'If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.'
Posted on 10/01/2008 7:53:54 PM PDT by BGHater
A NEW study claims no more than 25,000 people were killed in the massive Allied bombing of Dresden in the Second World War – far fewer than many scholars have believed. Four years of research being carried out by a team of historians and academics has cast doubt on previous claims that up to 135,000 may have lost their lives in the eastern German city over two days in 1945.
The bombing of Dresden became arugably the most controversial operation carried out by British and US forces during the Second World War as it involved creating firestorms by dropping incendiary bombs.
Controversy has raged for decades over how many people died in the waves of attacks by the Allied bombers.
A recent book by British historian Frederick Taylor, published in 2005, claimed as many as 40,000 lost their lives. But the new commission – which involves dozens of university professors, archivists and military historians – has managed to confirm there were just 18,000 deaths. They have also discovered that police and city officials at the time believed that there were only 25,000 victims.
The medieval city of Dresden, was 85 per cent destroyed by two waves of British bombers on 13 February 1945. US planes blasted the city the next day.
The official death toll has most recently been put at about 35,000, but many scholars believe the actual number was higher as bodies – civilians mostly, fleeing the advancing Red Army in the east – were reduced to ashes in the firestorm.
The Allies hoped the bombing would hurt the Nazis where they would feel it most, and help force their capitulation.
Recently, neo-Nazis in Germany have talked of between 500,000 and a million victims of Dresden, calling the raid a "bombing Holocaust" and comparing it to Hitler's murder of six million Jews.
However, a statement issued by the research team yesterday said: "The commission, in this preliminary report, believes there were a maximum of 25,000 people who died during the February aerial attack."
The team of experts has pored through file stretching for more than 2,600ft in the Dresden state archives and interviewed dozens of witnesses. The commission has also studied aerial attacks, rescue operations, firefighting, and archaeological evidence.
Despite the chaos during the devastation of the bombing, they said they found records of recovery and burial of the dead to be "remarkably orderly".
Dresden's mayor Helma Orosz said: "Through this work of the commission the victims get a face and a name. Behind every single victim is suffering and we should remember this."
'If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.'
Slaughterhouse Five, anyone?
24. As related in paragraphs 5-11 above, Dresden became a military target as (1), and of overriding importance, a primary communications center in the Berlin-Leipzig-Dresden railway complex; (2) as an important industrial and manufacturing center directly associated with the production of aircraft components and other military items, including poison gas, anti-aircraft and field guns, and small guns; and (3) as an area containing specific military installations.
Barely available on Amazon.
So many of us kids back then were fascinated with such things, probably because our parents were kids during that era, and told us about it.
Now, if kids draw pictures of guns and bombs, they get expelled; our teachers never gave it a second thought; boys will be boys; they understood that.
No school shootings back then. Hmmmm.
Very true, though the Russians overall won that battle. The sniper in the pic is Zaitsev and a prominant German sniper named Heinz Thorvald was also at Stalingrad.
I’ve always wanted to visit Oradour Sur Glane.
My dad was a tailgunner on a B25,lost a kidney when it crashed.
If there were as many air battles, as I drew as a kid, WW2 would have lasted 20 years.
There was a lot of that when I was a kid.
Charles Heller (our local Libertarian well-informed smart guy) interviewed two real live B-17 pilots last Sunday. It's not in the archives yet, but hopefully it will be soon.
http://www.libertywatchradio.com/listen
1:30 - Dewayne "Ben" Bennett, pilot, B-17 "Squawkin' Chicken" 384th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force, 31 missions March-July 1944 and Andy Anzanos, Flight Engineer and Top Gunner, "Liberty Bell-e" 390th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force, 26 missions November 194-March 1944.
I wish you could hear that, it was a treat to listen to these two old guys.
One caller asked them what kind of rounds they used, he thought it was 20mm. Pilot told him it was .50.
Then the caller asked them what kind of rounds they used, armor piercing, tracer...?
The pilot told him they quit using tracer, so the German pilots wouldn't know which guns were out.
Damn. Just Damn.
The Greatest.
No one is a Bundist for doing nothing more than noting that there were Americans vitally concerned with what happened in some German cities selected for bombing by the Brits.
I’d love to see that interview, a family friend in Georgia got to know LT. Cmdr. George Gay a few years before his death.
It's silly to rely on an official history of the winner's actions during war.
You can make all three points (ex the specific hardware - which is questionable) about any large city in the USA.
Dresden was FIRE bombed, just as Tokyo was fire bombed, and then bombed again with HE to bring the war home to the German people and because, again, like any major city, it was a transportation hub.
The only justification needed is that it offered a means to advance our strategic goals against enemies that had shown themselves to be capable of brutality as well as a desire to harm us and our allies.
The truth of those strategic goals in Europe was that allied planners didn't think they had any better options and needed to ratchet up the pain.
The truth of those goals in the Pacific was more complex.
At first, we didn't have he assets to concentrate only on military targets - fire bombing is cheap and does not require an armada to do it right. Later, we had reasonable fears that a land invasion would literally depopulate Japan as well as cost a huge number of Allied casualties - and we had this neat new weapon that no one really understood at the time.
It can't be made pretty, it ain't nice, but it might have shortened the over all war and probably saved allied lives.
Footnote:
In modern western society attacking civilians is never a first option, its either a result of frustration, stalled progress, or, like Coventry, error in execution. Nazi Germany changed that long before the war by attacking groups of people at home and then expanding their war into neighboring sovereign states. Their strategic goals were muddied, their social goals were not.
Sadly, we may see the same shift again unless islam reins itself in and rediscovers civilization sometime soon.
If any of them bothered to read Mein Kampf, they would have known what Hitler had in store. Seems to me that Hitler wasn't properly 'vetted' by the German people.
And then - across the river is what the Soviets built. Quite a contrast!
I'm sick of holocaust denial. It's pervasive and disgusting.
Hitler's National Socialists murdered 11.5 million people in the death camps (of whom, yes, six million were Jews).
Apparently, 5.5 million murdered Gentiles are "unpersons".
Folks need to quit covering up for Hitler. Give him full credit for being the abomination he truly was.
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