Dresden deserves to be remembered

Dont you start bringing actual facts in to this thread.

I’ll try to do better (or worse) next time.

I read all the way to the end of the comments, and it took some time.

After nearly a decade as an aircrew member aboard B-52s and B-1s, and more than a decade as a planner and a scientific analyst, I confess that I can still experience surprise - well, a little - that so many are still in such denial about the potential of air power. Odd, how they are so uncommon eager to falsify the record about how it won WWII. Those of you who pine for “civilized warfare” are still stuck in the 18th century.

Dresden - and a great many other events - deserve to be remembered, but to lend special emphasis to the reminiscences of an aging POW who artfully and conveniently exposits the Left’s viewpoint, misses the point. We can expect little else today, steeped as we are in attitudes enabled and sharpened by the likes of Kurt Vonnegut Jr (an author of exceptional talent, perversely motivated by what can only be called infantile misconceptions). Just because one American and one Brit were on the ground in Dresden in February 1945, does not lend them any credence. But Americans are nothing if not deaf to irony: the conceit that civilians can be exempted from attack passed generations ago. The world has never been that safe, nor that orderly.

I’m so glad I spent 29 years in uniform, undergirding the freedoms and inalienable rights of so many citizens: in this case, to think so many foolish thoughts. And to voice them. No sarcasm tags here, because I’m not being sarcastic: if you think long enough, you may actually come up with something of use. After all, even a stopped clock is right, twice a day.

More troubling are you moral absolutists dressing up as conservatives. You may congratulate yourselves that you are riding to the defense of “timeless universal principles”, but in the fullness of time I have come to the conclusion that you are too lazy to find out what’s really going on before you open your mouths. It doesn’t take much effort to apply the same yardstick to every situation, regardless of circumstances: collecting data and observing what is going on around you take time, and effort, and money. Uncovering the historical context takes more time and effort; actual insight, and thought, about what to do next, take yet more.

And if the situation involves combat, doing all this can involve real risk. I can forgive you for lack of courage to face hostile fire, but I find your certitude less than captivating.

Decisions, especially in the midst of war, cannot always wait. It is the height of hubris - not to say moral imbecility - to second-guess the decisions made generations ago, by people caught in unpleasant circumstances. And your disdainful moralizing, your condescensing blamestorming, becomes more odious, if you do it from a position of comfort and security ensured by the very privations and sacrifices of those who made those decisions and took actions you are now pleased to turn up your nose at. Your pronouncements are of no merit.

But all these arguments about what is moral, or what isn’t, are as nothing. Indeed, they are rendered as weightless as a single feather, balanced against one simple truth: first, win the war. Then worry about morality.

The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan ended it, avoided an amphib invasion, saved countless Japanese and American lives.

Also saved Japan from being divided, like Germany and Korea, into American and Soviet zones, and with it, likely a civil war that would have made Korea look like child's play.

WOW!!! Great post.

If it was the picture I’m thinking of, I thought that the decapitated airman was Australian.

Well said.

I am a moral absolutist but I don’t see how the allies did anything wrong in Dresden. Those factories are legitimate targets, and its not like we had smart bombs. Wasn’t a bomb landing within a mile considered a “hit”?

You may be right, dfw. But it was well known that Hachioji was the site of the execution of downed allied airmen. By the time I got to Japan in Oct 1965, it was pretty much rebuilt, thanks to an enlightened occupation by Mac Arthur. If I had slogged my way through those jungles, I might not have been so kindly disposed.

After nearly a decade as an aircrew member aboard B-52s and B-1s, and more than a decade as a planner and a scientific analyst, I confess that I can still experience surprise - well, a little - that so many are still in such denial about the potential of air power.

I must say I’m a little surprised myself - that a planner and scientific analyst would confuse potential with realized capability. You flew much more modern aircraft than those which bombed Germany in the early 1940s, and yet I will venture to say that you wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole when a B-52 was level bombing from high altitude and was aiming within 100 yards of you and flying directly toward you. And that’s with radar helping the B-52 know its own velocity much better than the B-17 crew knew their position, velocity, and the wind conditions. Even with the B-2, they realized excellent bombing accuracy by dropping guided missiles known as “smart bombs.”
Which ought to tell you something about the limits of the accuracy potential of WWII bombers.

One cannot help but note that c_I_c comes tantalizingly close, but misses the mark - as do many who *think* they know a lot about something, but do not.

After getting to know many officers from all US armed services and several other (not all allied) nations, I am aghast that most leaders still flounder about only a few steps out of the horse and buggy era, when it comes to their grasp of air power.

I will concede to an imprecise (too concise?) choice of words: in 1918, the strategic impact of air power (only one portion of which can be termed “direct” bombardment) was merely potential: the more foresightful were just beginning to imagine the concepts, while the engineering, manufacturing, and operational developments enabling sufficient ordnance delivery with sufficient accuracy to affect outcomes were yet to be forged. The United States did more than any other nation to turn “potential” into “actual” in the 1930s, and that power was brought to horrific reality in the early 1940s.

Perhaps I should have written that potential to affect outcomes by direct air attack (and a whole bunch of other airpower - created or facilitated capabilities no other poster has yet bothered to bring up) became actualities on a small but decisive scale during World War Two.

Vexingly, the US military establishment itself has been retreating from the level of air power it built up in the late 1940s and 1950s. Some blame the inconclusive involvement in Southeast Asia, but I date it to August 1945: on learning about the use of atomic weapons in action against Imperial Japan, our self-appointed moral betters (the religious and scientific communities, chiefly) promptly declared such methods “morally unacceptable” and commenced what became a decades-long mission to “re-educate” the American public. They claim they had only the highest of motives; perhaps they were upset that we’d won so easily.

Purity of motives aside, by the early 1990s their relentless cultural counterattack bore fruit. It was aided at propitious moments by elements within other defense establishment branches, and even within the United States Air Force itself. Noting the ever-dwindling size of our arsenals, one cannot deny that the peace freaks have been victorious.

On a purely technical level, airborne radar did nothing to reduce bomber miss distances that c_I_c cannot resist lecturing us about ... throwaway comments about B-52s versus B-17s amount to very little: radar allowed a lot of other things to happen, but when pinpoint aiming accuracy was called for, optical systems reigned supreme for far longer than most citizens know. It might interest the forum to learn that various versions of the Norden bombsight saw duty in Southeast Asia. B-52 bombing and navigation systems of the day (none of which remain in service today) were designed for other tasks; the “guided missiles” and “smart” bombs c_I_c purports to know something about are of no moment to this discussion, as they operate by principles that are categorically different.

Many additional blunders have been committed in this thread, on levels from the minutely technical to the most overarching concepts of conflict. I have neither the time nor the bandwidth to refute them all - assuming I could do so without boring the forum into a coma.

Suffice to say that objections to air campaigns of WWII reduce to the complaint - endlessly repeated - that it somehow the Allies were not playing “fair” by raining death and destruction from on high. All the moralistic verbiage spilled across countless pages since then amount to precious little beyond post hoc window dressing: it bears repeating that complainers have gotten the rhetorical cart before the horse.

First, win the war. Then, worry about morality. If this formulation bothers you, I can only remark parenthetically that if we fail to win, all talk of morality (or the lack of it) stops.

A masterpiece of a post.

>>>>>Not exactly. Germany invaded on 1 September, USSR on 17 September, after Poland had more or less been defeated.

Interesting that the Soviet Union didn’t start fighting Imperial Japan until the US had nearly defeated her.

I sense a pattern here...<<<<<

To be honest Soviets and Japan had a non-aggression treaty. For that reason Russians had to imprison US airmen landed in Russia after raids on Japan (thus they cheated and sent Americans back home via Central Asia and Iran).
Soviet participation in Far East became an option after Yalta conference. Churchill and FDR persuaded Stalin to attack Japan and he agreed on condition to launch an invasion in three months after Germany’s surrender.
And he did exactly three months later as promised.
Soviets actually did a good job against the Japanese. In short, they obliterated a million-strong Kwantung Army. Due to an original plan, Soviets had to participate in a mainland Japanese invasion but US backed off.

Thank you! That was informative!

Well said.

Same as it ever was.

I won’t go into whether the Germans knew about the Holocaust or not since that’s going to be a debate until the end of time (at most, I’d probably say that it was indeed closer to complete secrecy since I remember seeing in a documentary that Heinrich Himmler actually got scolded for giving any hint at all about it in a phone call about the planned genocide at the SS headquarters. No reason to claim most of the populace knew if Himmler, of all people, got scolded for potentially blowing the operation via a phone call in his own SS headquarters.).

However, I WILL mention this bit: The German people never “put” Hitler in power, because he was never actually elected into the Chancellorship in the first place, he was appointed to the position by Paul Hindenberg. This was made pretty clear in the RiseOfHitler website. And quite frankly, they had pretty bad options all around. Even if they didn’t elect the Nazis, the other parties weren’t much better, such as the German Communist Party which were the Bolsheviks in all but name and the Social Democrats who were basically Fabian Socialists. I always get irritated with when people act like the German People had any real say in Hitler gaining power. Last I checked, “appointed to the position by the actual leader of the country” =/= “the people directly electing that person”. And bear in mind, I’m someone who utterly hates the democratic process largely thanks to a lot of Christians being massacred by democracy since the French Revolution. If ANYONE ought to be blamed within Germany for Hitler’s rise, it was Paul Hindenberg and his staff (though to be fair, Hindenberg was undergoing dementia, and he also really wanted to retire from being president, but Hitler made running again unavoidable). Doesn’t help either that the SA were engaging in a lot of voter intimidation (and let’s be fair, I could easily say America was responsible for a tyrant like Obama being elected president under the exact same circumstances).

I’m pretty much a moral absolutist in a lot of things, mostly because God requires me to be. And I have to say, Dresden was ultimately necessary to do based on what I’ve read, about as necessary as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (heck, if anything, such WAS moral ultimately, since it’s either that or let the enemy continue rebuilding its supplies. And it’s also unlikely there were many civilians in Dresden anyway.). It was a major weapons production center and railine junction, and last I checked, eliminating the ability of the enemy to create and transport weapons and materiel is a viable military strategy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole “controversy” about Dresden was manufactured by Stalin as anti-Western propaganda. If there was any true atrocity that we had conducted, it’s that we even sided with the Soviets at all, and that we didn’t even bother punishing the Soviets at Nuremberg (oh, and also muzzled Patton as well from going after the USSR, which we really should have). Well, that, and if we go by Saving Private Ryan, it’s our shooting a couple of Ost division members who were clearly surrendering (don’t know if that actually happened or if that was made up by Spielberg, though).

As far as the avoiding attacks on civilians, that unfortunately ended with the French Revolution when thanks to so-called “Enlightenment thought” (which if you ask me did far worse for everyone), they pretty much demanded the people be merged together with the military.

And in any case, the whole “Rules of Engagement” have done far worse for war by making it more prolonged. If there are rules to be had, it’s stuff done within reason like no interrogating someone just because.

Do your homework. The Nazis won 235 seats in the Reichstag after the 1932 election. That gave them the power to form a government. They were voted into power by the German people and Hitler was named Chancellor.

No, I don't think it's too broad and I'm beyond fed up with moral idiots calling Dresden a war crime. The Luftwaffe flattened Warsaw, they burnt out the heart of Rotterdam and Coventry. They started the damn war!. In a speech in 1943 Josef Goebbels gave a stem winding speech at the Berlin Sportsplatz and thunderously asked the German people “Do you want total war?’’ And they thundered back “Yes’!’’. Well they got it. Tough shit for Dresden.

My ignorance is shocking? WTF are you talking about? American day time losses over Germany were appalling until the arrival of long range P 51 fighters. You're not telling me anything I don;'t know.