Pacifists and Pacifism

[C. Flower]

Well, the Brits never cared for precision... their night raids usually started off with cookies (aka blockbusters) designed to lift the entire roof of houses, followed by bundles of incendiary bombs to burn down the rest. Fairly blunt but very effective to destroy cities and large towns.

If anything their tactics rather strengthend the resolve of the population. In fact, quite a few downed Allied airmen (categorised in Germany as war criminals who by their own actions had removed themselves from the protected status as prisoners of war under international law) were lynched by angry mobs.

The Americans on the other hand mostly (but not exclusively) targeted industrial areas in day raids which required a lot more precision as many of these facilities were quite well hidden and indeed much better protected.

They were not trying to limit bombing to strategic infrastructure.

Unfortunately this is not quotable by cut and paste.

Do you think she got it wrong, technically ?

Massacre by Bombing - The Facts behind the British-American Attack on Germany

[TotalMayhem]

As I said, the Brits never cared for much precision and "strategic infrastructure". They simply didn't have the means to provide efficient protection for their bombers, and quite frankly, they thought the Amercans were nuts to fly daytime bombing raids over the Reich.

There were some exceptions though, such as Operation Chastise.

[Shaadi]

Well, the Brits never cared for precision... their night raids usually started off with cookies (aka blockbusters) designed to lift the entire roof of houses, followed by bundles of incendiary bombs to burn down the rest. Fairly blunt but very effective to destroy cities and large towns.

If anything their tactics rather strengthend the resolve of the population. In fact, quite a few downed Allied airmen (categorised in Germany as war criminals who by their own actions had removed themselves from the protected status as prisoners of war under international law) were lynched by angry mobs.

The Americans on the other hand mostly (but not exclusively) targeted industrial areas in day raids which required a lot more precision as many of these facilities were quite well hidden and indeed much better protected.

To put it very crudely, Yankee Doodle wasn't too fond of brutalising White Europeans. Their kith and kin.

Liquidating hundreds of thousands or millions if need be of people of the less respected races cost them not a whit of regret then or since.

[C. Flower]

PW, your view of WW2 is utterly distorted and divorced from reality. In no way did Britain, under Churchill, hope that Hitler would take out the soviet union.

In 1943-4 Britain and the soviets were allies in an anti-fascist struggle. The victory over fascism was, at least in my opinion, the greatest political achievement of the 20th century.

The bulk of the German people were by that stage in wholesale and willing co-operation with the brutal, genocidal Nazis. Non-Nazis were a small minority. I cannot believe you would compare Nazi hegemony in Germany of that time to a fine gael majority in Ireland.

Well, this is all so real that Churchill, even in 1945-6, had a plan developed to utilise German/Nazi troops along with the western allies to attack and defeat the USSR.

At Downing Street, he invited the Soviet ambassador, Feodor Gusev, to lunch and gave him a dressing down.

The Russian recorded how Churchill 'roared' as he listed a catalogue of grievances about Poland, about communist forces trying to seize Trieste and British representatives being barred from Prague, Vienna and Berlin.

Truman agreed that urgent talks were needed. Yet what if talking to Stalin got nowhere? Was there anything the Western Allies could do? Churchill thought there was. They could go to war again.

Within days of Germany's surrender, he had astounded his chiefs of staff by inquiring whether Anglo-American forces might launch an offensive to drive back the Soviets. He requested the military planners to consider means to 'impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire' to secure 'a square deal for Poland'.

They were told to assume the full support of British and American public opinion and that they would be able 'to count on the use of German manpower and what remains of German industrial capacity'.
In other words, the beaten Germans would be mobilised on the West's side. There was even a target date for such an assault - July 1, 1945.

The Foreign Office - though not the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden himself - recoiled in horror from Churchill's bellicosity, as did the chief of the Army, Sir Alan Brooke. 'Winston gives me the feeling of already longing for another war!' he noted in his diary.

(Indeed at the Potsdam conference in July 1945, Churchill's inside knowledge that the Americans had just completed the first successful atomic bomb test emboldened the PM in his crusade to bring Stalin to heel. Pushing his chin out and scowling, he told Sir Alan: 'We can tell them that if they insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev and so on.')

Nonetheless, the British Army high command faithfully executed Churchill's wishes by examining scenarios for military action against the Russians. It required feats of imagination unprecedented even among the many wild ideas they'd had to consider during his war premiership.

Needless to say, given the acute sensitivity of their draft proposal for what was termed Operation Unthinkable, security was at a premium. Needless to say, too, Stalin learned very quickly what was going on in the British camp.

One of the many spies he had in Whitehall swiftly conveyed to Moscow tidings of an instruction that had gone out from London to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the senior British commander in Germany, urging him to stockpile captured German weapons for possible future use.

But, the Kremlin apart, Churchill's promptings remained a state secret for more than half-a-century until confirmed in papers released by the National Archive in 1998.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/ar...#ixzz41E25GRWQ

[C. Flower]

To put it very crudely, Yankee Doodle wasn't too fond of brutalising White Europeans. Their kith and kin.

Liquidating hundreds of thousands or millions if need be of people of the less respected races cost them not a whit of regret then or since.

Not a bit of bother to them.

In Germany, over 1,200,000 civilians were killed in carpet 'fire bombing' carried out by the British and Americans. Whole towns and cities were levelled. A further 70,000 people were drowned following the bombing of dams.

And it is worth remembering that NATO has bombed Europe since the end of WW2.

[TotalMayhem]

To put it very crudely, Yankee Doodle wasn't too fond of brutalising White Europeans. Their kith and kin.

You may think different after reading Patton's speech prior to the invasion of Sicily...

We're not just going to shoot the bastards, we're going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-*******-basket.

[Shaadi]

You may think different after reading Patton's speech prior to the invasion of Sicily...

Aye, but WASP society wouldn't have considered the swarthy dago Italians to be real Whites.

[Shaadi]

Not a bit of bother to them.



And it is worth remembering that NATO has bombed Europe since the end of WW2.

See TMs daylight raids by the Americans in Germany vs the British less careful operations.

NATO bombing was of the Slavs who they'd regard as something approaching a villainous race.

Hollywood bad guy material....like the Russians and anything East of Berlin.

[Shaadi]

Anyone not welcome at the Country Club unless they were serving the master race..... back in the "good old days".

[C. Flower]

See TMs daylight raids by the Americans in Germany vs the British less careful operations.

NATO bombing was of the Slavs who they'd regard as something approaching a villainous race.

Hollywood bad guy material....like the Russians and anything East of Berlin.

I'm not sure what TM was talking about.

The raids posted about in the OP were primarily British, and were not careless, they were designed for mass destruction. They killed over 1.2 million German civilians and destroyed large parts of 50 towns and cities. ( The German raids on Britain killed around 50,000 and were more focused on strategic industry.)

Churchill described this as an experiment. The idea was that it was going to bring the war to an end in 1943 as the remaining civilian population was meant in theory to revolt. It didn't: people were too stunned and traumatised to do anything much.

The Americans experimented in the same way but using nuclear bombs on two civilian populations. I read a description of one of the bombings by an Irish doctor who was a prisoner of war there. He was of religious disposition, and at first believed that what he was seeing was the end of the world. About 220,000 people died in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, most of them on the day of the bombing.

[random new yorker]

Aye, but WASP society wouldn't have considered the swarthy dago Italians to be real Whites.

ahem .. you mean 'dego' Italians?

[random new yorker]

I'm not sure what TM was talking about.

The raids posted about in the OP were primarily British, and were not careless, they were designed for mass destruction. They killed over 1.2 million German civilians and destroyed large parts of 50 towns and cities. ( The German raids on Britain killed around 50,000 and were more focused on strategic industry.)

Churchill described this as an experiment. The idea was that it was going to bring the war to an end in 1943 as the remaining civilian population was meant in theory to revolt. It didn't: people were too stunned and traumatised to do anything much.

The Americans experimented in the same way but using nuclear bombs on two civilian populations. I read a description of one of the bombings by an Irish doctor who was a prisoner of war there. He was of religious disposition, and at first believed that what he was seeing was the end of the world. About 220,000 people died in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, most of them on the day of the bombing.

you saying that Hiroshima and Nagasaki played no role in ending WWII in the Pacific?

sure your irish priest saw the end of the world...so did the japanese people that survived

[pluralist]

To this day, few British people know what we actually did to Germany. We know of and are rightly angered by the Luftwaffe attack on Coventry and by the London Blitz. But these wretched events were tiny compared with the ruin we inflicted on Germany.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/ar...-led-them.html

[pluralist]

ahem .. you mean 'dego' Italians?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dago

[random new yorker]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dago

yes d(ee)gos is how we call them in NY