Posted on 02/15/2007 5:43:06 PM PST by Zionist Conspirator
It would be so easy to destroy Iraq or most middle eastern countries. Most of the population is heavily concentrated in cities, with vast unpopulated deserts. I think that if we had 5 thousand B-52's and 30 million dumb bombs, we wouldn't have to put 2 boots on the ground to defeat the entire region. Just bomb their mosques during their 5 daily prayer calls.
"I wish Bush had done a Dresden on Fallujah instead of sending our boys door to door like Avon ladies and then investigating one of them for shooting a wounded terrorist when the MSM got it on tape. We should have killed another 2-300,000 Iraq civilians in this war and many more Afghans as well. MacArthur himself hung nearly 1,000 Japanese agitators in a relatively peaceful occupation. In Iraq we let Al Sadr murder Americans left and right and did nothing while pretending one idiot Arab stooge "PM" after another was "in charge". What a joke. We early on focused stupidly on trying to build a "democracy". We forgot that these are savages, and the enemy. Had we gone in with our bloodlust unchecked, nobody today would be whining out an "Iraqi quagmire"."
POST OF THE DECADE!!!!!!!!!
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror
Your comparison of the Dresden bombing to the attacks on the World Trade Center could use some additional "fleshing out."
1. Do we know, for a fact, that Dresden was bombed simply for the sake of increasing the terror?
2. How many civilians had Hitler's government killed, at home and abroad, in the 5 years before the bombing of Dresden?
How many Muslim civilians (radical or otherwise) had the Clinton and Bush governments killed, at home and abroad, in the 5 years prior to 9/11?
With today's technology it would have been enough, but back then more than half the bombs dropped didn't land anywhere near their targets. HE had to be close to be effective, but with incendiaries a lot of infrastructure could be destroyed even if they missed.
They did. Hamburg was turned to ashes fairly early in the war.
"...they bloody started it..."
I saw on the History channel where they said the the ENGLISH started the bombming of innocent civilians (tongue in cheek). They went on to explain how the first civilian casualty of the bombing was from an English bomber that had a bomb go off in error and destroyed a farmer's shed (nobody hurt). But that got Hitler all pissed and he declared that "they started it" and gave him the "right" to start the Blitz.
At least with Hitler they had to destoy a shed first, nowadays you print a silly cartoon and they get all riled up.
Also we were in it to win as fast as possible. It was not strategic to bomb a little and see if it worked while they moved equipment elsewhere and scattered it making victory even more difficult.
We did not know exactly what they had where and were tqking no chances we might miss some war material or war production facilities.
Actually, the idea was not to reduce the population but to disrupt the economy by making life difficult for workers. The Bomber Command term for the objective of area bombing was "de-housing the enemy".
Well, for one thing, any "kill 'em all" strategy directed at an Arab population would likely destabilize Saudi Arabia, thereby interrupting our oil supply, sending gas prices soaring, and driving the US economy into a depression.
IMO.
Well said!
Ever heard of Hamburg?
If this author is correct that "only" 30,000 "or so" died at Dresden, the losses at Dresden were less than the losses at Hamburg.
Operation Gomorrah , the series of attacks over about a week in late July 1943 killed over 50,000, destroyed a quarter-million houses, and left over a million homeless.
This also seems to be one of the earliest recorded instances of an artificial "firestorm". The streets themselves caught fire. When air-raid shelters were opened well after the attack, the people who had taken refuge in them were melted into greasy puddles on the floor.
It's covered in far greater detail in Martin Caidin's book The Night Hamburg Died, which I've read.
"I notice you have nothing to say about German terror bombing".
For a simple reason - well educated persons know that the British, not the Germans, started the cycle of terror bombing civilians. The RAF Air Secretary admitted it in his book.
From: Advance to Barbarism: The Development of Total Warfare from Sarajevo to Hiroshima (Paperback)
by Frederick J. Veale (Author) on Amazon.com
". . . The accusation leveled against the Germans that they deliberately caused harm to civilians is refuted by the fact that the British started this breach of international law. Veale cites J.M. Spaight's book BOMBING VINDICATED to prove that the British started the deleiberate of German civilians on May 11, 1940 which Spaight called the "Splendid Decision." While the battle for France was being waged hundreds of miles from German civilians, the British, who should have focused their bombing to military targets such as bridge networks in France, bombed innocent civilians who had nothing to do with the Battle of France. In fact, Veale makes a good point that had the British concentrated their bombing on these bridge networks, destruction of these networks would have stopped Hitler's mechanized forces due to the lack of getting gasoline supplies. The German offensive would have stalled and would have been defeated."
No, you can't have my copy.
You are right about lowering the population in Germany after the war. For two years after 1945, people were forced to live on half-rations as a result of the Potsdam Conference. The Marshall Plan ended the starvation when Communism threatened Europe. After the war, Germany was deemed to have an excess of steel capacity capable of rearming the nation. Something like 25% of steel plants were destroyed after the war to assure the Germans wouldn't remilitarize.
Thanks! I added it to my reading list
Such as yourself, I'm sure. < /sarcasm>
...Veale makes a good point that had the British concentrated their bombing on these bridge networks, destruction of these networks would have stopped Hitler's mechanized forces...
That assumes the bombing would have actually destroyed the bridge networks.
Perhaps you're unaware that this took place in the era before laser designators and "smart-bombs".
See post 53 on the error of terror bombing - it may have cost the British the Battle for France. The point is that if terror bombing enemy civilians is ok for the U.S. to do, the enemy, now or in the future, may decide that terror bombing U.S. civilians is ok for them to do also.
Remember what Voltaire said: Beware of persons who can convince you of absurdities, because they can convince you to commit atrocities.
A number of posters here are trying to convince others of the absurdity that targeting civilian women and children with terror bombing is ok. In my opinion - it is not ok for Al Quada to do terror bombing to us, or for us to do to others, as in Dresden.
If you want a long book that has a much wider compass than Lemay alone, read Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." Lemay plays a major role, of course, at the end. It's a fascintating story about people, physics, spies, politics, war strategy, tactics, engineering, Japanese and German nuclear programs, antisemitism in Germany, etc. I could go on, but you get the idea of the scope of the book. Highly recommended if you want to see where Lemay fit in the big picture.
I for one wouldn't be here. My dad was a Marine on the troop transports amassing for the Japan invasion in the summer of '45. Without Little Boy and Fat Man, I like many others here, probably wouldn't be alive.
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