I think people around W should keep their mouths shut .
It’s an difficult moral choice. You kill the people there with the bombs but shut down the gas chamber.
Ask these folks....http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1951975/posts
Clinton would have apologized for not arguing more forcefully that it should have been bombed, expressing regret that his advice was not taken.
Will he cry and say the US should have bombed the terrorist states that surround Israel?
A typical WW II bomber might be able to hit the camp, maybe. I doubt that would do much more than delay the Germans by a couple of days and keep a bomber from hitting targets that would end the war faster.
If I were an Army Air Corps general at the time, I would have had a very tough time not bombing the camp, but the only way to stop the killing was to conquer Germany, thus every mission had to be to that end.
Forget about Auschwitz..it’s yesterdays history.
Care about stopping future killing of Jews.... bomb Iran instead.
The idea is consistent with Bush’s WOT strategy: destroying the camps, whether it is a torture and killing camp or a camp where terrorists train to torture and kill.
There’s been debate about this topic for decades and it’s always easy to make lofty moral judgements after the fact. The Nazis were so insanely determined to exterminate the Jews that I don’t think one life would have been saved had Auschwitz been flattened. The Jews would have died in sealed boxcars or else been murdered elsewhere.
The cat should of married its kindergarten sweetheart!
Oh man, the Opposition is going to have a field day with this one....
Bombing then was good for +/- five miles. Worse at night.
Nazi’s could kill anywhere.
After Bush performs his “moral calculus” regarding Israel and palestine, he throws a backhanded compliment to Israel “he would have bombed Auschwitz” Like that is going to make things better. As Bush sells out Israel.
What happened to George Bush?
And 70 years from now the grandaughter of Chelsea Clinton the first woman president is saying the same thing about the nuclear processing plants in Iran that allowed over 1000 simultaneous small nuclear devices to be detonated in the US and knocked us lower than a third world nation for over 10 years.
Mr. President:
History does not reveal her alternatives
One of the great mysteries of WWII was why FDR pursued the policy of unconditional surrender against the Germans and ignored the many secret overtures to the US and UK by the German resistence for help in overthrowing the Nazis...several overtures made by the head of German intelligence Wilhelm Canaris...who was ultimately executed by the Nazis.
There are many historians (Thomas Fleming among them) who believe that these were tragic errors by FDR that cost millions of lives (including the Holocaust victims) and laid the groundwork for the Communist domination of post-WWII eastern Europe
Operationally and strategically idiotic statement.
1. A concentration camp is basically nothing more than a barbed wire enclosure surrounded by firepower. Any bombing damage can be repaired in hours.
2. The gas chambers were not essential for the killings. They were "luxuries". The gas chambers just made is psychologically easier for German troops to kill in mass quatities. If the gas chambers were not there, the method originally used by the Nazis ( dig trench, machine gun victims, refill trench ) would then have been used again.
3. Reaching Auschwitz without fighter escort would have decimated the Eigth Air Force. (The Eighth Air Force suffered 50,000 killed as it was.)
4. Redirecting bombing efforts away from German war making capabilities and massacring your own bomber assets would have prolonged the war and ultimately increased the number of Jews killed.
Hind sight is always 20/20. We knew about German concentration camps before we got into the war. Humphrey Bogart even declared in “Casablanca” (filmed in late 1941) that he had spent time in and was released from a Nazi concentration camp. Most leaders figured they were work camps for political, religious and idealogical undesirables. It was expected that life at such places would not be pleasants, but nothing prepared the Allied leadership for the shocking truth they learned in 1945.
The Allies didn’t bomb the concentration camps for the same reason they didn’t bomb POW camps. Had they known what was really happening, I imagine they would have made an effort to take out the roads and railroads feeding the camps.