Re: War Celebrations

parris_k@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
The Todal skrev:


"Palindr?me" <me9@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:12b2jb7187r9u4d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Cynic wrote:

If the targets of the bombs had been the factories, then OK. But if
the bombs were deliberately targetted to fall on housing estates and
monuments, then no. The mens rea is the important thing.

If the factories cannot be stopped any other way, I have no problem in the
morality of blowing up estates full of factory workers who spend their
days in them, making munitions that will be used against me.

That rather evades the issue - are you saying estates that happen to contain
only factory workers who make munitions? I might agree with you that they
are a legitimate target, but I suspect that usually the workers from diverse
industries are mixed within a suburb or estate.


YOu have no problem with the destruction fo Hiroshima, where hundreds
of thousands were indiscriminatley killed in a city which had rather
less miltary value than Dresden. Why do you keep whining about Bomber
Command during WWII? Your lack of consistency illustrates how ignorant
and confused you are.



Time perhaps for a quotation from Irving's book on Dresden, "Apocalypse
1945". I suppose there will be some who assume anything said by Irving must
be fake, and I am in no position to obtain the source material for myself,
but it is quite interesting.


It's hilarious that you've been shown that Irving's book on Dresden is
at best an exagerration, designed to further his agenda of painting it
in the same light as the holocaust, yet you continue to quote from it
to support the tattereted remains of your bull*** argument.



[quote]

As the winter of 1943 approached, the forces aligned against Bomber
Command were not entirely those under the command of Adolf
Galland and Hajo Hermann; at the same time, a controversy about the
ethical issues involved in night area bombing was mounting both
within and without the British government.


Note there was no such ethical discussion amongst the Nazis..


In public the government's statements had been designed to
assuage suspicious minds. When the B.B.C. reported in May 1942
that numerous workers' dwellings had been successfully destroyed
during attacks on Rostock, a Member of Parliament for the Independent
Labour Party had asked the Secretary of State for Air
whether the Royal Air Force had been instructed 'to impede and
disorganise the German effort by the destruction of workmen's
dwellings?' This was some weeks after the acceptance of Professor
Lindemann's minute on area bombing, and ten weeks had passed
since Bomber Command had been instructed to aim at the built-up
areas, 'not for instance the dockyards or aircraft factories where
these are mentioned'; but Sir Archibald Sinclair still felt justified in
replying smoothly that 'no instruction has been given to destroy
dwelling houses rather than armament factories'.
Similarly, when Mr Richard Stokes, Labour M.P. for Ipswich and
another veteran campaigner against the bombing of enemy civilians,
asked on March 31, 1943, at the height of the Battle of the Ruhr,
whether British airmen had been instructed to 'engage in area
bombing rather than limit their attention to purely military targets,'
Sinclair again dismissed the suggestion with an airy assurance that 'the
targets of Bomber Command are always military'. He must have
been as aware by this time as any of the thousands of Bomber
Command personnel of the exact siting of the pencilled crosses on the
aircrews' target maps;


It' s amusing to see you defend bombing as a method of weakening the
enemy's will by bombing cvilians in one case (Hiroshima) then abruptly
doing an about face and criticising it in the case of Bomnber Command,
all because you read an innacurate book by a Nazi apologist.

By the way, are you EVER going to support your ludicrous assertion that
the RAF were the first to target civilians in WWII?

<snip whining>

I had no idea Todal considered the nukes on cities justified. I remain horrified at their first use on cities, in spite of my acceptance of carpet bombing.

ISTM that the first nuclear weapon could have been dropped, say, above the tree line of Mount Fuji, at dawn, on the slopes facing towards Tokyo. The effects would have been very dramatic and persistent, but the loss of life relatively small.

It was not that whole cities could be levelled by the US - the Japanese already knew that was going to happen, using conventional carpet bombing. But carpet bombing leaves prepared positions and men mostly intact. The "beauty" of nuclear weapons is that it leaves nothing intact - nothing left with which to fight back.

A huge scar on the side of Mount Fuji, the snow and trees gone, the huge flash flood of melted snow and ice..an unmistakable sign of what would be to come, if the war continued.

--
Sue













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