British and Dominion forces in both world wars? British and Hannoverian forces in the late 1600s? British and Portugese forces during the Peninsular war? Not convinced by that statement…
British and Dominion forces in both world wars? British and Hannoverian forces in the late 1600s? British and Portugese forces during the Peninsular war? Not convinced by that statement…[/quote]
WTFOFMGBBQ :?: :?: :?: I think you would have just been better off saying that the only fighting done in all of WW2 was in North Africa. To belittle my statement is almost belittling utter vastness of that war.
Firstly, I group Dominion forces into the British catagory and here is why:
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Dominion
The US gave you so much stuff under the land lease act its not funny. And thats before we were declared Allies. Naturally you repaid the favor thru other means (equally as much IMO) when we did join the alliance. But what assitance did you send your Dominion forces??? IMO your “former” colonies came more to your aid than vice versa.
The US and UK traded just about everything possilbe to help further the war effort and the eventual defeat of the Axis powers. You said that yourself. …trying to seperate out the actions of the western allies during WW2 is pointless at this level - the US, British and Commonwealth/Imperial forces were integrated to a very deep level and their policies were virtually indistinguishable towards the enemy. About the only things we didnt give each other were things of the highest national security. And there wasnt alot. Before D-day 1 in every 15 men in England were US soliders. And where were these US soliders staying? Mostly in the homes of your countrymen and women. If you go to Malta and see the headquarters there. You will see Eisenhowers desk right down the hall from Alexanders.
Lets say that the Nazi’s had got somekind of alien help. 
Getting serious now. LOL. And that the Axis powers had conquered the world. Who do you think most of the poor bastards at their f*cked up war crimes trial would have been??? Minus the Russians. Leaders of the the UK and the US. They aint going to be messin with some captain of a New Zealand regiment, who was ultimately under UK command anyhow.
And your other forces you talk about. Portugese and Hannoverian. Those wars dont compare. And i seriously doubt that they could compare to the integration of the US and UK forces of WW2. WW2 was the largest conflict ever known and hopefully it will end that way.
I know this probably sound as thou im trying to knock you and that is not my intention. But sorry I am not “convinced” You might argue my outlook of Dominion (interesting term BTW) forces. So change my statement number to 3 then. US-UK-Former parts of the UK. So i stand by my statement. Although applied to another conflict “We must all hang together or else we will surely all hang separately” would be very befitting quote in regards to our WW2 alliance.
So bomber Harris may have been “your” bastard but we take as much responsibility for him as you do. :lol:
British and Dominion forces in both world wars? British and Hannoverian forces in the late 1600s? British and Portugese forces during the Peninsular war? Not convinced by that statement…[/quote]
WTFOFMGBBQ :?: :?: :?: I think you would have just been better off saying that the only fighting done in all of WW2 was in North Africa. To belittle my statement is almost belittling utter vastness of that war. [/quote]
I’m not having a go at the scale of US co-operation/aid, rather at the suggestion that it was completely unprecedented for two countries to co-operate that closely. In the case of the Dominion and Hannoverian forces, they both had the same king as the UK at the time but were still independent countries. This would force military co-operation to be very close indeed. In the case of the British and Portugese forces during the Peninsular war, the Portugese put Wellington in charge of all their forces - giving a unified command structure nearly 150 years before the US/UK did so.
Equipment and training. They were all equipped almost exclusively with British pattern equipment (despite occasional other designs like the Ross rifle, which were usually unsuccessful - the Dominions simply didn’t have the industrial capacity to arm themselves), and were protected by the RN. The Dominions contributed more to the British Empire on land than they got back, but at sea it was a very different story - the RN was massively larger and more capable than any dominion navies (who were integrated into and controlled from the Admiralty in any case).
Dominion is the technical term for a state that was formerly in the British Empire but is now self-governing with the British Monarch as head of state. I think this still applies to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, although I would have to check.
I do not approve of bombing civilians, but I see no problem in bombing an area if it is filled with factories or other legitimate targets. However, in all fairness, I must say that the US did the same thing over Japan near the end of the war when the Japanese would not surrender. I saw a documentary that discussed it and showed night-time incindiary raids over Japan by US bombers. They dropped huge amounts of incindiary bombs from low altitude over Japanese cities. Many civilians died in the terrible fires that resulted.
The thing is, the Japanese split up the work of making goods for the war and they did it in their own homes. The documentary showed Japanese footage of them making all manner of things, even metal things, in their homes with materials provided by the Japanese government. So, you could say that the civilian areas had become military tagets legitimately. It’s a touchy subject though.
I can understand the feeling of wanting to though. The Japanese were ruthless. They bombed military field hospitals in the Pacific and their treatment of POW’s was just as inhumane as the Germans was. I don’t think it is an excuse for area bombing though, no matter who did it.
I think that the Japanese treatment of POWs was actually a lot worse than the Germans.
The treatment of other prisoners - Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovahs witnesses (although I can understand that one :D), the retarded and others, however is an entirely different topic and one that IMO should never be forgotten.
IIRC Lend/Lease wasn’t all one way, billions of pounds worth of UK owned companies and investments were liquidated by the US. One of the reasons Britain was so shakey after the war was the loss of these overseas investments.
As in WW1, the british bought goods from US (no Lend lease then) and had to sell their investments in US to a large extent. I think that before WW1 the Brits owned about 1/3 of US companies etc. Mind you, i think the Chinese own a fair proportion of US bonds now, same story, diffrent era.
Bomber Harris was the man. And not a criminal.
The first bombing missions of the war were by Handly Page Hampdens against naval targets, because factories were classed as private property.
It was the germans who opened it right out to total war. They were the first to bomb civialians and the first to move the bombing on to the capital ie london.
Their stukas were used against unarmed ie usually civialian targets, mainly due to the fact that when they were used against countries like France and Britain with a higher level of technology than, say, Poland they suffered higher losses. They were extremely vulnerable in their “dive”.
Just because the Germans lost, and their cities were ruined doesn’t make Bomber Harris a bad man. He fought using their rules, and won. Dresden happened long after the inferno of Coventry.
Someone above said:
"Area bombing had been advocated by all major military nations as a legitimate instrument of war. However, the bombing of cities (particularly the fire raid on Dresden) caused massively disproportionate casualties for any military advantage gained. "
In a full-on general war how do you decide what is proportionate and what is not?
From my point of view if bombing Dresden saved a single allied life and killed 20000 Germans then fair enough. We were at war after all. Imagine the hypothetical situation where you had to explain to a British widow that her husband had died because we didn’t have the guts to area bomb the town producing the aircraft that killed him because of a “disproportionate risk” to German civilians. Wouldn’t she ask whose side we were actually on? What if it was your life?
In the 3-4 years he was in command of Bomber Command he had a tough job to do which morals 60 years later and out of context struggle to understand. Personally I think him and his men were heroes. It is an absoluet trevesty that Churchill distanced himself from Harris after the war and Bomber Command never got a campaign medal. Albert Speir himself said that the allied bombing campaign was the biggest factor (or one of them - sorry I forget exactly) in Germany losing the war.
We owe those bomber command chaps a huge debt.
PS - The Brits recently helped the Germans to finish rebuilding the Frauen Kirsche in dresden - I wonder if the Germans will ever help to rebuild the many bombed our British Cathedrals/churches?
What happened at Guernica tore up the Rule Book & we all know who sanctioned THAT action.
Harris fought his War the best way he could, with the less than perfect instrument available to him & I am certain that if the Luftwaffe had built up a heavy bomber force, then they would have used the same strategy.
Not quite true, when the Bomber Command chiefs proposed bombing the Rhur in 1940, the government dissallowed it as it was an attack on private property.
I think what finally turned Bopmber Command around was the German Blitz on London. From then on it was given a purpose and a leader in Harris that stuck to his theories of bombing incessantly.
It was at that time the only real way the British could take the war to Germany and a great many RAF crews paid for this with their lives.
I do however personally believe that Harris got sucked into his own Spin. I think that instead of area bombing cities to de-house workers, he could have went after the transportation and Oil networks as a priority. But as has been said often and is still true, hindsight is a wonderfull thing.
I am some way into Bomber Command by Hastings but have put it down for a number of weeks now. I have just got to the part when Harris takes command. I will look over what I have read to get accurate info and post again. but it has highlighted a number of thing that I was not aware of ie the bombing of private property and who had the idea behind strategic bombing.
Firefly
At the time, Area Bombing was about the best the RAF could achieve:
Most crews did not have the navigational or bomb aiming skills to hit anything smaller than a city & often missed those as well.
It wasn’t until Pathfinders, Master Bombers, Oboe, H2S, etc., were introduced that they could bomb with any semblance of accuracy & even then it was only exceptional crews like those of 617Sqn who had the skills to be effective.
Both the Oil & Transportation plans which came later in the war relied heavily on the USAAF daylight raids for hitting small targets with accuracy, whilst the RAF went for larger targets, such as marshalling yards.
Even 617Sqn had trouble hitting targets such as canals & viaducts at night.
I see no problem with the fact that the raid was simply meant to kill as many people- military and civilians as possible plus destroy as many structures as possible. Loss of human life is always regretable but it was unrestricted warfare.
Had the Luftwaffe enjoyed a long-range bomber force they would have gladly instigated the same raid on England earlier in the war.
It is lame to once again attempt to project today’s morality or social conscience into the past but unfortunately that’s what lots of folks do. They have no feel for what the mood was anywhere during the war and that it was seen as a “win at any cost to stop Hitler.”
By the same token when V-1s and larger V-2s rained down on the civilians of Holland, Belgium and England how “rude” was that? Apart from the reasonable treatment of each others POWs and not employing bio/chemical agents it was no holds barred with the Germans. Modern people keep attempting to read some rules and morality into a global war. It’s absurd.
Then we must consider the Tokyo napalm raids that killed many more civilians than were killed in Dresden. Is that too something “illegal?”
If someone desires to view events of the war through the distortion of the concept that civilians are somehow magically immune to injury in some fantasy rules of war that never existed save for some peoples’ minds, they have failed to immerse themselves in history.
The German war industry began dispersing early on when Allied air attacks began gutting normal factory complexes. It’s real easy to target a huge facility that builds Messerschmitts in ONE location. Break that manufacturing system into several parts and place them in clandestined locales that actually increased production after dispersion, and you might as well bomb hell out of everything just to make sure you got the intended target.
This may not apply to Dresden but you get the idea. As we bombed the easily targetable war materiel facilities the Germans dispersed them and production increased!
On March 9, 1945 Lemay began the concerted fire bombing of Japanese cities. Why? Because Jap civvies were makeing war products in their dispesed facilities in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. These raids were effective in that before the next round of napalm attacks leaflets wee dropped waring of the fact and 8.5 million fled to the country to escape frying. With them in out of the urban areas war production nose dived.
And even with that they didn’t surrender but prepared a hellatious defensive network of Kyushu and Hokkaido that was to be “last man” mentality.
The Dresden raid was done to please the Russians since they continually complained that they were suffering higher casualties relative to the Allies. Their revengful tactics had a name. It was called “terrorisation.” GB was pressured by the Russians to wreak havoc amongst the German civilians.
The initial concept plan for Dresden was not instigated by Harris himself at all. It came from higher up. Can’t you picture Churchill being lobbied by Stalin to step up to the plate and “go Russian” on those crazy Nazis?
General Antonov made three specific requests for Allied assistance to the Russians:
a. To speed up the advance of the Allied troops on the Western Front, for which the present situation is very favorable: (1) To defeat the Germans on the Eastern Front. (2) To defeat the German groupings which have advanced into the Ardennes. (3) The weakening of the German forces in the West in connection with the shifting of their reserves to the East (It is desirable to begin the advance during the first half of February).
b. By air action on communications hinder the enemy from carrying out the shifting of his troops to the East from the Western Front, from Norway, and from Italy (In particular, to paralyze the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig).
c. Not permit the enemy to remove his forces from Italy
The Viet Cong used our dislike for seeing innocent civilians injured in Vietnam. I saw daily how they exploited and used them as chattel to sucker us into fights. They had absolutely no conscience about ending their lives so they could get a response from us. This was not isolated but was done on an ongoing, daily basis.
Non-combatants have always been in harm’s way in warfare. They’ve been exploited by either side as they saw fit to gain advantages over their enemy. I say non-combatants and not innocents because many of the adults were engaged in war materiel production. They were contributing to the war effort.
This delusion that in January 1945 the war was all but over is hogwash. Hitler had just pulled off the Ardennes Offensive and we still hadn’t landed on Iwo Jima or Okinawa that produced the most horriffic blood letting yet. The kamikazes were doing their thing in the Pacific and more German jets were hammering Allied bombers.
We only know that the war was “almost” over in a relative sense because we’re sitting on our butts 60 here years later. No one knew how long the carnage would go on back then. This is why it is flawed to second guess “what they shoulda done was…”
We never knew then whether our enemies would use bio-chemical warfare as a last ditch effort. It’s so easy to look back 60 years and conclude that wasn’t a factor worth considering. Believe me it was considered by fighting men in early 1945.
I don’t see anyone justifying the Nazi depoyment of V-1 and V-2 rockets that were made ONLY to kill civilians. I don’t see anyone imagining that the Germans wouldn’t have unleashed vicious bombing attacks on civilians had they possessed a substantial force of heavy bombers either. So why does it makes sense in the turmoil of times and fog of war that this one event was more evil than any other? The Brits were in their 6TH YEAR of eating Nazi crap and they were damned tired of it! Does anyone really believe that some bleating voice of tempering military actions would have been listened to then?
Dresden was the 7th largest Geman city with primary importance as a communications center. It was, in February 1945, known to contain at least 110 factories and industrial enterprises that were legitimate military targets, and were reported to have employed 50,000 workers in arms plants alone. Among these were dispersed aircraft components factories; a poison gas factory (Chemische Fabric Goye and Company); an anti-aircraft and field gun factory (Lehman); the great Zeiss Ikon A.G., Germany’s most important optical goods manufactory; and, among others, factories engaged in the production of electrical and X-ray apparatus (Koch and Sterzel A.G.), gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke), and electric gauges (Gebruder Bassler). Specific military installations in Dresden in February 1945 included barracks and hutted camps and at least one munitions storage depot.
The Berlin-Leipzig-Dresden railway complex was a major transportation crossroads logistically involved in the movement of German troops.
Here’s the cities by population with the total bomb tonnage expended for the entire war:
Berlin- 4,339,000 67,607.6 tons, Hamberg- 1,129,000 38,687.6 tons,
Munich- 841,000 27,110.9 tons, Cologne 772,000 44,923.2 tons, Leipzig- 707,000 11,616.4 tons, Essen- 667,000 37,938.0 tons, Dresden- 642,000 7,100.5 tons.
The Russians pressured the other Allies for this raid. It’s in the books. As a target of interest this came from ABOVE Harris. Harris and company only laid out the tactics.
There are no actual rules of war. Yes politicians may sit around and debate idealistic goals that combatants should strive for in the next war but when that conflict comes the rules mean nothing. All that exists is the collective moral code in practice by a given society at a given time.
This moral code may be something such as American and British airmen not strafing enemy pilots in their parachutes. And while this was not widespread in the Japanese Imperical Navy the Army practiced it often. Same goes for POW issues. While the Japs starved, beheaded, tortured and used them as slave labor, their prisoners, the western Allies treated theirs splendidly. The Japanese had no qualms about using biological and chemical weapons on a daily basis for 10 years in China. I dare say the British would not see that as cricket and follow suit.
I say this without malice or prejudice- please believe it from one who experienced it, there are no rules in war. There is only an accounting in the aftermath. If the city had been Liverpool and the Nazis were the victors would it be viewed the same? If the city was Manilla and the Japanese had won would they have wrung their hands? At any rate one can easily be clinical and dissect complex events in detached hindsight to rationalize any end they desire.
War crimes trials were in one sense to segregate torture, starvation, medical experimentation, perversion, mutilation, forced labor and such from an 88 mm artillery barrage that killed many civilians in a French village or bombing mission misses.
The fact that the aforementioned acts are commited at a very personal level often with a resulting euphoric satisfaction on the part of the perpetrator separates them from aerial bombing, artillery attacks or naval rifle bombardment.
There could be a case for the persecution of air-to-ground attack as a whole. What could be less fair? Why those new fangled aeroplanes come outta the heavens like wrathful angels killing poor soldiers on the ground without warning! The old fogies that dictate what the next conflict’s fighting will be like (and are always wrong) could have lobbied that aerial warfare is abominal given the amount of destruction that can be unleashed upon the earth sometimes killing non-combatants.
I see this silly-azzed attempt for people of today to 2nd guess earlier generations and project morals in hindsight and never understand why that whole scenario is totally flawed.
Twitch1 - that was a heck of a post - but I agree with everything you said.
Your statement:
"This delusion that in January 1945 the war was all but over is hogwash. Hitler had just pulled off the Ardennes Offensive and we still hadn’t landed on Iwo Jima or Okinawa that produced the most horriffic blood letting yet. The kamikazes were doing their thing in the Pacific and more German jets were hammering Allied bombers. We only know that the war was “almost” over in a relative sense because we’re sitting on our butts 60 here years later. No one knew how long the carnage would go on back then. This is why it is flawed to second guess “what they shoulda done was…” "
…is absolutely true. It winds me up no end when people since the war (11 May 1945 on!) state that there was no need to keep bombing Germany and Dresden in particular as teh war was nearly over. Yeah right it was. What with jet aircraft, Battle of the Bulge and so on, it could have gone on for many many months and certainly could have gone either way at many times during its course.
I take confort from the fact that those who say that area bombing wasn’t justified are ignorant of the facts and ignorant of what living under the Nazis would have meant.
PS - I’m still bitter about the fact that the Bomber Command chaps were belittled and marginalised after the war and DID NOT receive a camapign medal - an utter travesty.
Good post Twitch1.
Good post matey. I agree, total war means total war.
Although by late 44 the RAF were as accurate by night as the USAF was by day.
The USAF was never that accurrate anyway, they never did put their pickle into the barrewl, the Norden was a great bombsight for Texas, but was something different for Europe.
Damn good post though…
You just made a funny translation error:
Church in German is “Kirche”
“Kirsche” means cherry.
You just said that the British helped the Germeans to rebuild their women’s cherries, … after having popped them 60 years ago?
Jan
[quote=“Walther”]
You just made a funny translation error:
Church in German is “Kirche”
“Kirsche” means cherry.
You just said that the British helped the Germeans to rebuild their women’s cherries, … after having popped them 60 years ago?
Jan[/quote]
Does that idiom work in German or only when translated to English?
Well picked up Walther!!!
:oops:
x100!
Off topic everybody.
Just noticed walther that I have two PMs sitting in my outbox to you. Have you checked you PM box recently or did they just not go?