Allied Terror bombing of Germany

Agreed. Than the bully complains to the teacher after.

 

All weapons are designed to kill - that's their primary purpose. There is no way to prevent accidental death from any weapon. Panzers were designed to kill and they have killed vast numbers of innocent civilians too. So why should we give them preferential treatment? Allegedly, collateral victims of Panzer are okay whilst an accidental death of a civilian hit by a bomb in Hamburg is a crime. What is the reason of such discrimination?

I guess I know.

Over the past few days I have visited several revisionist sites to see their point of view. Without exception they re-iterate the same false accusation against Churchill, Lindemann and Harris. In absence of other "proofs" that the Allies were equal or worse than the Nazis they have first de-legalized bombing and then have inflated the number of "murders". Some of them went even so far to claim that the real Holocaust was bombing of Dresden.

This whole matter stinks from revisionism.

But if a soldier shoots a lined civilian or a pow, it is disgraceful and a crime. That's against the rules and completely in collision with ethics and morality. We all know that the Allies did not do that.

 

Why is this still being argued?

Did Germany start the war? Yes
Was the initial bombing of Berlin directed at military targets? Yes poor accuracy resulted in civilian casualties.
Was the mass bombing of British cities intended as a reprisal and to disrupt British morale/industry? Yes

Was the Allied bombing of French villages/cities intended to destroy specific installations and to disrupt German movement? Yes
Did they still cause heavy civilian casualties in their vicinity due to poor accuracy? Yes

Was the mass bombing of German cities intended as a reprisal and to disrupt German morale/industry? Yes
Was the devastation greater because the Allies had more and larger bombers? Yes


Was the overall goal on both sides to utilize bombing as a way to hurt the enemy while saving the lives of it's own soldiers? Yes
Did either side have a clear idea of the present much less the future? No

The bombing of Dresden came 20 days after the Battle of the Bulge. The allies had just taken 90,000 casualties.
As far as the allies were concerned the attack had come out of nowhere from a foe considered almost beaten.
They wanted the war to end.


Was either side perfect? No
Were both sides aware this was a war not a school yard tussle? Yes
Were the civilians consulted? No but on both sides they supported the war for the most part.

War is hell for everyone involved. Let us just be grateful wars of this magnitude haven't occurred for decades.

 

Harris' bomber fleet was indeed small and ineffective during the Battle of Britain : considering that at the time he was only AOC 5 Group and therefore hardly in charge of bombing policy.

 

Your point about The Bulge is spot on. It's one of those lesser mentioned events in relation to this topic that, IMHO, had no real chance of overall success with a high casualty rate.

 

Agreed

 

I think I made my own feelings fairly clear on my original posting No.6.

I still stand by this opinion and nothing I have read over the past 70 odd years has given me cause to change it.

Ron

 

IMO targeting cities in an attrition campaign ranks between mass deportations and building extermination camps from a moral standpoint. The key word here is "attrition", German attacks on cities were "terror" bombing as the main desired result was shock that was to be exploited by other forces, late war allied bombing look more like genocide by HE and incendiaries as by then it was obvious shock wasn't going to work and there were no "other forces" to exploit the shock effect. (shock worked when the A-bomb introduced a "quantum jump" in the horror level but that's a different story). So the allied raids were not terror bombing, they were something far worse.

BTW allied bombing of Nijmegen in February 1944 killed as many people as the German bombing of Rotterdam, and served no military purpose I could think of, so why is the Rotterdam attack that forced the Dutch surrender always mentioned?

 

Indeed - as the definition of 'genocide' is 'the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nationality or ethnic group' (OED) it could be argued as a description of many of the events of WWII.

 

On February 22, 1944, Nijmegen was heavily bombed by American planes, causing great damage to the city centre. The American pilots thought they were bombing the German city of Kleve. Alleged by the Germans to have been a deliberate act, the NIOD announced in January 2005 that its study of the incident confirmed that it was an accident caused by poor communications and chaos in the airspace.

Over 750 people died in the bombardment.

Kleve suffered heavy bombing during the Second World War, with over 90% of buildings in the city severely damaged. As a result, relatively little of the pre-1945 City remains, although many historic villas built by wealthy German vacationers from the Ruhrgebiet during the heyday of Bad Kleve still stand along the B9 near the Tiergarten.

 

We all DO know very well, that the Allies also did that - especially the soviets. Civilians/POWs being lined or not is hardly significant.
---
If you are interested in revisionist sites (of WW2) then mayby you should also check some official Russian sources.
---
Sir Arthur Harris has said the following:

"the aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive...should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany"

Denson, John V (1999). The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories. Piscataway, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-7658-0487-5.
Garret, Stephen A (1993). Ethics and Air Power in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-312-08683-0.

".. the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."

Sokolski, Henry D (2004). Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. ISBN 1-58487-172-5.

Based on those statements the bombings of German cities were clearly meant as terror bombings.

 

No : should mean that it wasn't and it was never the Allied policy to kill deliberately German civilians,which,besides,was impossible with aircraft .


Other point : even if it was the Allied policy to kill German civilians,this would not mean that the bombings were terror bombings .

 

John V.Denson is a revisionist ,which is a PC term for neonazi (see PP 354/356 of the cited work):any one who is using a liar as Bacque as source deserves the appellation of neonazi .

And Garrett is a moralist who should better keep his mouth shut ,instead of talking about ethics and air power.

 

Karjala, with all due respect and sympathy I have for you, your sources do not do you honor!

 

May I also add that Benson is publishing on Rockwell.comm,things as : the US nucleair attacks on Japan were not needed,FDR was lying about Pearl Harbour,etc. I think that people will recognize the pattern .

 

Wochenschau-magazin, September 1940...

 

I'm not famliar with the backgrounds of those authors and if their reputations are questionable I appologize. I just googled for Harris' statements and those came up first.

Still - it seems that Harris indeed said what I quoted earlier, so my statement stays.

"The destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany [is the goal]. ... It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories." -- "Air Marshal Arthur Harris to Sir Arthur Street, Under Secretary of State, Air Ministry, October 25, 1943" quoted in Tami Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 220.

Naturally the final decisions were made by Churchill.

 

They weren't "by-products" because they were part of the mechanism. The target was still the factories but the workers, utilities, and transport system was one of the vulnerabilities of the system and one which bomber command could address.

 

Exactly! You cannot remove cancer successfully without removing some healthy tissue. If someone has to suffer, let the foe suffer, not your own boys.
And by the way, workers in German factories were legitimate military targets as much as the British sailors on the ships sunken all over the Atlantic and elsewhere by the German U-boats. Only, the Britons were, fortunately, much more successful.

 

search for polish girl mourns sister. There are some photo of a Polish girl mourning her sister just killed by a German pilot. There was also the cities in Czechoslovakia wiped out for their alleged role in the killing of Heydrich and the city in France wiped out as reprisal in 1944, The Germans also destroyed too many places in Russia and the Balkans so please spare me the innocent Germans suffering bit. They wanted Hitler and supported him to the end