Posted on 02/13/2013 9:04:00 AM PST by Kid Shelleen
It's the 68th anniversary of the Dresden bombing. In Britain, we don't think about it as much as, perhaps, we should. The bare facts. More than 1,200 RAF and USAAF bombers attacked the city between the 13th and 15th of February 1945, in four raids. They dropped 3,900 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs, killing between 22,000 and 25,000 people, almost all civilians. The city's anti-aircraft defences had all been moved to defend the industrial works of the Ruhr valley. The details are chilling.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
In a war against a fanatical enemy like Nazi Germany, the back of the country, and the will of the people, had to be broken, and broken hard. Dresden was just one of many events that served that end.
Those who reject the notion of any rules in war are in direct conflict with our country’s founding document.
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
I guess the Founders didn’t really have any reason to complain. King George was just waging war by any means necessary.
Josef Goebbels: “I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?”
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
The Soviets invaded Poland because of an agreement between Molotov and Ribbentrop to divide the country. This was done so that Germany could invade Poland without opposition from the USSR; without that deal it is likely that the invasion would have been delayed or cancelled.
Cruel and hard as it may have been, the unspoken rationale (and the only one that could justify the utter destruction of an open city that was also one of the most beautiful in all of Europe) for the incineration of Dresden was to give the Soviets, who were close enough to see the smoke plume and maybe even feel the heat, pause if they happened to be thinking of rolling past the agreed demarcation line and on to the English Channel. During the Cold War they made solid propaganda use of Dresden as an example of Capitalist cruelty, but the point was definitely made. “This could be Moscow”.
The Soviets wanted revenge for 1920, as well.
He had several opportunities to surrender didn't he? He chose not to, and the building was torched. I see no difference between this and the military torching the tobacco barn on Garrett's Farm where John Wilkes Booth and David Herold were hiding. Even after the barn was on fire, Booth refused to give up and planned to fight on. If it wasn't for Boston Corbett, Booth would have died of smoke inhalation, and burned to a crisp. And unless Dorner committed suicide before he caught fire, he probably died of smoke inhalation as well.
I saw a "cartoon" years ago;
There was a decimated landscape, bomb craters, buildings blown to rubble, trees splintered, and a single grunt standing in the midst of the destruction. His helmet was dented, his fatigues torn, his eyes sunken and dark. He stood in awe and said "We won, I think". There was no one left to answer...
When you loose your humanity in order to fight an immoral enemy, what is the difference between you? In "total war" you are "killing for peace", an oxymoron if ever there was one. Killing only brings peace to the dead, the survivors are forever haunted by what they have done.
My parents left Germany in the 1920s, if they had stayed I might have been born in Berlin in 1943, sometimes I wonder about that. There but for the grace of GOD go I...
Regards,
Gandalf
While Dresden was harsh, in general the Western Allies treated the Germans fairly for the most part...that’s why they surrendered in droves to them....as opposed to the Soviets, where they fought them tooth-and-nail right up to the bitter end.....The Soviets lost 150,000 men in the Battle of Berlin, alone. I suspect if it had been the Western Allies that liberated Berlin, they would have taken it without much of a fight.
Wrong. War is about nation building and soft power. Didn't you get the memo? Get with the program. /s
The firebombing of Dresden was a war crime. It was a massacre, wanton annihilation in the vein of Attila the Hun. This “It was war” excuse is unmitigated BS like this whole WWII was a good war. It can’t be a good war when the war was prosecuted by that effete Communist FDR, the USA’s closest ally was the blood-soaked Soviet Union, and when the war was over Communism spread over half the world. Uncle Joe Stalin won WWII and the USA helped him do it. America is paying for it now as the Communists complete their takeover here.
And according to muawiyah, the way to stop that sort of thing is...to have moral outrage.
Like that will help.
The fact that force must be countered with greater force will not go away because you wish it so.
Sun Tsu pointed out what is required to not be on the receiving end of genocide when war comes that will bring it to somebody.
The Germans were bringing Genocide to a lot of people. Total war in kind was the only thing that was capable of stopping it.
I've ofter wondered why the bleeding hearts almost always fail to mention the blitz and the V2 rockets.
Dresden was a military target - moreover it was the best target for night-time bombers that existed at that stage of the war.
Bombing it was in no sense a war crime.
I knew that and probably should have stated so in my post.
But the deal was secret, and Stalin did indeed claim he was acting in defense of minorities in eastern Poland. And the various commie symp groups in the West supported him in this.
It should also be pointed out that the eastern boundaries of Poland were based not on any logical ethnic dividing line or ancient historical border but rather on the results of the Polish-Soviet War of 1820.
I was stationed in Heilbronn in 69/70. It was bombed several times during the war. In the City Hall building there was a model of the city in ruins, 62 percent destroyed.
It never has occured to me to question or doubt why or that it was bombed.
The city is on a major river, and presumably the target of the night raids by the Brits were military and/or industrial.
It appears the US and Britain bombed Heilbronn over the war years, night and day.
That is how wars are fought and won. Anybody unable to grasp this reality is living in a magical fantasy world.
I wish we were fighting that way in Afghanistan. Instead of bringing Americans home missing limbs or messed up from multipl deployments over a decade, we’d instead be killing civilians until the war was won.
We so thoroughly defeated Germany and Japan in less than four years, and they haven’t spawned more warriors or tried it again.
Contrast that with pinprick precision, sparing the mothers of future warriors, and what we get is permanent war with islam.
I’m a very strong supporter of killing lots of civilians in war.
Would that be a preference for easy targets?
Acckk. Make that the “Polish-Soviet War of 1920.”
Ah, the "they did it first" defense. If you read your history a little further, I think the race to include the civilian workforce as a target in WWII was already set by the precedents of WWI, where the Germans first bombed civilian London using Hindenburg-type airships.
In total war, both sides are guilty of escalation. The Germans were first to use trench gas attacks, then the Brits used them. The Brits were first to use tanks, then the Germans adopted them. It ends in horror, of course....and the resulting tolerance for inflicting and receiving it.
Of course, Stalin thought Finland was an easy target, too...
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