The Allied Terror bombings

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ljadw
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#16

Post by ljadw » 18 Oct 2014, 09:10

JustinYT wrote: What I said was I didnt agree with bombing civilians in general regardless of what country they come from or what side they stood on.

Why do you not agree ?

In WWII,the unintentional killing of civilians was considered as legitimate,and,besides ,a war without civilian victims is impossible .

If it is legitimate to kill Wittman,it's also legitimate to target Schmidt who was making ammunition for Wittman,Schmid who transports the ammunition to the front, Strauss who is producing coal for Schmidt, Merkel who is producing food for Wittman,Straus,Schmid,Adenauer who is making loc's ,Erhard who is repairing the house of Schmid after an air attack,etc,etc.
In a total war,everyone is a soldier .

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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#17

Post by Hop » 18 Oct 2014, 13:08

Not denying they had an effect on either side, but the desired effect was not achieved, seeing as how the goal is to degrade morale to the point to where people would rise up an demand that their government withdraw from there war.
The desired effect was to reduce German production.

When the Germans bombed Coventry in 1940 they made housing one of the targets:
In addition to destruction of industrial targets, it is important to hinder the carrying out of reconstruction works and the resumption of manufacturing by wiping out the most densely populated worker's settlements.
The Blitz Then and Now, vol 2, orders for KG4.

A US diplomat, Herschel Johnson, reported the aftermath of the raid on Coventry to the US Secretary of State:
The bombing of working-class residential districts in this
area has come to be accepted as an ingenious and effective move
on the part of Germany. Moreover, such bombing has come to be
viewed as even a greater menace than the damage actually done
to industrial plant. What happened at Coventry well illustrates
the devilish effectiveness of the bombing of districts inhabited
by working-class people. It seems to be pretty well established
that as many as 70,000 houses in the comparatively small city
of Coventry were affected by bombing and that of these 30,000
were made unfit for human habitation, and 7,000 demolished entirely.

The big raid on Coventry took place during the night of November
14-15, 1940. Since that time some weeks have elapsed and great
strides have been made in the direction of make-shift repairs
to damaged working-class residences. But there is not a sizeable
industrial enterprise in the whole of Coventry whose production
is not still being adversely affected by raiding has wrought
in the lives of Coventry working people. There hovers over that
city an apprehensiveness which has lingered since the raid took
place. This apprehensiveness is born of a realization that the
Germans can at will again do to Coventry what they did to it
during that one horrible night in November.

Intricate, costly, and heavy machine tools can be extricated
from the cellars of demolished manufacturing plants. Many of
them can be repaired and installed in new plant. But the workers
who man these machines, so long as they live as they do today,
can never attain the efficiency which, before the events in question
took place, they maintained as a mere matter of course.
A report from the Ministry of Aircraft Production to the British War Cabinet:
We are also having difficulties about machine tools. These do not spring
from the actual damage done to the tools. On the contrary, it has been found
that the machine tool stands up to the blast of the bomb remarkably well.
In the attack on Coventry, where 50,000 machine tools were concentrated,
only 700 were destroyed. In Birmingham, where as many as 70,000 were
assembled, 700 were destroyed.

But while the machine tools in our possession might give very good results
when the men worked them by night as well as by day, it is now very hard to
persuade staffs in some centres to do night duty.
The general effect has been to cut down the proportion of men employed on
night work. In many directions night shifts have been abandoned.
The lesson the Luftwaffe taught Britain was that bombing of towns caused more lost production than bombing of factories. It's a lesson the RAF took to heart. When "morale" was made a target, it wasn't just in the hope of causing collapse, it was in the expectation of causing damage to German production. It worked, too, with absenteeism running at around 20% in many German factories late in the war.


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phylo_roadking
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#18

Post by phylo_roadking » 18 Oct 2014, 15:54

The Mass Observation studies done during the Blitz did indeed find the bombing had an effect. They just never admitted it.

http://www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/ ... art-7.aspx

http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/40 ... le-in-1940

The same applied in Germany
Actually....there are indeed indications that the German population was brought close to unrest by the bombing on two occasions in 1943 - one obviously being in the immediate aftermath of GOMORRAH. These are recorded both by Albert Speer, and Goebbels in his diaries. You also had the later-war example of the "Edelweiss Pirates" and other areas of bombed German cities being out of government control and descending into chaos.

Unrest in London led to several instances of a very near breakdown in law and order; the famous one being when Winston visited the East End and declared for the cameras that "the East End could take it" - off-camera the locals told him firmly and loudly exactly HOW much more they were prepared to take! :lol: And Churchill had to be ushered off the scene rapidly...

The second was the incident of the Police having to issue and draw firearms to keep Londoners out of the Underground system when the Blitz began - one of the major fears of the government being that the population would go into deep shelter and not come out again, especially for the next day's work; this all got rather ugly at a couple of Underground stations, but thankfully the government rescinded the order rather than enforce it further, and the Underground was opened up for nightly shelter.
if anything it shows how resilient people are in general, hell it took two nuclear bombs before Japan surrendered.
Remembering of course that the Japanese people had little or no - make that just no - say in the matter...
Did an international understanding ever come to pass or is the bombing of civilian populations something that most countries just agree to not do without it being on paper?
You seem to have a quite "romantic" view of war and how it was done; to put it simply, you do whatever is needed AND that you can do...right up to the very limit that any international agreements made in peacetime permit - and THEN go over those limits if you can make a suitable case to anyone listening....or willing to hold you to judgement. In a world full of Neutrals you want to trade with, you pay attention to THEIR sensitivities over international agreements and how the keeping or breaching of them might hint at how you'd treat THEM!

Governments don't come to polite agreements - they come to agreements by back channels because there's something one party wants, and that the other party can screw them for. But often they don't come to agreements in wartime simply because they want the ability/right to do something further down the line open to them.

Example - the USSR wasn't a signatory to the Hague Conventions after November 1917...but on the outbreak of the Winter War Stalin came to a back-channel agreement with the Finns that they would observe SOME negotiated elements of the Conventions between them during the war...in the summer of 1941, Stalin made the same offer to the Germans after the start of BARBAROSSA but this time Hitler refused, because he was certain of German victory and saw no reason at all to grant any favourable treatment to the prospective "defeated"...

They also come to unspoken agreements in a "balance of terror" situation - like the British development and testing of weaponised Anthrax mid-war being communicated to the Nazis to checkmate their potential use of newly-developed of nerve agents....

But beyond particular circumsntaces like that - war is hell. You do what you need to do to win. You don't not do something because it's unpalatable...see under Mers-el-Kebir.
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wm
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#19

Post by wm » 18 Oct 2014, 16:13

JustinYT wrote:From what I've read about the Hague an the discussions it does appear that they saw that things like bombing civilians from the air was something that shouldn't be done but that the majority could come to a universal way to interpret what should and shouldn't be allowed. Did an international understanding ever come to pass or is the bombing of civilian populations something that most countries just agree to not do without it being on paper?
The Hague Conventions listed the exceptions:
- buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes,
- historic monuments,
- hospitals,
- places where the sick and wounded are collected.
Adding: as far as possible, and provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.

There is nothing wrong with adding cities and civilians as exceptions too. After all many of the rules are arbitrary. You can kill a soldier by setting him on fire, but not with a bullet that flattens easily.
The question is for what purpose?
If cities were sacred defense would be much easier, wars much longer and bloodier. After all cities, towns, villages are everywhere. Always in the way of any quick and decisive offensive.
In the end the only left alive would be those precious civilians but without any able-bodied men among them.

And wars where only the soldiers die, but the rest is safe are easy to start, but hard to end. If you make wars nice and safe for the majority, we will have wars constantly. Maybe we even have.
Some said: It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it. He was right.

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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#20

Post by ljadw » 18 Oct 2014, 17:54

Grant ? Sherman ? Sheridan ?

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Ponury
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#21

Post by Ponury » 18 Oct 2014, 22:14

Amnesia? Mourn over the fate of the executioners, who also aspire your hands to the role of victim? The confusion. Start teaching until 1939 and the bombing carried out by the "knights" of the Luftwaffe. Crime to crime. Stop talking crap, start with the one who caused this war and who supported Hitler. Supported Germany, including those which later rightly bombs fell on the head of Hamburg or Dresden. Those bombs at each other brought, triggering a war of aggression ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of ... rld_War_II

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Warsa ... n_1945.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Frampol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_de ... _of_Warsaw

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Sheldrake
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#22

Post by Sheldrake » 18 Oct 2014, 22:35

My 2 p - sorry if this repeats someone else's post.

It was widely known that bombing civilian targets was outside the rules of war as defined in the Hague at the end of the C19th. However both sides in Ww2 found it expedient to wage warfare by any means that seemed to work

WW1 changed perceptions of the rules. In a war between industrial powers does it matter whether you kill than man holding the gun or the woman who makes the bullets that the man firers?

The strategic/area/terror bombing of Germany was very popular policy in the Uk in WW2. It was also popular in opccupied Europe. The bombing of Germany was a way to tell those enslaved that someone was on their side.

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phylo_roadking
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#23

Post by phylo_roadking » 18 Oct 2014, 22:47

WW1 changed perceptions of the rules. In a war between industrial powers does it matter whether you kill than man holding the gun or the woman who makes the bullets that the man firers?
And yet - WWI was also the war that produced the only real legal test of aerial bombing, the 1922 case taken by the Greeks against Germany for the effects of the bombing of civilians in Salonika....which the Germans lost and had to pay compensation.
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#24

Post by LineDoggie » 19 Oct 2014, 06:14

JustinYT wrote:So what's every ones feelings and opinions about the allied terror bombings of Germany?? Many names were used during the war strategic bombing, area bombing and some others but "terror bombing" is the most well known. I can understand the bombing of cities/areas that have a substantial industrial presence and other military targets. When you look at the transition from military targets to factories industrial sites harbors and then to the destruction of the workers homes, it takes a somewhat dark turn.


During the war it was more or less told to the public the bombings were only targeting Germany's ability to produce war material an their ability to transport soldiers etc, until after the Dresden raid when British Air Commodore Colin McKray Grierson let an off hand comment slip that the raid also helped "destroy what was left of German morale", to which it ended up in the papers as "Allied air bosses have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler's doom."


Me personally I've never liked the idea of deliberately bombing major civilian areas, especially that the general idea of it is that you can destroy the moral of the enemy populace to the point they force the leadership to end the war, obviously this was not going to happen in Germany. The bombing of Hamburg was probably one of the worst raids, while it did have legitimate military targets and industrial targets the resulting civilians death of somewhere of 45-55,000 civilians killed mostly caused by the largest firestorm of the war is horrendous as well as an un-foreseen event of a fire tornado that sucked up a lot of oxygen killing many hiding in the bomb shelters.


Dresden is obviously the most well known example of terror bombing, with the second largest fire storm of the war claiming the lives of 20-35,000 civilians. While Dresden was listed as the 7th largest industrial manufacturing city in Germany, what Dresden primarily manufactured for the war had little to no effect on the war at the time it was bombed in Feb March and April of '45. Some of the other stated reasons for the raid was to assist the Soviet advance an that a possible counter attack on the Soviet offensive could be launched from Dresden but in all honesty in 1945 there was nothing that was going to stop the Red Army.
The fact that Dresden was the 7th largest manufacturing city an yet it was left untouched until 1945 should say a lot, as well it's hard to believe that the Allies knowing that it was one of the larger cities that was left untouched through out the war that it had become an city with a large number of refugees something in the park of 300,000 refugees fled there.


In 1953 the USAF put out a report justifying the raid, but critics like a journalist named Alex McKee began to point out that,military barracks that were listed as a target were in fact a long way out of the city an were never targeted nor attacked, that some "hutted camps" listed as a military target were refugee camps, also the autobahn bridge to the west of Dresden was not target or attacked nor were a railway bridge that went over the Elbe river was neither targeted or attacked.


McKee went on further to state that "The bomber commanders were not really interested in any purely military or economic targets, which was just as well, for they knew very little about Dresden; the RAF even lacked proper maps of the city. What they were looking for was a big built up area which they could burn, and that Dresden possessed in full measure". Terror bombing in my opinion has always been a bad idea, and at times can make you no better than your enemy, luckily it is no longer accepted to purposely bomb civilian populations
Wall of text, try using the enter key a few times so we dont go blind trying to read it.

Germany Started the modern terror Bombing with Guernica, Madrid, Warsaw, Rotterdam....

When it comes down to it, Don't start nothing there wont be nothing fits

IF the Germans hadn't started indiscriminate bombing of civpop they likely would not have been on the receiving end of it, RAF & USAAF were just better at large scale bombing than Germany
"There are two kinds of people who are staying on this beach: those who are dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here".
Col. George Taylor, 16th Infantry Regiment, Omaha Beach

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wm
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#25

Post by wm » 19 Oct 2014, 11:49

Sheldrake wrote:It was widely known that bombing civilian targets was outside the rules of war as defined in the Hague at the end of the C19th. However both sides in Ww2 found it expedient to wage warfare by any means that seemed to work
The rules were consistent for that period of time, and didn't say that.

1863, Lieber Code
War is not carried on by arms alone. It is lawful to starve the hostile belligerent, armed or unarmed, so that it leads to the speedier subjection of the enemy.

When a commander of a besieged place expels the noncombatants, in order to lessen the number of those who consume his stock of provisions, it is lawful, though an extreme measure, to drive them back, so as to hasten on the surrender.

Commanders, whenever admissible, inform the enemy of their intention to bombard a place, so that the noncombatants, and especially the women and children, may be removed before the bombardment commences. But it is no infraction of the common law of war to omit thus to inform the enemy. Surprise may be a necessity.

The citizen or native of a hostile country is [...] an enemy, as one of the constituents of the hostile state or nation, and as such is subjected to the hardships of the war.
1880, Oxford Manual
It is forbidden: to attack and to bombard undefended places.

In case of bombardment all necessary steps must be taken to spare, if it can be done, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science and charitable purposes, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are gathered on the condition that they are not being utilized at the time, directly or indirectly, for defense.
1889-1907, Hague Conventions
The attack or bombardment of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended, is prohibited.

The Commander of an attacking force, before commencing a bombardment, except in the case of an assault, should do all he can to warn the authorities.

In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps should be taken to spare as far as possible edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not used at the same time for military purposes.
1913, Oxford Manual
The bombardment of undefended ports, towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings is forbidden.

Military works, military or naval establishments, depots of arms or war ' matériel, ' workshops or plants which could be utilized for the needs of the hostile fleet or army, and the war-ships in the harbour, are not, however, included in this prohibition.

If for military reasons immediate action is necessary, and no delay can be allowed the enemy, it is understood that the prohibition to bombard the undefended town holds good.

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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#26

Post by wm » 19 Oct 2014, 20:03

A definition of undefended towns, from the never adopted Draft Convention for the Protection of Civilian Populations Against New Engines of War (1938):
A town, port, village or isolated building shall be considered undefended provided that not only (a) no combatant troops, but also (b) no military, naval or air establishment, or barracks, arsenal, munition stores or factories, aerodromes or aeroplane workshops or ships of war, naval dockyards, forts, or fortifications for defensive or offensive purposes, or entrenchments exist within its boundaries or within a radius of "x" kilometers from such boundaries.
An early example of an indiscriminate bombardment of civilians.
In January of 1971, during the siege of Paris, the Germans fired some 12,000 shells into the city over 23 nights in an attempt to break Parisian morale.
paris1.jpg
paris1.jpg (213.39 KiB) Viewed 632 times
paris2.jpg
source: 1, 2.

Leutnant Von Historian
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#27

Post by Leutnant Von Historian » 01 Nov 2014, 16:10

Its very sad and ironic that all of this started simply because a group of German planes misbomb civilians which make the British mad and bomb German civilians which in turn make Hitler mad and target British civilian and on and and on and on.

I myself strongly disagreed with the bombing of civilians populated area which have very little military value. In fact such bombings may perhaps raised German morale when connected to the "Unconditional Surrender" propaganda (Used by Allies against Germany, used by the nazis against Allies).

The thing is, whoever do that whether it was the Allies or Germany is morally wrong. Whether there is rules against it or not. The point is those rules are made prohibit any nations from targeting civilians. Well, that is my opinion.

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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#28

Post by ljadw » 01 Nov 2014, 18:05

This is not correct

1) Morality has no place in military strategy

2)You can't condemn a military strategy,which was accepted and considered as normal when it was used,because, 75 years later, YOU consider it as wrong .

3)The use of aircraft to attack enemy cities was already used in WWI,when the Germans used a substitute (the Zeppelin) to attack British cities .

4)Even after WWII,this strategy was used in Korea, Vietnam;the ME,......

The question is : why would it be morally wrong to attack enemy cities,which were objects that could be attacked legally ?
Civilians who are helping the enemy can not claim immunity .

5) A justification claim for the air attacks was that they would shorten war and thus savethe lives of a lot of people ,and that it was thus morally justified to attack enemy cities .

ljadw
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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#29

Post by ljadw » 01 Nov 2014, 18:08

Leutnant Von Historian wrote: The point is those rules are made prohibit any nations from targeting civilians. .
Civilians were not targetted,cities were targetted.With the primitive aircraft of WWII,it was impossible to target civilians . And,I doubt that it is possible today,whatever will claim the air force lobbies .

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Re: The Allied Terror bombings

#30

Post by Rob Stuart » 01 Nov 2014, 18:47

Morality has no place in military strategy
ljadw,

This is not true. If war could be waged without moral limits, then in 1982 the Argentinians could have murdered the entire population of the Falklands when they occupied them (to render moot the British argument that they could not surrender the Falklands without the agreement of the residents) and British could have nuked Buenos Aires. Obviously, neither of these measures could have been morally justified. In WW2, with the UK fighting for its life against a regime as murderous and criminal as the Nazis, actions which would be immoral in other circumstances were justifiable, if militarily effective. But even in that war there were still limits. For the most part the British and Americans did not mistreat their PoWs, for example, unlike the Japanese or, in the case of their Russian prisoners, the Germans.

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