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I did say, "deliberately, " and for a reason. Joel Send a noteboard - 03/02/2010 04:23:44 AM

My only quibble is that, while no country is perfect, Allied bombings of non-military targets in WWII was very much the exception rather than the rule. Even in Dresden; Wikipedia notes (and cites; they didn't pull it out of thin air) that claim is disputed on the grounds that "several researchers have argued that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were in fact targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas outside the city centre. "

Actually the guy Churchill had studying the effects of bombings found that that vast majority of the bombs missed their targets. And his definition of 'hitting a target' meant landing within a mile and a half! He said that a better description of what the bombers were doing would be "exporting explosives." By the time of Dresden, Churchill claimed the point was to drive the civilians out of the cities to block the roads and interfere with troop movements.

That seems rather dubious; Churchill never struck me as that stupid or grossly inefficient. When you're rationing everything you don't just bomb things at random for the hell of it. And missing a legitimate military target, even often, doesn't equal DELIBERATELY TARGETING civilians. My dad told a very different tale of the Norden bombsight anyway. One wonders why something so ineffective was more important than the pilot, and (according to Wikipedia) remained in use until Vietnam. I'm not a huge fan of strategic bombing, understand; frankly, I think it helped LOSE Vietnam because flying whole squads of B-52s into flak traps designed to look like ammo dumps and railroad stations is costly in terms of men and material. But to say it had no effect in Axis controlled Europe, that their military production only diminished when they lost control of Balkan and French territories, raises the question of why the war machine that managed to take control of those resources despite lacking them couldn't retain control when possessing the additional benefits they provided.

That's fine if you want to believe the Allies deliberately ignored significant military targets just to inflict suffering on the civilian German populace, but since the Allied commanders probably knew better than anyone that the German populace had little say in the war by then it seems dubious.

They didn't give a flying crap one way or another. As was well-known to their political superiors, and should have been known to them, it wasn't so much an issue of ignoring military targets to aim at civilians, as their sheer inability to actually make that distinction meaningful.

Additionally, they were middle-aged to elderly men whose careers were heavily invested in being experts at bombing. Damned if they were going to admit the situation called for anything other than more bombing. To confess that they had no clue what they were doing, and that it was an appalling waste of munitions, money & lives on their side, and to the other, an atrocity whose sole virtue was the ability of the performers to distance themselves from the results, would have meant admitting that they were responsible for all the men who were killed uselessly on bombing sorties, the civilians who were slaughtered indiscriminately, and the wasted resources that could have gone to something more useful. Like, say, equipment to better protect the ground troops who were doing the actual work of pushing back the Germans. The claims that the strategic bombing campaigns had an appreciable effect on production or morale cannot be taken seriously considering that German production actually accelerated during the height of the strategic bombing campaign, and did not noticable slow down until late in 1944 to 1945, when the last German sources of iron & oil (France & Romania, respectively) were out of their hands.

I'm guessing the biggest reasons Allied commanders thought strategic bombing effective were 1) it proved VERY effective for the Germans who pioneered it, as the Brits saw first hand and 2) the resource bare NAZI high command continued making great efforts to stop it despite a general disregard for their own populations welfare. I don't think morale was the primary consideration, but people STILL talk about the Dresden firebombing, so it's hard to dispute it had an impact.

All of that said, however, a case can be made, and if one accepts that case then I agree it would qualify as terrorism. Deliberately targeting civilians as an end in itself is reprehensible whoever does it, but if you insist on zero civilian casualties then every invading army will mount babies on the front of their tanks.

Of course. Collateral damage is perfectly acceptable, morally speaking (not having to run for re-election I am rather indifferent to the PR aspects). The question is actually whether or not they are collateral or the only damage. I'd have signed off on targeting an orphanage if I had reliable intelligence that Hitler was inspecting it, but not bombing random orphanages on the off-chance he might be in one of them. When the inefficacy of your weapons, such as that of high-altitude or night-time bombing, renders any sort of accurrate targeting impossible, and this is known at the highest levels during the conflict, the moral justification drops off sharply. And when the civilians are deliberately targeted, merely because they produce food or might work in factories that produce war materiel, or to dishearten the troops - terrorism. Period. And regarding that last, whenever I see dramatizations of WW2 on the Western Front I tend to want to smack the anglophonic troops. I imagine post-war a GI making friends with a former Wehrmacht conscript and talking about their tribulations.
GI:"I got a Dear John letter, and Ma says they're rationing sugar and butter, so she can't have a cake for me when I get home. I am so unhappy."
Fritz:"Ja, I understand where you are coming from. Mein parents were killed when our block was randomly bombed und my girlfriend was gang-raped by Russians, so I can totally commiserate."

Of course that scenario is silly. They wouldn't have been friends, since official Allied occupation policy was to forbid speaking to Germans as a punitive measure to dehumanize them, and ol' Fritz would have been starving in an internment camp, where he would have been re-classified as something other than a Prisoner of War, since we were not feeding German prisoners enough to meet the Geneva Convention standards for official POWs.

And while the horrors Germany inflicted on Poland on the Ostfront, as well as the entire history of Stalin's regime, combine to make Malmedy look like a practical joke, it simply does not excuse our conduct. Reciprocity would have been one thing, but there was no real attempt to use brutality to dissuage the Germans from the same.

One could argue we merely encouraged German terrorism, since the historically unprecedented unconditional surrender proclamation at Casablanca left them no way out. We basically announced our intention to utterly destroy them, which left them no recourse but a fight to the death. The rebuttal of overtures from German resistance movements and the strategic bombing campaign helped encourage that mindset among Hitler's followers and made them more likely to stick by him, believing that if they could not throw him to the lions, they might as well try to help him stave them off.

Wait, so the ALLIES caused the HOLOCAUST by forcing Germanys hand? I suggest you NOT try selling that to any native German unless you want to be punched. At the risk of sounding like Llyod George and Clemencau, we didn't start the freakin' war either time so I fail to see how the Allies MOTIVATED any of it. I'm curious how bombs that couldn't hit munitions and machine factories despite their top secret bomb sights were supposed to accurately target enough workers to shut those factories down completely. You're asking me to believe the Allies weren't just evil, but staggeringly STUPID. "Let's knowingly devote the output of dozens of factories, and thousands of hours of training for men of whom many won't come back, to marginally reduce the output of a few German factories by killing a tithe of their workers (and incidentally commit war crimes. " The best rebuttal to that is that anyone that stupid would've lost the war.

I'm less concerned about Allied policies to "dehumanize" (I believe the official term was "denazify" ) German POWs by refusing to speak to them as they starved than about than Wild Bill Donovan ignoring Trumans explicit orders NOT to allow any war criminals to be shipped out of Germany to the States along with the thousands of others we snuck out in Operation Paperclip. Presumably picking their brains required speaking to and feeding them. Still, I see your point; poor abused slave labor using Werner von Braun; my heart bleeds for him....

Whether we can sell our agreed upon definition of "terrorist" and "guerrilla" remains to be seen....

Meh. Politicians & their court historians are irrevocably committed to the highly complex scale of nomenclature determination which might best be summed up as "Them" and "Us."

"Father and Mother and me,
Sister and Auntie say,
And all the nice people like Us are We
And everyone else is They." - Kipling

Most seem committed to excuses for collecting fat paychecks but ignoring real problems (unless you consider re-election a real problem, which in many cases it is, just not for them. )

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All Terrorists are Muslims… except the 94% that aren’t. Ghavrel - 01/02/2010 10:42:12 PM 1704 Views

I find that unsurprising. LadyLorraine - 01/02/2010 11:31:43 PM 399 Views

Lot of BS in there Isaac - 01/02/2010 11:33:08 PM 507 Views

I'm afraid I have to agree with this. Legolas - 01/02/2010 11:46:02 PM 462 Views

Well, no. Robbery accounts for a very small percentage of those attacks. Look at the chart. Ghavrel - 01/02/2010 11:50:39 PM 416 Views

I found the so-called Islamophobic reply... allow me to quote it in its entirety. Legolas - 01/02/2010 11:52:37 PM 438 Views

It's a valid complaint. *NM* Ghavrel - 02/02/2010 01:49:08 AM 178 Views

Whose complaint is valid? Legolas - 02/02/2010 01:55:58 AM 403 Views

Yours.

*NM* Ghavrel - 02/02/2010 02:15:01 AM 175 Views

I did note the rampant bias.

Ghavrel - 01/02/2010 11:48:55 PM 515 Views

What about attacks on Iraqi police volunteers? beckstcw - 01/02/2010 11:53:58 PM 426 Views

it only included attacks on American soil *NM* random thoughts - 02/02/2010 02:03:16 PM 186 Views

Most of the Iraq violence isn't against the foreign occupier... Legolas - 01/02/2010 11:54:44 PM 433 Views

Ahem... /\ /\ /\ beckstcw - 01/02/2010 11:56:34 PM 465 Views

Dude, 46 seconds. I was typing it while you posted.

*NM* Legolas - 02/02/2010 12:05:44 AM 164 Views

True, but I was referring to attacks on US soldiers. Ghavrel - 02/02/2010 01:47:55 AM 408 Views

That's still a bad benchmark Isaac - 02/02/2010 10:00:23 AM 500 Views

You would be very wrong random thoughts - 02/02/2010 02:11:08 PM 460 Views

Um, since when is all Mid-East terrorism against foreign occupiers? Joel - 02/02/2010 12:33:13 AM 588 Views

I would agree with this. Cannoli - 02/02/2010 02:33:47 AM 503 Views

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Joel - 02/02/2010 04:10:13 AM 533 Views

This is the only problem I have with "definitions" beckstcw - 02/02/2010 04:51:00 AM 411 Views

You're conflating two types of fighters who shouldn't be, I believe. Joel - 03/02/2010 06:16:21 AM 400 Views

I think you missed the point. beckstcw - 05/02/2010 05:15:40 AM 407 Views

One of us did.

Joel - 05/02/2010 08:26:07 AM 580 Views

I'm not talking ETHICALLY or MORALLY beckstcw - 14/02/2010 06:41:32 PM 407 Views

I was, or at least speaking legally. Joel - 15/02/2010 06:54:50 AM 475 Views

Churchill's justification of bombings cited civilians as the targets, IIRC Cannoli - 03/02/2010 12:46:16 AM 602 Views

I did say, "deliberately, " and for a reason. Joel - 03/02/2010 04:23:44 AM 550 Views

Re: I did say, "deliberately, " and for a reason. Cannoli - 05/02/2010 02:22:10 AM 751 Views

Re: I did say, "deliberately, " and for a reason. Joel - 15/02/2010 09:46:48 AM 558 Views

Lame. beckstcw - 01/02/2010 11:55:50 PM 396 Views

Demographics are the key, methinks. Joel - 02/02/2010 12:20:46 AM 519 Views

WTF? Are these people serious? Tom - 02/02/2010 02:19:05 AM 451 Views

Ah, good. I've driven you out of lurking. Now recommend me operas. *NM* Ghavrel - 02/02/2010 02:41:30 AM 170 Views

Huh? *NM* Tom - 02/02/2010 02:03:24 PM 177 Views

I made a survey on musicals and operas on the board! Ghavrel - 02/02/2010 05:15:45 PM 383 Views

I agree with tom Roland00 - 02/02/2010 02:54:53 AM 421 Views

So what? Cannoli - 02/02/2010 02:23:42 AM 468 Views

Waco were terrorist? Do they just make this crap up? *NM* random thoughts - 02/02/2010 02:00:40 PM 357 Views

So I presume the article meant to highlight that Muslim American citizens aren't all that violent? Larry - 03/02/2010 04:17:06 AM 503 Views

I'd assume so. It's not very well written, though. *NM* Ghavrel - 03/02/2010 06:35:37 AM 285 Views

How many other attacks killed almost 3,000 people of over 90 different nations? Griffen - 03/02/2010 06:26:23 AM 483 Views

leftist dhimmi allies... rofl BlackAdder - 04/02/2010 04:56:48 AM 407 Views

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<quote id="77569">
<quote id="77529"><quote> My only quibble is that, while no country is perfect, Allied bombings of non-military targets in WWII was very much the exception rather than the rule.  Even in Dresden; Wikipedia notes (and cites; they didn't pull it out of thin air) that claim is disputed on the grounds that "several researchers have argued that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were in fact targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas outside the city centre. " </quote> Actually the guy Churchill had studying the effects of bombings found that that vast majority of the bombs missed their targets.  And his definition of 'hitting a target' meant landing within a mile and a half!  He said that a better description of what the bombers were doing would be "exporting explosives." By the time of Dresden, Churchill claimed the point was to drive the civilians out of the cities to block the roads and interfere with troop movements.</quote>
That seems rather dubious; Churchill never struck me as that stupid or grossly inefficient.  When you're rationing everything you don't just bomb things at random for the hell of it.  And missing a legitimate military target, even often, doesn't equal DELIBERATELY TARGETING civilians.  My dad told a very different tale of the Norden bombsight anyway.  One wonders why something so ineffective was more important than the pilot, and (according to Wikipedia) remained in use until Vietnam.  I'm not a huge fan of strategic bombing, understand; frankly, I think it helped LOSE Vietnam because flying whole squads of B-52s into flak traps designed to look like ammo dumps and railroad stations is costly in terms of men and material.  But to say it had no effect in Axis controlled Europe, that their military production only diminished when they lost control of Balkan and French territories, raises the question of why the war machine that managed to take control of those resources despite lacking them couldn't retain control when possessing the additional benefits they provided.
<quote id="77529"><quote>That's fine if you want to believe the Allies deliberately ignored significant military targets just to inflict suffering on the civilian German populace, but since the Allied commanders probably knew better than anyone that the German populace had little say in the war by then it seems dubious.</quote> They didn't give a flying crap one way or another.  As was well-known to their political superiors, and should have been known to them, it wasn't so much an issue of ignoring military targets to aim at civilians, as their sheer inability to actually make that distinction meaningful.

Additionally, they were middle-aged to elderly men whose careers were heavily invested in being experts at bombing.  Damned if they were going to admit the situation called for anything other than more bombing.  To confess that they had no clue what they were doing, and that it was an appalling waste of munitions, money & lives on their side, and to the other, an atrocity whose sole virtue was the ability of the performers to distance themselves from the results, would have meant admitting that they were responsible for all the men who were killed uselessly on bombing sorties, the civilians who were slaughtered indiscriminately, and the wasted resources that could have gone to something more useful.  Like, say, equipment to better protect the ground troops who were doing the actual work of pushing back the Germans.  The claims that the strategic bombing campaigns had an appreciable effect on production or morale cannot be taken seriously considering that German production actually accelerated during the height of the strategic bombing campaign, and did not noticable slow down until late in 1944 to 1945, when the last German sources of iron & oil (France & Romania, respectively) were out of their hands.</quote>
I'm guessing the biggest reasons Allied commanders thought strategic bombing effective were 1) it proved VERY effective for the Germans who pioneered it, as the Brits saw first hand and 2) the resource bare NAZI high command continued making great efforts to stop it despite a general disregard for their own populations welfare.  I don't think morale was the primary consideration, but people STILL talk about the Dresden firebombing, so it's hard to dispute it had an impact.
<quote><quote>  All of that said, however, a case can be made, and if one accepts that case then I agree it would qualify as terrorism.  Deliberately targeting civilians as an end in itself is reprehensible whoever does it, but if you insist on zero civilian casualties then every invading army will mount babies on the front of their tanks.</quote>  Of course. Collateral damage is perfectly acceptable, morally speaking (not having to run for re-election I am rather indifferent to the PR aspects).  The question is actually whether or not they are collateral or the only damage.  I'd have signed off on targeting an orphanage if I had reliable intelligence that Hitler was inspecting it, but not bombing random orphanages on the off-chance he might be in one of them.  When the inefficacy of your weapons, such as that of high-altitude or night-time bombing, renders any sort of accurrate targeting impossible, and this is known at the highest levels during the conflict, the moral justification drops off sharply.  And when the civilians are deliberately targeted, merely because they produce food or might work in factories that produce war materiel, or to dishearten the troops - terrorism.  Period.  And regarding that last, whenever I see dramatizations of WW2 on the Western Front I tend to want to smack the anglophonic troops.  I imagine post-war a GI making friends with a former Wehrmacht conscript and talking about their tribulations.
GI:"I got a Dear John letter, and Ma says they're rationing sugar and butter, so she can't have a cake for me when I get home. I am so unhappy."
Fritz:"Ja, I understand where you are coming from.  Mein parents were killed when our block was randomly bombed und my girlfriend was gang-raped by Russians, so I can totally commiserate."

Of course that scenario is silly.  They wouldn't have been friends, since official Allied occupation policy was to forbid speaking to Germans as a punitive measure to dehumanize them, and ol' Fritz would have been starving in an internment camp, where he would have been re-classified as something other than a Prisoner of War, since we were not feeding German prisoners enough to meet the Geneva Convention standards for official POWs.

And while the horrors Germany inflicted on Poland on the Ostfront, as well as the entire history of Stalin's regime, combine to make Malmedy look like a practical joke, it simply does not excuse our conduct.  Reciprocity would have been one thing, but there was no real attempt to use brutality to dissuage the Germans from the same.

One could argue we merely encouraged German terrorism, since the historically unprecedented unconditional surrender proclamation at Casablanca left them no way out.  We basically announced our intention to utterly destroy them, which left them no recourse but a fight to the death.  The rebuttal of overtures from German resistance movements and the strategic bombing campaign helped encourage that mindset among Hitler's followers and made them more likely to stick by him, believing that if they could not throw him to the lions, they might as well try to help him stave them off.</quote>
Wait, so the ALLIES caused the HOLOCAUST by forcing Germanys hand?  I suggest you NOT try selling that to any native German unless you want to be punched.  At the risk of sounding like Llyod George and Clemencau, we didn't start the freakin' war either time so I fail to see how the Allies MOTIVATED any of it.  I'm curious how bombs that couldn't hit munitions and machine factories despite their top secret bomb sights were supposed to accurately target enough workers to shut those factories down completely.  You're asking me to believe the Allies weren't just evil, but staggeringly STUPID.  "Let's knowingly devote the output of dozens of factories, and thousands of hours of training for men of whom many won't come back, to marginally reduce the output of a few German factories by killing a tithe of their workers (and incidentally commit war crimes. " The best rebuttal to that is that anyone that stupid would've lost the war.

I'm less concerned about Allied policies to "dehumanize" (I believe the official term was "denazify" ) German POWs by refusing to speak to them as they starved than about than Wild Bill Donovan ignoring Trumans explicit orders NOT to allow any war criminals to be shipped out of Germany to the States along with the thousands of others we snuck out in Operation Paperclip.  Presumably picking their brains required speaking to and feeding them.  Still, I see your point; poor abused slave labor using Werner von Braun; my heart bleeds for him.... :rolleyes:

Look, man, I like the Germans, too, but the Nazis were sick SOBs and while their behavior is easily comparable to the atrocities committed by Mao and Stalin (which the Germans, Nazi and non, fully expected, hence the mad dash to find a Brit or American to whom they could surrender) you don't have to look farther than the Berlin Airlift to see that's not how the Western Allies did things.  Germans don't excuse the Nazis and accuse the Allies like this, so why are you doing so?
<quote><quote>Whether we can sell our agreed upon definition of "terrorist" and "guerrilla" remains to be seen.... :disapprove:</quote> Meh.  Politicians & their court historians are irrevocably committed to the highly complex scale of nomenclature determination which might best be summed up as "Them" and "Us."

"Father and Mother and me, 
Sister and Auntie say,
And all the nice people like Us are We
And everyone else is They." - Kipling</quote>
Most seem committed to excuses for collecting fat paychecks but ignoring real problems (unless you consider re-election a real problem, which in many cases it is, just not for them. )
</quote>

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