Civil war is only the worst kind of war for the inhabitants. Too often in history have we seen external enemies invented and external wars fought in order to avoid internal strife.

I for one am grateful that the vast majority of islamists are busy fighting each other in Syria/Iraq.

So we don't want to be European inhabitants then, should such a calamity occur in the EU, do we?

I have already opted out of that particular 'we'. ;)

I think the breakup of the EU, whilst acrimonious, will not result in any kind of civil war. There is neither the means nor the appetite to hold it together.

Point taken, Fox3. Hopefully we will soon be following your excellent example, though not by emigrating but by voting democratically to say, "Thanks, but no thanks".

Good luck with that, but first you have to find a political leader who will even offer you the chance to vote democratically....

..can't have the people voting unless it's to agree with what the poli's want, can we?

...which in some ways brings us back to why Dresden got bombed in the first place.


There was a good line on the John Thaw drama about Bomber Harris, spoken after Dresden.

Don't think Harris ever used those exact words, but it summarises the sentiment rather well.

I am also much in favour of asking the question - what other strategies would people have used to win the war?, and having those totalisers running of all the deaths to Jews, our troops etc. happening whilst they delayed.

Chugalug2

Surely we went to war because Germany had invaded Poland. We had after all on 25th August 1939 signed an "Agreement of Mutual Assistance" with Poland. This agreement contained promises of mutual military assistance between the nations in the event either was attacked by some "European country".
As Chamberlain said on 3rd September 1939: "This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11.00 a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us."

"A study of the effectiveness of Allied bombing yields one consistent lesson. The attacks on almost any of the target priorities; cities, ball bearings, aircraft factories, oil production, could have brought about a rapid end to the war if the initial raids had been sustained.
Harris was right."

But Harris himself was against what he called "panacea targets" such as the oil programme

how much of that was due to the fact that for most of the war hitting a precise target was impossible for most aircrew of any side I don't know but it was obviously an issue

It was only in mid/late 1944 that the air defences of Germany were degraded to any reasonable amount - until then the critical issue that you had to keep going back to targets such as railways or bridges to keep them knocked out was recipe for suicide

While we are on this, what did people think of BBC TV coverage of the Dresden anniversary? Methinks it was a bit on the "awfully sorry" track, but what do others think?

Quite right of course, Warmtoast. My suspicion though is that we obligated ourselves to Poland because its invasion would constitute a line in the sand crossed that meant that Hitler was on a roll and thus posed a direct threat to us.

The Saarland, Austria, The Sudetenland, had all been gobbled up on the specious pretence that as their inhabitants spoke German they hence belonged within the Third Reich, whether they wished it or no. Poland was obviously an exception to any such rule despite Danzig, as was of course the previous seizing of the remainder of Czechoslovakia.

Funny how that all strikes a bit of a chord with present day events isn't it? Particularly ironic is a German Chancellor reporting to a Munich conference that a military confrontation with another dictator, bent on a similar gathering in of the Herrenvolk, was not the answer but that negotiations should produce peace in our time! What goes around comes around...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Reichsgaue.png

United States Air Force In Europe 1954 Report
 

For anyone prepared to read through the 52 pages, this report seems pretty comprehensive....

http://www.afhso.af.mil/shared/media...130523-051.pdf

Molemot, from the 1954 US report: I thought he was known as 'Butch' by his crews because of their personal rate of attrition. Perhaps they picked it up from the Germans - a bit like Lili Marlene.

It was so near to the end of the war and the bomber crews could see what they were doing - especially the second wave that caught out so many of the young firefighters.
Just to remind you that it was Britain that declared war and it was Churchill's pressure to start bombing civilian cities - the Germans were not initially intentionally targeting civil areas but Hitler was under political pressure to retaliate in kind. The now known deliberate "de-housing" strategy carried out by the RAF was indeed a war crime - it was areas of the highest density housing in Dresden that were the focus.
You need to understand whose pocket Churchill was in and what was the particular significance of Dresden to them.
Why the Polish government did not accept Germany's generous compensation for letting the Danzig corridor go (re-uniting East Prussia with the rest of Germany) is hard to understand - perhaps it was under pressure from elsewhere to trigger that war.

Some real flights of fantasy now appearing on here but I've never before read that it was Poland and Britain who were the aggressors against the poor misunderstood Nazis.

never heard of Guernica, or Rotterdam ????

Another nutter for my ignore list. Never used to need it.

wk:-
Perhaps it was that they were rather better informed! Rather like the Belgians they knew that the threat was always from the West or from the East, or as it turned out this time from both and simultaneously! They had been after all breaking the Enigma traffic, were no doubt avid readers of Mein Kampf, and knew where he was going and how he was going to get there.

I've no doubt also that they knew they possessed the one vital raw materiel desperately needed by Germany, the Gold reserves. Those wily Swiss bankers were not impressed by the creative accountancy of the Reich Bank, that had bankrolled the Wehrmacht and the Autobahns, and demanded Gold on the Nail in exchange for the Foreign Exchange that was needed to balance the books. Hitler had to go to war, and the Poles knew it long before the Germans did.

Blimey Walter Kennedy, I've been trying to work out a response to your post but I am so astounded by your comments that I am just speechless :oh:

Have to agree with Fox on this one!

Walter Kennedy

So consequently, but purely as a retaliation against Britain, and having already finished off Poland (in a stitch-up with the USSR), Hitler then attacked.... Norway!(?). Then followed by Belgium, Holland and Denmark, et cetera.

Yes, that all makes sense now. About as much sense as your post anyway.

Walter Kenedy, you by by any chance related to the late Ambasador Kennedy who did his utmost to hang Britain and her allies out to dry in 1939/1940? Had the American Pesident listned to this dirt bag the world I think would have been doomed to hundreds of years of the "Master Race' policies. Its no secret over here that granting Sir Winston Churchill honary American Citizenship was President Kennedy's way of apologising to the world, its a good thing that the then US President had enough dirt on Kennedy to ensure that he behaved himself when he was recalled.As for the allies being the originators of bombing cities, I sugest you walk down the Thames river and view the monument and inscription to the victimes of a Gotha raid in 1917, on top of this the "Kondor Legion" refined this method of waging war in Spain againts the legitimate government and population of this nation, you Sir, talk utter B---!

I was thinking along similar lines this morning: if we had to run a/some bomb attack(s) or even use the buckets of instant sunshine against IS held cities - areas to stop them will we have similar afterthoughts in 70 years time or will we be happy for ever that IS was eliminated?

Also we need to have a thread about the efficiency of mass bombings.

Rwy in Sight

Chugalug wrote
<<Those wily Swiss bankers were not impressed by the creative accountancy of the Reich Bank, that had bankrolled the Wehrmacht and the Autobahns, and demanded Gold on the Nail in exchange for the Foreign Exchange that was needed to balance the books.>>
While most of the developed world was suffering in the Great Depression Germany had made herself into a prosperous country by 1937 (separately from rearmament) by generating its own method of banking that did not involve borrowing currency from overseas at compound interest - this allowed the payment of workers/industries in the internal economy, the means of exchange of goods and services that sovereign nations need - they could have reminded the world how to control their own money supply and break the economic stranglehold on nations that exists today. Of course they needed gold for international business as the powers that be didn't like their money. The Germans taking control of their own economy in 1933 was the real trigger for WW2 - had they been allowed to continue prospering UK, USA, etc may have followed suit. We should today look at independent national economies again to get ourselves out of the mess we are in.