Posted on 02/13/2013 9:04:00 AM PST by Kid Shelleen
It's the 68th anniversary of the Dresden bombing. In Britain, we don't think about it as much as, perhaps, we should. The bare facts. More than 1,200 RAF and USAAF bombers attacked the city between the 13th and 15th of February 1945, in four raids. They dropped 3,900 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs, killing between 22,000 and 25,000 people, almost all civilians. The city's anti-aircraft defences had all been moved to defend the industrial works of the Ruhr valley. The details are chilling.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Mostly due to Stalin's incompetence.
Lol, Forth = Fourth, whoops
I guess you skiped the class (smoking Pot) the day they discussed the bombing of London by your Nazi Comrades
“Hindsight is 20/20...we have the luxury of looking back and determining that perhaps bombing Dresden wasn’t such a great idea....guess what, most decisions taken in war aren’t the right ones.....the best of battle plans don’t survive the first shot.”
It’s funny, but I am not arguing if it was the right or wrong thing to do. My first post was simply that the Allies lied about the reason. Then I get three replies about something else.
The mistakes were probably another 5 Year Plan for the Bolsheviks in which 20,000,000 people needed to be killed I guess. Stalin probably did not care about taking mass damage in terms of population, so his erratic strategy was probable based on an eventual “Battle of Polotsk” scenario to occur, lol.
Ain't that the truth. They very nearly DID, as you're apparently well aware.
It's a good thing we didn't bomb the Imperial Palace and kill the Emperor. We'd have had nobody to turn the bloody war "off" if he was gone, and even with Hirohito alive, he was almost prevented by military officers from so doing.
Can you imagine fighting an internecine battle stretching into the mid-1950's on the main Japanese island of Honshu? [shudder]
Sauron
Ain't that the truth. They very nearly DID, as you're apparently well aware.
It's a good thing we didn't bomb the Imperial Palace and kill the Emperor. We'd have had nobody to turn the bloody war "off" if he was gone, and even with Hirohito alive, he was almost prevented by military officers from so doing.
Can you imagine fighting an internecine battle stretching into the mid-1950's on the main Japanese island of Honshu? [shudder]
Sauron
Sorry, I (mostly) don’t buy it. Not without additional evidence.
The question is not whether Allied bombing caused problems for the German war effort. Of course it did.
The question is whether it caused more trouble than the same amount of manpower, money and resources poured into other modes of attack. For example, additional armored or parachute divisions in France, or more troops in secondary fronts such as the Balkans or Italy. Or more trucks and jeeps to the Red Army.
The Allied bombing effort was immense and caused huge losses in American and other air forces. About 10% of all American dead in WWII were in Eighth Army Air Force. It cost vast amounts of money and consumed scarce resources such as aluminium at great speed.
Did strategic Allied bombing of Germany have a net benefit over the same resources put into other means of attack? Heck if I know. I do know that you just cannot answer the question by showing that it had some effect. You have to show that it had greater effect than the alternatives.
I’m perfectly willing to believe it, but I’d like to see an argument made with facts and numbers, which somebody has probably done. Not just assumed.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but there is a lot of truth to your point. Germany managed to alienate some populations that were predisposed to welcome/support them. This was a grave mistake that resulted in especially ferocious partisan activity.
I believe it would have been very easy for Hitler to overthrow the Bolshevik regime, I think Stalin was toast if the Nazis managed to take Moscow....of course, perhaps Hitler understand his replacement could have been even more formidable.
Possibly. There is a lot of revisionist history about this in modern books and TV shows. Hitler's suspending the drive to Moscow in order to send forces to the Battle of Kiev was actually regarded very highly by many/most of his generals at the time. That Hitler was willing to delay the attack on Moscow he so badly desired showed military prudence in the minds of many. This allowed Germany to surround well over half a million Soviet troops and is regarded as one of the greatest encirclement operations of all time. This was not the reckless, silly, decision textbooks and documentaries explain it as these days.
No whining when it happens.
In February of 1945, with the Russian army threatening the heart of Saxony, I was called upon to attack Dresden; this was considered a target of the first importance for the offensive on the Eastern front. Dresden had by this time become the main centre of communications for the defence of Germany on the southern half of the Eastern front and it was considered that a heavy air attack would disorganise these communications and also make Dresden useless as a controlling centre for the defence. It was also by far the largest city in Germany - the pre-war population was 630,000 - which had been left intact; it had never before been bombed. As a large centre of war industry it was also of the highest importance.
An attack on the night of February 13th-14th by just over 800 aircraft, bombing in two sections in order to get the night fighters dispersed and grounded before the second attack, was almost as overwhelming in its effect as the Battle of Hamburg, though the area of devastation -1600 acres - was considerably less; there was, it appears, a fire-typhoon, and the effect on German morale, not only in Dresden but in far distant parts of the country, was extremely serious. The Americans carried out two light attacks in daylight on the next two days.
I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself, and that if their judgment was right the same arguments must apply that I have set out in an earlier chapter in which I said what I think about the ethics of bombing as a whole.
Air Marshall Arthur Harris defending his order. The destruction did give Allied leaders pause to resume the strategy of bombing high population centers in Germany. Stalin probably loved the carnage as he used it as propaganda for the East German students to consume after WWII when Dresden was under the German Democratic Republic, “those half-cocked, decadent, lazy Western Allies, shame on them,”).
“Of course, your sense of basic decency may differ from mine.”
You’re seriously comparing Dresden to 9/11?
Your sense of basic sanity obviously differs from mine.
My Dad remembered it well. He was there on one of the thousand-bomber raids, providing fighter escort. I don’t think he felt the same tender concern for the poor little Nazis that this story evinces.
“Moral judgments must be based on the intrinsic morality of specific actions, not on the identity of the perps or victims.”
The “Moral Judgment” of the declaration of war is all that is necessary to determine the “intrinsic morality” of Dresden.
You get to decide what is moral after you win. I very much doubt there would be much self-flagellation on the part of the Germans on, for instance, the Holocaust, had they won the war.
There certainly wouldn’t be concerns over the “intrinsic morality” of genocide from them.
The more I think about it, it may have been Dachau. Grandpa only talked about it once, and, blessed as I was with the know-it-all wisdom of an 18-year-old, I didn't pay close attention. I just assumed that there would be plenty of other opportunities.
It doesn't matter which, I suppose. The point would be the same.
He said one thing that stuck with me - after visiting the camps, he "knew exactly why he was over there".
And, I suppose, this bit is relevant to the thread. A fair bit of his (my) family was from Dresden, originally. Those who could, emigrated to America before the Kaiser started to get frisky.
Grandpa, while he was over in Germany right after WWII ended, tried to see if there was anything he could do to help the family who stayed. He said that there was nothing to be done; they either were all dead, or all gone, with no trace left either way. "Everything had been burned flat", was what he said, approximately.
I also remember him saying that 100,000+ were killed, not the 20-25K quoted in the article. I'd believe someone who was there to see it, I think.
There was a Band of Brothers episode that dealt with the 101 encountering such a camp, the episode was titled "Why We Fight".
We knew full and well what the buildings in Tokyo were made of and what the effect would be. We'd seen the effects after another incendiary raid on Kobe on February 4 showed similar results, and a much smaller raid on Tokyo on February 25 leveled a square mile of the city. On March 9, 1945, we sent over 300 B-29s loaded with incendiary bombs SPECIFICALLY to burn the city. The March 9th raid still stands as the most deadly aerial bombing of all time. More than Hiroshima, more than Nagasaki, more than Dresden.
Now that would have potential for a heckuva movie.
Interesting that they rarely mention those raids.
I remember being amazed when I discovered that far more men died in the 8th Air Force (26,000) than in the entire Marine Corps in WW2
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.