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BOMBING OF ROTTERDAM
Hitler had envisioned needing only one day to beat the Dutch army. The operation was now stretching into five days. On May 14, 1940 General Schmidt (German Commander of the 39th Army Corps) issued an ultimatum to Colonel Scharroo, the Dutch Commander of Rotterdam. Rotterdam was to be destroyed if the troops did not surrender. General Winkelman, Commander-in-Chief of the Dutch armed forces, wanted to play for time. He asked Scharroo to request a second ultimatum. Schmidt ordered the bombardment postponed due to the further surrender negotiations. He had a new ultimatum drawn up at 1:20 p.m. and allowed Scharroo three hours to surrender. However, German bombers appeared within mere minutes. Panicking, Schmidt ordered red flares to be let off to indicate surrender. It was too late. One squadron could abort its attack in time, but the planes approaching from the east dropped their bombs on the City. The bombing lasted for fifteen minutes and the resulting disruption was beyond belief. Houses were on fire and the power failed. The whole city was in a state of chaos. Rotterdam mourned some 800 dead, while 78,000 people were homeless. Half an hour before the second ultimatum expired, Scharroo signed the surrender of Rotterdam.
Life is too short to have historical discussions with people who don't even know history.
Hitler used massive bombing compaigns with the express intent of terrorizing the allied nations, Britain in particular.
No, you've got it all backwards. This was the British and American policy - terror bombing of civilians, including not just Germany and Japan but also Italy and occupied France (why do you think the French hate Americans so?). I doubt you could even name a German air-raid where mroe than 1000 people died.
The Cato Institute (Nazi Apologists????) has an article on the subject here:
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0995d.asp
However, in the throes of battle it is not always so easy to determine the exact amount of military action needs to be taken, especially when the uncertainty of a horrific war looms over your psyche.
Are you familiar with the harmless medieval town of Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber? In the "throes of battle" on Easter Sunday in 1945, a bomber group decided that having run out of other targets, now would be a good time to flatten Rothenburg, so they did. I think its fairly easy to question such decisions as they are happening.
Don't get hyper-focused on Dresden. What was done to Dresden was what was done to nearly every city and town from Normandy to Lithuania.
Britain's and America's roles in WW2 as morally equivalent to Germany's genocide is intellectually dishonest.
Killing innocent civilians is killing innocent civilians. Period. There is total moral equivalence.
Had the Anglo-American forces lost, the Wehrmacht War Crimes Burueau would have strung up "Bomber" Harris and Gen. Eisenhower just as quickly as we hung Gen. Keitel and Air Marshall Goering. And with just as much justice I might add.
It was never the American policy to terrorize Germany into surrender via indiscriminate bombing of civilians. Note that the 99.99% of the American strategic raids took place during the day, which would make for more accurate bombing, but which placed the American crews at far, FAR greater risk -- a risk not necessary when you're bombing something as large as a major population center which can be easily hit even at night. Their targets were never cities in general but ball-bearing plants, rail yards, aircraft factories, etc. The bombing proved not to be as accurate as hoped but it was NEVER thought by the Americans that they could terrorize Germany into surrender via terror bombings. They had just seen this very strategy fail against England for one thing. And even before that, they thought bombs were wasted on civilians -- instead they should be aimed at bonafide strategic military targets to have any effect at all on the enemy's ability or will to wage war.
True, the first German raid on British civilians was a navigation error, but not from that moment on. When England bombed Berlin a few days later, Hitler specifically ordered the terror bombings, aka The Blitz, which only stopped when he needed the planes for Barbarossa.
That the Germans never matched the number of civilians killed in air raids had nothing to do with a lack of desire to do so on their part. It had to do with the fact that -- despite all this talk of German technological superiority -- they never built a strategic bomber even remotely comparable to American B-17's and B-24's, and British Lancasters. (It cost them the war in the East because their tactical twin-engine bombers didn't have the range to reach Russian factories East of Moscow.)
Oh, and the French hate Americans because they are jealous girly-men. It's a development from France becoming the center of postmodern wuss-dom after the war. But it was hard to find a French citizen who hated Americans when they liberated Paris. Except for the collaborators, of course...
Well, then, now that you've admitted that the Nazis targeted civilian populations as a matter of policy, I suppose you'll be bowing out of this thread.