Re: Jewish Attitudes to Dresden Bombing

On Fri, 6 Apr 2007 16:21:09 +0000 (UTC), in
soc.culture.jewish.moderated , Andy Katz <amkatz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in <9coc1394rb80isojs4hk4lrlk87i6ga9oj@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 6 Apr 2007 04:25:35 +0000 (UTC), Matt Silberstein
<RemoveThisPrefixmatts2nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 5 Apr 2007 13:27:08 +0000 (UTC), in
soc.culture.jewish.moderated , Andy Katz <amkatz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in <tkr913l8a0h3lea865djlkqctc1pibev2d@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 5 Apr 2007 06:31:38 +0000 (UTC), backon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

What about Coventry?* It was morally wrong for the Germans to attack.
I don't see how the Germans doing something wrong makes it ok for the
Allies to do a very similar (except on a much larger scale) thing.


Son, you're 27 years old. Many of us on SCJM have children older than
that. Those pushing 60 have a different perspective on life. Our fathers
served in the military in WWII. We, growing up in the 1950's, "lived"
through the period, hearing stories about WWII from those that fought
there.

Josh, wadr, playing the age card is not only bad form but misleading.
I'm midway between Matt and 60.

Why did you assume he has a clue regarding my age? He made that up.

What, Josh making characterizations without supporting evidence?
Josh Backon?
Our Josh...?

I honestly thought that you'd made reference to your age somewhere and
Josh was referring to that (in a most irrelevant and inappropriate
way).

I have a long history on the net (oops, there goes an age reference)
working hard to avoid making personal claims. My
age/gender/religion/etc. is not relevant to most of what I write, so I
don't say a thing about them.


Both my parents, all of my uncles,
etc., served. I heard the stories, too. But I've come to realize that
the effort and sacrifice ofactions such as the Eighth Airforce and
Bomber Command's raids are impossible to evaluate objectively *at the
time*. What are we going to do, tell the men of Bomber Command, who
experienced casualties on par with WWI trench warfare, that their
sacrifice didn't help to end the war?

If it did not help end the war then it did not help end the war. We
should not refuse to learn in order to protect their feelings. BTW, I
suspect that lots of those people felt then and later that it was not
helping. I don't blame the individual pilots* and crew because they
probably had no idea about their targets or the results of their
actions. It was the leadership that bears the moral responsibility.

I agree, Matt. It was important to determine the cost-benefit of such
actions--the lack of which is part of what made their own commanders
more dangerous than the enemy to WWI troops--but this information
filters through to the public consciousness gradually. One wouldn't
expect a headline in the days following raids such as Dresden to read
something like: AIRMEN SACRIFICED IN USELESS RAID!


*This is a problem with bombing, and much of modern warfare in
general. There is the plausible deniability because the weapons are
such long range. But there does come a time when pilots have to
understand what is going on.

Right. There are other rationales as well. I recall during the first
Gulf War hearing commentary wrt the area bombing of Bagdhad that the
Iraqi people had to "take responsibility" for their government (and
thus the bombing was justified; and this despite Saddam being
characterized as a despot and autocrat). Recall as well all the talk
about "smart weapons" during the conflict, only to learn afterwards
that only a tiny percentage of weapons used fell into that catagory.

Somehow people don't seem to understand what "Dictator" means. Or how
a secret police affect things.

You're right, of coursre, is that other generations have a different
perspective, a valuable and irreplaceable one, but not necessarily a
more accurate one. As I've written elsewhere, some believe the bombing
of Dresden and Hamburg and other cities may have prolonged the war, at
least in the west, made in it more difficult for those opposing Hitler
to gain support, not when Dresden and Hamburg made the Allies seem as
ruthless as the Soviets.

Certainly the bombing of London had the result in stiffening the
resolve of the British. Buber said (my paraphrase, if I am wrong blame
me not Buber) that immorality consists of considering of treating
people as "the other". Morality and practicality are ill served by
assuming that our opponents are somehow fundamentally different from
us. The acts that made the British more resolved would likely make the
Germans more resolved as well.

Right. And I've read some of the comments in reply suggesting that the
British and Germans are far more alike than our "opponents" of today.
Whether that's true or not is hard to tell. If we look back at wartime
propaganda it was pretty far out there.

My personal feelings about the bombing of Dresden? NOT ENOUGH were
killed!!

You're not wrong. But that's a feeling, Josh. The question leaders
need to ask, and historians afterward, is will it help end the war? If
not, why do it?

Bomber Command, as I wrote, suffered tremendous casualties, worse even
that Fighter Command or the Eighth Airforce. It's also doubtful that
their nightraids really accomplished very much in terms of shortening
the war. Nightbombing simply wasn't accurate enough.

That is where the immorality comes in. It was known that they were not
accurate, so they compensated by dropping *lots* of bombs,
particularly (in Dresden and Hamburg) incendiary bombs. They knew they
were not accurate, so they just tried to destroy so much that they
might also destroy something of military value. They *deliberately*
attacked civilians with the hope that some military target would also
get hit.

Well, here I differ in that I don't see it as necessarily immoral. It
was a strategy that had to be tried. The first World War ended after
Germany collapsed from within.

In WWI Germany collapse on the front, not with the populace. One of
the problems following WWI was that the people did not feel the
deprivation the war caused. While this was a political decision inside
Germany it supported later claims that Germany was stabbed in the
back.

So while the British in particular
ought to have taken their own reaction to bombing into account, it was
at least possible that the Germans would not react the same way.

"At least possible" is a pretty poor support. I think that this is
just cover and that a clear motivation at the time, and justified by
some here, was revenge for German attacks on civilians.

Hitler, after all, was a dictator, and I don't think the degree of
support the National Socialists enjoyed until the bitter end was fully
appreciated by the Allies until after the war.

I think a chunk of that support is analogous to some of the support
for Bush or Ahmadinejad: there are those who dislike the policies but
support the country and so the leader. Now please note, I don't offer
that as a defense: doing bad things for National Socialism is not
worse than doing them for Germany. And doing bad things you know is as
bad, if not worse, than doing them because you support the act.

It was at least
possible that demonstrating Germany's inability to defend herself in
the most fundamental way might have led to a critical undermining of
the Nazi government.

Daytime bombing would do that as well or better. Bombing Berlin would
do it better.

So isn't it
worthwhile to consider this possibility and, should another war of
this sort take place, rethink the advisability of sacrificing so many
brave airmen in pursuit of a dubious strategy?


Now go back to your guitar music and atheistic views and leave
us alone.

This is really inappropriate.

But somehow the moderators accept those personal attacks.

Yes. And to the detriment of the overall quality of discourse on this
ng:(

As a conservative you probably kvetch
endlessly about "political correctness" yet here you are, implying
that Matt isn't even Jewish (leave *us* alone?) because his views are,
as far as you're concerned, politically incorrect.


I do find it strange that someone whose attitude toward
Judaism and Israel like yours has a one man crusade against the Muslim
slaughter of Xtians in Darfur. I'm confused why you and your sister Susan
are on this group. This is soc.culture.JEWISH.moderated and we discuss
JEWISH topics.

Then discuss ....

It was determined about six weeks ago that there *is* now "Jewish
attitude" to the bombing of Dresden. Thus your presence here is a
contradiction in terms from the get go.

Furthermore the irony of your attack against Matt couldn't be more
obvious: It seems to me that *both* of you are approaching this issue
from emotional rather than rational standpoints.

My point is judging others like we judge ourselves. I don't see the
emotion, but I am open to learn.

Perhaps it's not emotion as much as not putting yourself into the
position of Allied leaders at the time.

I don't think that I present a whiggish view. I don't depend on
knowledge unavailable to them, I don't depend on some "calm
reflection". Harris knew what he was doing.

I think given the limitations
that Bomber Command worked under, area bombing had at least to be
tried, just as Truman was obligated to use the A bomb both to shorten
the war and reduce US casualties in the process. Had Japan not
surrendered then, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be more controversial
still, and while there *were* alternatives to using the A bomb, I
don't think they were politically viable at the time.

There were many viable options available and offered. See my other
post on this.


Sure, it's great that
the Germans got a tiny little taste of the Holocaust they'd been
dishing out, but at what cost to the airmen who had to deliver that
attack? Or the possibility that Dresden et. al. prolonged the war
itself instead of shortening it?

It was a poor use of resources in that we had better targets. It may
even, as you suggest, have been counter-productive. I don't find it
immoral when as a necessity or an accident some innocents are killed:
I am not a complete pacifist. We have to weight many factors and wars
are all terrible things. But the case of the night-time bombings is,
IMHO, pretty clear. We deliberately targeting civilians for something
that, *at the times*, was of dubious military value.

Many actions undertaken in war can be proved to have been
counter-productive in the fullness of time and reflection.

There is another factor to consider. The U.S. had the capability to
daylight bombing, the British did not. The British did not want to be
left out of the fighting so, useful or not, they did what they could.
That is not a justification for targeting civilians.

Did more children die due to area bombing, or did more die during the
"turnip winter" of '17/'18 when the RN blockade of German was really
beginning to be felt in Central Europe and actually shorten a war that
otherwise had no end in sight?

Which is morally more reprehensible?

That is also a difficult decision. I am not at all sure about the
morality of food blockades, but I don't think it is the right
question. The issue in WWII was not blockade or firebomb. I see
morality as between actual choices available: X is not moral or not, X
is moral in terms of your alternative choices Y or Z. We don't compare
the blockade to the bombing, we compare the blockade to the options
available to them then.

Consider too that blockade is a fundamental tool of any war. It's been
proposed as the moral alternative to A bombing in WWII.

Actually they did both. The "amusing" thing is that we learn in the
U.S. that we entered WWI because, in part, of German use of
unrestricted submarine warfare. And we don't learn that unrestricted
submarine warfare was what really brought Japan to its knees.

But as a
tactic it's also the one directed at civilians the most. After all,
the military isn't going to starve. It has, out of practical and
patriotic necessity, first call on dwindling resources. So even that
most "humane" of wartime strategies contains that element of plausible
deniability wrt civilian depredations that you suggested above.

I agree that civilians get hurt in wars. I have said over and over I
do not find that per se immoral (except that we should consider all
wars immoral, even if the most moral alternative). If the blockade
could have reasonably allowed food and only food in, then we would
have had a moral choice. The problem is Dresden was not that civilians
were killed, it was that civilians were the target.



--
Matt Silberstein

Do something today about the Darfur Genocide

http://www.beawitness.org
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