Germany had the option of using poison gs during the blitz in 1940. One factor that deterred it from doing so was that Great Britain threatened to use her own poison gas.
During the cold war the threat of a Soviet Nuclear strike on the United States and allies and vice versa was prvented by the deterrent of the same happening to the other side.
During ths econd world war Great Britain said that bombing of its cities would cause a similer retaliation against German cities. Germany, with the mighty Luftwaffe and seeing the poor show of British attemots to bomb Berlin ignored these warnings. The attacks on German cities were retaliatory.
As Arthur Harris said himself.....
" The Nazis entered this war under the childish notion that they were going to bomb everyone else and no one was going to bomb them"
Harris said that ‘they have sown the wind, let them reap the whirlwind’ - you can’t cry ‘unfair’ when you’re loosing a war if you started the thing in the first place. Harris was right when he paraphrased Bismarck ‘All the cities in Germany are not worth the bones of one British Grenadier’. This makes him a war criminal? Or a man that used the assets given to him in the best way to shorten the war?
So no military targets in Dresden then?
Quote from the Dresden-Klotzsche website
The strategically important air base was not targeted during the war. The Deutsche Wehrmacht tried to destroy the airfield and technical equipment when retreating in April 1945, but German workers managed to prevent at least the Hansa-Haus from being blown up. The Wehrmacht moved out of the airfield on 7 May 1945, leaving an incredible chaos behind.
Or how about the rail yards – not the biggest in SE Germany?
This was written by Maple in another thread on Bomber command.
It is apparant to me that the Germans did employ terror bombing and that they would have done it more if they had the ability to do so. They utilized terror bombing in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, The V-1 and the V-2 were not accurate at all and were used to kill civilians more than anything else. During WW1 the Zepplins and the Paris gun didn't perform any militarily useful function other than to terrorize civilians in an attempt to reduce allied morale. I think that the Axis powers believed that their 'strength of will' would enable them to defeat the Allies. I also believe a strong component of this 'strength of will' is indifference to the suffering of people both friendly neutral and enemy. It seems the Axis powers were surprised when their 'weak willed' enemies could also be indifferent to the suffering of German civilians, I supposed they were appalled that these lesser people could not recognize the superiority of the master race. The impression that I got from the WW2 USAAF vets I've met is that nobody needed to trick them into fighting the Nazis.
This also summs it up beautifully. If a thread on such a tragedy can be described as such.
regards,
, the allies did belive there to be sufficient military reason in bombing dresden, transport hubb, troops moving through the city etc etc
