Posted on 08/23/2007 12:54:32 PM PDT by lizol
for reference by the forum:
“The Dreden Legend”
by Rebecca Grant
in “The Air Force Magazine”, October 2004, Vol. 87, No. 10
http://www.afa.org/magazine/oct2004/1004dresden.asp
(in pdf format):
http://www.afa.org/magazine/oct2004/1004dresden.pdf
As it was, the time line went like this:
Dec. 16, 1944 through 25 January 1945: Battle of the Bulge. The costliest battle for American forces of the entire war in terms of the numbers of soldiers killed over the space of time. 19,000 in five weeks.
13-16 February 1945: Dresden is bombed. Dresden was a recognized center for communications and transportation for the entire southern eastern front. Many of the refugees were soldiers who were reprovisioning there. It was also the largest German city left entirely intact throughout the war. It was bombed on night by 800 British bombers and then two days by 500+ American aircraft. 35,000+ people died...some estimates are much higher, nearly 70,000. At the time, clear reports indicated that German moral, both militarily and civically was crushed by the report, both near and far.
8 May, 1945 V-E Day. Almost 3 months after Dresden.
Do not get me wrong. I have great affinity for the German people as a whole. I have many relatives from there and many friends. I talked to many people during the two years I spent there in the mid-1970's, living on the economy. The vast majority I spoke with admitted at the time that as a people, they had been mesmerized and led, willingly, down the primrose path by Hitler and his cronies. They recognized that it led to their abject and total defeat...and the destruction that was wrought upon them.
At that time, they did not blame us in the least. They recognized that theblame lay with the tyrants who came to pwoer, and to them for not seeing it, despite Hitelrs own writings. They also knew that if they had not lost...the entire world would have experienced a decent ito probably the darkest hours of its entire history.
As with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden was an awful necessity of war that punctuated the allies' will in total defeat of the NAzis. That point was made and taken...and, IMHO, it also worked.
Well, wideawake, let us see.
The Battle of the Bulge was essentially over by January 1st, 1945 (ie all German offensive operations had failed and were over)
The bombing of Dresden was essentially over by the end of February, 1945.
That is about 9 weeks.
In those 9 weeks:
The Soviets capture Warsaw.
The Soviets capture most of Eastern Europe (up to the Danube River)
Over 1 million Soviet troops approach the Polish/German border
The US Army (with Allies) captures all of the low countries and enters Germany.
Yep - it sure makes sense to fire-bomb a military insignificant German city packed with refugees...like those crazy Germans were on a fricken roll.
Hey - the Nazi also performed medical experimentation on children. Can we do the same on German children and Iraqi children?
Chuck Yeager said as much in his autobiography. The fighter group he was assigned to were given a strafing mission towards the end of the war. No one was thrilled about it, but they did it.
War is a grim business. If you fight, you do it totally. Hoping that war will never happen again.
Because of Dresden, the Germans were spared a Hiroshima.
War sucks. It sucks more for the losers.
I am totally on board with that thinking.
More people need to understand this.
It wouldn't matter if they did, there is an essential moral difference between aggression and defense.
2banana, with due respect, in your estimation I suppose Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also unnecessary. I disagree. The outcome of WWII, both theaters, was a lot closer thing then most of us know, esp. in the early years.
When faced with occupation and slavery our grandfathers waged total war, like the Nazis and Japanese, and they won.
Sorry to post and run, but the whistle just blew. Something to chew over: the victors write the history books. We incinerated a lot of civilians and broke a lot of ceramics in Dresden. You screw with the bull, you get the horns. That’s war.*
[If more Nazis are gathering, now’s the time to bomb them, before they reproduce.]
Dresden was the most significant military target in Germany in February 1945.
The Nazis had already stalled the Soviets at the Polish border and Dresden was the transfer point for 500,000 reinforcements evacuated from France and the Low Countries to hold off the Soviets who had strung their forces over a 600 mile salient.
The Nazi strategy was to continue to hold the Soviets at bay while using the Siegfried line to minimize US/British capitalization on the Battle of the Bulge.
When Dresden went, the Nazis were unable to quickly move reinforcements from West to East and Nazi forces on both Western and Eastern fronts were forced to make rushed and inefficient movements to try and shore up their now-liquid lines.
Eisenhower believed that the key to avoiding several more battles as bitter as the Bulge was to stop the Nazis from reinforcing their Eastern lines.
Destroying Dresden was the key to that strategy - once Dresden was gone, the two wings of Nazi resistance were effectively severed and the Nazis were rolled up.
By so doing, we avoided a costly military invasion and saved many American lives, and even a lot more Japanese lives.
Simply put, we not only defeated them and their will to fight...we CRUSHED that will to fight in the hopes that it would not rise again. And it has been successful.
At the time, the same ratlional held for the Germans. The Nazis were fanatics, and they were smart and ruthless. We had to absolutely crush them and the people who supportedthem. Dresden was a part of that at the end, but, as I said, it punctuted our will in the matter and the fighting, when it did end, (apart from a few more or less minor incidents as compared to the whole) ended with finality.
That finality and then our own compasison to the peoples in those countries after the fighting ended in that manner, saved many, many lives.
In addition to my study of the history of it, I speak as one who lost his only uncle on my mother's side, over Grmany in a bombing raid in late 1944.
Anyway, I'm a bit surprised about how many of the germany threads on this board are WW2 related...it's been 60 years after all, you'd think there is more to report about. It's a bit tiring, commenting on your standpoint regarding WW2 and Nazism all the time.
Or how if Mary Jo Kopechnie had lived she would probably be grateful to Ted Kennedy for bringing comfort to her old age.
If there weren’t large demonstrations of Neo-Nazis in Germany TODAY Americans would probably not give much pause to comment on WWII.
Also, the city of Dreden was not "just full of refugees". Many of what we call refugees now, were soldiers at the time being reprovisioned there. As has been pointed out on this thread, in February 1945 Dresden was a significant military target in the Eastern front and played in to rolling up both fronts by destroying the Nazis ability to move men and material between east and west.
It was a horrific fire strom that it produced that did kill many, many civilians...but it, once again, crushed the will of the population of the German people as well as their military.
It was a horrific result of the all out war World War II was...and in my estimation, it was a necessary punctuation on the will of the allies to crush the will and capability of a bitter and ruthless enemy and her people.
My Grandfather on my Fathers side told me of a similar occurance after VJ-Day. He said units came into their POW/slave labor camps and got as much information as possible on guards and officials who’d abused the crap out of them for 3.5 years and they “took care of them” before the primary occupation forces moved in...
There are a few cities in the Mid-east that should get Dresden treatment.
Ya hear me Mecca? How about you Damascus? Tehran ya paying attention there boy?
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