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Dr Strangelove
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Your argument has a few flaws in it. Calling Tsarist Russia a market economy is a bit misleading. The Tsar ruled Russia as an autocrat and frequently intervened in Russia's economic deelopment, often to Russia's detriment, so it would be more accurate to label Russia's pre-ww1 economy an 18th century mercantilist economy. If the Tsar wanted a piece of your industry he got it. He often determined who could build what and where. As an example, he moved much of Russia's heavy industry to St. Petersburg simply because he wanted to keep a close eye on it. This decision placed Russian industry at a significant disadvantage, because most of the raw materials of industry had to be transported from the Urals. If you examine the placement of heavy industries of other major western powers during this era you will find that in most cases successful industries would have been located near major sources of coal, and also preferrably near sources of iron ore.
OTOH if you examine the development of US industry you find that in the early part of the 19th century the US rose from virtually nothing to one of the top four industrial nations by 1830. Of course, the world wasn't very industrialized during this era, so that's not saying much.
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
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quote:
Originally posted by notyoueither
Are you making this up as you go?
There were warnings dropped only starting late in the bomber campaign against Japan (July 27, 1945). That was long after the first night time, incendiary bombing of Tokyo (March 9, 267,000 buildings destroyed, 80,000 dead) and many other Japanese cities. Note the raid on Tokyo was about 3 weeks after Dresden (Feb. 13).
So yes, for the last 2 weeks of the war, leaflets were dropped. Big freakin' deal! |
This is not consistent with the facts as I know them.
Could you explain why we would start dropping leaflets on July 27? Potsdam?
No, I am sure if you look a little harder on the Web or in the Library, you will find actual copies of leaflets dropped earlier.
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
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As Shawn and Molly have pointed out, the B29 was a high altituded bomber by design. The problem was that at this height, bombs were so innacurate that "precision" bombing that we conducted in Germany was impossible. That is why LeMay switched tactics to low level nighttime bombing using napalm. The leaflets apparently began right after the Tokyo raid. But this raid occured only weeks after Dresden and the news of that raid reaching the US through Sweden. I would not be surprised if a good historian could find a document that called for leaflets to be dropped thereafter.
And, BTW, the Brits firebombed Dresden on the night of Feb. 13. The US had no part in that.
We precision-bombed railways, bridges, etc., during the daylight hours of the next day.
Last edited by Ned on 18-01-2004 at 00:49
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shawnmmcc
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Lazarus, it would have been sadistic, except at that point it was moot. The firestorm had already gone through the city turning it into a giant crematoria. The USAF bombing at most was coordinated as in that both groups hit targets in the same area so as to hopefully exhaust/overwhelm defenders. It was very different than Hamburg, which was a mix of area bombing at night and "precision" bombing of factories/infrastructure during the day. In that case it was a major German industrial center, and a legitimate target.
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molly bloom
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Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:33
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quote:
Originally posted by Ned
As Shawn and Molly have pointed out, the B29 was a high altituded bomber by design. The problem was that at this height, bombs were so innacurate that "precision" bombing that we conducted in Germany was impossible. That is why LeMay switched tactics to low level nighttime bombing using napalm. The leaflets apparently began right after the Tokyo raid. But this raid occured only weeks after Dresden and the news of that raid reaching the US through Sweden. I would not be surprised if a good historian could find a document that called for leaflets to be dropped thereafter.
And, BTW, the Brits firebombed Dresden on the night of Feb. 13. The US had no part in that.
We precision-bombed railways, bridges, etc., during the daylight hours of the next day. |
I would not be surprised if in your increasingly more ridiculous efforts to prove the U.S. goody two shoes in WWII, you could find any number of ridiculous 'facts' to support your absurdities.
The morning after the Dresden firestorm:
'In the morning as relief columns approached on the ground, a second wave of Flying Fortresses of the 1st Air Division of the U.S. Strategic Air Force arrived. Fighter escorts strafed anything that moved.'
In case you don't get it, that 'anything' refers to people, too.
‘As Messenger recounts, 13 February brought 796 Lancaster bombers and 9 Mosquitoes from the Royal Air Force . In 3 hours, they dropped 1,478 tons of explosive bombs and 1,182 tons of incendiaries . Likewise, the American Flying Fortresses and Liberators, as Beck recounts, dropped 1,800 explosive bombs and 136,800 fire sticks. American planes completed the raid when they returned and unleashed 3,700 more explosive bombs on Dresden .’
‘On February 15th, 200 more American bombers flew over the already burning city with the idea that even more chaos could be created if raids were made while fire-fighters were already trying to get the fires that were started 36 hours earlier under control.’
You think they could pick out non-civilian targets then, perhaps?
You keep insisting on this 'precision bombing'- it didn't exist in WWII- it was precisely because the Allies couldn't precision bomb, that they switched to incendiary devices. The 'precision bombing' was tried out by the Americans in the Pacific theatre of war- it's only notable success being an attack on the dry dock facilities in Singapore in 1944. Because it didn't work, they switched to other tactics.
U.S. incendiary raids on Japan were part of a pattern- and the leafleting wasn't a response to Dresden- so pack up those hypocritical Yankee morals in the old kit bag and sink it along with those Japanese hospital ships.
Dr. Johnson put it very well-
In Taxation No Tyranny, he asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
Beck, Earl R. Under the Bombs: The German Home Front, 1942-1945. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986.
Black,. John. “The Truth about the 1945 Bombing of Dresden.” Workers World. Feb. 1995.
Messenger, Charles “Dresden, raid on.” The Oxford Companion to World War II.
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
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Molly, it is hard to think that my uncle Tom, who was a B17 bomber pilot during WWII, could be a mass murderer. It is simply hard to imagine US soldiers deliberately targeting women and children. I think they knew that some of their bombs would fall on civilians. But their targets were always defined and were infrastructure, not people.
In your rendition of our participation in Dresden, you failed to mention that we bombed during the day and that we had genuine targets.
The Brits bombed at night and generally had no targets other than the city itself.
Our tactics did change with the firebombing of Tokyo. But afther that raid, we dropped leaflets until Hiroshima. But after two such atomic bombs fell, Truman called a halt because he could not stomach deliberately attacking women and children, which of course acknowledges that he did deliberately attack women and children in the those two major attrocities. LeMay gets the credit for Tokyo. Perhaps he should have tried as war criminal. Instead, the Emperor gave him a medal.
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Bereta_Eder
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quote:
Originally posted by notyoueither
Do any of your posts ever mean anything? |
I thought prejudism not simple mindness was your problem?
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notyoueither
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of naught
Aug 2001
time: 22:33
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Parker, R.A.C., "Struggle for Survival: The History of the Second World War", Oxford University Press, 1990.
quote:
In the Second World War, strategic bombing reached a climax with the American bombing of japan in 1945...
The Army Air Force proceeded to renact, in a much shorter time span, the original experiences of RAF Bomber Command over Germany. Until 9 March 1945 their bomber striking forces concentrated on daylight, high altitude, precision attacks, mainly against aircraft factories. Bomber crews ran into bad weather, found high winds at bombing altitudes, and saw their targets less than half the time in december 1944 and during less than one fifth of their bombing runs in February 1945. Most bombing was radar-guided and highly inaccurate. At best, 17 per cent of bombs fell nearer than 3,000 feet from the aiming point. Moreover Japanese fighters, handled by what remained of their experienced airmen, inflicted heavy losses, which rose in January 1945 to 5.7 per cent... By the time the Mustang fighter squadrons were ready for action, the B-29s had begun to follow new tactics, of low-level raids at night with a high proportion of incendiary bombs. Like the RAF attacks on Germany these raids set fire to houses, partly to reduce the productivity of industrial workers, partly to destroy morale by terror. On 9 March 1945, 334 B-29s set off for Tokyo and dropped incendiaries on a densely-populated area of dwellings, mostly made of wood and bamboo. Stong winds set off a fire-storm visible from 150 miles away. Sixteen square miles were burnt out. One quarter of Tokyo's buildings - 267,000 - were destroyed, 1,000,000 people lost their homes and about 80,000 people died. As a mechanism for slaughter, the American air force had caught up with the RAF some months before the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Until then Americans had shown distaste for area bombing, as an unpleasant British practice. General Kuter, assistant chief of the US Air Staff, thought it 'contrary to our national ideals to wage war against civilians'... Among the American public, moral inhibitions against the bombing of Japanese civilians were weaker than in the case of Germans because of the hostility inspired by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour followed by the notorious Japanese ill-treatment of American prisoners, and reinforced by the general acceptance of racialist sterotypes. Even so, the authorities claimed they were attacking 'military objectives'. General Arnold, the head of the US Army Air Force, told Stimson that although small-scale Japanese war production was dispersed among individual houses in Japanese residential areas, the USAAF tried to minimize civilian casualties. Ignorance and eager self-deception came together in varying proportions to quiet worried consciences.
In the next four weeks after the Tokyo raid, five more cities lost 37 square miles of buildings. Then such raids ceased until late June, partly because stocks of incendiary bombs ran low, partly because attention shifted to the support of the invasion of Okinawa. Between late June and the end of the war on 14 August, fifty-five cities were attacked, with populations ranging from 30,000 to 325,000. On average about half of the built-up area was destryoed in each. On 27 July came an innovation: Le May, the commander of the B-29 offensive, arranged to have leaflets dropped on eleven cities giving warning that they were about to be attacked, and next night six of them were. He followed the same procedure twice more. By that time, American aircraft roamed safely over Japan, as the number of effectively trained Japanese pilots had dwindled during the Okinawa campaign. When weather permitted specific targets to be seen, precision bombing went on by day against economic objectives, while area bombing continued... |
He concludes with a mention of a total of 22,000,000 homeless, and then goes on to discuss the atomic raids.
Last edited by notyoueither on 18-01-2004 at 07:12
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shawnmmcc
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notyoueither and molly
Molly's quote:
quote:
‘On February 15th, 200 more American bombers flew over the already burning city with the idea that even more chaos could be created if raids were made while fire-fighters were already trying to get the fires that were started 36 hours earlier under control.’ |
If this portion is true, it definitely makes the USAF accessories to the crime. The only caveat I'll add, similiar to the argument I had with Ned over the A-bombings, is what did the minutes of the meetings planning those raids indicate?
Unfortunately, and this is because I have not studied Dresden in detail, as it was a terror raid with little impact on the war, I cannot verify this either way with sources on hand. Could either of you, Molly or notyoueither, find me the footnotes for those claims? The reason I ask is that this dovetails with some reports I have read of Americans in bomber command having serious differences with Air Marshall Harris. If they complained, and then went on to follow orders, fully aware of the "terror" nature of the raid, they were "just following orders." (reference Nuremburg, obviously).
notyoueither, I notice that Parker and I largely come agree when it comes to the facts, though we phrase it a bit differently.
quote:
Ignorance and eager self-deception came together in varying proportions to quiet worried consciences. |
That's a statement of interpetation, and editorial at that. If you look at Ned's excellent citation, and the book he quoted when we were arguing over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is what you need to win over those who still have an open mind. Parker makes states more opinions:
quote:
As a mechanism for slaughter...
Among the American public, moral inhibitions against the bombing of Japanese civilians were weaker than in the case of Germans...
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The is a problem with my preferred kind of history anymore - after three decade of reading them, I started back in Junior high - is that the kind I prefer are painfully dry. I just loaned a book of mine (South vs. South, from one of the academic presses) to our daughter's godmother, who had an ancestor doing garrison duty on the Mississippi during the Civil War. It is an excellent history, quoting correspondence, newspaper reports, etc. to show exactly how brilliant, and (opinion here) a rat-bastard Lincoln was (most great people are not very nice individuals). Even with her interest in the area, she only got through two chapters, and complained to me how dry it was.
Dresden and the fire-bombing of Japanese cities has become such a polarized issue - sort of like the Waffen SS and the A-bombs - that it's hard to find a history out there that simply recounts the facts - meeting, morandums, results. Let the reader draw the conclusions, save polemics for the forums.  I don't know if we are going to find a commonality here, except to agree that Dresden was a terror raid and a war crime, the fire-bombings of Japanese cities produced horrific results, and that we probably don't have the time, or inclination here, to research the actual documentation to show what was the INTENT of those involved. Without the intent (i.e. Molly's quote on torpedoing hopital ships, a clearly documented war crime UNLESS the US KNEW they were being abused, which frankly I doubt) you simply cannot know.
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Dr Strangelove
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I don't suppose that this is the time or place to point out that the Germans started the terror bombing is it? Names like Guernicia, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, London and Coventry come to my mind. I'm sure that there were many other examples less well known too. You can be certain that Prime Minister Churchill was put under a great deal of public pressure to respond in kind, though I'm also certain that he wouldn't have required any public pressure to sway his mind that the Germans needed some reprisals. That the Allied bombing campaign eventually became much more effective than the German bombing campaign is due not so much to a lack of effort on the part of the Axis, as to the superior industrial output of the Allies.
If the Germans had decided to use chemical warfare do you believe that the Allies would not have replied in kind?
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
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quote:
Originally posted by notyoueither
I agree to a point, shawnmmcc. I was a bit concerned about his polemics while I was entering all that in. However, the point stands. The USAAF used area bombing of population centres with incendiaries after it was known what could happen, and after it was safe for their bombers to return to other tactics. I wanted Ned to see that.
Regarding Dresden, it actually was a military target, sort of. The Soviets were launching an offensive, and they requested the RAF and USAAF to disrupt German communications (roads and rails). Bomber Harris thought that incendiaries would be useful for the task, I suppose. Either that or he was pathological. |
NYE, I still see multiple stories on when the leaflets first began.
Also, I suspect the bombing halt had from March through June may have had to do with more than just a lack of napalm and may have been caused by higher ups who wanted to review the ethics of what LeMay was doing.
But the facts do indicate that LeMay and McNamarra did not appear to have the moral qualms we had in bombing Germany.
BTW, it appears on its surface that had we alone bombed Dresden that we would have focused on the rail yards, bridges, etc., and would not have caused the firestorm.
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BeBro
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of the Krauts
Mar 2000
time: 06:33
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quote:
Originally posted by Ramo
"He started it" isn't an excuse for adults. And IIRC, the Brits responded to a relatively minor bombing of a church in Coventry (which IIRC wasn't intended) with a deliberate bombing of civilian targets in Berlin. |
AFAIK the first German bombs on London weren´t intendet, but the attack on Conventry was absolutely, and it was not that small. They bombed also other British cities after Coventry.
IIRC a German bomber hit London accidently during the battle of britain, and the Brits answered with attack on Berlin the next day. Then Hitler made his (in)famous speech were he said "If they say that they will attack our cities on a larger scale, we will erase theirs!" (or so - early sept. 1940) and regular attacks on London started, the first with ca. 300 bombers and fighter escort. The attack on Coventry in november was planned, ca. 500 (? not sure here) planes took part and killed ca. 500 people. This may not sound much, but the centre of the city was hit so hard that "to conventrize" became a new expression in the German Luftwaffe. Bear in mind that earlier single attacks like those on Guernica, Rotterdam or Coventry aren´t a good comparison to the 1000 bomber raids of the Brits/US later, because the Nazis had only tactical medium bombers of very limited range and payload, not a single heavy stategic bomber. So the intent was clearly to destroy as much as possible.
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Dr Strangelove
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quote:
Originally posted by Ned
So, in truth, Dr. Strangelove, the Brits were the ones who first deliberately targeted German civilians in WWII.
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Well, it would hardly have been appropriate for the Luftwaffe to have targeted German civilians now would it?
If you meant that the British instituted bombing of German cities before the Germans commenced bombing of Allied cities, then I'd like to know which German citiy was bombed before Warsaw, Danzig, Posnan or Cracow? These raids were carried out in September of 1939, and they were terror bombings as civilian areas were deliberately targetted. I don't believe that the RAF was in position to bomb Germany until the Polish campaign was well over. The Germans began bombing civilain populations as soon as the western campaign began also. They made no apology about their tactics. They intentionally bombed cities to the rear of the lines of fighting in order to spread confusion and hamper the enemy's ability to move troops towards the front and also to demoralize populations. This bombing of civilians was a part of their military doctrine, and they did it everywhere their armies went, Poland, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France, the Balkans, Great Britain, Russia, and North Africa. Please do remember that Poland, France, Holland and Belgium were Allies of Great Britain, and therefore Great Britain was justified in treating attacks upon its allies as attacks upon itself. Therefore, when germany began bombing Poland it opened itself to reprisals in kind.
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germanos
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behind a firm ****, Rotterdam, NL
Apr 2002
time: 06:33
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quote:
Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Please do remember that Poland, France, Holland and Belgium were Allies of Great Britain... |
Holland persued a policy of strict neutrality, and it had hoped it could remain neutral, just as it had been in WWI.
Holland did call for help when it got invaded, and indeed there had been close ties between Holland and Britain, but I doubt they were allies as f.e. Poland and Britain were.
BEF did enter Holland after the call for help, and Holland surrendered after the bombing of Rotterdam exept for the province of Zeeland (SW, bordering Belgium and guarding the entrance to the port of Antwerpen), where the BEF was. Middelburg, the provincial capital was bombed subsequently by the Luftwaffe.
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17-01-2004 19:48
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