Posted on 02/13/2013 9:04:00 AM PST by Kid Shelleen
It's the 68th anniversary of the Dresden bombing. In Britain, we don't think about it as much as, perhaps, we should. The bare facts. More than 1,200 RAF and USAAF bombers attacked the city between the 13th and 15th of February 1945, in four raids. They dropped 3,900 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs, killing between 22,000 and 25,000 people, almost all civilians. The city's anti-aircraft defences had all been moved to defend the industrial works of the Ruhr valley. The details are chilling.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the average German was lukewarm to the war....But once France fell, they became very enthusiastic.
No it isn't. The first British civilian death from German bombing was caused on 16 March 1940. Not that this was the catalyst.
The bombing of cities in the Western theater started with the German bombing of Rotterdam on the 14th May 1940. This was explicitly a terror attack which had its desired effect of forcing the Dutch to capitulate.. "Fortress Holland" was forced to surrender due directly to the targeted bombing of its civilians. A point which was not lost on anyone at the time.
The day after this the British abandoned their previous extremely restrictive policy of bombing only military units and started to bomb industrial targets in the Ruhr. The inaccuracy of strategic bombing led to civilian deaths, but these deaths were not the aim of the bombing.
The first German bombs were dropped on London on August 24, 1940. They were almost certainly dropped in defiance of orders, but that didn't make much difference to the people underneath the bombs.
The British attacked the next night with a raid on Berlin, targeting Tempelhof airfield and the Siemens factories in Siemenstad. Hitler then declared (in a famous speech) that if the Royal Air Force dropped so many kilograms of bombs, that Germany would drop a hundred times as many - leading directly to the Blitz.
The whole process of wholesale German v British city bombing kicked off from there.
Ever hear of Guernica?
Otherwise we may as well go back to 1915. Ever heard of Zeppelins?
“The raid was a rush job, a request by the Soviets to an RAF who had no strategic interest in the city. If the RAF ‘spared’ the factories, then it wasnt deliberate. Just sheer luck.
Dresden was an important military hub. Thats why it was bombed, to help the Soviets.”
That may very well be true that Dresden was attacked to help the Soviets. But I don’t follow how you say the RAF had no strategic interest in the city and then go on to say it was an important military hub. wha?
The first wave was high explosives to destroy the buildings. Why come back three more times with incendiary bombs and hit the exact same area over and over, unless the intention was to kill civilians? My only point is to say that this raid from the start doesn’t pass the smell test. Just be honest and say we killed civilians as part of our total war strategy and be done with it.
Sorry, but you are looking at early 20th century history thru a lens created in the last few decades.
It's only during this period that the Democratic vs. GOP opposition has correlated (more or less) with the liberal/progressive vs. conservative split. During previous decades both parties had conservative and progressive wings.
In fact, our party politics have gotten a lot more rational since about 1970. Before that they made little sense at all.
Incendiaries were an important component of night-bombing because fire is not only devastating: it acts as a marker. This was particularly important in cloudy conditions.
Later bombing waves tended to hit the same place because this was night-bombing. Specialist pathfinders might lay flares and TIs to diversify the attacked area once the original target was considered devastated, but the biggest flare target was always the flaming area left by the first wave.
Remember - during WW2 it wasn't trivially easy to hit a city at night. Some German bombers memorably managed to bomb one of their own cities (Freiberg I think) in the early stages of the war.
The subject was Dresden. WW1 was a squabble between cousins. Japan’s ambitions had nothing to do with WW1 and everything to do with securing itself a role as a dominant power in Asia.
At that time there were still people around, active Conservatives, who'd known TR, FDR and the Taft's personally.
BTW, back then we used meeting halls and the mails to communicate ~ worked just as well.
The dichotomy you're talking about as having not occurred until recent times IS WRONG ~
Your point is well taken. Particularly when we have a communist media and a eunuch in the white house.
I gathered that. It helps sometimes though to put the sarcasm tag up.
It was an important military hub, outwith of whether the British had any interest in it. Thats simply a fact.
It was in the Soviet field of operations, and thats why we were asked to level the place.
Strategically for the British, it was too far east for us. Our eyes were further west: the Ruhr, the Rhine and the North German plain.
It was an important military hub, outwith of whether the British had any interest in it. Thats simply a fact.
It was in the Soviet field of operations, and thats why we were asked to level the place.
Strategically for the British, it was too far east for us. Our eyes were further west: the Ruhr, the Rhine and the North German plain.
Except that carpet bombing didn’t end the war. The war ended after Hitler was trapped by the Soviet army and committed suicide.Strategic bombing didn’t end the war in Japan, either - until the “shock and awe” produced by the two (count them, two) atomic bombs. And that was after Curtis LeMay had killed scores of thousands of Japanese in individual nighttime carpet bombing raids on Japanese cities. He had reached the stage where he was inviting the Japanese civilians of a city to evacuate, then devastating that city with firebombs. It seems clear that interdiction of enemy fuel supplies was the productive use of heavy bombers. It wouldn’t end a war by itself - but it would substantially hobble the opponent’s military capability so that opposing armies could victoriously end the war.
The dichotomy I’m talking about is one of Democratic = liberal/progressive and Republican = conservative.
Until recently both parties had liberal and conservative wings.
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