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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (82702)	3/16/2003 7:57:33 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

>>dozens of cities in Europe and Japan, for years. A systematic campaign<< The Allies systematically bombed dozens of non-military targets for years? I don't think so. That's why Dresden is considered remarkable. It was tit-for-tat for Coventry. Didn't work, either. Neither worked. Just pissed everybody off. That's the main reason nobody does stuff like that anymore. If it worked, maybe they'd still do it. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the other hand, were legitimate military targets. And, by the way, I don't think having lawyers approve targets is a bad idea. Prevents our military from being prosecuted for war crimes. Now that we have more precision in bombing. Which, by the way, is why they didn't usually waste time bombing civilian targets during WWII. All they could do was just drop the bombs and hope it hits something worth hitting, so they'd try for target rich environments.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (82702)	3/16/2003 8:31:35 PM
From: marcos	Respond to of 281500

'Frankly, I looked upon it as a problem to be managed. The information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have a lot of confidence that I could leave that to the press.' - Cheney - artistsnetwork.org Jacob, there certainly was a systematic campaign to destroy both german and japanese cities, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo all fairly well known but there were many others, much civilian territory around the Ruhr that was deliberately targetted for instance, not just 'collateral damage' ... there was more damage and loss of life in the firebombing of Tokyo than there were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined .... i know a man who flew in the Hamburg raid, multiple missions, he was one of the first in, saw the city with only the pathfinders' flares lit, then he was one of the last in ... he agrees now with what is generally recognised, that there was no net benefit to the war effort in targetting civilians, as was believed at the time, in fact there was the opposite, a stiffening of national resolve, an enforcement of conviction that the german people were besieged by barbarians, as their rulers had been telling them for some time ..... there is a fairly good overview on Bomber Command here - valourandhorror.com The first bombing of London in the blitz was an accident, the planned target was on military production elsewhere, and there were standing orders to the Luftwaffe to avoid the city entirely ... the RAF retaliated for it with a raid on Berlin, then it all went full tilt after Coventry

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (82702)	3/16/2003 11:21:55 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Jacob Snyder; Vonnegut was an American soldier of German extraction, captured and held in Dresden during the fire bombing. Here's a quote: Vonnegut later commented that it was "a terrible thing for the son of an architect to see" (his father and grandfather were successful architects in Indianapolis). Many critics share the opinion that this event touched Vonnegut's soul and influenced his fiction. In the introduction to "Mother Night" he writes ironically: "... *high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes (...); it was the largest massacre in European history, by the way." His bitterness was caused by the fact that American newspaper carried nothing about Dresden's destruction, which for him was a demonstration of dishonesty and a loss of moral sense.* albert.warka.pl -- Carl P.S. I should add that comparing Dresden to the Final Solution is a bit of a stretch. Two wrongs do not make a right.