How do they characterize the blitz of London?
Payback for RAF bombings of cities in the Ruhr Valley during the spring and summer of 1940.
That would only be an issue if you spoke the words in Germany, but it's a very interesting question. My guess, they'd say the same thing, it was a holocaust.
It couldn't be compared to Dresden, but only because the scale was different. Had the Germans been able to get the same level of destruction going there then they would have.
Mind you, we should thank our lucky stars the Germans switched to civilian targeting with bombing.. That effectively lost them their aerial advantage by allowing the RAF to recover. I still think we would have won anyway, but it might have added on a year or more to the war.
The Germans were really attacking and hurting the English air force. They were bombing aircraft factories and English air fields. Churchill was told it was likely the way things were going,that Germany was going to achieve air superiority. Everyone knew that if Germany got air Superiority they would launch an invasion and defeat Britain.
Churchill took a gamble. He ordered a highly risky attack. He ordered the Bombing of Berlin. Hitler was furious. The German air force had been careful not to bomb civilian areas. They did not want the British to bomb German cities. . The German Generals knew what Churchill was doing. They wanted to continue their campaign to achieve air superiority. Hitler overruled his generals He ordered massive air attacks on London in retaliation. It was exactly what Churchill hoped for.
While Hitler attacked London, England was able to build enough planes and enough air strips to defeat the German air force in the Battle of Britain.
Dresden was bombed because it was a college town. Churchill thought that if we killed a lot of German intellectuals they would be so mad at Hitler they might figure out a way to overthrow his regime. It backfired.
After the war research showed that the attack convinced many Germans that they had to win the war or we would kill them all.
We need to understand that wars are not fought by gentleman's rules. A nation facing defeat will do what ever it takes to survive. That includes using any tactic they think might help them survive.
Roosevelt read somewhere that the Japanese were very afraid of bats. He seriously proposed dropping plane loads of bats on Japan. Wiser heads prevailed.
I remember going to movie theaters during WWII. I was just a little boy. The news reel would show dead Japanese and dead Germans mowed down by our troops. The audience would scream and wildly applaud. So did I.
London didn't burn down.
The justifications for burning Dresden change from time to time, but so far no one has anything really convincing except maybe they didn't like the Dresdener's cousins in Indianapolis ~ maybe it was just Bomber Harris' way of "getting back at" Chenault or other Americans with an Indiana address.
The whole event is covered by the grandson of one of the former inhabitants, Kurt Vonnegut. He was there, on the ground. I don't think he particularly enjoyed it.
Exactly. This was a period of, "Total War." Grant and Sherman reinvented it in 1864-65. Massive war against civilians was a tactic of Hitler. Britain and the US used the tactic against Dresden and Cologne. The US fire bombing of Tokyo (pre-Hiroshima) yielded more than 100,000 dead civilians. War can get nasty. It's been this way for all time. And it will happen over and over again..long after we are gone.
"How do they characterize the blitz of London?"
The Blitz was very bad. Dresden was a man-made firestorm of hellish proportions.
"How do they characterize the blitz of London?"
-----as an unsuccessful Holocaust.