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To: lentulusgracchus
I second that. I'm unaware of any situation in the Second World War in which Eisenhower ordered attacks on civilians. The air war was another story, but at least the American raids had legitimate targets, like the notorious ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt and the refineries around Ploesti. The British night raids were more problematic, but even at night the British made attempts to target, using visual references and the "H2S" black boxes, and in any case they resorted to night raiding (as had the Germans) because of their casualty experience in attempting daylight raids.

Hundreds of thousands of German ghosts may disagree.

Deliberate savaging of civilian targets was something more typical of the German side (Rotterdam, London, the V-weapon offensives, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau's gratuitous shelling of Deal during their Channel breakout, Ouradour, Lidice, half a hundred Polish and Russian towns). However, any fairminded person would have to admit that Sherman's march to the sea did adumbrate this kind of warfare, which had no precedent since the Thirty Years' War, or even the Hundred Years' War.

What about what the British did to the highlanders?

1,802 posted on 03/28/2004 2:16:57 AM PST by #3Fan (Kerry to POW-MIA activists: "You'll wish you'd never been born.". Link on my homepage.)
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To: #3Fan
The Germans who died in World War 2 can take their complaints to the front desk of hell.

Okay, the British "puttings down" among the Scots borderlands and among the Irish after the Boyne would be another couple of cases.

1,818 posted on 03/28/2004 5:39:00 PM PST by lentulusgracchus (Et praeterea caeterum censeo, delenda est Carthago. -- M. Porcius Cato)
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