I know mooxe, but carpet bombing made them more into a strategic target. And the fact remains that them being targetted did save soldiers lifes on both sides. Offcourse this is not the "right" way to fight a war. But I guess you forget about these things when the enemy starts bombing whole towns to hell.
Chef- " I just wanted to learn how to fucking cook man!"
And the fact remains that them being targetted did save soldiers lifes on both sides
How can you say the firestorm created in Dresden saved lives of Allied soldiers? Maybe this strengthened the morale of the country therefore the men fought more fiercely. Maybe the opposite. Anyways, this is not a fact that it saved lives. It is only a theory. There is no way to measure how this affected the battlefield.
A better strategy would of been actually bombing the war machine, rather than civilians. The effect would of been easier to measure, and it would be easier to say and prove this strategy shortened the war.
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I guess in some cases it was effective and in some not, like in Rotterdam it was effective for the germans. So were the atom bombs on Japan. Dresden and Germany in general are different, you would have the hardcore nazis who would only get more fanatic in general, but on the other hand you had enough people doubting hitler from the start.
I think Hitler was too obsessed and had too much control over his people and could somehow still give enough people the idea there was a better way out of this, then to surrender and most Nazi leaders knew they would be shot or put in prison.
Offcourse a clean war with just 2 armies fighting on a field far away from civilians would be ideal, in that case we might just go to a system with token armies, I'd say 15 units max, 5 armor limit, VL rule, 15 mins , moral off
But seriously I think civilians will allways be a possible target in a war and have been for ages. Just takes a twisted mind and/or desperate times it seems.
Chef- " I just wanted to learn how to fucking cook man!"
Hey badger-bag, no offence but i think you are out of youre league here! These remarcs about the civilians beeing bombed are a bit..how do i have to say "extremist". 1.
Mate, you misunderstood my angle of attack.
My sister in law, whom I love with slavish devotion, is a German. ALL her family, are my family now, by extention her whole country. Previous to my knowing her, I never had much hatred for Germans anyway
NAZIS , well, they I repudiate with all my heart. The Nazis had to be destroyed, there isn't any other way to put things. And it was a struggle, almost one too big for the forces of freedom. When you say extremist , thats just one way of not focusing too closely on the fact that
The world was at war, one side wanted to extend its domination over the other, and it was evil AND powerful.
Pretty extreme, wouldn't you say.
So yes, it was terrible that many hundreds of thousands of civilians had to die along the way.
My way of looking at what you consider to be a CIVILIAN target is to think of how many sons that city had provided ( willing or not, though any student of the times can be forgiven for suspecting they were willing enough. Fed on propaganda and with the scent of victory, I think the average 19 year old German guy of the times was willing to pick up his helmet, step on the train, and go to war. KNOWING that that meant attacking cities, the enemy won't give in till you have his cities, after all.
Did the young guys pick up their helmet and say "Let's go destroy civilisations, and herd their citizens into crematoria" ?. No. However, does any man go to war without knowing that is part of it?. No again.
And lots of German men DID say no. They were executed. ) and how many more it would have provided too.
Was it the ideal war you spoke of?. No, Dresden and Warsaw both, were far from ideal, but who started things? Stukas bombed Warsaw before any planes flew over a German city.
The Nazis were Germanys fault, honestly the fault of Germans. No other country was to blame, and it came back to their door.
And I think that without the raids on Coventry the British wouldn't have burned out Dresden, They hadn't done anything like it beforehand, had they?.
"one side wanted to extend its domination over the other, and it was evil AND powerful"...sounds very close to USSR also.
Maybe you should think better about whose fault was that Hitler became to power. Or should i remember you that he apllied to the art school in Wien, wanting to became a painter and was refuse because his paintings were "infantile" in style...after the war became known the fact that the style of his paintings was ahead of his time...simply better than other painters of his time - the modern society "full of valor" created this monster (the course of the history could have been diferent). or should i point you far more back to the Treaty of Versailles were the french and british made the decisions that ultimately and inevitable will lead to the beginning of ww2. The economy of Germany was so f****d up after the war by this decisions that wenn the NSDAP apeared promissing a better life was seen as an viable alternative. I wonder if you realize how close were the allies to loose the war and how thankfull you should be for the lives of the mens and womens in the allied armies for the fact that you don't speak german and don't kiss the butts of the nazis you hate so much today.
"one side wanted to extend its domination over the other, and it was evil AND powerful"...sounds very close to USSR also.
Maybe you should think better about whose fault was that Hitler became to power. Or should i remember you that he apllied to the art school in Wien, wanting to became a painter and was refuse because his paintings were "infantile" in style...after the war became known the fact that the style of his paintings was ahead of his time...simply better than other painters of his time - the modern society "full of valor" created this monster (the course of the history could have been diferent). or should i point you far more back to the Treaty of Versailles were the french and british made the decisions that ultimately and inevitable will lead to the beginning of ww2. The economy of Germany was so f****d up after the war by this decisions that wenn the NSDAP apeared promissing a better life was seen as an viable alternative. I wonder if you realize how close were the allies to loose the war and how thankfull you should be for the lives of the mens and womens in the allied armies for the fact that you don't speak german and don't kiss the butts of the nazis you hate so much today.
I WOULD point out to you that there were many MANY other people in the world refused positions at art schools/universities because their work wasn't attuned to the sensibilities of the directors of said school, that did not then go on to attempt to
(a) commit genocide on a race of people
(b) invade and become dictator of perfectly harmless nation states
(c) fight on well after anyone sane realised it was a lost cause, there by ENSURING the destruction of his own country/people
(d) finally taking a cowards way out of the resulting mess his actions had caused, his and his alone.
well, I WOULD I say, but anyone bringing up Adolf Shickelgrubers mental weaknesses and history as (seemingly) an excuse for his actions, is either beneath my contempt as an appologist, or being ironic. And I must admit your subtlety has beaten me, the irony lost on me.
I notice that you grant Hitlers name, and Germanys' also, a capital, but "Accidentally" have failed to extend the same mark of civility to both France and Britain. So I guess you are an embittered person, that sadly hasn't the strength of character to be honest enough with yourself, AND us, to admit it out loud.
I am of neccesity grateful to,exactly as you so feelingly phrase it," the lives of the mens and womens in the allied armies" as, in my fathers and mothers generation 15 of my direct family served, 5 casualties, 6 deaths. I was RAISED knowing the just gratitude I owed them.
German wasn't in an enviable situation after the 1st world war, a war THEY started, mind you, and one they prosecuted to the utmost of their ability. Yes, things should have been handled better in the treaty of Versaille, and Germany had some legitimate greviences. However, to then try to argue this was JUSTIFICATION for all the excesses of Hitler and his backers, is just wrong.
People AND peoples have laboured under disadvantage and grevience before today, without lashing out and brnging the world into the fire.
They chose it, or at least a majority didn't resist it to the death. And it came back and bit them in the arse. Forgive me for thinking the destruction of some German cities was a more just result than the FURTHER destruction of MORE of the allied cities, in fact, if Hitler had NOT have been stopped, ALL of them.
The above was me, I was signed in but then it has made out I was a guest.
Talking about Dresden reminded me of a serviceman I knew, who was my grandads fishing buddy, and used to tell us kids about his war service.
My family had a good friend, Paddy McGeedy , sent to the front from Cairo, only in the desert for 15 hours when his truck was shot up, and him and his mates captured.
He was injured, his leg badly fractured. They were taken by ship to Greece, where he got medical aid for the first time 4 days after being captured. The mounted infantry people that took him prisoner, had no medical supplies for THEMSELVES, let along prisoners.
The ship they traveled on from Greece to Italy was attacked three times on the way by the allies. This was a worry to them, as they were all locked into a section of the hold, and basically friendly guards told them that in the event of the ship being abandoned they were not to be freed. The guards were "sorry" about this, but, they said "orders must be obeyed".
When they got to Germany, they were first held in a clearing camp.
They had already patched up Paddys leg. He was sent from place to place. At one camp they came and asked for "volunteers" to work in industry, and because he was looking for a way to escape Paddy said "Righto". Off they went to Dresden. They were put under the charge of a German of Polish descent, in a small foundry that made castings for fuses for bombs, and also Porcelain light fittings. MOST of the workers were slave labour from Poland. Things were semi-civilised and they were quite well fed, though they had to work 16 hour days seven days a week.
While they were there, failures of batches of fuses brought the company to the attention of the SS. An officer turned up, and ordered a parade of all the staff. He "reasonably" represented that the war effort was at stake, and that supply of weapons to the Reich took preceedent over the lives of its people. If people were going to sabotage the war effort, they would pay with their lives. Paddy said the horrific thing was the matter of fact way he stood and waited for this to be translated into Polish so people would understood what was going on perfectly, calm, not much different to someone just doing a job.
He selected one allied soldier, a Pom, and four Pole slaves by saying "You, you, you and you" and had them put up against a wall. The implication was they were about to be killed as an example.
At which point in the story a German man, stood up for what was right, the honour of the human race, and in fact that of his people. The Civilian in charge of the company , a German Pole, demanded that, as it was his responsibility, the entire place and its production, he was to share any punishment. So no-one got killed, they all got reduced rations instead. As soon as the "bad" Germans left, the "Good" German simply increased their rations back again.
Paddy said that was the turning point in his opinion of Germans. Up to that point, he had hated them all blindly, because it looked to him as if they were all happily onside with the war. After that point he just hated them individually.
Anyway. The group of soldiers he was with got taken to a holding compound. Two nights later there was the firebomb attack, for which the air-raid shelter supplied to the Allied prisoners was a dirt ditch in the middle of the compound. they got VERY busy with some tin cans, making it deeper. He said that the radiated heat from the burning was so intense, that it cracked all the glass in the buildings facing that way. The men got behind the shadow of a building, because the heat of direct line of sight made your hair crisp up and it felt like you would burst into flames.
The next evening they were marched directly away out of the city so he didn't know what happened to the factory with its "good" German, but he was very sure that it was destroyed from where it was in the city.
Not long before he died, I introduced a friend ( Curt Morrison, to the one of you that knows the name ) to him. Curt said "War is wrong, people should just refuse to join armies, then all the war would be finished, everywhere".
Paddy looked at him, and just said "Son, while there are two dogs and one bone, there will always be war".
Sorry if you consider me or have made someone to consider me embittered..i'm quitte the opposite. I hear and see everyday peoples who trash around the germans for what has happened in the ww2 and i think someone should defend them at least for once. The bombing campaign was eficient in the first lets say 6-7 monts after that the factories were moved underground...in fact the peak of the bombing campaign coincided with the peak of the Germany's war production. The thing is that always i try to put myself in the oponent shoes to see how i would react in similar circumstances and in the situation i was a german in those days i would have fought on the front with the rest of the population just because it was no another way to chnage the things. I'm sure you would do the same. In times of peace everybody can be a hero but when its comming the time to reacts things change and valors tend to be reconsidered. I don't try to find Hitler excuses for the things he did. It was a psychopat and deserved his fate...but i will never associate the person of Hitler with the german population. The majority of them don't deserve that. The people did what was right to do then...fight the war..a war that they didn't wanted. The things that happened during the war were the fault of a small numbers of criminals wich should pay for that....its WAR...and war is never fair...and in every war bad things happens.
If you look closely to the things that happen today in the world you will see that the tension mounts in different spots as we speak...and when the "Baloon will pop" you will have to make some quick choosing: do i fight or do i protest! And when the state of war and the martial law is installed you will fight for your country as the rest no matter of what you believe in! And i will do the same for my country! Hell...i think everybody here will do that. And after 50-100 years after the war wears out in some forum 2 guys will argue who was right and who was wrong and so on... The truth is that noone is right...WAR isn't right and it will never be right! The victor always has right! So i'm sorry if i've hurt somebodys feelings, it wasn't my goal, just to tell people to look from the other side of the fence. Life isn't always black and white...it's more grey. And that old soldier was right: as long humanity will exist the war will exist also... And with this let's end this discussion (wich by the way is far from the title of the topic ). Hope you don't have some bad feelings towards me..this was just an opinion..i'm not nazy or any other fascist suporter and i respect every single soldier that fought in ww2 no matter what nationality! Sorry for my bad english (it's not my native language). Take care!
when the "Baloon will pop" you will have to make some quick choosing: do i fight or do i protest! And when the state of war and the martial law is installed you will fight for your country as the rest no matter of what you believe in!
I wouldn't have to make a "Quick Choosing" at all. Any more than , finding a wallet dropped in the street, I have to make a quick choice about keeping it or returning it to its owner. That choice I made long ago, I am fourty years of age.
The people that might say " Oh, you don't know until the time comes" ACTUALLY mean that THEY have made their choice long before too. THEIR choice is to stay alive regardless of what compromises on their honour are forced on them. Good luck to them, too.
I wouldn't serve in an immoral war, which isn't to say I would walk into the recruitment office and dare the army to hang me. though if it came down to being told "Go to Iraq and help us to murder innocent children and women with tanks and bomber planes so that AMERICA can contol their oil". . . . . . I would rather die, than become the thing I hate.
There isn't anything very wrong with your English at all, you make your point quite clear. And no, I don't have bad feelings towards you mate, not at all. If I didn't think your opinion counted, what was all this typing about
About 800 plus, British planes conducting an air raid of my home town Dresden followed with another similar raid 2 hours later, creating one of the biggest Firesturms of the war. A town filled with refugees, Prisoner of War camps and where every hospital was filled to over flowing also most schools had been made into hospitals. The air raids were timed in a particular cold blooded way with the second raid designed to kill as many of the emergency services, such as firemen, rescuers, ambulances and police as possible
The next morning, February 14th another raid this time 300 + American B 17s with fighter escort continued what the British bombers started. The fighter escord of Mustangs strafed anything that moved. Guess what moved ?
People trying to find and rescue relatives or salvage some of their their belongings and especially all those people seeking safety on the bank of the river Elbe.
In 2 days over 35,000 people died.
It included my parents and younger sister.
In THE BOMBER COMMAND WAR DIARIES the basic facts of the February 13-14
Dresden raids were recounted:
"796 Lancasters and 9 Mosquitoes were dispatched in two separate raids and
dropped 1,478 tons of high explosives and 1,182 tons of incendiary bombs . . .
311 American B-17s dropped 771 tons of bombs on Dresden the next day, with
the railway yards as their aiming point (they missed). Part of the American Mustang (P-51)
fighter escort was ordered to strafe traffic on the roads around Dresden to
increase the chaos. The Americans bombed Dresden again on the 15th and on
March 2 but it was generally accepted that it was the RAF night raid which
caused the most serious damage."
At the time of those raids the Russian army was less then 50 miles away and I believe those air raids were merely to demonstrate to Stalin the Western air power. Besides that late in the war (wars end less then 3 Month away) what little industrial production there was would not have made any difference.
It is ironic General Dornberger and Von Braun, the architects of the V2 program would have been hanged by the British if the Americans had not needed them for their Space program. In contrast RAF Air Marshal "Bomber" some called him "Butcher" Harris was promoted and later knighted for instituting the terror raids of Hamburg, Colon, Nürnberg and many more which killed over 35,000 civilians in Dresden alone as to compared with, at most a few thousand killed by V2 rockets.
Well, I don't think we, as a race, actually LEARN. Or ww1 wouldn't have been followed so swiftly by ww2.
The man that STARTED ww2, certainly hadn't enjoyed the first one, nor learned much from it. On the allies side, were lots of blokes that didn't want to do it all again either. And, obviously, because we DON'T learn, a lot that did.
I am very sorry for you, for your loss of of your parents and younger sister. That war ate three of my Uncles, and our loses are just a tiny bit of them. I wish it had never happened, and that we could have met under happier circumstance, without the cloud.
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He said that the radiated heat from the burning was so intense, that it cracked all the glass in the buildings facing that way. The men got behind the shadow of a building, because the heat of direct line of sight made your hair crisp up and it felt like you would burst into flames.
