Posted on 03/18/2022 10:14:21 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Because populations do not commit crimes. Individuals do. Dresden was a mass killing of random and mostly innocent people. The city was filled with refugees fleeing the Russians.
Czar Nicholas also had an effective security service. When the military revolted and the workers went on strike it was over. Leaders need to spread money around so people can eat. When they go hungry they know who to blame. Food supply ‘disorder’ has already started in Russia.
We can quibble regarding what the writer posits as the inevitable consequences.
What the writer gets correct is that this was an epic failure of Putin. Strategy wise, planning wise, operationally and execution wise.
1. Putin’s primary goal was to make Russia and show Russia to be a worthy great power.
2. He has done the opposite. Russia is an economic failure, one now with economic sanction and “boycotts”.
3. The great Russian army myth has been exposed.
4. Putin still has no positive end game that connects with number 1.
Bunker mentality
There is nowhere good to go
Dictators, at least the ones that survive for lengthy periods, are paranoid to the extreme about internal threats. Because of this, they are ever vigilant about possible rivals within the military or who have too much support from the military. Stalin’s constant purges of his military hierarchy left him with very little competence at the top. The Soviets floundered badly in Finland, and Hitler took note of that. Putin grew up in that system and is primarily focused on his own personal survival. No matter the reasons he publicly gives for his Ukraine war, his primary concern is always himself.
I will debate a point with you, though: the bombing of Dresden and the fire bombings - and nuclear bombings of Japanese were the excesses that erased the image of us as a force for good in the world. Any idea that we were a Christian nation evaporated with those mountains of civilian dead.
In the end, we used the methods of the butchers we were fighting to quickly beat them - not to teach them anything, but finish the war before the American people lost heart because of our losses - and to prove the Air Force's dogma of air's central role in the defeat of enemies
I saw a lecture where the speaker said that the "loyalty oath" reason to not betray Hitler was largely post-war excuse making. He pointed out that every senior military officer had sworn an oath to support and defend the Weimar Constitution, but not a single one of them chose to so much as object when Hitler made himself dictator.
I think he’s been backed into a deep corner, and is flailing-out at anyone and everyone, to get this situation “resolved”. The world is amazed at how feckless and incompetent the Russian Army’s leadership and soldiers are, and it’s making Pooty-Poot nuts.
As for Dresden, it was a defended city with significant German Air Force and Army units, substantial industrial capacity, and the potential to impede the advance of Soviet forces. In short, it was a legitimate military target by the standards of the era.
Wartime Nazi propaganda by Goebbels was later adopted by both Nazi sympathizers like David Irving and anti-American leftists. They inflated the number of casualties, omitted essential facts, and accused the US of a war crime. Yet official inquiries and scrupulous evaluations by dispassionate historians rejected such claims.
And, why so much attention to the casualties in Dresden when nearby Poland suffered far worse at German hands, about six million dead, some 17 per cent of its prewar population. The German bombing and shelling of Warsaw at the start of the war -- a shocking development at the time -- helped set a precedent that was later applied to Germany's cities.
On the whole, captive Poles, Jews in the camps, and other victims of the Nazis cheered the bombing of Dresden and other German cities as condign punishment for their enemies and a sign that Nazi Germany was being defeated. My sympathies are with them, not Nazi Germany.
Dresden can be debated ad infinitum, but while it was bad, it occurred during a time in the war (Feb 1945) when the Reich was still putting up a stiff fight. The casualties from it were still less than the attacks on several Japanese cities later that year.
As far as both the fire bombings of most Japanese cities and the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are concerned, they saved more lives than they took.
They broke Japan’s will to fight. And even then there was a coup attempt to try to stop the surrender broadcast. The other option was the invasions of Kyushu and Honshu, which would have caused millions of casualties.
Truman took the least worst option to stop the killing.
For some perspective, I recommend that you read the essay Thank God For The Atom Bomb by Paul Fussel. A well-regarded English professor, Fussel was also a WW II combat veteran in the ETO who was slated to take part in the invasion of Japan. For him and many thousands of other GIs, the atom bombing of Japan meant that they would live, contrary to all expectations.
That was no mere posture. A WW II Army veteran I knew well had the exact same reaction and view of the A-bombing of Japan. Intelligent with leadership skills, he had been highly trained by the Army and was assigned to be in the first wave on the first beach in the invasion. The A bombing of Japan meant that the will and last letters home he had written would not be delivered. Instead, he and hundreds of thousands of young American men got to live.
The leaders of wartime Japan knew in advance through a spy operation that the US had developed an atom bomb and what its effects would be. With Japan's wartime leaders hopelessly divided, the faction that wanted to surrender instead of being utterly destroyed through a suicidal defense of the home islands looked to American use of the A bomb as providing a basis for surrender.
And, as American decrypts of Japanese diplomatic traffic showed at the time, Japan then executed a propaganda plan to play up the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and pose as a victim in order to divert the world's attention from Japan's brutal criminality towards its WW II enemies. The plan mostly worked, with moralistic handwringing about the use of A bombs persisting to this day -- and with Japan, almost all of her leaders, and many thousands of bloody-handed war criminals escaping a just reckoning. Much the same also held true for Nazi Germany.
Such justice as there was came mostly during the war through the US bomber forces visiting mass destruction on the people and nations who were the aggressors. Blunt instruments to be sure and capable only of blunt effects, America's bombers were justly used against two of the most vile and destructive regimes in history. We have cause to be sad over that but there is no cause for moral reproach against us.
Moreover, moral scruples were both a motive and an inhibiting factor for the faithful Catholic Claus von Stauffenberg. Crucially, he discarded a substantial portion of the explosive originally in his briefcase, most likely to limit the casualties. Had the full charge been used, more people would have been killed, but Hitler would have been among them and the July 20th plot would have succeeded in its essential objective.
You are oblivious to the machinations of the Air Force and its drive for independence/supremacy. When the Air force's "high altitude daylight precision bombing" campaign failed, they turned to the same tactics the Brits adopted earlier in just obliterating cities at night. Only cost us 50,000 young American men in the process. They were and are wedded to "winning the wars with air power" and still sneer at using Close Air Support in support of our infantry. How many of our lives could have been saved if the Air Force used precision, coordinated CAS (as was used effectively in Luzon) to support the Normandy landings?
When the Marines and the Army were sent to seize Saipan and Tinian, it was because the Air Force needed bases to attack Japan - and because the B-29 campaign from bases in China failed to hit anything. Once our ground-pounders fought (and died) en masse, they build their bases and flooded the air with the B-29s - but they were once again ineffective in attacking critical strategic targets. The combination of interceptors, the Jet Stream and persistent weather fronts prevented any kind of effectiveness at high altitude, LeMay made the bombers drop down to 5,000 feet and attack at night with incendiaries against cities. The objective wasn't to end Japanese industrial capability or to kill Japanese armed formations, it was to kill as many civilians as possible.
Taking Iwo Jima and losing 6,000 dead Marines/sailors and 25,000 wounded was to give the Air Force "an emergency landing base for crippled B-29s" and "to reduce the threat from Japanese early warning". (My uncle flew P-51s out of Iwo and when fighter escorts weren't really needed anymore, they were ordered get down on the deck and strafe - a really worthwhile use for P-51s after a 1500 mile trip). And please don't tell me that "seizing Iwo saved 25,000 airmen" - that's Air Force backtracking to cover the expenditure of 31,000 Marien and sailor casualties for the same number of Air Force potential losses. Only makes sense if you believe that the Marines and sailors were less worthy to live.
Was "Unconditional Surrender" actually necessary or was it the direction FDR's assistant's Soviet handlers insisted on? Did we have to resort to the same brutal and war criminal ethos the Nazis and the Japanese themselves subscribed to? The fears that our WWII combatants had of invading Japan may not have even been necessary if the Japanese were allowed a way out of the mess they got themselves into.
Age-related decline in faculties plagued the Allies for the last 2-3 years of WW2. FDR was incapable of understanding that the “unconditional surrender” policy pressed on him by Stalinist agents in his administration would prolong the war (on both fronts) by two years and millions of deaths. He was as stubborn as a two-year-old about it. So Germany got Dresden, and Japan got the Tokyo firebombings. Had FDR had a lick of sense left, Hitler would have been deposed in 1943, and Stalin would never have taken control of all of eastern Europe.
This is what allowing men deep into their dotage to lead great military powers gets us.
FDR WAS 63 years old when he died. Hardly someone deep into thier dotage.
Six presidents including Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump were older at the end of their presidency.
Every significant German city was defended. The British did not bomb Dresden because it was defended, and they certainly didn't do it to aid the Soviets. They did it as a demonstration to impress the Soviets. They were already having conflicts over the post war settlement. They knew about the American's impending use of the atomic bomb, Churchill wanted to look like a big dog too.
And it was the British, not the Americans who did the worst of the bombing at Dresden. The Americans bombed Dresden a few days after the British, just for good measure. If you want to see a similar tragedy committed by the Americans take the American bombing of Cologne.
How dare you dredge up David Irving? Really?
And what are these "official inquiries" you refer to? Would those be "official inquiries" made by the victors by any chance? The US Air Force tried to claim it was a strategic target, but that wasn't until a decade later in response to criticism. They had made no such claim at the time. And as far as I know the British never have tried to soft sell what they did. Although Churchill did once dismissively answer "I thought the Americans did it."
"Scrupulous evaluations by dispassionate historians"...
Try not to confuse opinions with facts. By the standards of the day what happened at Dresden was not considered a war crime. But the people who made the decision to bomb Dresden's civilian population were the same people who got to define what was a war crime at the time. By modern standards, Dresden was absolutely a war crime.
Germany's crimes against the Poles and Polish approval of the Dresden bombing do not have any bearing on whether or not the Dresden bombing was a war crime.
If you want to get a better feel for the event try looking beyond Wikipedia, which is where you got most of what you wrote. Wikipedia is hardly a scrupulous and dispassionate source. I don't think I would call this dispassionate, but try Ralph Raico's short essay Rethinking Churchill.
Even after Japan was defeated in the field and A-bombed and Emperor Hirohito decided to accept surrender, military hardliners tried to block the surrender by overthrowing him or seizing him as a hostage. During the Occupation, the American military was shocked at the extent of Japan's plans and the hidden fortifications, forces, and material available for a determined defense of their home islands and the accuracy of their assessment of US military planning.
I suggest that there is a contradiction between your preference for peace negotiations and opposition to the bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. Absent those campaigns, there would have been little reason for either Axis power to enter into negotiations and agree to a surrender to the Western Allies.
A key reason then for the policy of unconditional surrender was that it helped the keep the WW II allies united and in the war. This blocked Hitler's hope of using peace negotiations as a way to split the Allies.
Marshall and the Joint Chiefs advised Roosevelt -- correctly -- that keeping the Russians in the war against Nazi Germany was essential to the success of the D-Day invasion. Otherwise, if Russia and Germany had agreed to a cease fire or separate peace -- which was entirely possible -- the German military forces freed from combat in Russia would have sufficed to make an invasion of France impossible with the forces available to the Western Allies.
If that had happened, the US might would likely have held off on an invasion and instead used the first A bombs on Germany instead of Japan. Indeed, there was planning for that and many of the physicists making the bomb at Los Alamos regarded use against Nazi Germany as the only morally justified purpose for building the bomb.
As for the US strategic bombing campaign against Japan, it was part of US Air Force planning beginning in the 1920s, with the design of the B-29 and the bases it was to use first analyzed in an era of open cockpit flying. It would have been nice if precision daylight bombing had worked in WW II, but the technology was beyond reach at the time. By default, bombing enemy cities into rubble then became a military necessity.
Just what bona fide historical evidence do you have that Dresden was bombed to "impress the Soviets" and that "Churchill wanted to look like a big dog too?" And, by the way, it was David Irving who resuscitated the debate over Dresden, in part by taking the casualty claims of Goebbels at face value and inflating them even further.
At the time, few on the Allied side questioned the bombing of Dresden because the war was underway and the horrors of Nazi Germany were painfully evident. Bombing German cities was normal. In later years, the bombing of Dresden was taken up as a cause by both David Irving and left-wing historians and propagandists.
Applying modern standards to the bombing of Dresden is a form of historical fallacy.
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