Our politicians no longer have the heart to fight to win.
They think they are to "civilized" to wage a real war.Our enemies do not have that problem.
Interestingly, i was just in Dresden two weeks ago, on business. It was my first visit to the city.
Spent a full day wandering the city center, and a museum near our hotel, which had a Stalingrad exhibit.
Found a park nearby that had a statue erected to the Soviet red armies during the “great patriotic war”. I was a bit surprised that the statue was still there, 20+ years after the fall...
I still think the Soviet influence in the old East Germany is still quite strong. They dont have the infrastructure that exists in the “west”, etc. Interesting to note.
I think the world would be better served commemorating Coventry rather than Dresden.
What part of ‘war’ don’t these people get.
Dresden was full of skilled labor that added to their war machine. The skilled labor were a strategic resource as well as the ball bearings, etc.
When China finally gets around to attacking us when Obama drops our defenses, do you think they’ll want to keep around that small group of Americans that actually know how to make something anymore?
Back then wars were fought to defeat the enemy and gain victory.
WWII for the USA was fought and won in less than 4 years because the goal was to defeat the enemy - not to ask them why they didn’t like us.
Today our politicians have made war just another part of the FREE STUFF culture. They build our enemies dams, power plants, water treatment plants and supply them with the most up to date equipment. That is why “wars” today last 10 years an more. There are too many people making money off it and getting FREE STUFF.
Yet, the more of us they kill, the more we give them.
Then our government brings our enemies to the USA, puts them in the high government positions and in the military, and gives them better treatment than its own patriotic citizens.
When they kill us our government calls it “workplace violence” and protects them.
Dresden style carpet bombing was a better way to go.
If we had fought in Afghanistan the way we fought WWII we would have been out of there in 3 months and it would be a long time before anyone screwed with us again.
Don’t you love it when journalists who weren’t even alive during the war decide to offer their stupid opinions? I doubt the Germans have lost any sleep over the thousands of British men, women and children killed during the blitz. Germany bombed London from zeppelins in WWI as well. I just finished reading a book titled “Soldaten.” It’s about the secret U.S. and British recordings of German & Italian POW’s. Germany got what they had coming to them. They started the war, and we finished it. They’ll get no sympathy from me.
Chillig, schmilling.
Dresden was the chief rail junction for the Eastern front.
Both Air Forces were fast running out of targets....and MOST IMPORTANTLY, the Russkies asked us to.
Our politicians no longer have the heart to fight to win.
They think they are to "civilized" to wage a real war.Our enemies do not have that problem.
Churchill subsequently distanced himself from the bombing.[94][100][101] On 28 March, in a memo sent by telegram to General Ismay for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff, he wrote:
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.[10
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.
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 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.
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.
Don’t bomb Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry.
We are sadly rapidly coming to the point where the only thing kids are going to wind up learning about from WWII will be Hiroshima and Dresden, and how “bad” we were.
“War is Hell!”
William Tecumseh Sherman
My Dad remembered it well. He was there on one of the thousand-bomber raids, providing fighter escort. I don’t think he felt the same tender concern for the poor little Nazis that this story evinces.
This is my new answer to these kinds of requests that I feel bad:
I was not alive when this happened. I am sure it was horrible. I cannot apologize for this any more than I can sympathize for those in Carthage, or Alexandria, the Somme, Pearl Harbor, Nanking, Sherman’s March to the Sea or the horrors of Andersonville.
I can hold an opinion on the war in Iraq, or the guy that cut me off yesterday.
I can study the past and use it to form an course of action when faced with similar circumstances in my life.
I simply cannot work up a whole lot of outrage about stuff that happened years, decades, or centuries before I was born.
"War is not a contest with gloves. It is resorted to only when laws (which are rules) have failed."
(Major George S. Patton, Jr., from The Effect of Weapons on War, Cavalry Journal, November 1930, concerning the use of poison gas in war)
"Death, destruction, disease, horror. That's what war is all about, Anan. That's what makes it a thing to be avoided. You've made it neat and painless. So neat and painless, you've had no reason to stop it. And you've had it for five hundred years."
(Captain James T. Kirk, from the Star Trek episode A Taste of Armageddon, explaining his justification for turning a sanitized computer war that had led to the deaths of three million people a year and had lasted for 500 years into a real shooting war.)
Leftists have been pushing the idea of proportional war and Robert McNamara advocates the idea in the movie The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from The Life Of Robert S. Mcnamara. That movie is worth watching, even if he some of the conclusions he advocates are wrong (transcript here), and has a segment on Curtis LeMay's firebombings in Japan that nicely illustrates that Japan suffered the equivalent of dozens of Dresdens before Hiroshima.
The problem with proportional war is that it makes war safer for agressors because they can assume the retaliation with be proportional to their agression, which makes war more thinkable and a rational option rather than unthinkable and an irrational option, which means that (like so many things advocated by leftists), the "cure" means more of what they are trying to prevent, not less. If you want war to be unthinkable, you need to make it brutal and disproportional, not sanitary and proprortional. Dresdens and Hiroshimas are terrible but the horror of modern warfare during WW2 is a big part of why the Cold War remained cold rather than turning hot. The dangers comes from low information voters who forget history and thus may be cursed to repeat it.
I also highly recommend the essay Thank God for the Atomic Bomb (which you can find here) by Paul Fussell, the source that made me aware of the Patton quote above.
The book discusses the British carpet bombing campaign against German cities. The book suggests that the only thing that won the air war was Mustangs attacking and defeating the Luftwaffe where the Luftwaffe had to fight. And the Luftwaffe had to defend its own fuel supplies even more than it needed to protect Berlin. The Germans, I recently learned, were using 87 octane gas in their airplanes! We were using 100 octane aviation gasoline; no wonder we did well!
- Freedom's Forge:
- How American Business Produced Victory in World War II
Arthur Hermanexplains the “miracle” of American production during WWII by giving the history of the vigorous efforts FDR made to keep Britain afloat after the fall of France in May 1940. The US was trying to supply Britain with war materiel (case in point, after Dunkirk the British Army had few weapons, and the US Army was in the process of adopting the Garand - so FDR sold Britain our entire inventory of bolt-action rifles) - and FDR bent every effort to use the British money for war materiel in a way to maximize future productivity. Result: we didn’t have much military inventory in December, 1941 - Britain had most of it - but we had factories and machine tools and the startup phase of production already well in hand. Pearl Harbor opened the funding spigot, and the planes and tanks and ships tumbled out.
- The New Dealers' War:
- FDR and the War Within World War II
by Thomas Flemingtreats of the politics of WWII.
One thing has to be said: Hitler savaged the Christian Church in Europe (formerly known as Christendom) - and the carpet bombing of the center cities of Germany, whatever the military justification may have been perceived to be, destroyed the old architecture of those cities. Including the churches. It was a radical act. I know, wars are radical. But I come down on the side of those who believe that bombing Dresden - and probably, most if not all carpet bombing of Germany - was substantially wasted effort and certainly didn’t help matters after the war. The same effort expended attacking fuel supplies would have done more damage to the Wehrmacht. Consider, if you will, the fact that Hitler’s Battle of the Bulge attack plan counted on capturing American fuel to sustain itself all the way to its objective. Intelligence confirmed that fuel limitation was the worst effect bombing had on the Wehrmacht - and yet Bomber Harris was fixated on bombing German cites instead of helping the American campaign against German fuel.On the flip side, consider that Patton had broken into the clear in France, and had the Germans on the run - but was prevented from continuing to obey the Principle of Pursuit by fuel starvation. IIRC that was due to diversion to the disastrous “Bridge to Far” plan and not due to lack of fuel arriving in Europe - but it illustrates the effect fuel supply has on your capabilities (and illustrates what I think is the intent of the “Global Warming” hoax).
It is also the case that Britain bombed German civilians first - and that Hitler’s response in attacking London actually gave the RAF a reprieve from attacks directly on the RAF which were perilously close to achieving their objective.
American bombing of Japan is an entirely different subject. Hard to justify, except that it did end the war with Japan, whereas historically carpet bombing in Germany is not what ended the war there. But that was really just the “shock and awe” effect of the A-bombs, without which the US would have had to fight on Japanese soil as in Germany. Or else settle for a negotiated peace short of that . . .
I’m pretty much a moral absolutist in a lot of things, mostly because God requires me to be. And I have to say, Dresden was ultimately necessary to do based on what I’ve read, about as necessary as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (heck, if anything, such WAS moral ultimately, since it’s either that or let the enemy continue rebuilding its supplies. And it’s also unlikely there were many civilians in Dresden anyway.). It was a major weapons production center and railine junction, and last I checked, eliminating the ability of the enemy to create and transport weapons and materiel is a viable military strategy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole “controversy” about Dresden was manufactured by Stalin as anti-Western propaganda. If there was any true atrocity that we had conducted, it’s that we even sided with the Soviets at all, and that we didn’t even bother punishing the Soviets at Nuremberg (oh, and also muzzled Patton as well from going after the USSR, which we really should have). Well, that, and if we go by Saving Private Ryan, it’s our shooting a couple of Ost division members who were clearly surrendering (don’t know if that actually happened or if that was made up by Spielberg, though).
As far as the avoiding attacks on civilians, that unfortunately ended with the French Revolution when thanks to so-called “Enlightenment thought” (which if you ask me did far worse for everyone), they pretty much demanded the people be merged together with the military.
And in any case, the whole “Rules of Engagement” have done far worse for war by making it more prolonged. If there are rules to be had, it’s stuff done within reason like no interrogating someone just because.
