Posted on 02/13/2017 4:33:00 PM PST by nickcarraway
Dresden's mayor has used the event to remind participants of the brutalities of war, even in the 21st century. During World War II, Allied forces firebombed the German city of Dresden, leaving 25,000 people dead.
Around 12,000 people on Monday gathered in Dresden and joined hands to form a human chain in a message of "peace and reconciliation" marking the anniversary of the deadly firebombing of the city by Allied forces towards the end of the Second World War.
The act aimed at reminding the participants of the brutal bombing, considered one of the Allied forces more controversial acts during the war.
"In this world, several conflicts are being carried out in a warlike manner and human rights are being trampled on," said Dresden Mayor Dirk Hilbert.
"This suffering affects us directly in a globalized world," he added, placing a white rose on a memorial of the controversial attack.
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.com ...
The blood of those innocents is on the hands of Hitler, alone.
Russia did not invade Japan.
>It started when the Luftwaffe firebombed Rotterdam.
Never happened. The Germans bombed the train station with conventional explosives and the whole city went up because it was a mostly wooden city. They had big plans for the factories and losing them in the fire was viewed as loss for Germany.
The allies and the mass terrorbombing advocates started calling it a terror bombing just as they called the perfectly normal bombing of Warsaw a terror bombing. The allied propaganda machine had a negative effect in the defence of the Netherlands as they so over played what happened that rest of the country surrendered to avoid another Rotterdam to avoid what was described by the propaganda.
The only not tit for tat terror bombing that the Nazi’s did was at Gruneka during the Spanish Civil War. The Luftwaffe concluded that the terror bombing campaign increased enemy resolve to fight rather than weaken it and the tactic was dropped from thier war plans.
>The Germans made the rules. We played by them. Too bad for them.
The British made the rules and the allies persisted in them long past the point where it was clear they didn’t work.
>Would you have preferred a different outcome?
Yes, we start bombing the German transportation grid in 1943 and win the war in 1944.
>Russia did not invade Japan.
The Russian invasion of and the colaspe of the Japanese army Manchuria had a very large effect on moving Japan towards surender. However, it was our nuking of Japan that triggered the Russian invasion as they to grab wanted some of the Japanese held land before Japan surrendered in the face endless nuke attacks.
I thought at Tehran and Yalta Russia's assistance in fighting Japan had been secured?
No doubt a combination of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to the conventional bombing raids, combined with Russia's declaration played a very significant role in Japan's decision to surrender.
>I thought at Tehran and Yalta Russia’s assistance in fighting Japan had been secured?
As was typical with Stalin he was waiting until someone else did all the heavy lifting just as he did in Poland when he was allied with Hitler. In this case he was waiting for the invasion of Japan so Japan would remove troops from the mainland when the nukes forced his hand.
>No doubt a combination of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to the conventional bombing raids, combined with Russia’s declaration played a very significant role in Japan’s decision to surrender.
Conventional bombing increased Japanese resistance. The reason nukes are effective is the shock effect where as bombing raids don’t carry nearly that level of shock.
Yep now we’re eating sushi
maybe if we do the right thing everyone can enjoy kebabs again
No Mr. Goebels, Rotterdam wasn’t an attack on a train station. The entire wooden medieval city center was attacked along with wide areas of residential neighborhoods.
The Krauts were not trying to stop the Dutch train network from helping the war effort. They were demanding a Dutch surrender and the bombing of the cite was an “or else”. The Germans weren’t after a military target.
Same for Warsaw, the Germans went after a wide area of the city center with HE and firebombs with the goal of spreading panic. They weren’t going after a military target.
And as for Germans deciding they can’t terrorize a population, they kept trying to do so until the Luftwaffe and SS were crushed. Hell, they even named the V-1 and V-2 “vengeance” weapons. They launched them into a circle 7 miles wide if they were on their game. They did this until the month before the war ended. They were working on America bomber and rocket with the goal of hitting New York. The Germans obviously believed in terror bombing until they were blasted into being nice people.
Germans and Japanese both are very nice now, and it took Dresden attacks to do it.
“Conventional bombing increased Japanese resistance. The reason nukes are effective is the shock effect where as bombing raids don’t carry nearly that level of shock.”
Every reading of Japanese people of that era holds that the firebombing of Tokyo shocked them more than the atomic bombings. Conventional B-29 bombing of Japan didn’t increase Japanese resistance. They were weakened in spirit and knew the end was coming. That nation was falling into despair from the B-29s roaming with near impunity and with the USN Battleships and carriers pounding the home islands at will.
This revisionism is everywhere that the 8th air force bombings had no effect on Germany, that the japan firebombings did no real good, that we could have bypassed the Philippines, New Guinea, Iwo Jima, etc.
The truth is all of those things hurt them, and hurt them badly.
My readings concur. The B-29 raids really impacted the Japanese. There was very little defense against them. Their war production had plummeted as had their food production. If we’d wanted to we could have starved them to death. Imagine how history would play that in today’s pc world.
“Oh yes they did. Goebbels made a stemwinding speech in 1943 where he bought a crowd of thousands to their feet screaming for total war.”
Ten years before, March 1933, Hitler ended democracy in Germany and passed a decree “allowing for the arrest of anyone suspected of maliciously criticizing the government and the Nazi Party.”
By 1943 the Nazi party had been jailing it’s critics and opponents for years.
The reaction of a crowd to a public speech by Goebbels in 1943 had all the authenticity of any crowd in a one party state ruled by what historian Paul Johnson calls a gangster regime. Some will be true believers and others will know it’s in their best interest to be enthusiastic. North Korea is a current example.
German patriots had been plotting to get rid of Hitler as early as 1938. And Rommel would be one that paid with his own life just one year after Goebbels’ speech.
That’s laughable. Japanese resistance intensified right to the very end of the war and in Germany Gobels admitted in his own diaries that the destruction of German cities increased troop resolve and war output, a view also afirmed by miltary commanders like Hans Von Luck in his book panzer commander.
Did London lose hope during the Blitz? The people gained resolve and fought harder. How about during the V2 raids?
Terror bombing advocates were convinced that it would work if only they could murder on an ever increasing scale and they refused to examine data that showed that thier butchery was ineffective.
Unlike Germany and Japan Islam isn’t really open to change. The violence and intolerance of any rival is inherent in the Koran and waiting there for any group that starts taking the Koran seriously.
Nazism was something of a pagan aberration that has no deep roots in German culture. Japan is unlikely to become a problem for its neighbors unless they start claiming once again that their Emperor is divine, which they sort of abandoned in 1946. At any rate Japan won’t get any support from the outside, unlike Muslim countries do.
>My readings concur. The B-29 raids really impacted the Japanese. There was very little defense against them. Their war production had plummeted as had their food production. If we’d wanted to we could have starved them to death. Imagine how history would play that in today’s pc world.
B29 raids at 4,000 feet was amazing effective on indrustal targets once the Japanese air defense system was smashed, however the primary problem with the Japanese economy and food production seemed from the US Navy sinking all thier cargo ships(Mostly sub work, one of the greatest but seldom talked campaigns from ww2). Japan has few natural resources and had to import most items from the mainland. Note that food production is done in rural areas far from the terror bombings.
The Japanese were resigned to fighting to the bitter end knowing that they might even cease to exist as a people. It’s a trait inconceivable to the Western mind but it’s bound up in Japanese ideas of honor and obeying the Emperor.
They were willing to tough out all of the bombing and invasion that we could hurl at them.
But the atomic bombs were different. They were like a force of nature, and they allowed the Emperor to quit fighting without the Japanese people losing face. In an odd way the bombs saved many millions of Japanese from the death which conventional war would have inflicted upon them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.