Before this escalates any further, I would like to remind everybody to keep comments aimed at posts and not other users.
Before this escalates any further, I would like to remind everybody to keep comments aimed at posts and not other users.
Many thanks, Tiberios. We needed that, and I for one apologize for my part in things. Anyway, where were we?
Once again, that is misconstruing what I was saying. I speak *FOR* nobody but myself. I was speaking *of* (the comments regarding the subject of) not only myself but the others. There is a difference; much like how I might speak "of" President Obama's comments saying such and such would not be mistaken for me speaking *For* President Obama.
Please stop conflating the two. It does nothing good for the credibility of yourself or your argument.
I would welcome you to TRY. However, first you would have to prove my argumentation is nothing but nonsense, which has not been done thus far. Don't put the cart before the horse; first *win* victory and then claim it.
Too late, KEA. If you think anyone was fooled or swayed by such an after-the-fact addition, you are wrong. And thus far, your "better education" has not manifested itself in a coherent or accurate argument. Or in much of anything on this thread, to be honest; and that's the only thing that matters at this point. We await in bated breath..
ENOUGH. Whatever point you were trying to make, you have failed and failed miserably. Particularly by invoking that example. The "lovely" rules of engagement most American school systems use about bullying are no valid example for a sound or moral value of enforcement. If anything, they are concrete evidence of THE PROBLEMS when such a system is not enforced properly. THAT is why- in case you ever noticed- a lot of controversy has been building over the school districts and those "primary school teachers" who have ABDICATED their responsibility to their students by being so permissive to bullying.
And the issue isn't exactly limited to American schools.
So congratulations, KEA. You have highhandedly destroyed your own argument and your own credibility by trying to foist on an ivory moral tower a system and a manner of thinking that has caused thousands of *innocent* children needless harm. One which in fact underlined why rogue states on the national scale (like Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, etc. etc etc.) could *not* be combated on the large scale or suitably punished without reciprocity. That takes some doing. *Golf Clap*.
And no, my position does not translate to allowing anything so long as the other side starts it first. There is a reason that the crimes of Germany (and the Prussian-led German Confederation before it) would not justify genocide against Germans in response. However, there is *great* value in recriprocity and proportionality of means (if not of results, which I flatly do not believe in.). If you throw a punch at me, I reserve the right to defend myself and punch you in the head twenty times. If you kick me, I resolve the right to kick you back, and do so harder and more frequently. If you lunge at me with a knife, your life is forfeit. And likewise I am sure you would have the right to do the same if I were the aggressor. That is how we keep every bit of fisticuffs from degenerating into something that leaves a body. That is how we keep every war from degenerating into something that leaves millions of innocents dead and countries ruined.
It is not a perfect system. In fact, I would go so far as to say it isn't really a *good* system. But it IS the best system we have yet come up with.
Why not? Are you going to explain, or not?
Apparently not. And pray tell me what purpose that little snippet was supposed to do other than further degrade the quality of your argument?
1. For someone identified as making "troll postings", I wasn't the one who added a snippet that amounted to ""nitpicking" *lol*".
2. And neither am I sure. Which is why I am glad that I am NOT representing them. Again vis-a-vis the "Speaking of" vs. "Speaking For" bit.
If they choose to make an issue of it, I will. Until then, it is unnecessary. If they're really so bothered, don't you think they'll voice it?
Which excuses the blatant, overly naive, and overly uniform appeal to some uniform set of Western values that frankly didn't exist for most of history how?
No, you only wish we were. Because it would give your argument the *vague* chance that it might have some validity.
No, it was in fact part of it. Obfuscation and sophism do not change how total war is fought, or the fact that total war by definition drags entire nations and their populations to war. For the same reason that those who starved because of blockades are not counted as being victimized by something out of normal combat or war. Nice try, Roll Again.
It was both. Unfortunately for you, when the gloves come off (like the Germans etc. al. had done in WWII) the *former* takes precedence over the latter where there is overlap. That is why violence visited upon a civilian population as part of military operations is viewed as different from violence visited upon a captive or conquered civilian population, who have no means or defenses and are at the mercy of a conquering military. No amount of whiningly poor argumentation will change that fact.
A: Most historians would disagree.
B: Even if that is true, how is that supposed to change anything? It doesn't. Just because one combatant is all but defeated (but refuses to acknowledge defeat! and thus end the Bloody War!) does not mean the moral dimensions somehow change or get skewed in some fashion. Again, say what you will, but there was no moral, ethical, or LEGAL obligation by the Allied command in Europe to cause the painful, unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people- via the leaving of the Reich's infrastructure for defense and terror intact and capable of resisting further until the end- in order to sate your preferences of the "right" way to kill people in war.
That old candard? Sorry, but it is utterly and completely debunked. Dresden was a transit point between the Western and Eastern Fronts, and was playing host to a number of units strung out after the Battle of the Bulge , Market Garden, and the fighting for the Hurtgen Forest who were scheduled for transit to the East in order to confront the Soviet forces streaming Westward. The destruction of Dresden devastated the transport capabilities and largely marooned a good chunk of those units in the West where they were unable to have a significant effect on the war. Thus saving hundreds of thousands of lives by shortening said war. The fact that people who condemn the carpet bombings continue to trot out Dresden and especially *that* debunked rationale says more about their intellectual laziness and dishonesty than anything about the Allied carpet bombing campaigns.
Secondly, if throwing the tidbit "everyone knew the war was over" was supposed to impress upon us some changing moral mandate or alteration, it fails. Whether or not the Axis knew the war was lost is irrelevant, because they did not concede defeat and thus avoid the NEEDLESS DEATHS of hundreds of thousands if not MILLIONS of people. The Allies were under zero moral or legal obligation to "put on the kid gloves" because the Reich was losing the war, particularly when doing so would have strung out the war and caused even more suffering!
While you're not wrong on your characterization of KPD, I don't think there is a way to safely answer this. Given the fact that KPD did not enjoy the level of institutional tolerance and business support that the Nazis did, and that Hindenburg was unlikely to appoint Torgler as chancellor, and if we assume that Stalin thought the moment right, then only civil war comes to mind. If Stalin was ambivalent, as usual, then a mass cull of KPD members would be the reasonable result.
And that was my Devil's Advocate's Devil's Advocate (a term which I need to copyright one of these days).
I'd beg to differ on the whole, Vanoi. After all, a big part of what condemned Germany's conduct and that of its' allies in both wars was the needless murder of innocents. It's just that often times, it's recognized that while killing civilians is wrong and to be avoided, it's not totally possible to eliminate entirely.
The Germans just did it gratuitously and for no real military justification.
Originally Posted by KEA
As a matter of fact, most bombs were dropped on Germany in the last month of 1944 and the few month the war went in 1945.Every Historian knows your post is false.A: Most historians would disagree.
Humble, Richard (1975). War In The Air 1939-1945
gives these numbers for bombs dropped
on Germany by Bomber Command, and is the source for wiki
1939 31
1940 13,033
1941 31,504
1942 45,561
1944 525,518
Even wiki, you know what the uneducated turn to, for support:
RAF & USAAF Bomb Tonnages on Germany 1939–45 [159][clarification needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strateg...939.E2.80.9345
Year RAF Bomber
Command (tons) US 8th Air
Force (tons)
1939 31 —
1940 13,033 —
1941 31,504 —
1942 45,561 1,561
1943 157,457 44,165
1944 525,518 389,119
1945 191,540 188,573
Total 964,644 623,418
Last edited by Erebus Pasha; January 05, 2013 at 03:18 PM. Reason: personal references
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” Benjamin Franklin
Yes, its a standard number value, to be found in every book on the subject, including education text books and online assets* Its called facts, and is why every author uses these facts, as oposed to your uniformed false opinion that contradicts the facts.
*http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/wss/bomb...on/germany.htm
Allied Bomb Tonnage on Germany and German-Occupied Europe 1940-1945
All books contain the same values, there are none that support your false post.
Penguin Atlas of World History, the Allies dropped about 10,000 tons on Germany in 1940, 30,000 tons in 1941, 40,000 tons in 1942 and 120,000 tons in 1943 while in 1944 they drop 650,000 tons and in 1945, about 500,000 tons are dropped in the first four months (at that rate, 1.5 million tons would be dropped over the course of 1945).
I gave the author who wiki uses without a cite, you know, like you do when you know what your writing about instead of posting ignorant opinion and not understanding even wiki.Including the one that explicitly says "Clarification needed" because it was obviously snagged from Wikipedia, the Lowest Common Denominator of Scholastic research?
Last edited by DimeBagHo; January 05, 2013 at 05:08 PM. Reason: Off topic.
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” Benjamin Franklin
Right, have been preoccupied elsewhere, but now I have to set this straight.
This entire paragraph is completely devoid of any worth whatsoever. It is basically the deluded, masturbatory fantasy of a copy-past artist who thinks ad-hominem is an actual substitute for reason and facts. It isn't,
The fact that you are so..... shall we call it "bold" as to claim that every author uses the exact same numbers shows that you have no idea whatsoever how the actual statistical compilation of these things went (example? There was a serious bureaucratic dillema over whether loaded bombers that went down over their targets should be added to the "tonnage dropped" statistics!). Nevermind how the actual scholarly world has parsed, hypothesized, added, subtracted, and generally wrangled over those numbers and others like them.
The only "Uninformed false opinion that contradicts the facts" is your own, and you are doing a horrid disservice to a very good book with some very good services by conflating it with your own hubris.
Quick Quesiton: does that or does that not count undropped bombs in crashed planes towards the total? Do you even know?
You are making yourself out to be an idiot. You clearly haven't read all books (and neither have I!) and you clearly are happy to ignore a huge chunk of them which so much as *contain different numbers* than yours. But if they don't conform to your own biases, they don't exist? Is that how it goes, Hanny?
Please stop degrading good books by acting like they can excuse your behavior. They cannot. It's intellectual malpractice on the most basic level to claim that those are the only ones there are, and you are willingly walking into it.
Wow. This is so incredibly moronic it doesn't deserve a reply, but yet I will give you one.
LISTEN for once in your life:
1. Using sources without citation is just moronic, because you cannot verify the veracity of such a claim. IF you're attempting to do this as some sort of ironic jab at the fact that I don't have every single source I've ever read and absorbed on hand to spit out with links.... it doesn't work. It just makes you look foolish and incapable of credible debate or even discussion.
2. If you seriously are claiming that "serious books" only spit out one set of numbers without variation, you are a dishonest Idiot. Nothing more.
3. I reserve giving out my sources to when I feel I am obliged to. Doing the same with you would be a waste of my time and a needless hassle, since if you have failed debating and basic research you would never even remotely appreciate it.
Last edited by Tiberios; February 24, 2013 at 04:12 AM. Reason: Off topic removed.
I am perplexed with the fact that conversation about number of killed german civilians by allied bombing turned to determing how many bombs were actually dropped by the allies... is someone going to calculate how many allied bombs were needed to kill one german civilian? other than that (which is ridicolous by itself) I don't see any other resaon for debate about how somebody determined the number, and what was considered a dropped bomb or not...
if there is no intention to write a doctorate about it, it is better to drop it... 'cause I can't imagine any of you has a clearance to the bomber command records? and even those should be observed with some healthy dose of suspition...
Points of order, MM.
Firstly, I agree that it's perplexing overall, but it more or less started with someone taking a look at the German casualty statistics, looking at the completely wrecked pictures of German cities, and saying "I think the former are too small to have been reasonably be called for the latter!" Which means that this was never an overly civilized or wholly objective debate. We brought out the usual statistics that proved that no, there isn't the most efficient direct link between "amount of bombs dropped/stuff blown up" and "amount of population killed by bombs." Since there wasn't much left to be talked about there since the OP got the tripe blown out of him by evidence, things went on to other topics that we discussed here, including what you say. And since it was still a discussion, we carried on.
The amount of munitions you had to drop in order to kill one civilian was a relevant topic (especially vis-a-vis the difference between the Germans/European Axis and Japanese) and was in the process of getting prepped up, but it wasn't really put on the table due to the waving back and forth and the various agendas.
Secondly, it might've been better to, given how easily the OP's thesis was blown out of the water, but sicne there was still discussion that wasn't completely off the wall it carred on.
Thirdly, you'd actually imagine wrong; you actually can have clearance to the Bomber Command records, and moreso to other people who have clearance to and more resources to look through more than we civilians do. IIRC the archives have already been declassified/starting to be opened up, and even before than there were trickles of info leaking out. I have more than a few things that cover it myself, and I'd be happy to share 'em with you (preferably on PM).
And agreed, they should be treated with a healthy dose of suspicion given the sheer number of complicating factors here (debating counting bombs in shot down planes? Really?), but since they're some of the best we have, they can at least be used as part of our corpus of sources.
Something the numbers dont include are the dutch, french, etc. Cittizens of german occupied lands, who also were (sometimes accidentelly and sometimes on perpose) bombed, that would increase the numbers drasticly
I don't understand why some people in this thread are so keen to justify the indiscriminate bombing of the German cities because the Axis has done the same before. What we should determine is if the bombings had some military purpose or they were just a sort of vengeance through the same terror tactics used against the population.
In reality from a purely military perspective they were largely ineffective and the resources used on these missions could be better spent attacking targets that had more military value.
The military futility of the bombing should have been even more clear to the Allies looking at the complete failure of the Blitz, yet they had gone even more enthusiastically through the same mistakes.
In reality even if the Allies hadn't reached the same monstrosity of the Nazi death camps at the same time their mindset wasn't so different when they were evaluating the value of harm done to the civilians.
Civilians is such a loose term in a Total War. Morally loose, loose in general.
In fully industrially mobilized nations any civilian could potentially be aiding the war effort and thus an enemy. Direct battles don't work as we all know, thus the hamstringing of the logistical set ups are the new flanking maneuvers, and an effective one a that - a modern army is only useful as long as they are supplied. After the development of the breech-loading rife and with the advent of aircraft it could argued the targeting of civilians ("factories") becomes the rational option.
There is no suspicion whatsoever, war is industrial rather than skill based between developed nations, you do not defeat the army, they are too large - you defeat their will to fight. This is maximal war people, people say it's only existed since the French Revolution but I think it's always existed. It would make an interesting thread actually - Has Total War always existed or is it a modern development?
In many ways you're right, though from what research I've done on the subject (admittedly it isn't very extensive), the German morale was not noticeably altered by the Allied bombing campaigns. Now, as to the efficacy of the bombing campaigns, this is, as we have seen here, a subject of some debate. However, the most compelling conclusion I've seen presented on this topic in the historiography is that it was the American daytime escort bombing raids that were more effective in their goal, which was primarily to hit German infrastructure and industrial capacity. The British nighttime raids appear to have been significantly less effective, and more costly in terms of British air casualties and German civilian casualties. Again, I am not the most learned on the subject. I've only briefly examined it on the periphery of my own scholarly research focus.
This is 70 years ago. Most of the people commanding the armies in WW2 had served in WW1, I think people often forget that. We are talking about a whole generation of people who at the age of 19 or 20 saw entire rows of their friends gunned down by machine guns and blown to pieces by mortars. You cannot think of the 1930s and 1940s as a 'civilised' time to be compared with today, just because they had electric lighting and talked like us. In fact I think we in the 21st Century have more in common with our ancestors from the 19th Century rather than the Early 20th Century, it was such a messed up time. You shouldn't blame the Allies for their actions any more than you should blame Genghis Khan for his, especially considering who we were fighting against. Frankly I think a lot of Germans would probably have preferred to be killed than have to live with the guilt that they had voted in Hitler.
I find it droll that the only exception between the Axis and Allies to be on par with each other is the death camps, other than that their mechanics, of conducting war were similar or comparable? I hope that I am misinterpreting your intended point.
As much as I believe that Air Marshall Harris was a bit over focused on proving his point (area bombing), his Bomber Command did in conjunction with the American Army Air Corps dismantled the infrastructure of Germany in 44-45 which was the point of the exercise. Area bombing was not picked as first option but rather a last one given the RAF losses in daylight raids suffered in 40-41. War is not a game there are no points for coming in second place.
Last edited by Aurielius; November 13, 2013 at 12:40 PM.