Voland

Quote : / We massacred people too. For example, we massacred thousands when we fire-bombed Dresden. It was necessary, if we had not then Europe could still be under the heel of Fascism. That doesn't mean that it magically never happened.




I know this is off topic, but here I disagree. Dresden was definitely not necessary to win the war but was an example of how to "terrorise the Germans into surrender." It was a city packed with refugees and no economic or strategical significance. If you´re saying " the Germans deserved it", then that´s another issue. But the attack on Dresden accomplished little but to destroy one of Europes most beautiful cities and to guarantee tens of thousands of civilians a horrifying death at a time when Germany was already pretty much finished. (1945)
A comparison with Hiroshima doesn´t make sense in my view.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

Well, I think that most cities in Germany (with the notable exception of Berlin) capitulated very swiftly, so they were not the same as Japan, where US planners were expecting hundreds of thousands of casualties from an invasion there.

However, personally I'm going to say that I feel bad for the people who were killed at Dresden. Look at what Germany did. They got 60 million Russians killed, 11 million killed in the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Americans and British killed, and I'm sure there are many more on that list. I have no sympathy for them.


WEB

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

This is an interesting link I just found and wanted to share with the forum. It talks briefly about non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Holocaust - Stories and Pictures of the Holocaust's Non-Jewish Victims

dahermit

Some Germans were completely innocent...including the babies and children killed at Dresden. Likewise the babies and children that were killed at Hiroshima were not those who "deserved" to die because of Japanese war crimes.
If we had lined up and shot those killed in Dresden and Hiroshima, we would have been considered war criminals. But, burning them alive in a fire storm or Nuclear blast is not a war crime?

That is the problem with war; the innocent victims soon outnumber those who deserve to be killed.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

As far as Hiroshima is concerned, you are faced with a choice:

Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing Japan to surrender. 130,000 people die.

OR

Don't bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then the US invades Japan, has to do more firebombing on the Japanese, the Japanese take millions of casualites and the US takes several hundreds of thousands.


By any standard (keeping our troops alive or keeping more Japanese alive), dropping the bomb was the morally right thing to do.

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As for Dresden, yes innocents were killed. I would say that the children were innocent. They have my sympathy, their parents do not.


WEB

nsap

Hm.... actually Japan was already going to capitulate, since all the resources is already cut off its just a matter of time before they surrender, the Atom bomb only speeds it up. so for my opinion atom bombing innocent people is still not the right thing to do. no matter who they are.



NSAP

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

Japan was going to capitulate, yet it didn't do so after having had one atomic bomb and thousands of tons of firebombs dropped on them? They didn't capitulate after that, so it was the second atomic bomb that made them capitulate. What is your evidence for saying that without a second atomic bomb, Japan would have capitulated?

Brother Oz

Actually, they did capitulate after the first nuclear bomb. They sent a message to the Russians, saying that they surrendered. But, unfortunately, and no doubt accidentally I'm sure, the Russians didn't pass the message on in time, so America, believing Japan had not yet surrendered, dropped the second nuke.

In a no doubt completely unrelated matter, shortly after they received the message of surrender, the Russians sent thousands of troops into Manchuria to seize it. Of course, they couldn't hold it, but when the war soon ended after the second nuke, and the Russians got to keep the land they'd conquered...
Why, one might almost suspect they deliberately kept the message of surrender secret so that they could grab loads of territory!

Anyway, back to Dresden. I have to admit, I'm not an expert on Dresden, I simply put it in as an example of a horrible massacre carried out by the allies for what I thought were necessary reasons. I was always taught that Dresden was a big industrial area where they produced huge amounts of ammunition, planes, tanks and armaments, and so they had to destroy it to win the war. It could just be British propaganda though.

At the time, they didn't even tell anyone what they'd done, and after the war they tried to claim the Luftwaffe and not the RAF did it.

__________________
... I am surprised at your insolence in writing to me at all. You know, as I know, that I bought this constituency... may God's curse light upon you and may it make your women as open and as free to the excise officers as your wives and daughters have always been to me while I have represented your scoundrel corporation.
I have the honour to be... your obliged humble servant, Anthony Henley
- MPs reply to constituent, mid 1700s

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

The US apparently knew of everything the Japanese were sending to the Russians.

Japan Surrenders, August 10-15, 1945

The Japanese were trying ARBITRATE and NEGOTIATE terms for surrender. Even after the first bomb had been dropped on them, they still wanted to try some strategems to secure better terms for surrender, so they did not unconditionally surrender until after the second bomb was dropped on them.

Even then, there was an attempted coup by the military to stop the surrender AFTER the second bomb had been dropped.

I'm no expert either. I heard it was a rail and supply hub. Some websites I have seen a long time ago said that the Allies did it to weaken the Germans in the East and to have something to point to, for the Russians, to show that the Allies were making a war effort. Russia took massive casualties taking Berlin (300,000) so that may have been a gesture to coax the Russians into doing that.


WEB

dahermit

I agree that dropping the bomb was the right thing to do. However, there is nothing morally right about killing thousands of innocents. Nevertheless, I feel that we had the duty to drop the bomb to shorten the war as much as possible because our soldiers in the prison camps were dying each day. In effect, millions of Japanese lives, innocent or not, were not worth even one American prisoner of war or the life of any other American soldier. It was a hideous necessity of total war that I can never be proud of.

As to Dresden, "The Devil's Tinderbox" by Alexander McKee is an interesting account of the incident. In his book he states that there were no military targets of any importance in Dresden, and the whole purpose was to create a fire storm that would leave the city in such a state that the advancing Russians would be fearful of the ailed military might.