Posted on 06/25/2012 2:55:04 PM PDT by Olog-hai
The planned unveiling in London of a memorial to the 55,573 Royal Air Force Bomber Command airmen killed in World War II has sparked muted criticism in Germany, where many regard the Allied air raids that destroyed entire cities and killed over 500,000 civilians as unjustified and criminal.
Helma Orosz, the mayor of Dresden, which was devastated in an Allied attack in February 1945, criticized the plans for the monument when they first became public in 2010, and spoke to London Mayor Boris Johnson about it.
"The planned memorial triggered astonishment in Dresden and was judged critically by us in diplomatic terms," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "I am pleased that this exchange of views led to the monument now featuring an inscription commemorating the victims of the bombing war. The objections many people in Germany had to such a memorial have been taken seriously and I welcome this very much. It's a further gesture of reconciliation between Britain and Germany." …
The bombing raids were a response to German attacks on British cities and were stepped up massively in the summer of 1944 after the D-Day landings. Their aim was to destroy Germany's military machinery and to crush public morale.
Many Germans believe that Dresden, where up to 25,000 people were killed in the Feb. 13 raid that caused a firestorm, symbolizes the ruthlessness and pointlessness of a bombing campaign that failed to break their spirit or bring their industry to its knees. …
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
The younger brother eventually was recruited into the Schutz-Staffel, or Guard Unit, an elite military organization, while my teacher joined the US Army when the war broke out. They fought on opposite sides in France, where his brother was eventually taken prisoner by American forces and survived the war.
Their family was well off, and he showed us a picture of their house in beautiful downtown Dresden. However, Dresden wound up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, so they had to leave it behind and skedaddle to West Germany.
The should have made Arthur Travers Harris a duke, just like they did for Arthur Wellesley (The Duke of Wellington). Just think - Arthur Harris “The Duke of Dresden”.
The traditional rules of war were that civilians were not to be targets. Obviously, those rules were not observed.
Both sides bombed civilian targets, the Allies more deliberately. The plan was to leave the German workforce with no housing, so as to interfere with war industry. That is not in accord with the rules of war. You can bomb the factories, but not whole residential districts: than is mass murder of civilians. Just because you do it from the sky, does not make it right.
If the outcome of the war had been different, Harris and the rest would have been hanged for war crimes.
But not only was this a war crime. It was also a very expensive war crime in terms of men and equipment. The casualties were enormous. It was not even a clever bit of evil. If you are going to commit a war crime, at least make it pay!
The bombings in Japan using the A-bomb were similarly war crimes. The only excuse is that they shortened the war (which was already essentially over, anyway). That is no excuse: it was still a war crime. It was also unnecessary, as Japan was in ruins, and on the verge of starvation. Japan was ready to surrender.
If you can find a copy of the The Death of Forrestal, you will learn that his suspicious “suicide” eliminated the man who was the last major obstacle to US use of the A-bomb against Japan, to the benefit of the Soviets. Read about it. It was not only a war crime, but it was done mainly to allow the Soviets to enter the war and seize Manchuria. They also took the northern half of Korea, which led to the Korean War, and a divided Korea to this day.
World War II was not a pretty picture, and there is very little heroic about it. We also came out with half of Europe under Soviet Rule. Our supposed allies! Big victory!
We might have done...but IIRC the first test bomb wasn’t ready until two months after Hitler killed himself and the resto of the leadership developed enough sanity to surrender.
I would say Germany got off cheap....8,000,000 was the last count I recall of the Jews slaughtered by the Huns!!!
The Germans showed no mercy, why should they expect any? They can revise history all they want, they sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind...and a few firestorms.
The expression “total war” as used by Goebbels did not mean unrestricted warfare, as post-war propaganda tries to assert,. It merely meant total mobilization, maximum effort and sacrifice. We did the same thing: collection scrap, working long hours in war production, and rationing food. I remember all this, and I was only four years old at the time. We recycled metal cans.
The unrestricted warfare came from the air, and on both sides.
The world came out of WWII with rules of war weakened. Under pressure from the Soviets, guerrillas (“partisans“) were given combat status. This was to retroactively excuse their own actions in the War, but also to allow such tactics against the West in the Cold War years. Now guerrillas (people with no uniforms who pretend to be civilians until they kill you) are legitimized. And we are supposed to fight terrorism under such rules?
It was also unnecessary, as Japan was in ruins, and on the verge of starvation. Japan was ready to surrender.
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No kid Japan was not ready to surrender...
They had ammo dumps buried all over China...
are you forgetting that Japan invaded and occupied China about 10 years before they bombed Pearl Harbour ???
Sorry but I will never shed a tear for any German city bombed in WWII and I am of German descent. They simply were on the wrong side of history.
It took two a-bombs to get the emperor's mind right, and even then soldiers attacked the palace and attempted to prevent his recorded message from being broadcast.
Actually, it was a huge military loss in Manchuria that had more to do with the nips surrendering than the A-bombs did.
Hey, I know the war’s been over for 67 years, but I was looking at WWII photos this morning. Looking up stuff about the Ustasha, the Croatian pro-Nazi org, after seeing a doc about the Ustasha leaders-criminals yesterday. Difficult to feel sorry about dead Germans after seeing Holocaust pics for the umpteenth time.
That's a real snotty remark. Care to explain it? You think the wrong side won the war or something?
What an asinine remark. The Nazis started the total war thing. I suppose the Allies should have let the war go on for a few years and maybe the Nazis could have killed a few million more people.
A lot of folks on this forum have knowledge of the situation with Japan in the summer of 1945 because we heard it direct from the folks who were actually there doing the fighting, and a few of those folks have been posters here on FR. These people were our fathers,uncles and the fathers and uncles of our friends when we grew up in the 50’s-70’s.
Flash forward multiple decades and that knowledge has been corrupted by books written based on speculation and read by people who never heard year’s worth of multiple first hand accounts of what really happened.
You couldn’t be more wrong about the war being close to “over” in 1945. How many more Amercian casualties on the scale of Iwo Jima and Saipan would it have taken to satisfy your corrupted intellect that we should have given the Japanese a “fair” fight, not to mention the hundreds of thousands more Japanese that would have died in home island invasions?
Hint: Start with researching operations Olympic and Torch as well as Unit 731.
Japan ready to surrender? Wrong.
My father fought in the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944. After surviving it, thank God, he would have been in the planned invasion of Japan, and he very well might have been among the million predicted casualties. The bomb prevented that.
I seem to recall the Germans doing a little big city bombing as well.
And they started the damn war in the first place, so suck it up.
Germany should have made better strategic bombers.
As my daughter says, “It’s a bitch to suck.”
The Nazis could have surrendered anytime they wanted. I am sure we could have worked something out with us. With Uncle Joe? Probably not so much.
Except VE Day occurred two months before Trinity.
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