Given how many myths/downright untruths are in that article, I’d be VERY cautious about using it as a reference for anything…
Page 521 gives some information about the accuracy’s of bombing in GW1 with Guided and un-guided munitions, it also explains that something can be described as a hit but could actually be a fair distance away (10-30ft) and that many accurate bombs dropped in perfect conditions has a CEP (Circular Error Probable) of 200-400ft.
So even weapons in the much touted smart weapon war, dropped in perfect conditions were no where near as accurate as they claimed.
Chapter Seven: Offensive Air Power, Strategic Bombing and Preparation for the Ground Offensive
Great paper.
Thanks for providing the link.
I have read the whole paper when I was trying to do research into the BDA I was helping with in Kosovo in 1999 (another farcical example of the accuracy or not of air dropped munitions and intelligence). I eventually downloaded and stitched all the chapters together.
It can seem a little overwhelming at times but I found it interesting, I had another paper I was sent stating the average target hit (within 10m) of the smart weapons was as low as 25% (not even mentioning the Patriots) during GW1
I vote - “Criminal, but our criminal…” 
Good post matey. I agree, total war means total war.
IMO Harris [backed by sympatico war-monger/enabler, W.Churchill] wasted so many resources, both Allied & German,human & materiel, that, but for being on the winning side [but failing in his boast to win it himself via B.C.], he def`meets the criteria for war criminality.
The aircraft & crews [55,000!] wasted over Germany could have protected the Atlantic convoys more usefully, & burning civilians alive may have been par for the course for military dictatorships, but the democratic allies [or Britain, at least - since the U.S. had its horrific ‘Sherman’ principles] ought not to have tarred themselves with that murderous brush…
I guess that ‘war criminality’ is a forensic definition, but it can hardly be denied that Allied atrocities were a [needless & unfortunate] blot on their moral high ground authority…
Genocide is commonly understood to mean the destruction/extermination of a specific people, religious group or race. There was no thought given to exterminate either the Germans or Japanese as peoples. Therefore, Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Tokyo, Hiroshima & Nagasaki were not genocide by definition.
What about ‘holocaust’ as a definition?
It was the fire-storms created by deliberate incendiary attack on housing - which were the big killers of civilians…
& is it true?
That more ‘friendly-fire’ casualties were caused by Allied bombing co-lateral damage…
… than by deliberate German attacks on Britain?
I’m not sure I can make heads or tails out of your meaning here…
Find a dictionary then, R 744…
According to the concise Oxford, the No1 meaning applies to Harris’s city burnings…
& I want to know if anyone else had heard that bombing in occupied Europe had dealt so much deadly damage…
Two possible questions here:
- Did the British and Americans cause more damage to Germany than Germany did to the UK? Indubitably, by some margin.
- Did the British and Americans cause more civilian casualties in Germany than Germany did in the various occupied territories? Not even close - even leaving aside the Holocaust (~6 million), there were millions more deliberately starved or worked to death. The German air raid casualties are generally agreed to be substantially below a million.
1 Like
That was not the question though, was it?
It is kind of akin to cops being [supposedly] held to a higher standard as far as corruption/criminality goes…
& being punished more heavily if found to be dirty…
We expect certain behaviour from cruel ideologues, like Hitler/Stalin/Mao, not so much from democracies…
Further, you ignore the distinction between East & West…
Did the Nazis kill more Western European civilians [non counting insurgents/resistance] than F.F. air-raids?
In the East it really was ‘total war’, & no Geneva Convention for combatants either…
So the very worst crimes are OK because we know the people doing them are bastards? That’s the very worst sort of moral relativism.
If you or your family are victims of crime, do you raise that spurious numbers game?
How does a comparison of numbers stack up as a moral relativity question anyhow?
Are you entitled to be more outraged by a Cop doing you criminal harm than a Mafioso?
What Stalin said about tragedy being personal, but millions being a statistic?
Don’t know.
What, exactly, is the question?
Cognitive Dissonance?
I visited the Canberra War Memorial Museum earlier this week.
Among the excellent displays is a multi-media Bomber Command presentation based around G-George,
a lucky Lancaster survivor of multiple sorties.
The presentation does rightly focus on the sacrifice of the young fliers, but the tour guides were a bit
embarrassed by some of the questions fielded by visiting school kids on history…
Esp’ when some of the footage shows German kinder/kindling…
Not on my part.
Just an inability to understand whatever it is you were trying to say.
Your inadequate, truncated, strangely punctuated, rambling expression is not conducive to comprehension.
Which merely demonstrates that the tour guides lacked the knowledge, initiative and resources to respond with the opposed and greater evil of some footage of concentration camps, death camps, gas chambers, ovens, mass burial pits with a bullet in the back of the neck before being blasted into the pits, and Einsatzgruppen.
And lets not forget the Medical experimentation on civilians, as well as other “research” conducted by the Reich.