting our own crimes. I think, especially after visiting the site Walter linked, and reminding myself of the scale of this horror, that such an apology from Britain to Germany would not be out of order. Those who think differently, are, of course, free to excoriate me here, and make nasty references to my ancestry, while questioning my intelligence.
So I'll take that as 'yes'. :wink:
I laughed aloud at that last foray of yours, Steve, and i also suspect that we may both be repeating ourselves. I couldn't be arsed to read back and compare what i've written today with what i wrote months ago. Seems odd, doesn't it, that i would expend so much energy on that post, but wouldn't scroll back to the beginning . . .
You'll have that with small dogs wearing mortar boards . . .
Setanta wrote:
You'll have that with small dogs wearing mortar boards . . .
Interesting that you are comparing with SMALL dogs ... <away, to re-read books from psychology classes>
My girth and stature are not to be mentioned in polite society, Walter, i'm truly shocked ! ! !
heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee . . .
No problem Set!
Just give us a little warning when the urge to re write War and Peace or the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire takes hold!
I didn't disagree with much in your post btw. I think the RAF raids particularly in 1945 were criminal. But then that's easy to say now. Its saying it at the time that counts, and I don't think I would have been brave enough or informed enough to make a stand against area bombing in 1943-5.
Also what's the point of talking of war crimes? I've no problem in having Winston Churchill or Arthur Harris retrospectively condemned for some of the things they did. But what about the 55,000 aircrew who died? (Thats almost as many in one branch of the RAF as all the American dead in the Vietnam war). How do you tell their relatives that they were engaged in war crimes?
