Today is the Day?

[streakeagle]

Originally posted by AKWabbit
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

I thought my previous replies throughout this thread would make my answer clear. "BRING DEFEAT TO THE ENEMY BY EVERY MEANS POSSIBLE".

Minimizing enemy casualties is a consideration that is secondary to minimizing your own casualties. However, the answer should not be based solely on the casualty ratio at the end of the war, which can only be guessed at any way. The methods you use to get that ratio may come with unacceptable costs that make the first choice better than the second one in the long run. You have not provided sufficient data for a leader that is making a choice that will kill millions of people.

Leaders do not get a little magic tablet that says pick this option and you will get these exact results. Your question is oversimplified. Many things should be taken into consideration before making that kind of decision. I can easily construct cases making either choice superior depending on the circumstances at the beginning and end of the war.

Suppose we achieved your 2nd and "obviously superior" choice by nuking (or just carpet bombing) the crap out of Europe. Lots of people, including plenty that were not Germans, would be seriously affected by such a strategy. We might save 15 million allied lives now, but people have long memories and retaliation in the future could even cost us our existence as a nation.

Like it or not, real world warfare is almost always restricted by politics, which frequently take precedence over casualty rates.

The questions raised by Dresden:
Did bombing Dresden further any Allied objectives at all beyond observing the full effects of a firestorm on an undamaged city? Did it save any Allied lives? Did it shorten the war?

In the absence of hard data, the answers to these questions depend largely upon personal opinion. But one important fact is that we fought WWII for survival and political/economic victory, not revenge. If revenge was the goal, we would have kept the concentration camps open and made as many Germans die as the people they killed.

A line from a song in Roger Waters' album "Amused to Death":

"And the Germans kill the Jews, and the Jews kill the Arabs, and the Arabs kill the hostages, and that is the news." In that song, I am definitely the monkey and very much confused.

[CptTrips]

And you still didn't answer.  

You didn't answer because you're scared.  You and I both know wich answer you'd pick.  And thats not the popular answer.  Not the safe answer.  Not the Oprah Winfry/I feel your pain/group hug answer. But its the logical answer.  Its a hard question.  The kind of hard question men like Harris had to face.  

If Harris had beaten Germeny to its kness by '43 and ended the war he not only would have been knighted but he would have been a friggen national hero.  Irregardless of what the cillian toll might have been.  His only war crime was being ineffective.  


Its not that there was a Dresden, its that there weren't enough Dresdens, earlier enough in the war to make a difference.  

I would have traded 1000 Dresdens to have avoided D-day, avoided Ansio, avoided the Bulge, to have liberated Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka two years early.

Anyone who wouldn't is the real war criminal in my opinion.

And with this, the topic is squelched.  It has become tiresome.


Regards,
Wab

[palef]

Originally posted by SirLoin
At the end of the war,Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris was denied peerage(the title of Duke,Marquees,Earl,Viscount or Baron) given to all other major British commanders because of his terror tactics.

His aircrews were also denied a Distinctive Campaign Medal of their own because of this raid(and others..Hamburg..30,000 dead)

This is especially pathetic because they used the "Break the will of the people to win the war" excuse knowing full well from the Battle of Britain,bombing the civilians only strengthens their resolve to resist.

"Bomber" Harris was denied peerage because he was difficult to work with, constantly second guessed his superiors, and repeatedly made stupid public pronouncements. It had nothing to do with perceived war crimes. As we all know the winners commit no crimes in the pursuit of their righteous war.

The crews of RAF Bomber Command suffered horrendous losses, somewhere in the region of 40% fatalities, and are being considered for a retrospectively awarded campaign medal.

The problem with revisionist evaluation of historical events is that "hardware buffs" such as ourselves tend to ignore many of the mitigating social factors of the period. Our concepts of right and wrong are vastly different to the people that were forced to perpetrate war on such a scale. The view of society was VERY different to ours and the view of war was also very different.

Palef

[streakeagle]

AK,

It is an assumption on your part that any number of Dresdens would have ended the war sooner. Back it up with facts. There is nothing to support any country ever being beaten into submission solely by any form of bombing, whether it is strategic, tactical, or terror. Britain did not give in to terror bombing, they only fought harder. Germany would not have sat back watching it happen either. They would have been forced to abandon major cities, which they were pretty much doing anyway. They also would have attempted to do the same to Britain in retaliation.

There are many who argue WW2 would have ended sooner if the US had dropped more bombs on tanks and troops at the front lines rather than trying to cut off their means of production. It took years for strategic bombing to even have any impact on the war. Despite bombing efforts, German aircraft production increased drastically every year until they surrendered. But it does no good to have ball bearings and oil factories if enemy tanks are rolling through them. If you oppose enemy forces directly on the battlefield, you defeat them far more quickly than if you piss them off by killing their families deep behind the front lines.

Having learned from past lessons, did we burn Iraq to the ground  using terror bombing and killing as many people as possible? No, we pulverized select targets and focused on concentrations of military resources. Minimizing our casualties and winning a war does not necessitate committing the same criminal actions you despise in your opponents. Killing non-combatants is inevitable in warfare, but it is rarely, if ever, a useful objective.

If the aftermath of D-day could have been avoided simply by firebombing German cities, surely the Allies would have done so. Believe or not, Allied leaders were not trying to take their time and see how many people we could lose while fighting Germany. No matter how bitter you are about what the Germans did and how good it makes you feel to know they got firebombed in Dresden, it did not have prove to have any effects on the outcome of the war other than raising the German body count and demonstrating the physics of fire on a massive scale.

Combat decisions must be made based on the net results over both the long run and short run, not by emotions or a personal sense of vengeance.

The fact that no one involved was actually punished should be indicative how the people in charge really felt about Dresden. There is a big difference between not being knighted or getting a medal and being tried for war crimes. To this day Germans are still being hunted down and held accountable for their actions. Whereas in view of what the Germans did, very few Allied troops ever got punished for any atrocities they may have committed.

[mrsid2]

AKWabbit: Bombing of civilian targets is prohibited by the Geneva convention. If countries acted with your logic, they'd be charged with crimes against humanity and warcrimes.

The world is not black&white.

What goes for finland and nazi-germany, we were two countries sharing a common enemy. An enemy that cowardly attacked our small and unprepared country. An enemy whose desant infiltrators attacked the inland villages murdering the civillians while the men were in the front. Those murders were such a painful issue, that only lately they have been discussed publicly. They explain why many veterans still have a burning hate for the 'russkies' enough to shed tears when talking about it.

Finnish armed forces had no guns, ammo or even proper clothing for all its crew.

Russians had 10:1 superiority in infantry, artillery, tanks, aeroplanes and naval forces. The brutal winter, poor planning by russians and skilled guerilla warfare were the only things that saved our country from such an attack.

The russian army expected to cross the whole country in 2 weeks.

Yes, we did accept help from ANYONE in this situation. We had swedish, estionian and norwegian voluntary batallions fighting for us also.

Next wabbit will say that since finland was linked with nazi germany, all those soldiers made swedish, estonian and norwegian countries nazi collaburators too. It's so easy and simple.

Nowadays we have men fighting in the french mercenary legion, I guess that means that we're collaborating France and Nato instead of following 'official' neutral policy.