Today is the Day?

[Sharkm8]

IMHO there is no acceptable way to wage a war, people dying no matter which side is not acceptable, but it happens in this world so we have to live with it.  The WTC attack was just that an attack, no attack is considered acceptable but was it necessary, dresden did not seem necessary but it happend. the WTC attack was not necessary either but it happened and now the taliban and al-queada are dealing with the consequences of their decision to attack a major world power.

[Staga]

Wabbit I expected you to answer the second question "was it right or wrong when Al-Quaida attacked against the WTC-towers....  
second thought earlier you said "And it IS ok to kill ANYONE who is contributing ANYTHING to the enemies ability to continue killing your people."

So it looks like you already answered that question. Heh you and those terrorists are soul mates. You don't care how many civilians will die in your wars. Looks like you both think "More is better" in this case.

Oh humanity...

[majic]

Wabbit:

What strategic advantage do you think the bombing of Dresden gave the Allies?  Did it do anything to shorten the war?  Or did it piss off a large number of Germans who may have been wavering?  (not a flame...I just can't see any advantage it would have given us.)

[Wotan]

plain and simple he ought to have been executed for what he did. I hope he burns in hell and pray the rest of his life was filled with pain and guilt.

Just as surely as I would hitler or Stalin or bin laden.

Air superiority was won in europe during the daylight raids. production transport and fuel were destroyed not by killing civilians. Countries were liberated in europe not through area bombing but by inf and ground units. There would have been victory without dresden and the others.

Most christians agree with the idea of a just war. But aside from religious implications the killing for civilians is wrong especially when victory can be achieved by less barbaric means.

Theres a reason we have smart weapons today. Theres a reason we dont resort to the extreme everytime a conflict breaks out.

It not because we cant it is we choose not to. We could go poison every arab terror nation and erase them from the earth but we dont.

Theres a line to be drawn somewhere.

If you think fire bombing 135000 civilans helped end ww2 or did 1 thing to ensure peace you are wrong.

Saying it was wrong in no way is defense of nazi barbarity.

[CptTrips]

"was it right or wrong when Al-Quaida attacked against the WTC-towers...."

(Wabbit wonders if Staga has a learning disability)

No, because that makes them our enemy.  Nothing my enemy does is acceptable.  Our enemies must be pursued and killed without mercy until they unconditionally surrender.  Anyone who assists them in any way becomes our enemy as well and will share their fate.


>Looks like you both think "More is better" in this case.

No.  Little as possible is best.  I highly encourage them to surrender as quickly as possible so they don't force me to have to kill them all.  As I've stated before (again and agian for the learning challenged), as soon as they unconditionally surrender, I feel no further desire to keep bombing them.  Their fate is in their own hands.   Until that time, I have no sympathy for them.  Not a single one has to die if they just surrender up front.  Or better yet, don't even start it.

However, if there are going to be casualties, I'd rather them be the enemies than mine.  If I have to sacrifice a 1000 enemy civillians to save one single allied soldier then to me, thats a no-brainer, especially if they are responsible for starting the conflict and can stop it at anytime by unconditionally surrendering.


If I'm willing to bomb their soldiers, I have to be willing to bomb their airplane factories.  If I'm willing to bomb their aircraft factories, I should be willing to bomb the power plants that supply the factories.  If I'm willing to bomb the power plant then why shouldn't I bomb the ball-bearing plant that makes the ball-bearings that go into the generators that supply the aircraft factories that produces fighteres for the soldiers.  If the ball-bearing factory, why not the farms where the food is grown that feeds the workers that run the ball-bearing plant that builds the generators that supply the aircraft factories that produces fighters for the soldiers.   If the farms, why not the people in the town that work on the farms where the food is grown that feeds the workers that run the ball-bearing plant that builds the generators that supply the aircraft factories that produces fighters for the soldiers.

Like I said, logic is brutal.  I understand why you seem to prefer to avoid it.


Regards,
Wab

[Staga]

Wabbit try to keep this civilized and leave personal insults like "learning disability" to another threads.

First you say it was right to do when RAF and 8th did bomb Dresden (which was filled by refugees and civilians) and thus kill 100000-250000 people in a firestorm.
Next you say it was wrong when Al-Quaida did kill few thousand Americans in a strike against WTC-towers.

Both cases were "act of war" or "act of terror" if you like to use that word.
In both cases civilians were target.
In both cases target wasn't able to defend themself.

If you say bombings of Dresden were acceptable then you should also admit attacks against WTC were also ok.
Of course I know thats something you can't ever admit so continuing this is waste of time.
Guess this is good example of "Double Standards"?

[streakeagle]

This was all hotly debated when it happened.

People sympathetic to Arthur Harris provided evidence of the reaction of the German population to this attack. The survivors spread the word fast: anything, including surrender, was better than what they experienced and witnessed.

People against him cited the British reaction to Luftwaffe bomb raids.

I submit that if the British had to lose a city a day to that kind of attack, they might not have reacted the way they did during the Battle of Britain.

The effect of this attack on German civillian morale was far more dramatic than the Japanese reaction to the atom bomb.

Like others who have posted above, I believe a global war for survival like WWII was an all-out war. The results would and did have grave consequences for the rest of history. It is much easier to debate morality after you have won, than in concenctration camps while you are waiting to be gased.

Certainly, we must fight by some sort of rules, or we would be no better than the enemy we are trying to stop. But make no mistake, almost the entire German population was our enemy in that time frame. Hitler and his band of cronies could never have gotten as far as they did without a large majority of support from the general population. If the Germans hated what the Nazis were doing, almost all of their male population was armed to the teeth with planes, tanks, and rifles to stop the "minority of Nazis". I think "Nazi Germans" only became a minority after Russia had kicked their butt and was marching for Berlin.

While I strongly believe that the US and Britain did a lot to win the war, I cannot argue with Russians who claim that they sacrificed more than everyone else: more Russians died than the combined casualties of all other nations, including the Jews and others killed in German camps. Dresden was easily beyond the accepted Western standard of warfare, but justice demands that you treat your enemies as they have treated you. I am willing to bet, no one who lost loved ones on the Eastern Front has or ever will shed a tear for any of the Germans killed in WW2, including the "innocent" civillians in Dresden.

I do not think I would have ordered such an attack, but nor would I have refused orders to do so. It is interesting that both the leader and those who followed were penalized. Usually, the leaders find a way to pin the blame at the lowest possible level, or the leaders are held solely accountable since most troops are prohibited from questioning their orders.

May all those who were truly innocent rest in peace (both Allied and Axis), and all those who truly deserve it (both Allied and Axis) burn forever in hell. The people in Dresden got a sneak peak of hell on earth.

[CptTrips]

>Wabbit try to keep this civilized and leave personal insults
>like "learning disability" to another threads.


Oh you mean like :

>Heh you and those terrorists are soul mates.

Hmmm  Guess this is good example of "Double Standards"?


Wab

[CptTrips]

So staga, you've got to play grand inquisitor all afternoon, now Ill ask you a question:

If I'm willing to bomb their soldiers, I have to be willing to bomb their airplane factories. If I'm willing to bomb their aircraft factories, I should be willing to bomb the power plants that supply the factories. If I'm willing to bomb the power plant then why shouldn't I bomb the ball-bearing plant that makes the ball-bearings that go into the generators that supply the aircraft factories that produces fighteres for the soldiers. If the ball-bearing factory, why not the farms where the food is grown that feeds the workers that run the ball-bearing plant that builds the generators that supply the aircraft factories that produces fighters for the soldiers. If the farms, why not the people in the town that work on the farms where the food is grown that feeds the workers that run the ball-bearing plant that builds the generators that supply the aircraft factories that produces fighters for the soldiers.


Where is the line to be drawn and what proves thats where it should be?



Wab

[streakeagle]

As with any other equation, the solution to warfare is drawing the line at the point that results in maximum benefits (your side winning) with the minimum losses (of resources to both sides).

The real trick is having both the information and judgement required to accurately estimate that line.

[CptTrips]

Streak,

If winning the war would cost:


1. 25 million Allied civ/mil dead vs 50 million Axis civ/mil dead

or

2. 10 million Allied civ/mil dead vs 100 million Axis civ/mil dead


Which would you pick knowing they started the war in a attempt to crush the world and rule as a master race?


Wab

[Nashwan]

First you say it was right to do when RAF and 8th did bomb Dresden (which was filled by refugees and civilians) and thus kill 100000-250000 people in a firestorm.
Next you say it was wrong when Al-Quaida did kill few thousand Americans in a strike against WTC-towers.

Both cases were "act of war" or "act of terror" if you like to use that word.
If you say bombings of Dresden were acceptable then you should also admit attacks against WTC were also ok.

If America was organising, or supporting the Israelis in organising death camps for the extermination of the Palestinians I would say the WTC attacks were justified. They aren't, and they weren't.

Despite what Israel is doing, it is not a patch on what the Nazis did during the war.

The allies killed between 300,000 and 600,000 Germans during air raids.

The Germans killed 6,500,000 Jews, and an even larger number of Slavs. An average of around 8,000 a day, every single day of the war.

The true figure for Dresden, estimated at the time, since inflated by pacifists, communists (Dresden was in E Germany) and Nazi apologists (look, the Nazis were no worse than the allies), was around 35,000.
The initial reports of the Berlin and Dresden police chiefs both put the death toll at 18,000 confirmed (18K bodies were recovered by that time).
The Berlin police chief said he expected the true figure was around 25,000.
An officer responsible for recording the collection and disposal of bodies has said the final figure was 30,000 recovered.

The largest death toll in any other raid in Germany was 3.3% of the population of the city, which even if the population of Dresden was swollen to well over 1,000,000 would still indicate a figure of around 30-40,000.

Put into context, the allies killed up to 600,000 German civillians in air raids, the Germans over the same time murdered over 15,000,000 civillians, and would have carried on if not stopped.

For example, Kaltenbrunner sent an order to the commander of the Mathausen concentration camp in Austria in April 45:
Your quota is still 1000 Jews a day (to be killed)

The total number of German civillians killed in allied ai raids added up to around 1% of all deaths during WW2.

That doesn't strike me as out of proportion.

[streakeagle]

AK,

Those were not the choices.

By the time of Dresden, too many of both sides were already dead. Whether adding 100,000 or more civillians living in Dresden changed the equation in a favorable direction is the whole issue of this debate. Unfortunately, the correct answer could only be known if we could view an alternate history where only that one variable was changed. Everything we post here is pure speculation.

Though the past two "wars" we have been in indicate our military leadership is finally using a pretty damn good model from the perspective of casualties. Of course they are using Hitler's basic formula for major military victories with minimal losses: overwhelm the enemy with numbers and technology!

The dropping of the atom bomb is often justified by the lives it saved. Certainly a lot more Japanese and Americans would have died if we had tried to storm Japanese beaches like D-Day. However, postwar analysis pretty much indicate that Japanese leadership was prepared to continue fighting in spite of the atom bomb. They believed (quite correctly) that we didn't have many. They also believed they could scatter production facilities and/or move them underground to continure fighting indefinitely.

Once again (much to my dismay), I have to agree with Russian historians based on what I have seen and read. The Japanese chose to surrender to the Americans, not because of two isolated bomb raids that did less damage than traditional firestorm attacks, but rather to prevent the Russians from getting the chance to invade them.

So I don't necessarily buy into an event like Dresden being necessary at that stage in the war. But I wasn't there and I wasn't losing loved ones to the war on a daily basis. Armchair generals like us can't ever fully understand what was going on in the heads of our leaders at that time. What did they really know? What was it really going to take to get the Germans to surrender as soon as possible? I like to consider both sides objectively. My mind says do what is mathematically correct, but my heart says, "BY EVERY MEANS AVAILABLE BRING DEFEAT TO THE ENEMY!"

But if they weren't so curious about the effects of a firestorm, instead of hitting an undamaged target with little tactical or strategic value, they could have used that same raid to inflict massive strategic military damage as well as terror.

Same thing with the atom bomb. It was an experiment as much as it was an act of self defense. They had specifically set aside cities for nuclear testing. That makes me question their real motives. In order to maintain national security after the war, we really needed to know the full effects of nuclear weapons. "Made in the USA, tested in Japan."

[CptTrips]

>Those were not the choices.


Don't avoid the hard question.  


Forget Dresden.  I'm not interested if we actually had the ability.  Examine the underlying principle:

If you could have brought Germany to its knee's earlier in saving millions of allied lives but at the cost of huge Axis civillian casualties would YOU have made that trade off?

If you could have saved 15 million extra allied dead at the cost of an extra 50 million Axis civillian dead would you have made that deal?

Don't dance around the question.  Its easy to take the position that if its saves lives overall, but what if it saved our lives but cost them more so the net total was higher but shifted to them.
I know its a hard question, but that is the point.  War is full of hard questions.



Wab

[pbirmingham]

Originally posted by streakeagle

But if they weren't so curious about the effects of a firestorm, instead of hitting an undamaged target with little tactical or strategic value, they could have used that same raid to inflict massive strategic military damage as well as terror.

Same thing with the atom bomb. It was an experiment as much as it was an act of self defense. They had specifically set aside cities for nuclear testing. That makes me question their real motives. In order to maintain national security after the war, we really needed to know the full effects of nuclear weapons. "Made in the USA, tested in Japan."

What I've heard about the atomic bomb was that we definitely wanted Japan to know that we could turn untouched cities into rubble.  We didn't want to muddy the waters by hitting bombed-out cities, or setting bombs off in remote areas.  We made it clear that the danger was very real, and very, very great.

I wonder if that was at work with Dresden?  Did we want to make it absolutely clear that the war could not be won by Germany, and that the cost of prolonging it would be worse than that of an early surrender?

I don't know.  It was a horrible deed, to be sure, but I see it as a message in the universal language.  The message reads: "Do not make war lightly, because it is a horrible business."