Hmmmm....you didn't really read my earlier post carefully did you. I said quite clearly that on occasion that the Luftwaffe departed from its strict doctinal application, most notably over London, Lenningrad to an extent and over Moscow. But the vast majority of ops were carried out according to the tried and tested tactical doctrine. The mediums of the Luftwaffe were just unsuitable to strategic level bombing as applied by the Allies.So you are defining the Battle of Britain, the ongoing Blitz on London, the "Baedeker" raids as "tactical level"? I am sure you know better.
Sure, the Luftwaffe carried out, over the course of the war, a lot of direct-support missions (and BTW, it is misleading to compare the Luftwaffe with Bomber Command - the equivalent of the Luftwaffe is the RAF) aimed at helping the German ground troops. This does not mean that the Luftwaffe did not carry out non-direct-support missions, nor that the RAF did not carry out direct-support missions. Both did both, and both did what was needed.
Also, perhaps it can be construed as misleading to compare the Luftwaffe to Bomber Command, that is not my intention. It is however ligitimate to compare them in the context of the present discussion, ie 'city bombing'. A strict comparison if you wish, would be Bomber Command to the mediums of the Kampfgeschwader, but seeing as a huge number of bombing attacks over Stalingrad were carried out by fiebig's Stukageschwader, this would limit the number of aircraft that we can discuss in the conversation even further.
Curioso
And it remains my suspicion. The record as far as I am aware says nothing about the Russians asking for Dresden to be obliterated. I am well aware that Dresden was 'just another raid' as I have pointed out in my previous post. It simply followed the strategic doctrines of the Allied air forces attacking the City. If the RAF were truely interested in carrying out an attack "b. By air action on communications (to) hinder the enemy from carrying out the shifting of his troops to the East from the Western Front, from Norway, and from Italy (In particular, to paralyze the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig)" Then they could simply have targeted the three rail bridges that lead into the City in a limited tactical strike, instead of frying the entire centre of the town. The Allies had complete control of the airspace and had carried out limit tactical strikes before, notably in France. As it stands, Dresden continued to be a rail hub after the attack, up until the Soviets actually took the City.You "suspect" that the Allies justified the Dresden bombing with the support to an Allied advance "after the deed was done"? My advice to you is that you could and indeed should study the documents, rather than relying on your own "suspects". Mr. Thompson recently posted to this very forum an article titled "Dresden 1945 - Just Another Raid?". It quotes from the original documents of the time, which, mind you, have dates _prior_ to the bombing.
Curioso
Thats a wonderful statement, but it means nothing at all. The quote actually comes from Saundby, not Irving. If you have a problem with it, thats up to you.The quotes above, coupled with your quote from Irving, shows that if many people have problems with Irving, there are rock-solid reasons.
At the end of the day, while the RAF may ostensibly claim that they were targeting "rail hubs" and "communication", they were really carrying out "Just another raid" according to Directive 22.
Curioso
Will the title is not a very good one, sorry David as there weren't any attacks carried out purely for the purpose of Spoilation by any Nation. There were always other motives. Even the RAF's directive 22 stated very clearly the main strategic purpose for Bomber Commands night campaign and targeting civilians is not necessarilly "spoilation". But its the title and there it is.the moderator shifted the attention to "spoliation", which I will define, for ease of reference, as "destruction with no good reason". And, in this thread, to the supposed spoliation of Stalingrad.
Curioso
Hmmmmm....well then you have CLEARLY demonstrated that you have either neglected to read or completely misunderstood my previous post, which contained many quotes from Haywards "Stopped at Stalingrad" regarding the tactical targets defined by the Luftwaffe in and around Stalingrad.As to the rest, I do take notice that you have no evidence whatsoever that the Luftwaffe did not engage in general destruction at Stalingrad. According to this forum's rules, then, your claim is unsupported and can then be disregarded. We have thus cleared that you cannot claim that the Luftwaffe only attacked limited, tactical, military-industrial targets in Stalingrad, because you have no proof of that. Of course, if in the future you will be able to dig up any evidence, I'll be curious to look at it. Thank you.
I suggest that you read it again and then read the book in question to help you get a clearer picture as your statment leaves me somewhat foggy.
Also Curioso, YOU haven't 'cleared' anything at all. You have simply taken up a contrary position. However a reasonable deduction based on the study of the contexts involved is thus...
1. 40.000 civilians did not die in the heavy attack of the 23rd.
2. The Luftwaffe did not carry out attacks in the strategic sense al la the RAF over Dresden.
3. The Luftwaffe did not set out to attack civilian or purely civilian areas.
4. The Luftwaffe simply did not possess either the time or the number of aircraft required for such a mission type and engaging in such over Stalingrad would have been real folly. On the 20th of August Luftflotte had 58% of its strength on hand, the same as July.
I have not seen one single shred of evidence to convinve me otherwise yet and I am willing to accept a reasoned argument.
Again, I'll leave with a very simple echo...
the choice between attacking the residential area or the Red Army HQ is no choice at all. One will aid the advance and the other will do nothing for the troops on the ground.
Can you guess which one it is?
The rest of your post I can take or leave and I agree with some of its content. However the...
"So if I drop tons and tons of bombs on a factory in Stalingrad, held and used by the enemy to produce tanks, and kill a few hundreds of civilians in it, I'm not destroying it with no good reason. If I drop the bombs all over Stalingrad, the same holds true, because the enemy can make military use of every building, every street, every workshop, every warehouse, every utility. Regardless of the numbers of victims, regardless of the huge means employed."
...is a mistake. Given the limitations the Luftwaffe faced in the latter half of 1942 and the military objectives asked of it, "dropping bombs all over Stalingrad" and thus leaving the defined tactical objectives undamaged would have been absolutely pointless. It would make great Allied propaganda, but wouldn't help the average landser advancing into the defended City one iota. No... tactical targets had to be clearly defined and hit, but again that doesn't mean that civilian structures, especially the old town's wooden areas in the South and buildings near the administrative Red Square sector, would have escaped damage.
Such a hope is impossible even today.
But if the Luftwaffe were simply intrested in engaging in the destruction of Stalingrad, then they would have carried out night attacks from the airfields equiped for such actions, al la the Blitz or over Moscow.
The attack on teh 23rd was undoubtedly hard a certainly did leave "...houses, schools and factories wildly burning." But this still doesn't suggest that that Luftwaffe departed from its tactical doctrine. I have seen nothing either to suggest that the 40.000 (which started this discussion between myself and Walter two Months ago) is reality either, there is too much against it, but some people wish to be the truth.
Hayward is correct in saying that "estimating fatalities is difficult because of a paucity of realible statistical data".
That some KG units may have attacked residental areas is possible, but doubtful, given the urgency of the tactical situation. That they sustained damage (from a variety of violent methods) is a given. But what is not in doubt at all is that 40.000 civilians didn't die from Luftwaffe bombing on the 23rd or August 1942.
Curioso
Well...Eric Mombeek would disagree with you. In his Jagdwaffe series he talks about the Luftwaffe's bombing of Belgrade.On the contrary, bombing Belgrade is spoliation, for the reasons explained above.
"By the end of the first day, the main targets in Belgrade had been destroyed. In his post-war memoirs, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described the German raids as terror attacks and claimed a greatly inflated figure of 17.000 civilians had been killed by the Luftwaffe bombs, but when Generaloberst Alexander Lohr, the former commanding officer of Luftflotte IV, came before a Titoist court in 1946, the prosecution mentioned a figure of 1,500 Yugoslavs killed. It is believed, however, that the main targets in Blegrade were purely military and as the stukas carried out pinpoint attacks and the twin engined bombers carried a relatively insignificant load, it is certain that the figure of 1,500 was an exaggeration. However the Communist government wanted to conduct its own version of the Nuremburg trials and, convisted of atrocities, Alexander Lohr was hanged on the 26th Feburary 1947"
It seems Churchill had a penchant for inflating numbers killed during Luftwaffe bombing attacks. But on can't deny the great capital to be made out of claiming that 35.000 people died in Rotterdam and 17.000 people died in Belgrade. Perhaps too Churchill was seeking to minimise the post war shock of the revalation of the numbers of dead German's due to the RAF's bombing policy, by claiming that the "German's did it too".
Tony