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FAUXTON posted:Has there been any new work on the Dresden firebombing or is it still the "ONLY VALID MILITARY TARGETS WERE TOUCHED, THE REST IS PROPAGANDA" and "LITERALLY SIX MILLION AND ONE REFUGEES DIED THERE, ERGO BUCHENWALD GETS A PASS" fringes with most people saying war is hell and you cannot refine it? taylor argues that it was a legitimate military target, although extraordinarily beautiful. the east german dude who supervised the burials estimates about 25 thousand dead; the official number of registered burials was 21,271; taylor estimates somewhere between 20 thousand and 40 thousand. higher numbers are propaganda, either goebbels or david irving. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 08:18
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FAUXTON posted:Has there been any new work on the Dresden firebombing or is it still the "ONLY VALID MILITARY TARGETS WERE TOUCHED, THE REST IS PROPAGANDA" and "LITERALLY SIX MILLION AND ONE REFUGEES DIED THERE, ERGO BUCHENWALD GETS A PASS" fringes with most people saying war is hell and you cannot refine it? I have wondered about this a lot, in both theaters of WWII. Don't forget that even without the a-bomb we were well on our way to firebombing most Japanese cities out of existance too. But compared to the death camps, Japanese POW treatment, and the way the Axis treated conqured and 'undesirable' groups in general, I think the difference is one more of intent than results. In Germany (and I guess Japan), the goal was to knock out industry and infrastructure more than just killing people because <reasons>. The only way to do this in 1944 was area bombing - the tech just wasn't there to do anything else. People got killed as a side effect, especially in Germany; there was more of a racial element to it regarding Japan, but even there the goal was to end the war at minimal cost to Allied lives. Plus, after all the time and money sunk into the long range bombers, the Allies weren't going to not use them. During a total war like WWII where you know horrible things are being done to innocent people (we might not have known specifically about Dachau, but we knew the Nazis were all about killing and slaving), you arent going to set aside a tool like strategic bombing, especially when more of your guys are going to die in the process. Also, until the Italian campaign and really D-Day, it was the one truly offensive weapon the W. Allies had. Stalin would have gone apeshit if the bombing had been stopped over humanitarian concerns while 7,000,000 Russians were on the line fighting and dying. It wasnt until the 50s or 60s that people really started to question that part of the war and the ethics around strategic bombing. Even then the UN practically bombed N. Korea back to the stone age, and Rolling Thunder in Vietnam was more of the same, just on a somewhat smaller scale. That was more because of fears that China might get involved than worries about hitting an elementary school. Today, with drones, smartbombs, and elite troopers on helicopters popping in and out, its really easy to look at the bombing campaign in WWII as some horrible inhumane thing, but I don't think it was - even without prior knowledge of the death camps. Corsair Pool Boy fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 09:12
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MANime in the sheets posted:I have wondered about this a lot, in both theaters of WWII. Don't forget that even without the a-bomb we were well on our way to firebombing most Japanese cities out of existance too. But compared to the death camps, Japanese POW treatment, and the way the Axis treated conqured and 'undesirable' groups in general, I think the difference is one more of intent than results. In Germany (and I guess Japan), the goal was to knock out industry and infrastructure more than just killing people because <reasons>. The only way to do this in 1944 was area bombing - the tech just wasn't there to do anything else. People got killed as a side effect, especially in Germany; there was more of a racial element to it regarding Japan, but even there the goal was to end the war at minimal cost to Allied lives. Eh, I'm on the side of "it was the least bad decision" since yeah, a lot of civilians died in a late-war strategic bombing raid that continues to raise questions of necessity. On the other hand, Nazi Germany was neither militarily nor politically defeated, total war was a tenured doctrine, and Dresden was still a fairly intact and functioning city in a theater where those were scarce. The decision to include it among valid targets is hard if not impossible to argue against. If you consider the decision as a "do we bomb? Y/N" then you're looking at having to answer for not taking action against what by all accounts was a valid and worthwhile target, versus questions of collateral damage in a time when you'd be lucky to get your ordnance to stay within a half a klick of your target. I'm with you on the hindsight thing - these days we can feather a ton of explosive onto a target the size of a nickel. Our capacity for avoiding that indiscriminate collateral damage has vastly increased and to a similar degree our acceptance of error has become lower. Hindsight is a harsh mistress to the study of history because with all the clarity and contrast it provides, it numbs us from empathizing with the subject in context. In 1945 they were just starting to put primitive terrain radar on planes but mostly using flares for guidance. I doubt the decision-making process included a lot in the way of debating the collateral costs, since a lot of these brass had cut their teeth in a time when the only way to know you would hit a target was to fire artillery at its general vicinity for the afternoon. The belief was almost certainly "be thankful we were this accurate, 30 years ago and we'd be shelling it all weekend before rolling in with a bayonet charge" because it was the best tech available.
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Mar 10, 2017 09:52
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and four hundred years ago...  edit: although you're exaggerating the difference between them and us, they debated the dresden attack hotly and after it happened some english people were scandalized and heartbroken.
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Mar 10, 2017 09:55
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Ensign Expendable posted:Turns out there's a Russian catalog of all museum artefacts with photographs. Also it's online. http://goskatalog.ru/portal/#/  Babby's First Mosin. 
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Mar 10, 2017 10:01
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HEY GAIL posted:and four hundred years ago... Churchill among them to a degree, no less. Sure he softened his language a bit after It's fair, too - you don't want to be getting into a situation where you expect to be occupying a country full of people you'd just spent years viewing as blood-filled war materiel. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 10:04
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Go back in time and give Sherman the A-bomb IMO
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Mar 10, 2017 10:35
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MikeCrotch posted:Go back in time and give Sherman the A-bomb IMO Lol imagine the reaction to nuking Richmond in response to the shelling of Fort Sumter.
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Mar 10, 2017 10:40
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FAUXTON posted:Lol imagine the reaction to nuking Richmond in response to the shelling of Fort Sumter.  Time Kreider to the rescue
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Mar 10, 2017 10:55
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FAUXTON posted:Lol imagine the reaction to nuking Richmond in response to the shelling of Fort Sumter. Imagine the anime
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Mar 10, 2017 11:06
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Kassad posted:
OMG that is amazing.
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Mar 10, 2017 11:31
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FAUXTON posted:Eh, I'm on the side of "it was the least bad decision" since yeah, a lot of civilians died in a late-war strategic bombing raid that continues to raise questions of necessity. On the other hand, Nazi Germany was neither militarily nor politically defeated, total war was a tenured doctrine, and Dresden was still a fairly intact and functioning city in a theater where those were scarce. The decision to include it among valid targets is hard if not impossible to argue against. If you consider the decision as a "do we bomb? Y/N" then you're looking at having to answer for not taking action against what by all accounts was a valid and worthwhile target, versus questions of collateral damage in a time when you'd be lucky to get your ordnance to stay within a half a klick of your target. Fair point, I tend to look at the war as a whole, but Dresden was pretty late in the game.
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Mar 10, 2017 11:33
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I've mentioned the book Humanity by Jonathan Glover a couple of times ITT, and when it comes to those A-bomb things and the bombing campaigns in general, it's a good read if you want to actually delve into the moral issues of those. Long story short, people tend to ask questions like this as a question of personal morality like "what would I have done?", but in the actual situations, there was no I, there was an organization and a state, where responsibility ultimately gets diluted, and there are a variety of external factors that can't be discounted from the choices people made. You can still come to the conclusion that the RAF's bombing campaign was wrong, morally, but you should be aware of that based on the situation, there's almost no way that it doesn't happen. Much like there's a bunch of lamentation about how horrible the war is in various 30YW sources, but it's not like the commanders could change the physical reality of their existence.
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Mar 10, 2017 11:37
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Ainsley McTree posted:I think the British actually tried to do that, didn't they? I seem to remember a post in this thread about some government (I think it was the UK) trying to collect a confederate debt from the union after the war and getting laughed out of...whatever building they were in. Unless they sent a telegram or something, then I guess they could have stayed where they were. I very much doubt the UK government loaned the Confederacy any money; it was very conspicuously staying out of the whole mess. I could see a private UK citizen trying to sue for their money back though.
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Mar 10, 2017 11:39
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We coventrated Dresden 
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Mar 10, 2017 12:25
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There's this cottage industry of, uh, enthusiasts that are absolutely hellbent on proving that Allied fighters strafed survivors of the Dresden bombings. Last time I saw it pop up was in the comments of some random diving article where someone pondered diving for 50cal casings in the Elbe.
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Mar 10, 2017 13:59
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A wave of drunkenness ensued.quote:Unteroffizier Erich Hager, a Pz IV crewmen in the II./Pz. Rgt. 39 in 17.Panzer-Division, kept a detailed war diary and noted a variety of activities during the lull. Like many front-line soldiers, once the action stopped thoughts turned to alcohol, sex and rest, in that order. Hager noted on 25 April, that ‘provisions arrive. We get thoroughly drunk. Otherwise nothing happens.’
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Mar 10, 2017 15:19
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MANime in the sheets posted:I have wondered about this a lot, in both theaters of WWII. Don't forget that even without the a-bomb we were well on our way to firebombing most Japanese cities out of existance too. But compared to the death camps, Japanese POW treatment, and the way the Axis treated conqured and 'undesirable' groups in general, I think the difference is one more of intent than results. In Germany (and I guess Japan), the goal was to knock out industry and infrastructure more than just killing people because <reasons>. The only way to do this in 1944 was area bombing - the tech just wasn't there to do anything else. People got killed as a side effect, especially in Germany; there was more of a racial element to it regarding Japan, but even there the goal was to end the war at minimal cost to Allied lives. MANime in the sheets posted:Today, with drones, smartbombs, and elite troopers on helicopters popping in and out, its really easy to look at the bombing campaign in WWII as some horrible inhumane thing, but I don't think it was - even without prior knowledge of the death camps.
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Mar 10, 2017 15:34
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aphid_licker posted:There's this cottage industry of, uh, enthusiasts that are absolutely hellbent on proving that Allied fighters strafed survivors of the Dresden bombings. Last time I saw it pop up was in the comments of some random diving article where someone pondered diving for 50cal casings in the Elbe. Those are the same enthusiasts who add a zero to the reputable death toll calculation to save nazi face. They're often holocaust deniers or at least hardcore wehraboo fellow travelers. Basically: Dresden firebombing killed 200k people -> Dresden was a war crime/atrocity -> Allies didn't avoid committing war crimes/atrocities -> Holocaust was just one of many atrocities committed on both sides.
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Mar 10, 2017 15:56
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evil_bunnY posted:They also very much intended to kill the people working those factories. Eh, technically the plan was to burn down the houses of the people working in the factories, forcing them to move out of the city, making them unavailable to work in the factories.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:04
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HEY GAIL posted:https://www.amazon.com/Dresden-Tuesday-February-13-1945/dp/0060006773 I once wrote an article about Dresden (I work for a travel company and we sometimes do history/fluff articles about the destinations we go to) and in my haste/laziness i accidentally almost included nazi propaganda. I was being uncareful with my sources and I wrote a line that was something like "casualty estimates ranged from 20,000 to 100,000" (I forget the actual numbers but something like that). Fortunately we had the good sense to run the article by an actual German person before putting it out and he very very politely pointed out that only nazis put the estimates that high. I learned a lot that day. Fortunately I didn't mention anything about any strafing, i don't think. Ainsley McTree fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 16:26
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Interestingly the idea that 100k+ people died in Dresden appears also in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. It's a very ancient and common misconception, picked up even outside Nazi apologia.
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Mar 10, 2017 17:03
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steinrokkan posted:Interestingly the idea that 100k+ people died in Dresden appears also in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. It's a very ancient and common misconception, picked up even outside Nazi apologia. Yeah I'm sure I would've noticed if I pulled it from like "stormwar.jew" or something obviously affiliated with nazis. More likely I got it from a source that was also innocently being uncareful with its information.
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Mar 10, 2017 17:14
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steinrokkan posted:Interestingly the idea that 100k+ people died in Dresden appears also in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. It's a very ancient and common misconception, picked up even outside Nazi apologia. Slaughterhouse Five was published in 1969. 1963 is when David Irving published 'The Destruction of Dresden', before everyone realised he was literally a Holocaust denying Nazi, and that's where Vonnegut got his number from. You can blame Irving specifically for making up those casualty figures, it didn't just happen.
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Mar 10, 2017 17:21
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Also, Vonnegut was actually there for the bombing of Dresden.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:00
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Also, Vonnegut was actually there for the bombing of Dresden. True, and not to diminish his experience, but it doesn't mean he would know the total number of deaths firsthand.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:06
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Ainsley McTree posted:True, and not to diminish his experience, but it doesn't mean he would know the total number of deaths firsthand. I absolutely didn't mean to imply it did. I just wanted to remind everyone he was actually in Dresden when it was killed with fire.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:30
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Kemper Boyd posted:Much like there's a bunch of lamentation about how horrible the war is in various 30YW sources, but it's not like the commanders could change the physical reality of their existence. Pretty sure changing the physical reality of your existence is one of the main benefits of being a wizard. And I 100% cited the 100k number when I was younger thanks to Slaughterhouse-Five.
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Mar 10, 2017 20:51
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I mean it's not hard to be off massively if you're not counting the burials and morgue intake and all that, so it's not like Vonnegut couldn't have thought on his experience and found the 100k figure to seem in line with it. If you emerge from (IIRC) a basement and you're sent to clear rubble and find even a few hundred bodies crammed together, it's got to be a crushing thing. Add a couple decades of time to that and you can definitely have a recollection that's got a bunch of emotions tied up in there that can distort what you'd consider the "actual" toll to be. It's just that when the statistics from the sources who actually did the counting say it's in the 20-25k neighborhood, it's real hard to also uphold 100k+ because it would have to assume at least three of every four fatalities ended up not leaving remains worth identifying. That's not Vonnegut's problem, though, since he likely did what countless people have done and grabbed what seems right from an accessible source since he's not being peer-reviewed on a novel.
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Mar 10, 2017 21:40
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everything above street level was destroyed but the basements are fine. sometimes there are archaeological excavations in the middle of the city, and this might be the only european city where i'm pleased to see a basement from the nineteen-teens being worked over by archaeologists
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Mar 10, 2017 22:06
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wwii-era moral equivalency arguments, especially if Nazis are involved, are maybe the worst thing on the internet. ...there, I said it.
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Mar 10, 2017 22:10
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bewbies posted:wwii-era moral equivalency arguments, especially if Nazis are involved, are maybe the worst thing on the internet. worse than nazi furries or the alt right?
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Mar 10, 2017 22:11
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Pretty sure Furred Reich is worse than normal Nazis
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Mar 10, 2017 22:21
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HEY GAIL posted:everything above street level was destroyed but the basements are fine. sometimes there are archaeological excavations in the middle of the city, and this might be the only european city where i'm pleased to see a basement from the nineteen-teens being worked over by archaeologists I wonder if goon basements will one day be a valuable source of historical anime figurines and meticulously preserved Magic cards.
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Mar 10, 2017 22:25
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Ensign Expendable posted:I wonder if goon basements will one day be a valuable source of historical anime figurines and meticulously preserved Magic cards. edit: i hate going down to the basement when i'm in dresden, i'm always "how many people have died in here?" the gauleiter of dresden spent lots of money on survival for himself but built no air raid shelters, so the people of dresden had been cutting doors in their basement walls for years--you could walk around under the city. but when they were bombed those passages became choked with carbon monoxide and the people in them got lost in the maze of their own basements and died HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 22:32
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Ensign Expendable posted:I wonder if goon basements will one day be a valuable source of historical anime figurines and meticulously preserved Magic cards. *going over discarded food wrappers* Truly inspiring that a family of four could share such a small space
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Mar 10, 2017 22:33
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Ensign Expendable posted:I wonder if goon basements will one day be a valuable source of historical anime figurines and meticulously preserved Magic cards. My meticulously preserved Magic cards are in my bedroom and would not survive the firebombing of Chicago  e: oh hey those candy wrappers were discovered ten minutes away from me! Pontius Pilate fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 22:36
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Ainsley McTree posted:*going over discarded food wrappers* https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20170307/logan-square/congress-theater-eric-nordstrom-urban-remains-hidden-treasure-candy-containers
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Mar 10, 2017 22:37
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Pontius Pilate posted:My meticulously preserved Magic cards are in my bedroom and would not survive the firebombing of Chicago "These plastic statues represent various gods of the time. Most gods represent aspects or forces of 21st century life. Coincidentally, this collection features mostly women with amazing tits, reflecting the sex starved nature of life in the early 21st century. This figurine, in the leather jacket, combat pants, and purple corset is Kusanagi, the Goddess of technology. This figurine in the yellow rubberized halter top is Faye Valentine, the trickster goddess. This statuette is of Haruhi Suzumiya, goddess of Megalomania, of which prominent political figures were frequently devoted to." erm, more on target: have a bunch of posters I jigged from that massive collection a few pages back.            
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Mar 10, 2017 23:26
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I live in Chicago and it's always interesting to think that it's never had a battle. Like, the civil war was a net positive for the economy of the city and was one of the things that super charged its growth. All the battles were comfortably far away and the closest we saw to military action was a hellish prison camp for confederates. You can say this for a bunch of western cities in the united states too. They have never had a war pass over them. No battles fought in or around them. How many cities are there like that in the world? Edit: just remembered Fort Dearborn, the garrison of which was all killed by the Potawatomi, but there were maybe five other buildings in the area in 1812. Benagain fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 23:33
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