Posted on 11/08/2014 1:56:55 PM PST by beaversmom
I came across this video on NetFlix a few weeks back. Shortly after, I then found someone had uploaded it to You Tube. I watched it for a third time last night with my mom on my little phone. I think it's well done and very emotional. Amazing what these men went through and survived. I have so much respect for these men. On the You Tube thread, one of the posters said that her father, Norman Fellman, who was one of the GI's featured in the documentary, passed away just this past August. God bless all these men...the men that perished fighting in WWII, the ones that are departing now, and the men that are still with us.
You probably don't even realize how offensive this would be to God-pleasing Jews.
"The Germans?" Including the thousands of young men who marched east and never came home, who had no idea of the Holocaust? The women and children (a huge part of the population) who did not live near concentration camps and knew nothing of the slaughter?
Food for thought -- much of the German population knew nothing about the Holocaust. There is no question on the other hand, that you and I know all about the new Holocaust, the abortion of innocents. What have you done lately, or ever, to prevent it? It's easy to beat our chests and condemn the German population for what happened, while ignoring the massive log in our own eye that none of us, none of us have done enough to stop.
Bullseye! The Mrs asked hundreds to stand in front of the blue death camp at
But, it is a big day when we could get fifteen people to come and pray at our local death camp.
I have long ago stopped pondering on how the Germans allowed it to happen. We, in this nation, are right in the middle of the same damned thing.
I’ll try to think of some.
Cool.
To the contrary, you have the reek of the worst kind of moral equivocator about you -- that it is acceptable to answer evil with equal or worse evil, even against those uninvolved with the evil you are facing.
I’m not talking about war-waging methods — the bombing of Dresden for example was a terrible thing, but not outside the rules of war accepted by both sides. I’m referring to your agreeing with the other guy that Germans should have been exterminated after the war.
I said I liked the way he thought. Show me where I agree specifically with him that all Germans should have been exterminated.
This is not true. There was actually British opposition to what was then called "area bombing." Howard Cowan, an AP war correspondent, filed a story about the Dresden raid (mid-Feb, 1945)in which he called it "deliberate terror bombing of great German population centres" and Richard Stokes, MP, addressed British Parliament opposing indiscriminate area bombing on both moral and strategic grounds.
The controversy reached the highest levels. By the end of March, Churchill sent a telegram to General Ismay for the Chiefs of Staff in which he stated, "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...."
When some objected to his use of the term "terror," Churchill simply reiterated his point (April 1945) with the usual British euphemism for attacks on cities: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so called 'area-bombing' of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests....". (I got these quotes from Frederick Taylor's book on Dresden.)
Prior to WWII, doubts about the strategic use of area bombing emerged during the Spanish Civil War. Large scale bombing of the civilian population, thought to be demoralizing to the enemy, often had the opposite effect. The book "Air Power" quotes strategist E. B. Strauss as saying, “Observers state that one of the most remarkable effects of the bombing of open towns in Government ("Loyalist") Spain had been the welding together into a formidable fighting force of groups of political factions who were previously at each other's throats…”
In other words, it unified and hardened the resolve of the opposition.
These experiences influenced the RAF and the USAAF, at the beginning of WII, to at first adopt a policy of daylight precision bombing against military assets, rather than indiscriminate terror bombing.
I question whether you would have found the British leadership disputing, at least in principle, that aerial operations must comply with these principles of law: military necessity, distinction, and proportionality. In other words, an attack or action must be reasonably anticipated to be effective step in destroying the enemy's war-making capacities; it must be an attack on a military objective; and the harm caused to civilians or civilian property must be proportional and not excessive in relation to the direct military objective.
These principles may have ALL been abandoned in practice by the end of the war, but the fact that the terror-bombing was continually obscured by secrecy and euphemism shows that those who did it knew they were open to condemnation as terrorists.
From a moral point of view, I know that Elizabeth Anscombe, a young Catholic philosopher, and the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, protested while the carpet bombing was in progress, on the grounds that either the directly targeted or the deliberately indiscriminate killing of innocent persons is murder.
There were others, as well, who knew the difference between legitimate use of lethal force, and murder. Sometimes we forget.
Madame, it was war. And Germany and Japan started it and had every intention of winning it by any means necessary. As to ‘’area bombing’’? Obviously you know little or nothing about the technology of aerial bombing of WW2. The RAF attempted daylight early in the war and found it to be veritable suicide. It’s the main reason why the RAF chose to bomb at night, trading accuracy for ‘’area bombing’’ or carpet bombing. The Eight Air Force, that being our forces used the Norden Bombsight which required daylight to be effective. Between daylight and night time bombing Churchill expressed satisfaction at being able to ‘’Bomb the bastards ‘round the clock’’. While the RAF suffered losses the USSAF suffered tremendous losses in day light bombing raids. I have no patience with those of your ilk who want to second guess what a generation of war time leaders and soldiers did to rid the world of an evil unlike anything humanity ever faced. Are you sorry the Allies won WW2 Madame? Perhaps you could suggest a more ‘’humane’’ way the Allies might have conducted a strategic bombing campaign. I’d love to hear it. In the mean time I close by quoting Lt. Bert Stilles, a bombardier who flew with the 8th. Air Force in a B-17. Though realizing that indeed he was unleashing hell on civilians below, considering who and what the Nazis were , the friends he’d seen blown out of the sky and killed by the German fighters and anti-air craft fire and the war those German civilians and their fathers, husbands and brothers had started, he summed it up quite nicely I thought. He said, “Tough sh!t!’’.Lt. Stilles was later shot down and killed on a bombing mission.
THAT is war.
Targeting civilians is murder.
Oh well pardon me. Could you tell me what the definition of "is" is, btw?
I happened upon a book that completely explains the Morganthau Plan in my mind. It is the WWI memoirs of Morganthau. He was US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at that time. Humanitarians who could contact him continually pleaded with him to do something to stop the Armenian Genocide, and he had almost no influence although he tried everything, threats, demands, publicizing it. He reports that the Germans knew and it was fine by them.
Then he saw it again twenty years later an order of magnitude larger from the same mindset, and was in a position to stop it for good.
In college I used to read bound volumes of Time & Newsweek from the WWII years; by 1944 the Morgenthau Plan was being openly discussed (I was wrong that it was a classified document that was `leaked’). Germans were referred to as “children of disaster” who should never again be allowed the means of industrial production as they would only use it to produce weapons. The postwar era proved that Germans & Nazis were not the same thing & that a revitalized West Germany was a necessary asset to NATO.
Never before thought about Imperial Germany’s view of the Armenian genocide. After all, these were Christians being exterminated by a Muslim state.
The German General Staff held the Turks in contempt as allies, despite the Turkish victory at Gallipoli. Hindenburg said of the Ottoman Empire, “we are fettered to a corpse!”.
Thank you for conceding the argument.
So they upgraded to Italy for the main event. ;-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.