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Originally posted by Lett328:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tomark:
I
The bombing of London came about by accident. The Luftwaffe had previously stuck scrupiously to bomb*** military targets but on one occasion two bombers got lost and dropped bombs on West London killing about 10 people. In retaliation, either as an act of Machiavellian genius or pure dumb luck, Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin and on three consecutive nights minor damage was done by a handful of planes to Berlin suburbs. This so incenced Hitler that he switched the Luftwaffe's assault on the RAF to the bombing of London thus saving the RAF from total destruction and making the British people aware that there really was a war going on. That the British and American thought they could break the will of the Germans through bombing is a mystery as bomb*** of London had only made the British closer and more determined to defeat their enemy.

Suggesting that the Germans scrupulously avoided bombing civilian targets prior to September 1940 is a tad 'Irvinesk'. Ever heard of Warsaw and Rotterdam?

Hambourg was a legitimate target - it was a defended city after all with many factories, communications networks etc. The casualty figures were so high due to the unusual weather conditions.

As for allying with the Soviets - as Churchill said we would have allied with the devil to beat Hitler. The crimes committed by the Nazis against the Soviets outweigh anything done by the Russians in 1945. E.G. launching a war of aggression resulting in c20 miilion Soviet dead.

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To pretend they were ignorant of the deaths caused to British civilians in Birmingham before their "change of tactics" in September 1940 beggars belief.

I don't think Lett is claiming ignorance on the part of the germans, simply that the Luftwaffe was primarily there to support the army's blitzkrieg tactics and such bombers that did exist were light, did not carry heavy payloads and targets were largely strategic. The bombing strategies and civilian casualty figures speak for themselves.

In Hamburg it was noted that the damage to the shipyards was being quickly repaired and so the decision was taken to bomb the districts where the shipyard workers lived, not the docks themselves. There were many in England who argued against targeting civilians in this way, some on humanitarian grounds and some on the grounds that it was a waste of (scarce) resources.

Hi all,

I enjoyed the programme although nothing much new came out of it.

I did feel that his depiction of US forces against the Japanese was a bit off. The reason many Japanese soldiers were shot out hand was because they would conceal grenades, knives and pistols upon surrender and attempt to take out their captors in a final suicide attack. Hence the shot of the naked troops that Ferguson seemed to say was because the Americans were dehumanising them. On the contrary they were stripped to prevent exactly what I described above.

Japenese troops expected not receive surrender and nor did they give it. A policy that came unstuck for them in Burma and the Pacific Islands. The US and indeed British also realised that it was a fight to the death with no quarter given.

My point is that it wasn't the Americans who dehumanised the conflict but the Japanese by the way they fought which forced US soldiers to adapt the tactics they did. You rarely saw similar occurances on the Western Front. I think he got that very very wrong.

Also bombing of cities was undertaken by the RAF because in 1940 we couldn't bomb in daylight with any accuracy and losses were enormous. So the only option we had was to bomb large cities at night. Public opinion demanded that war be taken to Germany, Churchill had to show Roosevelt and Stalin that Britain was capable of fighting against Germany and we tied up 1 Million men, upwards of 20,000 guns, million of gallons of aviation fuel and forced German war production to make fighters to defend the Reich as opposed to offensive planes such as bombers and ground attack aircraft. It was a justified tactic in my opinion.

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Originally posted by Sunnyblink:
Suggesting that the Germans scrupulously avoided bombing civilian targets prior to September 1940 is a tad 'Irvinesk'. Ever heard of Warsaw and Rotterdam?

I was referring to the Luftwaffe's campaign in Britain.

[Hambourg was a legitimate target - it was a defended city after all with many factories, communications networks etc. The casualty figures were so high due to the unusual weather conditions.[/QUOTE]

The fact that most of the bombs dropped were incendiaries, small bombs filled with highly flammable chemicals, among them magnesium, phosphorus and petroleum jelly, couldn't have anything to do with it, could it? The result was the first ever firestorm created by bombing, and it caused terrible destruction and loss of life, almost entirely among civilians.

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As for allying with the Soviets - as Churchill said we would have allied with the devil to beat Hitler. The crimes committed by the Nazis against the Soviets outweigh anything done by the Russians in 1945. E.G. launching a war of aggression resulting in c20 miilion Soviet dead.

At the time of allying with the Soviets, Stalin had already executed 7 million and goodness knows how many more were in the Gulags. Hitler by comparison had killed relatively few.

By the way, has anyone got a really authorative source for the Soviet dead? As Ferguson said Stalin's terror did not stop during WW2 and I have yet to see a comprehensive breakdown of the cause of the Soviet dead.

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For the British WW2 was a case of hypocracy. War was decalared on Germany because it invaded Poland, but then so did the Soviet Union.

From a purely legal viewpoint the Polish-British pact was a common defence treaty on the basis of being attacked by Nazi Germany, not on the basis of a generalised attack. It was also signed only a couple of days before teh NAzi-Soviet pact: an agreement which did not publically admit to carving up the Eastern block countries.

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The result was that the British chose to align itself a totalitarian regime which had already killed millions of people and would kill many millions more during and after the war. There is justified sympathy for the victims of Nazism yet the victims of the Soviet regime are almost totally ignored.

I quite agree - the Soviets were no different. And we knew about the gulags. Unfortunately when your existence is on the line, and democracies are floundering you have to decide who to ally with: the less aggressive nation was deemed to be the USSR.

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I don't think Lett is claiming ignorance on the part of the germans, simply that the Luftwaffe was primarily there to support the army's blitzkrieg tactics and such bombers that did exist were light, did not carry heavy payloads and targets were largely strategic. The bombing strategies and civilian casualty figures speak for themselves.

But the Luftwaffe did target civilians. Remember the attacks on refugees? Remember the bombing of Wieluń in September 1939? No military targets, 1200 civilians slaughtered.

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Originally posted by Sunnyblink:
Suggesting that the Germans scrupulously avoided bombing civilian targets prior to September 1940 is a tad 'Irvinesk'. Ever heard of Warsaw and Rotterdam?



I was referring to the Luftwaffe's campaign in Britain.

Regardless of directives from Hitler, bombs were dropped on purely civilian targets. Once they did that the Nazis were open to return fire.

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Originally posted by decrypted:
From a purely legal viewpoint the Polish-British pact was a common defence treaty on the basis of being attacked by Nazi Germany, not on the basis of a generalised attack. It was also signed only a couple of days before teh NAzi-Soviet pact: an agreement which did not publically admit to carving up the Eastern block countries.

So what you are saying is that Britain was only concerned about Poland being attacked by Germany. In the event that only the Soviet Union attacked Britain would have stood on the sidelines.

Presumably Stalin or his advisers recognised this and therefore felt that they could do what they liked with their share of Poland including sending all the Polish army, who were originally fighting against the Germans but found themselves in the Soviet half, to Siberia and executing all the officers in the Katyn forest. Perfidious Albion had no interest in the fate of the Poles only a desire for war with Germany.

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So what you are saying is that Britain was only concerned about Poland being attacked by Germany. In the event that only the Soviet Union attacked Britain would have stood on the sidelines.

Clearly Poland was concerned only with the Nazis invading. That's why the Soviet invasion with the Nazis came as a surprise.

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Perfidious Albion had no interest in the fate of the Poles only a desire for war with Germany.

No - Britain was desperately trying to make a pact with Stalin similar to the Entente 30 years prior. A pact which would have seen Britain, France and the USSR pin Germany down. Unfortunately the Germans managed to sneak in with a plan that tickled Stalin's fancy: involving carving up Eastern Europe.

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Originally posted by Lett328:

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Originally posted by decrypted:
From a purely legal viewpoint the Polish-British pact was a common defence treaty on the basis of being attacked by Nazi Germany, not on the basis of a generalised attack. It was also signed only a couple of days before teh NAzi-Soviet pact: an agreement which did not publically admit to carving up the Eastern block countries.

So what you are saying is that Britain was only concerned about Poland being attacked by Germany. In the event that only the Soviet Union attacked Britain would have stood on the sidelines.

Presumably Stalin or his advisers recognised this and therefore felt that they could do what they liked with their share of Poland including sending all the Polish army, who were originally fighting against the Germans but found themselves in the Soviet half, to Siberia and executing all the officers in the Katyn forest. Perfidious Albion had no interest in the fate of the Poles only a desire for war with Germany.

It is rediculus to suggest that Britain's sole motivation for supporting the Poles was to engineer a war with Germany. If Britain had wanted war than she would have gone to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia or over the unification with Austria or the occupation of the Rhineland, Hitler gave Britain several excuses for war before September 1939.

Britain was trying to avoid war and only supported Poland because it was clear by then, even to Chamberlain, that Hitler would keep on swollowing up countries until he dominated Europe.

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Originally posted by Lett328:


A fiction that has prevailed.

What utter rubbish! You should speak to the personnel involved (a fast dying breed of course.

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But the Luftwaffe did target civilians.

I suggest you read the paragraph that you cut and pasted again.

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I suggest you read the paragraph that you cut and pasted again.

Which suggests that the Germans simply targetted centres of strategic importance i.e. military, industrial.

It didn't. It had a two pronged approach: strategic and civilian. It may not have been on the scale that the western allies were to muster, but that isn't the issue. British responses early on were proportionate.

Of course, it's easy to focus on air attacks, but it's like watching a man with knife in one hand stabbing people in a street whilst ignoring the semi-automatic in his other hand, merrily mowing down rows of people.

Also add to the list the German's pilotless V1/V2 craft as a means of taking out civilians, with the most indiscrimant form of missile attack probably ever devised.

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I enjoyed the programme although nothing much new came out of it.

I did feel that his depiction of US forces against the Japanese was a bit off

I agree with that, he just pulled out the PC card which was ridiculous in the the historical context - a German army observer at the Rape of Nanking in 1937 said that the Japanese soldiery was "bestial machinery", their whole training and ethos had dehumanised them.

If great wars like that are to be fought it is inevitable that the enemy is going to be demonised, justly in that case, and that the methods for fighting it are going to be brutal.

I was disappointed with his treatment of RAF Bomber Command. He rightly made great play with the Battle of Kursk and the vital contribution of US lend-lease. However he did not mention that by Sept 1943 some 8876 German 88mm guns were deployed defending German cities, mainly against the RAF. In total there were around 24000 guns of various calibres, mostly 20/37mm light flak. There had to be vast stockpiles of shells, defence of the Reich took up a lot of electrical and optical production - as Tomus said it also meant the deployment of nearly 900000 fit men to flak units and ground air defence activities. There were also around another 1000000 required to repair and clear up the vast bomb damage.

The 88 was of course a very versatile weapon - not only in the flak role but also anti-tank and against infantry.

If the Germans had had all those 88's on the Russian front it would obviously have considerably augmented their anti-tank defences.

In the prevailing circumstances this was the best help that Britain could give the Russians

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Which suggests that the Germans simply targetted centres of strategic importance i.e. military, industrial.

I wrote "largely strategic" not "entirely strategic" which appears to be how you have interpreted it.

It depends on the timeframe. Largely strategic would apply purely to Britain up until September 1940. Afterwards it decayed into a mix of terrorising civilians and approximate bombing of targets at night.

Decrypted,

Please stick to the point. In reply to Lett, you stated:

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To pretend they were ignorant of the deaths caused to British civilians in Birmingham before their "change of tactics" in September 1940 beggars belief.

Lett said nothing of the kind.

Nor did I ever state that German bombing was entirely free from the accusation of bombing civilians indiscriminately.

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There were also around another 1000000 required to repair and clear up the vast bomb damage.

Hi Cottar,

I'd be wary of those sorts of figures. It creates the impression that there were 1,000,000 men specifically set aside for this task thereby preventing them from active service elsewhere.

No such body existed. Clearance was done by the civilians, the equivalent of the home guard, POWs, slave labour and german soliders returning on leave from active service were often drafted in to help too. It's hard to see how any figure could be calculated anyway as it depends so much on 'where and when'.

The point about the 88mm is good. In addition to those guns, the trained gun crews too are an important consideration. Whether it is decisive or not though, no one can tell. These things have been studied and various scenarios played out in war games time after time, nearly always with a different outcome. If you deploy those guns and stop the russian advance, have you got enough armour to push it back? Even if you have enough armour to push it back, have you got enough fuel to go anywhere?

One often hears comments such as

"if the germans had concentrated on building Panzer Mk IVs in greater numbers rather than attempting to build superior tanks all the time, they would have won in the east."

Such comments are however only one part of the story. It's very hard to see what the germans could have done to put the russians into a position where some sort of negotiated peace could be reached, whatever they deployed.

best

harry A

Harry - this is turning into a nitpick by you.

Look at how the thread progressed:

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Answer to point 1: the allies did not initiate the bombing horrors of ww2 and considering the Luftwaffe tried to flatten London, Coventry, Plymouth, Manchester, Bristol etc etc we should't feel so bad.

...

(Lett's response)
Point 1 - most of the German bombing was tactical and aimed initially at the war production. For example the "flattening" of Coventry was largely limited to factories in the centre and the death toll was in the hundreds.

It wasn't tactical. It was a mix of inaccurate sorties and terrorism. Especially after August 1940.

Coventry, Plymouth, Manchester, Bristol were all targetted during this period of terror. With equal spite towards those civilians as any "military targets"