Prime Minister Chamberlain had given an assurance that "the British Government would never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children and other civilians for the purpose of mere terrorism."
However, Churchill's policy was different, as Spaight put it, "Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets... It gave Coventry, Birmingham, Sheffield and Southampton the right to look Kiev, Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol in the face. Our Soviet allies would have been less critical of our inactivity if they had understood what we had done... Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones.'
The difference between the German Air Force and the RAF was that the Germans designed their air force bombers to aid the ground forces in attacks, while the RAF designed heavy bombers for area attacks. Veale discusses the difference between tactical bombing in support of the army vs. terror attacks. Ground attacks on cities supported by bombers (tactical bombing) as the Germans did is very different than targeting civilians for terror as happened in Dresden.
In a nutshell, Spaight admitted that thousands of British died because Churchill wanted Coventry . . . to look Kiev . . . in the face. As to Guernica, the Germans never admitted a policy of targeting civilians, unlike the British, and Guernica had armaments factories - check Wikipedia for info on Guernica, such as the shooting of a captured German pilot by the Communists prior to the bombing.
As Voltaire said, Beware of people who can make you believe absurdities, because they can make you commit atrocities. Even Churchill came to the realization that the RAF had committed an atrocity at Dresden.
In a nutshell, Spaight admitted that thousands of British died because Churchill wanted Coventry . . . to look Kiev . . . in the face.
Again your Spaight quotes are quite selective.
JM Spaight's Bombing Vindicated."Today we can hold our heads high. Could we have done so if we had continued the policy which we adopted in September, 1939, and maintained until May, 1940? It was a selfish policy after all, an ungenerous one, an unworthy one. We were prepared to see our weaker neighbours' cities devastated by air attack—of the tactical order—to bear their misfortunes with equanimity, to do nothing to help them in the only way in which we could help at all. (We had no great army then to oppose to the German hosts, and the mills of sea power grind very slowly.) We were prepared, in fact, to leave them to their fate provided we could save our own skin. Our Great Decision As it was, we chose the better, because the harder, way. We refused to purchase immunity—immunity for a time at least—for our cities while those of our friends went up in flames. We offered London as a sacrifice in the cause of freedom and civilisation."
Britain began bombing Germany only after Germany had bombed Poland, and Norway, and Belgium, France and Holland. Even then Britain tried to bomb only precise military targets with small numbers of aircraft.
Spaight isn't saying what you want him to at all.
Britain was attacked and already well into a war with Germany. Where is the equivalent situation for Al Quada to attack us on 9/11 as you claim?
The fact is that Spaight never wrote the above. It was quoted as coming from Spaight's book by Kenneth McKilliam in an article called How World War II Came About.
McKilliam claims the quote comes from a book by Spaight called "The Splendid Decision", but Spaight never wrote a book called that. He does use the phrase "The Splendid Decision" in Bombing Vindicated.
The article was written for Spearhead magazine, published by John Tyndall. Spearhead was the official magazine of the National Front, then the British National Party, of which Tyndall was the leader.
The national front, and now the British National Party, are both far right fringe parties in the UK, and regarded by most people as fascists. Kenneth McKilliam was an election candidate for the national front.
What a load; it's not just about Guernica or Dresden.
The Nazi party very roots began in the targeting of civilians... even its own country's civilians. German built concentration camps and ovens were full of civilians from all parts of Europe who ended up there because their fellow civilians didn't lift a finger to stop it and even pushed for it by joining the party and propelling their artistic ex-corporal to power.
The victims of the camps weren't victims because the German army wanted them there. They were there because the German people aka *civilians*, and the collaborators in other nations who culled their own civilian populations for victims sent theirs too, and the media of the time were all complicit in sending them there.
Civilians looked the other way when Hitler's minions before the war started slaughtering the retarded and the crippled first. They just kept showing up to those rallies for years , even once some realized they were afraid not to. So long as they thought they could survive under Hitler or some other Nazi they would continue to do so.
There's nothing sacred about being a civilian. Hitler depended on masses of civilians to get into power.
If someone has shot the SOB before he made it there would be an outcry about assassinating a civilian. He was a star at the time, even here in the US he had a following of the biggest loser "civilians" you could ask for.
Sure, it would have been just peachy if Dresden hadn't been toasted. But it was brought to ruin and yet in the sum of all things the war ended with a better outcome than if Hitler had been given free reign, and I have to wonder what purpose there is to trying to extract endless "admissions of guilt" from the people who - thankfully - won the war?
The purpose seems only to try to establish some sort of twisted moral equivalence between Britain and Nazi Germany, and even between nations and anarchic entities and terrorist groups. No good can come of that.
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