Victor's injustice

Actually, it was pretty typical for that period of the war. Hamburg - nearly 2 years earlier, with a far less developed and capable Bomber Command force - involved 3,000 bombers and 9,000 tonnes of bombs in the raid. The same night as the first Dresden Raid, Chemnitz was hit by over 700 heavy bombers, and a similar sized force came back 2 weeks later. A week after the Dresden raid Pforzheim was hit by just under 400 aircraft, killing nearly 20,000 people and flattening 80% of the buildings in the city. To quote Sir Arthur Harris, “for want of a rapier, a bludgeon was used” - but the bomber command he fashioned was capable of destroying entire cities in a night, without even applying it’s full strength.

The true facts are widely available, and there are multiple very good books which go into the raid in great depth. The only ones to give the figures you quote are by the likes of David Irving, who actually managed to lose a libel trial in the UK after he sued someone who accused him of being a holocaust denier.
So if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Yet you’re citing figures from a source that essentially says that more people were killed in the Dresden Raid than were murdered in the “Holocaust”…

Which the Nazis and Japanese did not even attempt to observe.

There was nothing like, for example, Einsatzgruppen or Harbin on the Allied side.

Allied bombing was directed towards winning the war, not just the mindless racist brutality of the Nazis and Japanese which had nothing to do with winning the war and everything to do with hurting and killing people for the despicable fun of it because they were considered inferior.

Anyway, the notion of rules in war is inherently absurd. Where is the sense in, for example, banning shotguns but allowing claymore mines and banning dum-dums but allowing grenades? Gee, given a choice I’d really like to be hit by a claymore or grenade instead of one of those nasty shotguns or dum-dums which might really hurt me.

Well, the Nazis and Soviets used tanks, artillery, mortars, rifles, bayonets and grenades.

Was it wrong for the Allies to use the same things because the Nazis and Soviets used them?

Why not?

Without them there would be no wars and no war crimes.

When it came to war crimes trials after WWII, who was prosecuted? Not just some of the leaders who gave orders but also the people who carried them out.

If some people who regard it as perhaps the worst war crime ever had their way, who do you think would be prosecuted for Allied bombing of Japan? Just Curtis Le May? Or the crew of the Enola Gay as well?

The thread title is Victor’s Injustice. Mightn’t there be an injustice of a sort in prosecuting and punishing someone who was fed a carefully crafted evil philosophy by skilled manipulators in a totatliarian system and who has acted on it while many of those at the top are left alone?

That’s a bit of a myth.

There were plenty of examples of Germans disobeying orders they didn’t agree with and not being punished.

Even in the more rigid Japanese system it could occur, as with a senior officer after the Japanese victory in the Philippines who refused to carry out orders which Colonel Tsujii told him came from above to kill the American prisoners.

As for Bomber Command, I can’t recall the title of the book I read some time ago but it looked at psychological stress in the crews including refusals to fly and found that while many men were punished in the sense of being downgraded and posted to crappy duties, hardly anyone was ever prosecuted or formally punished.

As always, an excellent plaidoyer, my esteemed colleague. Nevertheless, allow me just a pair of minuscule remarks:

Anyway, the notion of rules in war is inherently absurd.

No, it is not my esteemed colleague. You see, however the term may be derided and the concept attacked, law and order remains the bedrock of every civilization. Without it, human society must degenerate into the darkness of barbarism. The unrestricted practice of putting absolutely no limits is inevitably leading human beings back to jungle. More than 5000 years of recorded history show man making different rules of conduct. And rules of conduct in war are only an expression of the principle that in every civilized community human relationship must be governed in a manner to put certain limits to the aggressive animal called Homo sapiens with numerous remnants of his destructive Troglodyte past. Seen in this light, rules in war are only an absolutely necessary instrument of limitation of the ultimate offense one human being can commit against the other.

Gee, given a choice I’d really like to be hit by a claymore or grenade instead of one of those nasty shotguns or dum-dums which might really hurt me.

Please, don’t understand me wrongly, my dear Mr. Rising Sun, but let’s speak about a choice between a claymore mine and a napalm bomb instead. You see, as far as I remember, certain scientific examinations have verified noteworthy and completely measurable dolorimetric variations in pain severity between the two. Please, just follow this link:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1421259

In the meantime, I shall prepare - with any luck! - a number of adequately intriguing methodological examples for our distinguished forum member, Mr. Ivaylo. You see, for some unknown reasons he thinks that certain absolutely uncivilized methods of human conduct were somehow exclusively connected with Soviets and Nazis, and that subsequently those methodological patterns illogically and inexplicably were employed by Western Allies in an intersocietal war - the most serious manifestation of human aggressive behavior.

Hopefully, that completely erroneous anthropological assertion will be effectively disproved. :slight_smile:

In the meantime, as always – all the best. :wink:

Again we are not talking about the whole allied bombing throught the war , we are talking about particular Dresden bombing … which if i am not wrong the main reason was not any transport hub or whatever else but the british said it is in VENGEANCE ( yes ) for the bombing during 1940 … and yes there weren’t Einsatzgruppen on US/UK side but your other allied side used NKVD , yes my Librarian their camps (GULAGS ) and the sistem of killing was the same. And actually i would prefer not anyone be hit with anything and no wars more to be conducted in Europe if you ask me .
War rules are not absurd … cause imagine you being taken prisoner , if there are not any rules for example the germans late in the war wouldn’t go out of their lungs to run to the americans and to surrender because they knew the americans won’t shot them down like the russians would or send them to GULAGS .
And i am not against that the UK/US used tanks, artilery and etc. i just think they must admit some of their errors and to re-think about the methods in some cases like Dresden for example , that’s all .
As for the war crimes … you know the sistem of the army , the high command with the leaders of the nation share all responsibility in what they do , the others just execute orders and share small piece of guilt but no way as their leaders . For example my president order the general to send battalion in Afganistan , i go there as corporal , the sergeant order me to shoot at some civilian saying he is damn partisan kill him , what i would do say for example " hell no mr.Sergeant screw you i won’t do it " … i would be sent to court martial imidiately strip of ranks and kicked out of the army in the best case .
There are plenty of examples of some i suppose Volksgrenadier militia or some other not so high in moral troops for which the sooner the war ended the better , which is quite normal in army there is always elite troops and such that are low on morale , equipment and etc. Even if they did desert or refuse to carry orders , i don’t think they had to expect flowers and greetings .

If so you have a very screwed up military system. One of the compulsory training elements for UK armed forces (all of them, including reserves) is a video on the Law of Armed Conflict, which makes it very, very clear that in such a circumstance you must disobey the order given to you by that Sergeant, and that any attempt to follow it will be a war crime. A small number of UK troops have been tried by civilian courts in the UK and jailed for substantial periods of time for doing what they were told in a very similar situation.

I’ve never seen any sort of cut an dry admission about “vengeance.” What would make bombing Dresden any more vengeful or satisfying than say–the bombing of Hamburg–conducted much earlier?

… and yes there weren’t Einsatzgruppen on US/UK side but your other allied side used NKVD…

Our “side” used the NKVD? Perhaps. But then, the NKVD were fighting an invading army, whereas the Einsatzgruppe were part of one…

Finally, certain graphic materials have arrived, so we can now continue with our tiny theoretical treatise about human behavior in war. :slight_smile:

You se, my dear Mr. Ivaylo, although numerous manifestations of intragroup aggression have excited a considerable amount of attention and controversy, many specialists regard intersocietal war as the most serious manifestation of human aggressive behavior. There is a thread of continuity that runs from individual aggressiveness to organized warfare. However, when it comes to the more highly developed modern forms of military action, the link between individual biocultural responses and the plans and strategies of warleaders is rather indirect, so we cannot regard war as simply individual aggressiveness projected onto a larger screen. Nevertheless, the anthropography of so called cultivation peoples (in contrast to hunting-gathering peoples) seem warfare ridden, because numerous different human groups of various locations all seem to have in common a tendency toward internecine raiding and warfare.

Several anthropologists have carried out cross-cultural studies of warfare, attempting to generalize from large numbers of cases. Keith Otterbein, for example, has tasted a number of generalizations concerning the development of warfare habits and demonstrates the not-unexpected finding that more complex communities have more complex organization for warfare. Escalation of warfare to more serious dimensions depends, however, upon an aggressive drive which is induced by existing structure of the society, and it motivates behavior of the individual to injure the obstacle. The usual cause of human aggression is frustration, and the other is that aggression has the properties of a basic drive – being a form of human energy thet persists until its goal is reached as well as being an inborn reaction. The most important anthropological fact, however, is that the forms that aggression takes, and the situations in which it is displayed are determined largely by social influences, generally know in theory as differential reinforcement. Those influences on the other hand have almost similar pattern in completely different societies.

That is the theory. And now we shall examine those theoretical postulates in praxis. Please observe very carefully these confirmed historical examples of utterly aggressive, non-ethical and lethal behavior in war, which are connected with dissimilar systems of human societies:

Kruševac, Serbia – 1914: unarmed Serbian peasants hanged by Austro-Hungarian troops without judicial trial and without verdict. Their crime – publicly outspoken verbal insults regarding the Emperor

Ćuprija, Serbia – 1916: Bulgarian troops are hanging peasant woman and a crippled teacher without judicial trial and without official verdict. Their crime – dissemination of enemy propaganda

Bitola, 1916 – Civilian victims (whole family) of Bulgarian poisonous gas attack carried out by unidentified artillery unit

Kuršumlija – 1917: 19 years old Serbian peasant girl whose leg was cut off with Bulgarian’s soldier bayonet after the attempted rape

Discussion questions are:

1.) Are these examples of aggressive human behavior, exclusively committed by different members of certain inherently democratic societies, somehow connected with Nazism or Communism, and if they are how?

2.) Do these sorrowful examples provide sufficient evidence for the assertion that democracy remains the most flawed, confusing and frightening sort of government, which is completely incompatible with personal security of different human beings during wartime hostilities?

After our hopefully fruitful theoretical discussion, we will examine some other historical examples which are directly connected with certain misdeeds with reference to the cases of indiscriminate bombing of an enemy’s cities before the WW2.

Hopefully, we shall expel our tiny ethical rabbit from its historical burrow. And with your kind permittance I shall represent the Crown.

In the meantime, as always - all the best! :wink:

Question: How democratic were Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria during/prior to WW1? I am interested (it seems germane to your questions) and genuinely have no idea.

I said your other allied side used NKVD … and so if someone invade my country for example Turkey do so … from your words i see that i can form for example BKVD - bulgarian komsiariat for internal affairs and when the turk army come to torture , put them in camps , mass kill them , and you will say well it’s ok after all the turks invaded them who cares . But i have strong suspision that you won’t definately say that … which means you have double standart

Than we come to the situation , when every soldier who is fighting now in Afganistan must on his own think if that boy is partisan or civilian … but on battlefield there is not much time for thinking , and where is the role of the sergeant , leuthanant then … they are just sensless figures , where is their responsibility , when simple soldier can say oww i am tired of shooting partisnans bye sergeant … ? That just broke down the morale of the whole army i think .

Well the pictures you posted are very very good congratulations . But i don’t have the other pictures to post from the same doings by greeks , turks expecially and their non-regular troops , i think such hostility was normal for the period of which the photos are , which definately don’t mean that i agree with that acts of brutality neither from my side , neither from others and what they did from the " Априлско въстание " (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Uprising) till the " batak massacre " ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Uprising) …

  1. the Balkans as whole in the period of 1914-1919 were very very far from democratic societies , cause simply the great powers from that time didn’t come to agreement how to partition the newly created countries between them … sound very familiar isn’t it from what happened in other period … So Austro-Hungary wanted control over Serbia and Bosnia , England is against any big christian country called Bulgaria ( cause that would be against their long term partners Turkey ) , Russia wanted to gain strategic control over and etc … But definately these images are connected with Nazism and commies cause they simply continued to treat their enemies with manners of 1914-1919 even when the time was already 1939-1990 …

  2. No doubt the democracy is the if not the best , the least human consuming sistem , and no doubt for now there is not any better civil sistem to replace it granting more freedom and rights ( another problem is how they are used ) . With my hand on my heart i must thank god that i am blessed to live now and not back in either of these two periods . And don’t get me wrong that i
    criticize the western allies sometimes doesn’t mean that i am not grateful of what they did .

Well for Bulgaria specially i can say not very democratic it was ruled by monarch and some goverment which was his puppet so we can say we almost had absolute monarchy here . Guess the Austro-Hungary was something the same although i am not very much into their history

Plaidoyer?

Moi? :wink:

Law and order; or the idea of law and order; or the belief that there is law and order?

Apart from those distinctions, one must separate law from order.

All nations have laws, but many with laws have little order, even without war. Zimbabwe’s expropriation of white owned farms by various laws supported by lawless “Veterans” is a fair example.

As for law being the bedrock of civilisation when applied to war, what is civilised about war?

War is the antithesis of civlisation, in the sense that civilised is commonly used to mean some level of sophistication and humanity.

That is exactly what happens in war. With or without laws of war.

I’d argue that in practice it was more often the case that individual humanity and individual morality which determined people’s fate.

The man with the gun decides who lives and who dies, not law.

Law, humanity and society may inform the decision of the man with the gun, for good or bad, but in the end he’s the one who decides what happens.

In WWII there was no prospect that he would be tried for war crimes by anyone but the victor after the end of the war, or by the enemy if he was unfortunate enough to fall into enemy hands during it.

In the absence of any universal legal system, it still came back to victor’s justice, or injustice. Or captor’s justice, or injustice.

Why only Dresden?

What about Cologne or Hamburg?

I don’t know about any vengeance as a reason for Dresden, but Cologne initially had a bit to do with Harris trying to establish the importance and or effectiveness of Bomber Command. Doesn’t that render Cologne unnecessary?

So that makes Italians equally responsible with the Nazis for Auschwitz and the Japanese for Harbin?

Was that because of laws or because of different attitudes towards Germans?

For a start, America wasn’t invaded by Germany and didn’t have Einsatzgruppen wandering around, say, Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, Idaho or Kansas murdering farmers just for being there. That might have altered American attitudes, which weren’t terribly sympathetic to Japan after Japan merely bombed Hawaii a long way away from any of those contintental states. Which attitudes were reflected in the different treatment of the enemy and enemy trying to surrender and surrendered enemy by Americans in the European and Pacific theatres.

Well, maybe you should read something about the Trail of Tears.

Authors such as the Holocaust expert David Cesarani have argued that the government and policies of the United States of America against certain indigenous peoples constituted genocide. Cesarani states that “in terms of the sheer numbers killed, the Native American Genocide exceeds that of the Holocaust”.[24] He quotes David E. Stannard, author of American Holocaust.

Pretty typical…we can save some time, cold meaningless numbers and justifications if we take a look at this pictures, then we can judge if this is a pretty typical air raid or a cold blooded crime, one of the instigators can be excused because he was not sober, as usual, the other so called “sir” no excuses at all.
Dresden-feb-1945..jpg

Waving a bloody shirt around does not provide a rational argument as to the legality or otherwise of a particular air rad. And to put up pictures like that and think that they demonstrate that Dresden was somehow exceptional shows a rather depressing lack of historical understanding. The bodies shown there are at most a couple of hundred - when air raids that killed up to a hundred thousand people happened during that war. And as for the photo of Dresden after the raid, that’s actually pretty typical for most cities in Germany by that stage in the war. For comparison, the photo below is from Tokyo, after a raid that killed 4-5 times the number of the Dresden raid.

Dresden was exeptional because there was no military reason to justify it, arguing that there was a rail junction in the city is ridiculous by February 1945,… the bodies were just a couple of hundreds???, did you count them?, the purpose of the picture is to show the way bodies were piled up in the streets in your pretty typical air raid and what is depresing is that your arguments just tell us that it was very typical for the allies killing civilians massively in the sake of democracy.
I’m sorry I can’t match your pictures, maybe if I sent a lunar landscape…

In a legal sense, at the time the only requirement was that the city was defended (which Dresden clearly was) - if so bombarding it is legitimate. In a moral sense, what must be known is what Bomber Command thought was there, rather than what actually was. And if you were actually aware of what was going on at the time, you’d know that a railway junction was actually very high up the allied target list. The Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) “Directive No. 3 for the Strategic Air Forces in Europe,” dated 12 January 1945 had transportation (including railway junctions) as the second highest priority for bombing after the petroleum industry. This comes out of the decentralised nature of the German war industry of the time under Speer’s plans - practically all German war materials were made up from sub-assemblies built elsewhere - with the whole system being critically dependent on transport to join them up. Given the technology of the time, the only militarily effective method of destroying/hampering railway junctions inside a city available to Bomber Command was to flatten the entire city. There are legitimate moral arguments against the bombing of Dresden, but to pretend that there was no military reason is downright wrong.

Yep. The end of the block is about 5 x 2, and I make it that it’s about 10 long in that photo. That makes it roughly 100 bodies in that block, I upped it to a few hundred to be conservative. Furthermore, that photo isn’t of bodies piled up in the streets, it’s of the makeshift crematorium made of lengths of iron rail which was IIRC in the old market to dispose of the bodies after the raid. I’m unsure of the exact reason, but IIRC it was kept quiet at the time so probably for propaganda reasons. Again IIRC (it’s a while since I read up on it - Frederick Taylor’s book on it is excellent) that photo is actually pretty rare as it was highly illegal to take photos of the cremations.

<Shrugs> The Germans killed civilians massively in the name of racial purity or even (in Russia) because it was logistically convenient. The Russians killed them because they disliked their political views (in the case of Katyn, for their presumed political views). The Japanese killed them because they weren’t Japanese. The Western Allies were actually somewhat unique in that they had at least some military objective in mind when they killed civilians, rather than a political/economic one (beyond that inevitable to a war).

It’s actually one of the most pernicious aspects of the Dresden myth that people think it was exceptional. It wasn’t - in fact it wasn’t even a particularly bad air raid. That in Hamburg (the world’s first firestorm) was the worst in Europe, and that on Tokyo was probably more destructive and lethal than even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.