Dresden deserves to be remembered

UK Telegraph ^ | 02/13/2013 | Tom Chivers

[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.

[the scotsman]

I dont revel in the deaths of women and children, but the raid was justified. And we have nothing to apologise for.
Except maybe a generation of historical ignorants.

[the scotsman]

Dresden was a major transport route and hub for the trains to the death camps. It was also a very pro-Nazi city and had been happily cleansed of Jews and the subhuman unwanted.

Oh, the irony.

We British will not and should not apologise for this (requested, not on British plans) raid anymore than we should apologise for Hamburg and any other raid.

Dresden simply proves that emotion clouds judgement. And how a mass of people will parrot a myth without knowing the facts.

[the scotsman]

Yes, there was.

Major military transport route and hub, over 110 factories making war material.

[the scotsman]

Yes, twas us nasty Brits.

After we had occupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria, subjugated the Czechs, and raped Poland. Then we turned west and raped Western Europe.

Hell, British murder squads called the Einsatzgruppen (funny name for a British unit, but hey...) murdered every Polish and Czech Jew, gypsy and subhuman they could get their hands on.

Oh, those nasty British.

[the scotsman]

‘Two guys who witnessed it as young men and both of them thought of it as unecessary and inordinately brutal. The Brits knew that’

Really?.

I wasnt aware you are British and have spoken to every British person, young or old, to get that ‘fact’.

[sauropod]

bflr

[Recovering Ex-hippie]

Its a very different military leadership today I believe.

[Recovering Ex-hippie]

we are in a time of “relative values” and “relative cultures”....there are no more “bad” or ‘evil” cultures.

[muawiyah]

There you go again, failing to read carefully and then you put words in my mouth.

This is another reason we should have held to the course of neutrality in WWI.

[muawiyah]

Germany in 1776 was, of course, non-existent. But the German speaking peoples were rather clustered in Central Europe and had a number of states.

[cripplecreek]

Today’s wars are more akin to trying to kill a nest full of wasps with with an icepick.

We’ll never succeed and we’ll be stung again and again and again but the pseudo intellectual emotionalists can feel good about not harming the wasps that haven’t stung us yet.

The costs of our perpetual war alone are enough to bring us to our knees.

[muawiyah]

In actual fact, we are pushing on centuries beyond the military capabilities of the overwhelming majority of nations on Earth. Obviously the nukes mean we can take out anybody, but the vast array of AUVs and Drones (referred to as Battlebots in the kiddy cartoons) allow us to take out very specific 'anybodies'.

We simply have no need to engage in wall to wall cluster bombing of civilian population centers anymore ~ if we ever did. The leadership elites in every country are ours for the picking ~ anytime we want.

One of the reasons to remember Dresdom is it simply wasn't necessary to do that to conclude the war in Germany ~ besides, Dresden by any calculation was going to be occupied by the Russians ~ (Yalta 1945 Feb 4 through 11) ~ unless Stalin had simply given orders to McCloy to 'just do it ~ show them my mailed fist'

[Zionist Conspirator]

But, let me put it to you this way ~ nations don't have friends, they only have interests. it was not in the American interest to participate in WWI ~ no one there was a threat to us.

I've always had an interest in WWI (with its being so obscured by the war following) and am not at all opposed to a little revisionism. However, there were several run-ins with Germany in the Pacific (I believe about the time of the Spanish-American War), which led the German military to contemplate an invasion of Boston. This doesn't mean that Germany intended to attack the United States. It means they were anticipating trouble with the US and considered this plan as one way to respond to it.

This is no different to the US preparing for war with Japan since the end of the Russo-Japanese War, long before Japan became hostile to America.

[muawiyah]

Japan understood what had happened the day the Great White Fleet showed up. Europeans were a little slow to understand but THEY KNEW ~ and within a few years had gotten rid of the Shogun, the organized clans of samurai and everything else that stood in the way of modernization and industrialization.

[Recovering Ex-hippie]

At least we aren’t “torturing” anyone...Drone killing is sooo much more “surgical.”

Sometimes we don’t have a choice when we fight evil...Hitler and the Japanese Emperor weren’t gonna stop killing until we made them say”uncle”. Now we get them to say” Bonjour Fools, come back again!”

I believe this country would be very different if more men and women were either in the service or maybe have spent a year or two in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or other parts of the world that aren’t quite so accomodating to their infantile, narcissistic yammerings.

[cripplecreek]

My grandfather encountered polish boys who had been taken from their homes and forced to fight for the Germans but he said they didn’t so much as fight as they served as a buffer as the Germans retreated.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Japan understood what had happened the day the Great White Fleet showed up. Europeans were a little slow to understand but THEY KNEW ~ and within a few years had gotten rid of the Shogun, the organized clans of samurai and everything else that stood in the way of modernization and industrialization.

Well . . . that really has nothing to do with my observations about Imperial Germany not being quite the innocent little lamb, but thanks anyway.

BTW--the "Great White Fleet" was in 1907, not 1853.

[CodeToad]

“Even Bomber Harris and Lemay “

You don’t know the first thing about Lemay. Lemay knew the only way to ensure victory was complete and total annihilation of the enemy populace using nuclear weapons. So, want to make another stupid and very ignorant statement?

[dfwgator]

Yes, twas us nasty Brits.

"We're gonna take you back, to the year 1939 when Charlie Chaplin and his nazi regime enslaved Europe and tried to take over the world....But then an even greater force emerged, the "un" ...and the un un-nazied the world - forever."

[GOPJ]

...Kurt as a writer was way up there in my teenage mind, and later, as i came to understand the costs of combat more, i could finally understand some of what he wrote about AND where his pacifist inclinations came from. No wonder he left the Midwest or the NYC crowd, but there you have it.

BTW, I grew up in an area that was in the cusp of both Irvington and Brightwood ~ rather poles apart when it came to intellectuals, engineers, movers and shakers and hard working railroadmen, and at times, criminals and cops. A cousin was actually John Dillinger's wife for a time ~ his father lived across the alley from my grandparents.

You've got wonderful stories there... thanks for sharing... Maybe it's one of the things freepers have in common - we lived lives that forced us out of 'easy' ways of seeing things....