Posted on 01/14/2008 10:02:11 AM PST by DFG
I take second place to no one in my admiration for George W. Bush. But there are times when he comes out with something so obtuse, so ill thought out, that it simply grates on the brain. Remarks of the "I have gazed into Putin's soul" variety. (I gazed into Putin's soul too. I needed two weeks of electroshock to straighten me out afterward.)
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
What's really amazing to me is the number of FReepers on this thread who are mouthing, almost verbatim, the Moveon.org talking points....
Unless there's some deep sarcasm in their posts that I'm missing...
And you can bet if FDR was a Republican, all you'd ever hear from them is how he interned the Japanese.
They are just probably lazy and don’t want to do the research necessary to understand the situation. Lots of liberal sycophants who are historians will do anything they can to protect FDR’s legacy. Ironically, Jews tend to be the most loyal of FDR’s supporters.
IIRC, the decision not to attack Auschitz or its rail lines was made by FDR and Churchill.... For Churchill, at least, it was apparently a difficult decision. Probably less difficult for FDR, who apparently was less prone to worrying too much about the moral consequences of his decisions.
Questioning the minds of our military leaders of WWII is simply not a good idea. We needed ALL of our resources to fight and win the war, and rescuing people simply wasn't on the military agenda at the time. Why question great military minds such a Patton, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and call into question their strategies? PC has been woven so deeply into the fabric of American society today even the POTUS feels it's politically expedient to bash America.
Btw, the bombing accuracy during WWII was extraordinarliy eratic. In fact, it was so eratic that we routinely had to re-bomb the same places several times before hitting the target, if we hit it at all. The bomb delivery system was comprised of a man looking out his bombbay window and praying for some accuracy. Also, there is nothing easier to fix quickly than railroad tracks, just as the 'Bridge On the River Kwai' so poignently displays. The Nazis would simply have used their Jewish captives and Allied POWs to do the repairing, as the Japanese did so brutally in Burma.
So many times we bombarded Axis positions with everything we had in an effort to "soften up" the enemy before attacking. Time and again we found out that innacurate 'carpet bombing' had little effect on the enemy. One example that jumps into mind is the invasion of Normandy, where we threw everything but the kitchen sink at them before invading, only to discover that we barely scratched them with our bombing. In modern times we have come to view bombing as an effective weapon against the enemy, but during WWII that just wasn't the case. Finally, could we have spared the aircraft and the pilots that we would have lost to the Luftwaffe and various anti-aircraft guns while attempting to alleviate the plight of the Jews in the concentration camps? Nobody seems to think about this gravely important factor.
There was no such thing as pin point bombing in WWII. Would it be okay with you if we had carpet bombed Auschwitz?
B17’s and B24’s dropped dumb iron bombs or incendiary bombs from 25,000 to 30,000 feet in those days and many bombs missed their targets. Bombing from a lower altitude to increase accuracy was suicidal. That would have destroyed the German facilities but would also have killed hundreds or thousands of Jewish prisoners.
Questioning the minds of our military leaders of WWII is simply not a good idea. We needed ALL of our resources to fight and win the war, and rescuing people simply wasn't on the military agenda at the time. Why question great military minds such a Patton, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and call into question their strategies? PC has been woven so deeply into the fabric of American society today even the POTUS feels it's politically expedient to bash America.
I certainly understand the tactical aspects you've pointed out, but overall this comment is profoundly short-sighted. It's always good to reassess and even question the decisions made by previous military leaders, so as to learn what mistakes they made, and how to avoid them in the future.
And in the case of something as unprecedentedly horrific as the what was happening in the death camps, I think that to avoid addressing that situation by hiding behind tactical reasoning is edging into morally questionable territory.
It'd be one thing if it were technically impossible -- but to know about it (as we did), and to be able to make the strike (as we could have, at some point after Normandy), and to fail to do so ... I think it was a mistake not to act.
It hardly surprises me that Ed Asner narrated a gloomy accusation that the U.S. and our allies were complicit in the murder of 6 million people. That sort of twisting of history is absolutely obscene but it fits the narrative. No knowledgable historian will take it seriously but the anti-American jihadists will go nuts for it. The sort of cheap moral equivalency that equates a crime with the inability of someone else to stop it is precisely the depth to which the Left has descended intellectually. I note that the Soviet Union is never included in this sort of historical falsehood. Wonder why?
Which would have amounted to much less than a day's work for the Germans at Auschwitz.
By war's end the Germans were killing up to 20,000 daily at Auschwitz. All you're saying here is, they'd have died anyway, but our hands are clean because the Germans did it.
One can legitimately question whether or not a raid would have been effective. But IF a bombing had shut down or significantly slowed the Germans' operation, then FAR more lives would have been preserved -- short-term, anyway -- than lost in the bombing.
Thank you.
You sound like a fellow WWII history buff. Finally an opinion from someone who knows something about the capabilities of our military in those days.
You are 100% correct.
Well that proves you have no clue what you are speaking of.
When he "didn't show up", was 1) when he was on TDY (and was showing up to his TDY unit), and 2) after he no longer had a plane because the model was being decommissioned.
As for "considered"...he flew a FIGHTER (not bomber); and when he signed with the unit, it was rotating fighter pilots into Vietnam...and stopped while he was in training.
Bombing Auschwitz would have killed thousands of Jews, killed a lot of guards, opened up the fences and allow the thousands of Jews that lived an opportunity to escape.
Escape to where?
Here is the answer:
Operationally and strategically, it would have been a very foolish idea.
1. A concentration camp is basically nothing more than a barbed wire enclosure surrounded by firepower. Any bombing damage can be repaired in hours.
2. The gas chambers were not essential for the killings. They were "luxuries". The gas chambers just made is psychologically easier for German troops to kill in mass quantities. If the gas chambers were not there, the method originally used by the Nazis ( find or dig huge hole in ground, machine gun victims, repeat as often as desired ) would then have been used again.
3. Reaching Auschwitz without fighter escort would have decimated the Eighth Air Force. (The Eighth Air Force suffered 50,000 killed as it was.)
4. Massacring the Eighth Air Force and redirecting bombing efforts away from German war making capabilities would have prolonged the war and ultimately increased the number of Jews killed. Redirecting bomber assets from "what we need to destroy in order to win" targets to "this will make us feel better" targets is what cost Germany the Battle of Britain and what may have cost them the war.
You do not win and end a war by doing thing that make you feel good. You win and end a war by destroying your enemy's ability to wage war.
Once Nazi Germany's war-making powers were destroyed, the Holocaust ended. That was the way to save the greatest number of Jews: Destroy Nazi Germany as quickly as possible.
Anywhere to the outside making it harder for the Nazis and SS to catch them. Many would have been caught and shot on sight but many could have had a chance to live if they were strong enough.
No, that isn't what I said. What I said and shall repeat here is that "well, they were probably going to die anyway" is a poor excuse for killing someone. It's the sort of thing one can only say with perfect hindsight.
What if we had bombed the camps and killed thousands of inmates? Would anyone rational absolve us of their deaths? Or would we have heard an endless sneering of the "destroyed it in order to save it" sort? My guess is the latter, and it would be coming from Ed Asner's mouth.
Just to be quite clear: the Americans and British made a conscious and purposeful decision NOT to attempt to shut the camps down, and in that sense there may well be some moral complicity. The decision itself was complicated by all sorts of considerations, including (IIRC) a stark disbelief that things could be as bad at the death camps as they were being described.
Perhaps the consequences of not actinge were less obvious than they are today ... but in retrospect, I think we should have tried to do something about it.
The Nazis did not want to kill Jews individually . .too much time and effort. They wanted to use assembly line killing.
Exactly right. I think it’s unfair to second-guess Roosevelt with the advantage of 65 years hindsight. FDR and his military leaders believed the best way to stop the holocaust was to win the war, as soon as possible. Bombing concentration camps would have caused little slowdown in the killings taking place.
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