Posted on 10/01/2008 7:53:54 PM PDT by BGHater
'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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