Originally Posted by
Kitsune
As if the Guernica Bombing had anything to do with it. The British arrived at the idea of area bombing quite independently (for instance, Churchill explicitely supported the bombing with poison gas to fight insurrections in todays Iraq already in the 1920ts). Later it were the not the Germans, but the British, who made the systematic bombing of the civilian population the main part of their war effort.
As far as the "However, if Adolf had kept his military inside of Germany's borders, then grief and suffering would have been spared to the population of many countries" comments are concerned, I am sometimes tempted to answer that, if the British and French hadn't declared war on Germany, perhaps WWII may not have happened. People seem always to forget that, Stalin had Poland also invaded, and that the Western Powers did still not declare war on the Sovietunion (instead they sent out their diplomats for the purpose of forming an alliance with the Eastern dictator, as early as October of 1939, which Stlain however rejected). This bit at least seems to be quite likely: Had Britain and France declared war against the Sovietunion two days after Stalin had Finland invaded and made an alliance with Germany against the Sovetunion instead the other way round, our history books would today tell us that WWII had begun on November the 30th 1939 and that the Soviet population is collectively responsible for it. Assuming that the Sovietunion had lost the war, that is.
Let's not kid ourselves (argh, I am beginning to sound like Obama, see what you have done to me Connaught?): The bombing of Dresden was a warcrime, pure and simple. It's aim was the killing of Dresden's civilians, the refugees tha flooded the city included. (By contrast, the bombing of Coventry, back then a nexus of the British arms industry, had the destruction of the industrial plants criss-crossing the town as objective. Naturally, that is a warcrime according to the British). Overall it's fascinating to see how very little the so called Allies regret their own atrocities, even to this very day. Tell me what you will, but this is simply moral double standard. The willingness to kill civilians, was very much present among the western democracies, who allegedly fought for nothing but freedom (allied with Stalin), justice (by fire bombing women and children) and the end of genocide (although the fate of the Jews seems to have been not overly on their minds at the time of the war).
The more I learn about WWII, the more cynical I get. This war as well as its ending was a far cry from the simple black and white affair as which mainstream history paints it. And as far as learning from history is concerned, it seems to me that the people of the victorious nations have learned not enough from it (they learn largely the covenient elements that fuel their self-gratification). The defeated Germans, on the other hand, have apprently learned far too much from the experience. They developed an almost masochist mind-set with downright self-destructive tendencies. Commemorating the civilian victims of Dresden has become all but impossible in todays Germany. And for the record, they were just that: victims, who were, for a change, not killed by evil Nazis, as the typical "storm and whirlwind" comments want to make us believe, but instead deliberately destroyed by Allied soldiers. This action, allegedly meant to support the Soviet troops, even happened at a time when the war against Germany was almost over. And only three month later, Churchill had the British generals work on a plan to attack the Sovietunion with the support of German troops ("to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire"), called "Operation Unthinkable".
This Week in History: The firebombing of Dresden
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