Dresden Bombings Anniversary
Today marks the sad anniversary of the dresden bombings in which over 100,000 souls perished during the two hour fire inferno caused by Allied bombing. Let's take a minute off and reflect...
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"Less than 5 percent." Oh yes, certainly a mere trifle, not worthy of a moment of contemplation. Come on.
shareheich1, pls try and get this into your head: (1) the name's David Irving, (2) no holocaust deniers here, old boy, and (3) even with as "low" a figure as 25-30,000 or "a mere 5%" (I'm amazed at your bizzare statistics) it was still a barbaric war crime of immense magnitude, that was completely uncalled for. Can you digest all this?
shareI was supicious because you used too high statistics. Do you also mark the bombing of Coventry and also call it a barbaric war crime of immense magnitude.
If not why?
heich1, of course the Coventry bombings were an entirely different affair since Coventry, being a highly industrialized city was in the words of Frederick Taylor (an English notable historian and not a "holocaust denier") "a legitimate target for industrial air bombing". Check it on Wikipidia. Dresden on the other hand was a defenseless city, save of the forces that were there trying to maintain some order in the chaos of the incoming miserable human army of refugees fleeing the Eastern front from the Soviet onslaught, and to guard the Allied war prisoners. You're into a morbid statistics mode so here's some: Less than a 1,000 people perished in the attacks in Coventry, mostly civilians.You know how many more perished in Dresden.So, yes cynical as I may sound the Coventry worker knew the risks of his being there unlike the destitute refugee of Dresden who found himself aflame from the phosphorus bombs, quite out of the blue, in a defenseless city (no factories, industry or chimney stacks in Dresden, old boy, but Museums, libraries and lots of statues). I think there is big difference. Don't you?
share Look again in Wikipedia. You will find that in Dresden at this time there was the Zeiss-Ikon optical factory and The Siemens glass factory manufacturing for
military gun sights. Also radar and electronic components, fuses for antiaircraft shells, gas masks, Junker aircraft engines, and cockpit parts for
Messerschmitt fighters. So Dresden had industry useful for the German War Effort.
I am sure that among the people of Coventry killed where completely innocent
children as there was in Dresden.
I lived in England during the Second World War as a small child. First in Cambridge which as you should know was a university town and then in Nottingham. In Cambridge houses were bombed although not where I was living in.
In Nottingham there was a lighted empty field near the city which was bombed and
the city itself all lights were out so it was spared. However I still remember
being awakened in the middle of the night because of warning sirens.
heich1, I read what you say. Hell, you lived through that messy ordeal so I guess you have first hand experience on the matter. What's to discuss? In times of war, ugly things happen so I suppose that Dresden can be paralelled to Coventry, is this the gist of what you say? Sorry, old boy, it simply isn't plainly black and white. Oh, by the way, I re-read Wikipedia and you're right I'm wrong as it says that current historians believe that "anywhere between 25,000 to 300,000 (!) people perished in the attacks" which is a long way from my own writing of 100,000 souls. Now, on the merits of the attack, it wasn't so much that Dresden was a heavily industrial city, but the fact that "successful attack would disrupt the flow of troups and materials" (again in Wikipedia). Anyway, let's not belabour the point and accept the obvious: the attacks was not one of the brightest minutes of the Allies in the War effort, they were completely uncalled for,based on the logic that the ends justify the means. Dresden, Piraeus, Marseilles, Nurenberg, et al.How's that?
shareHEICH1 is right,and you are wrong.
You mention TAYLOR but don't mention his book called DRESDEN which many informed people say nails the idea that the city was not a fair military target.
Have you read the book or many books on World War 11?
Do you know that the bombing of Dresden (never the RUHR or Munich or Berlin)is cause celebre for pro nazi people since it happened?
It was a military target because they made things like gun sites and radio valves there.
In any case it was total war,nearly everybody was contributing something to the war effort,Germany was not as mobilised as Britain but do you think they were making lots of nice china during World War 11?
The comparision always made with Coventry is helpful to the people who go on about Dresden because despite the shock at the time the number of people killed at Coventry was less than less famous raids such as CLYDEBANK,SWANSEA and many others.
The reason that so many more Germans were killed by allied bombing than allied civilians by the German airforce was because the German airforce was designed to work supporting the army with dive bombers and so on,they were not equipped to carry out heavy long distance bombing.
They didn't not want to kill more British people,they were not capable of doing so,I am glad to say.
Absolute bollocks.
You are a disgusting wretch to effectively say the horror of Dresden should not be discussed for fear of associating it with Nazi sympathisers. No one knows the total dead from Dresden with any certainty so it is is churlish to dismiss Irving's work. He is a consumate scholar on Germany in that period. The stories of the horrific firestorm and the phosphorus that rained down on that city is without doubt one of the most disturbing events in history. I would contend more people; the vast majority of whom were woman and children, died on that day and subsequent night than any 24 hour period in recorded human history.
Edit: On Irving's website he details corroborating evidence has been found in the PRO (Public record office).
http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2009/240409.html
"April 24th 2009. This afternoon, my quiet patience is rewarded. I have come across this new secret document, signed by the police chief of Dresden, and decoded by the British some weeks after the war.
At 5:55 p.m. on March 24, 1945 -- the day in fact when I turned eight, I remember it vividly -- the Dresden Polizeipräsident reported in code to SS Oberführer Dr. Dietrichs:
Re: Missing Persons Situation in Dresden Air Raid Defence region.
The Lord Mayor of Dresden City has established (a) a Central Bureau for Missing Persons and nine Missing Persons registries; (b) eighty- to one-hundred thousand missing-person notifications are estimated to have been registered so far; (c) 9,720 missing-person notifications have been confirmed as fatalities; (d) to date, information on twenty thousand missing person cases has been given out; (e) accurate statistical data possibly only later.
Even the "hundred thousand" figure for those reported missing must be an under-estimate. There were over half a million homeless refugees in the streets of Dresden, fleeing the Red Army siege of Breslau to the East. Whole refugee families must have been engulfed by the Dresden holocaust, with nobody surviving to report them as "missing".
Another thing seems brutally clear: those listed as "missing" -- in addition to those bodies formally identified and buried or incinerated by this date -- were never going to return. To use the words of the telegram I found yesterday (see above) they were dead, "carbonised," and unidentifiable."
In March 1942 Churchill’s War Cabinet adopted the ‘Lindemann plan’, whereby civilian targeting became official. Working-class homes were preferred to upper-class because they were closer together, and so a greater flesh-incineration-per-bomb could be achieved. The Jewish German émigré Professor Frederick Lindemann, Churchill's friend and scientific advisor had by then become Lord Cherwell. He submitted a plan to the War Cabinet on March 30th urging that German working-class houses be targeted in preference to military objectives, the latter being harder to hit. Middle-class homes had too much space around them, he explained. He was not prosecuted for a ghastly new war-crime, hitherto undreamt-of. Thereby all cities and town over 50,000 inhabitants could be destroyed, or at least brought to ruin. The War Cabinet realised that no inkling of this must reach the public. How Britain Pioneered City Bombing by Nicholas Kollerstrom, PhD
The 100,000 figure is in the film of course and Pilgrim receives electric shock treatment for comparing the atrocity to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is it any wonder the film has not received the credit it deserves.
You seem to deny being a Nazi sympathiser. However you say that Irving is a
consumate scholar on Germany of that period. He is a well known holocaust denier. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving. In addition you sem to blame the bombing on the Jews by mentioning Lindemann.
Say that to Adolf Hitler. He was the one who started the war. The Germans had it coming. Sorry.
shareMore civilians were killed in the bombing of Dresden , Hamburg and Nuremburg in the combined time of less then three weeks, than all of the civilians killed in Great Britain during the whole of the entire war from German bombing.
shareGive thanks to Adolf Hitler for it. He was the one who started this unnecessary war in the first place.
shareThe concept of total war was mainstream more than a century old before Hitler invaded Poland. While there are examples going back to Carthage, the more recent example is Sherman's March to the Sea during the U.S. Civil War, when all means of production in the South were considered a fair target. Sherman could, and did, spare human lives, but he did destroy everything else that could be used by the Confederacy.
Area bombing by British Bomber Command and daylight "precision" bombing by the U.S. were considered OK because any German city with a war factory or rail junction (which meant all of them) could be destroyed as a means to end the war. There's still today a great debate about how effective bombing was because the Nazis were able to keep much of their war production going until near the very end. It also took boots on the ground, Russian and Allied, to truly bring about the Nazi surrender.
The atomic attacks on Japan were something else. My opinion is that it was the only time in history "shock and awe" actually worked.
Not always.
shareBollocks.
I'm afraid the japanese had been trying to sue for peace months in advance of nagasaki and Hiroshima. They needed to try out the weapon to see exactly what destruction it would cause. Wierdly both cities were Christian ones. I'm sure Oppenheimer approved.
In his memoirs Admiral William D. Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff--and the top official who presided over meetings of both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined U.S.-U.K. Chiefs of Staff--minced few words:
[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . .
[I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet stated in a public address given at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945:
The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war. (See p. 329, Chapter 26) . . . [Nimitz also stated: "The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan. . . ."]
In a private 1946 letter to Walter Michels of the Association of Philadelphia Scientists, Nimitz observed that "the decision to employ the atomic bomb on Japanese cities was made on a level higher than that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." (See pp. 330-331, Chapter 26)
Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946:
The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. . . . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.
The Japanese were already trying to get peace terms actually. The twin atomic bombs were also against the two Christian cities in Japan. How very very peculiar. Not until you realise who the architects of the atomic weapons project were.
shareMy opinion is that they didn't bomb Dresden enough, they should have gone back and bombed it some more.
shareThere were several more bombings of this city until April of 1945. Anyway, Germans paid the consequences for supporting Hitler's Nazis. And I fear a few of them refuse to learn the hard lessons [ever heard of the skinhead neonazis in that area?]. Anyway, its history. Life goes on.
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