Allied Bombing campaign

[zack1234]

The Grand slam bomb introduced in March 1945 would have ended the war if introduced in 1944

The Narrzzies did not have or would have any plans to counteract earthquake bombs

[DaveBB]

I did a research paper on the Strategic Bombing Campaign years ago.  Here are just some highlights of it:

Targets that were extremely vulnerable, like the electrical grid (especially in Berlin) were ignored because of lack of data on how vulnerable they actually were.

The bombing of bottleneck industries, such as German ball bearing plants, was ineffective.

The bombing of refineries was ineffective.  Only when the refineries were overrun by ground troops did fuel production stop for the Germans.

The manpower required by the Luftwaffe (which also had some 2 million ground troops) to defend against bombing was effective due to the fact that those soldiers could not be used as front line ground troops.

Even daylight bombing was extremely inaccurate.  I don't remember the exact figures, but it's something on the order of only 30% of bombs dropped fell within a 1 mile radius of the target.

The best defense a bomber had against enemy aircraft was speed.

The main quality for an escort fighter to be effective was having a higher speed than the enemy aircraft.

[NatCigg]

The grand slam breakfast was introduced in 1977 
The Free world has not introduced a replacement 

[Arlo]

yum

[GScholz]

'A Single Column Of Flame'

In December 1944, Kurt Vonnegut was captured by the German army and became a prisoner of war. In "Slaughterhouse Five", he describes how he narrowly escaped death a few months later in the firebombing of Dresden. More than 600,000 incendiary bombs later, the city looked more like the surface of the moon. Returning home to Indianapolis after the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, and, seven years later, published his first novel, Player Piano. Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was "Slaughterhouse Five". Banned in several US states - and branded a "tool of the devil" in North Dakota - it carried the snappy alternative title: "The Children's Crusade: A Duly Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much) who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany - the Florence of the Elbe - a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale...

 
Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquility amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.

In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of artists and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen's agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an "open city."

February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for "suggestions how to blaze 600.000 refugees". He wasn't interested how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700.000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600 o centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be traced. Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night.

On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the Red terror imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.

Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets shivering in the bitter cold.

However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster warning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.

No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the Americans and British were "honorable."

So, when those first alarms signaled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that "great democratic statesman," Winston Churchill--in collusion with that other "great democratic statesman," Franklin Delano Roosevelt--had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.

What where Churchill's motives? They appear to have been political, rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china.

But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card--a devastating "thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation"--with which to impress Stalin.

That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out--to "disrupt and confuse" the German civilian population behind the lines.

Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. "Precision saturation bombing" had created the desired firestorm.
 
A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat--heat intense enough to melt human flesh.
 
One eyewitness who survived told of seeing "young women carrying babies running up and down the streets, their dresses and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or the collapsing buildings fell on top of them."

There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the open again. To escape the flames, tens of thousands of civilians had crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles square.

The second raid came at 1:22 a.m. with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten.

It was a complete "success." Within a few minutes a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders of Allied sadism.

At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue mission. He described it this way:

"The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall; it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city."
 
MELTING HUMAN FLESH
 
Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in spots.

Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last raid swept over the city. American bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two.

However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible night.

In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital town. During the previous night's massacre, heroic nurses had dragged thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying Mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands of old men, women and children who had escaped the city.

[GScholz]

When the last plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched ruin, its blackened streets filled with corpses. The city was spared no horror. A flock of vultures escaped from the zoo and fattened on the carnage. Rats swarmed over the piles of corpses.

A Swiss citizen described his visit to Dresden two weeks after the raid: "I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos and heads which had been wrenched from their bodies and rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs."

In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military target -- its railroad yards -- was ignored by Allied bombers. They were too busy concentrating on helpless old men, women and children.

If ever there was a war crime, then certainly the Dresden Holocaust ranks as the most sordid one of all time. Yet there are no movies made today condemning this fiendish slaughter; nor did any Allied airman--or Sir Winston--sit in the dock at Nuremberg. In fact, the Dresden airmen were actually awarded medals for their role in this mass murder. But, of course, they could not have been tried, because there were "only following orders."

Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaughter, was knighted, and the rest is history. The cold-blooded sadism of the massacre, however, is brushed aside by his biographers, who still cannot bring themselves to tell how the desire of one madman to "impress" another one let to the mass murder of up to a half million men, women and children.

[DaveBB]

I've read Slaughterhouse Five.  It *may* incorporate some of K.V.'s experiences in the book, but it is about a time traveler/body traveler. 

[GScholz]

Rense's article is not an excerpt of the book.

"The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in."

—Kurt Vonnegut, writer of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five


To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire.
Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then — to my utter horror and amazement — I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.
Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: "I don't want to burn to death". I do not know how many people I fell over. I know only one thing: that I must not burn.
”
—Margaret Freyer, survivor

[Arlo]

As tragic as the event was, it serves no good purpose to exaggerate beyond the truth of the matter.

"Large variations in the claimed death toll have fueled the controversy. In March 1945, the Nazi regime ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and death toll estimates as high as 500,000 have been given.[9] The city authorities at the time estimated no more than 25,000 victims, a figure which subsequent investigations, including one commissioned by the city council in 2010, support.[10]"

^ Götz Bergander: Dresden im Luftkrieg, Flechsig, Würzburg 1998, ISBN 3-88189-239-7, p. 217
^ Neutzner 2010, p. 70.

"According to official German report Tagesbefehl (Order of the Day) no. 47 ("TB47") issued on 22 March the number of dead recovered by that date was 20,204, including 6,865 who were cremated on the Altmarkt square, and the total number of deaths was expected to be about 25,000.[81][82][83] Another report on 3 April put the number of corpses recovered at 22,096.[81] Three municipal and 17 rural cemeteries outside Dresden recorded up to 30 April 1945 a total of at least 21,895 buried bodies of the Dresden raids, including those cremated on the Altmarkt.[84]

A number of refugees fleeing westwards from the advancing Russian forces were in the city at the time of the bombing. Although exact figures are unknown, reliable estimates based on train arrivals, foot traffic, and the extent to which emergency accommodation had to be organised, place the refugee population at between 100–200,000.[85] The city authorities did not distinguish between residents and refugees when establishing casualty numbers and "took great pains to count all the dead, identified and unidentified".[85] This was largely achievable because most of the dead succumbed to suffocation; in only four places were recovered remains so badly burned that it proved impossible to ascertain the number of victims. The uncertainty introduced by this is thought to amount to a total of no more than 100.[85] 35,000 people were registered with the authorities as missing after the raids, around 10,000 of whom were later found to be alive.[85]

A further 1,858 bodies were discovered during the reconstruction of Dresden between the end of the war and 1966.[86] Since 1989, despite extensive excavation for new buildings, no war-related bodies have been found.[86] Seeking to establish a definitive casualty figure, in part to address propagandisation of the bombing by far-right groups, the Dresden city council in 2005 authorized an independent Historian commission to conduct a new, thorough investigation, collecting and evaluating all possible sources by modern scientific methods. The results were published 2010 and stated that a minimum of 22,700[87] and a maximum of 25,000 people[88] were killed."

^  Addison (2006), p.75
^  Taylor, Bloomsbury, 2005, p. 424.
^ Evans 1996, "The Bombing of Dresden in 1945; The real TB 47
^ Neutzner 2010, pp. 38-39.
^  Evans 1996, (vii) Further misuse of figures: refugees, burials, and excavations.
^ Taylor, Bloomsbury, 2005, last page of Appendix B p.509
^ Shortnews, April 14, 2010: Alliierte Bombenangriffe auf Dresden 1945: Zahl der Todesopfer korrigiert
^ Rolf-Dieter Müller, Nicole Schönherr, Thomas Widera (ed.): Die Zerstörung Dresdens: 13. bis 15. Februar 1945. Gutachten und Ergebnisse der Dresdner Historikerkommission zur Ermittlung der Opferzahlen. V&R Unipress, 2010, ISBN 3899717732, page 48

"The bombing of Dresden has been manipulated by Holocaust deniers and pro-Nazi polemicists—most notably by the British writer David Irving in his book The Destruction of Dresden—in an attempt to establish a moral equivalence between the death toll of Jews in German concentration camps and the indiscriminate killing of German civilians by Allied bombing raids.[121] As such, "grossly inflated" casualty figures have been promulgated over the years, many based on a figure of over 200,000 deaths quoted in a forged version of the casualty report, Tagesbefehl No. 47, that originated with Hitler's Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.[122][123][124]"

^ Shermer & Grobman 2009, p. 261.
^ Evans 1996, "Chapter 3: Dresden and Holocaust Denial.
^ Gray, Charles. Judgement: Whether Irving has bent of falsified or misrepresented evidence. "Holocaust Denial on Trial, Trial Judgment: Electronic Edition". Irving v. Lipstadt. Retrieved July 2013.
^ Gray, Charles. Judgement: Irving's case as to the death toll and his use of TB47. "Holocaust Denial on Trial, Trial Judgment: Electronic Edition". Irving v. Lipstadt. Retrieved July 2013.

However ...

"The journalist Alexander McKee cast doubt on the meaningfulness of the list of targets mentioned in the 1953 USAF report, pointing out that the military barracks listed as a target were a long way out of the city and were not in fact targeted during the raid.[132] The "hutted camps" mentioned in the report as military targets were also not military but were camps for refugees.[132] It is also stated that the important Autobahn bridge to the west of the city was not targeted or attacked, and that no railway stations were on the British target maps, nor any bridges, such as the railway bridge spanning the Elbe River.[133] Commenting on this, McKee says: "The standard whitewash gambit, both British and American, is to mention that Dresden contained targets X, Y and Z, and to let the innocent reader assume that these targets were attacked, whereas in fact the bombing plan totally omitted them and thus, except for one or two mere accidents, they escaped."[134] McKee further asserts "The bomber commanders were not really interested in any purely military or economic targets, which was just as well, for they knew very little about Dresden; the RAF even lacked proper maps of the city. What they were looking for was a big built up area which they could burn, and that Dresden possessed in full measure."[135]

According to the historian Sonke Neitzel, "it is difficult to find any evidence in German documents that the destruction of Dresden had any consequences worth mentioning on the Eastern Front. The industrial plants of Dresden played no significant role in German industry at this stage in the war"[136] Wing Commander H. R. Allen said, "The final phase of Bomber Command's operations was far and away the worst. Traditional British chivalry and the use of minimum force in war was to become a mockery and the outrages perpetrated by the bombers will be remembered a thousand years hence."[137]"

^ McKee (1983), pp. 61, 62
^ McKee (1982), pp. 62, 63
^ McKee (1983), p. 61
^ McKee (1983), p. 63
^ Addison (2006) Chapter "The City under Attack" by Sonke Neitzel p. 76
^ McKee (1983), p. 315, quoting H. R. Allen (1972) The Legacy of Lord Trenchard

Interestingly:

"Far-right politicians in Germany have sparked a great deal of controversy by promoting the term "Bombenholocaust" ("holocaust by bomb") to describe the raids.[147] Der Spiegel writes that, for decades, the Communist government of East Germany promoted the bombing as an example of "Anglo-American terror," and now the same rhetoric is being used by the far right.[148] An example can be found in the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD). A party's representative, Jürgen Gansel, described the Dresden raids as "mass murder," and "Dresden's holocaust of bombs."[149] This provoked an outrage in the German parliament and triggered responses from the media. Prosecutors said that it was illegal to call the bombing a holocaust.[150] In 2010, several demonstrations by organizations opposing the far-right blocked a demonstration of far-right organizations."

^ Volkery, Carsten. "War of Words", Der Spiegel, 2 February 2005; Casualties of total war Leading article, The Guardian, 12 February 2005.
^ Volkery, Carsten. "War of Words", Der Spiegel, 2 February 2005.
^ Germany Seeks Tighter Curbs on Protests by Neo-Nazi Party, The New York Times, 12 February 2005.
^ Cleaver, Hannah. "German ruling says Dresden was a holocaust", Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2005.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

[GScholz]

The actual number of dead will never be known, and is rather irrelevant considering the magnitude of suffering even at the most conservative estimates.

[Arlo]

The actual number of dead will never be known, and is rather irrelevant considering the magnitude of suffering even at the most conservative estimates.

Ah. You quote a number. I find it to be exaggerated. Now the number is 'unknown.' Inflating 25,000 to half a million is now, supposedly, 'irrelevant.'

I can sympathize with tragedy. You, however, have mentioned the politics behind the attack without recognizing the politics behind inflating the event.

[GScholz]

I did not write the article, and I don't presume to know the actual number of victims or whose estimates are the most correct.

[BreakingBad]

The resulting novel was "Slaughterhouse Five". Banned in several US states - and branded a "tool of the devil" in North Dakota - it carried the snappy alternative title: "The Children's Crusade: A Duly Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr,

What do you mean by 'banned' in several US States?

[Arlo]

I did not write the article, and I don't presume to know the actual number of victims or whose estimates are the most correct.

It doesn't matter if you authored the article or not when you quote it as if it is authoritative. If you aren't presuming it is accurate then disclaim that it represents an inflated amount of several magnitudes above official estimates. It may be wise to go so far as to recognize that there are groups and individuals that are apologists of the Jewish Holocaust (more than Jews involved, actually) that have inflated the casualty count of the Dresden raids in order to use such as a comparative example.

[Arlo]

What do you mean by 'banned' in several US States?

Possible reference:

"Censorship controversy

Slaughterhouse-Five has been the subject of many attempts at censorship, due to its irreverent tone and purportedly obscene content. In 1972, a circuit judge banned it on the grounds that it is “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” In the novel, American soldiers use profanity; his language is irreverent; and the book depicts sex. It was one of the first literary acknowledgments that homosexual men, referred to in the novel as "fairies," were among the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.[11]

In the USA it has at times been banned from literature classes, removed from school libraries, and struck from literary curricula;[12] however, it is still taught in some schools. The U.S. Supreme Court considered the First Amendment implications of the removal of the book, among others, from public school libraries in the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico, [457 U.S. 853 (1982)], and concluded that "local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'" Slaughterhouse-Five is the sixty-seventh entry to the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999. Slaughterhouse-Five continues to be controversial. In August 2011, the novel was banned at the Republic High School in Missouri. The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library countered by offering 150 free copies of the novel to Republic High School students on a first come, first served basis.[13]"

^ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/08/the-neverending-campaign-to-ban-slaughterhouse-five/243525/#
^ 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five