Outrage
 

Now we have Saudi Arabia with its ultra modern air force ( supplied by?) Bombing the cr...p out of the Yemen and not much being done to stop civilians being killed other than a few feeble newspaper articles.
Hands up those who remember the conflict in the late sixties when the british were putting down an uprising in the same part of the world?No bad publicity then!

I agree with you about Saudi, but I spent two years stationed in Aden in the sixties. You are talking a load of rubbish, it was a defensive withdrawal spread over quite a long time and now they wish we were back!

TD, the problem is not the lack of teaching but what is taught and that is to a set syllabus for national exams. As an aside my daughter was taught one history syllabus and examined on another!

There is so much history. From our side it might cover the Romans, the Vikings, kings and queens in primary. By the time we get to secondary it focusses on few aspects. I recall that we spent much time on the detail of road construction, landscape gardening and a few other topics that thrilled our history mistress and bored the rest of us. When I later did history with the university it covered the French Fronds, a complete blank until I did it, the English Civil Wars, and then women and slaves. We covered economy in 19th Century America and City development in UK with Leeds as the focus. As far as wars, WW1 topic was what historians considered was the cause of the war. By the time we reached WW2 we had 8 areas to study but actually only had to pick one of these; I chose propaganda. It was much more process learning rather than fact learning. The aim throughout was not to teach you history but perhaps encourage you to study a particular area that took your interest.

The failure therefore is failing to instil curiosity in the pupils to broaden their knowledge.

Roy

When I visited Aden with the grey funnel line in 1989, ordinary people of a certain age were queuing up to renew acquaintance and wish us well.

Colonials
 

Brakedwell,
I also spent a couple of my formative years in delightful Aden helping to send various ordnances up into the hinterland.Never gave it thought people would get killed.I was lucky leaving as the first bombs started so no I was lucky.
Very little media about Aden then,in fact WW2 got more attention.Mad mitch and the jocks showed the locals a thing or too and the government were horrified !!

History will judge if knowingly killing so many innocent people without militairy goals will be translated into heroism or something else.

I grew up in a time where good & bad were clearly defined. Us being on the right side. Reality is usually more complicated. But don't tell our young heros at the frontline.

https://www.google.com/search?q=dres...sung&prmd=ivsn

Yes, that boy in the middle of the heap probably did scrapbooks on aircraft with his grandfather, who is in another heap. Media are not as alligned as they were anymore.

keesje. It seems you have an agenda there. Firstly, nobody said Harris was a hero. He was someone who had a dirty job to do, for good reason, and did it. Secondly, didn't your country need a little "assistance" during that troubled time?

Don't have an agenda. I didn't live during the war, don't feel guild / pride. Do you have an agenda Herod?
It is irrelevant my family was "good" during the war, as far as good/bad goes.
But they had second thoughts looking back at what really had happened around them.

If we start to justifying bad events, mass killings, because of historical backgrounds, orders, perceived national values, "defending", or "interests", things can get real ugly.
As the unprecedented Bloody and Cruel (mechanized) twentieth century showed us.

Starting to accept you may not always be completely right and opponents not completely wrong, is a start. But, we were part of "something bigger" is always in.
That justification isn't understood by the victims (family's) though, facing the executors. It can be suppressed, but doesn't go away.

It's seldom all good / bad in war, although few deny the WW2 Nazi's inconceivable crimes against humanity at a large scale (just read an article on operation Tannenberg :yuk: :( )

Looking at at the mortality WW2 numbers, they explain a lot of deep frustrations, traumas, aggression, taboos, choices and impact on societies.
E.g. why the Russian / Chinese were a kind of grumpy towards us, Europeans. They didn't start. For a few decades they weren't really listening to us..
It makes a difference if you are sending out troops, or your nice innocent neighbours getting killed by foreigners. It's the perspective I guess.

These day we have more open discussions then during the cold war, when teachers, tv & movies told us a clear story. We liked what we heard/ learned and didn't ask confusing questions.
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....4cddb23cb2.gif

Right. :rolleyes:
You have a rather selective view of history, or are perhaps are simply ignorant. (I also note that you hail from one of those little protected countries who rely on big friends ... interesting at whom you throw stones. Full disclosure: I served served with some superb Dutchmen - Navy, AIr Force, and Marines - in NATO ops and assignments; good eggs and good people).

1. Stalin signed a ten year non aggression pact with Hitler, and participated in the partition of Poland. He had previously purged a good many of his military as being "politicaly unreliable" and made a variety of other cock ups. They made their own bed and you complain that they had to sleep in it. They are "grumpy," and it is someone else's fault, of course. :ugh: You seem to be an easy mark for their rhetoric. you might want to go back and read the red rhetoric of the 1920's and 1930', and the stated goal of tearing down the world order of the time to be replaced with a utopia. Same blinkered ideals as the French revolution, similar flaws in execution ...

2. The Chinese were engaged in a war with the Japanese already in 1937, though you can argue that it began in 1931 with the occupation of Manchuria. If you check a bit of history, you'll find that Chiang and Mao spent as much effort, or more, fighting each other as they did the Japanese. (Granted, their civil war had been going on for some time, and the Japanese took full advantage of that in their decision to take over substantial portions of China). The Chinese 'being grumpy' with the West is a very different matter than with the Russians, particularly in the post war years (1945-1949) when the KMT got kicked off of the mainland. You, and your postulated Chinese, seem to forget why Japan attacked the US and the other Western folks in the "Greater Asian Co Prosperity Sphere" region: the US in particular had been leaning on the Japanese politically and economically for a number of years because of Japan's war making in China. (And various atrocities, Chunking was quite celebrated as an outrage in the Western press when it was China vs Japan with none of those nosy Westerners involved yet). There is an entire class of revisionist history that blames the US for Japan attackin Pearl Harbor due to the embargo/blockade that was implemented due to Japanese aggression and militarism in China.

Maybe the US should have just stood back and let the Japanese have their way with China, and not interfered.
Then the Chinese would have no cause to be "grumpy."
Sure. :ugh:

Despite my jaundiced view of your line, thanks for that nice graphical representation of the human costs in WW II. Human beings have developed a remarkable talent for destroying each other; the industrial age simply increases the order of magnitude. Jan Bloc wrote about that in the late 19th century, and well predicted the kind of slaughter industrial age was bringing to us. He argued that this made war a non solution to political problems. He was ignored, regardless of how right he may have been. ( I'd say he called WW I pretty much on point, aviation excepted).

The slandering of Bomber Harris in this revisionist, deconstructionist clap trap of a thread premise (the article that the OP refers to) is a bucket full of swill - FFS, it's in the Daily Mail - and your position isn't much better.

keesje are you saying that because you were born after WWII you have a more objective view of it than those who were alive then? If so, why? You also seem to apply a moral equivalence to WWII in that good and bad people were on opposite sides, which were therefore neither all good nor all bad. Mr Spock would beg to differ with you. Your country was invaded and occupied by Germany despite being a neutral country. It suffered terribly as a result, especially in the final winter of the war. The tiny block on your graph misrepresents that suffering given that the total population was only a few million. For others (I'm sure that you are more than familiar with what was entailed) here is Wiki's account :-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nether...Adolf%20Hitler.

You chose to post pictures of Dresden post its destruction by Bomber Command and the USAAF. Why stop there? Why not Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and half a hundred others? That is the price of war, and more to the point the price of Allied victory. If Dresden had been spared then the raid before it would simply have been featured in its place. Your seeming detachment from the rights and wrongs of this terrible conflict are hard to understand. Allied victory wasn't a given. The weapons that Germany was creating at the end were stillborn, other than the V1's and V2's (many launched against London from the Netherlands), but if the Bombing Campaign had not been conducted with the vigour that it was there were weapon systems that could have led to the irradiation of New York, and of course many other cities that were nearer. You have to fight a war with all that you have, or risk losing it. Manhattan was planned for Germany rather than Japan, but mercifully VE day intervened.

You seem to be aware of all this yet choose to summarise the Bombing Campaign, and by extension Harris, by :-

I'm afraid I find that glib and offensive, but then I was alive in WWII so am obviously incapable of being objective about it.

Keesje - was there a choice? was there any other way to stop Hitler and win the war?

God knows the British, the French and the Russians all bent over backwards NOT to fight Germany but they all were attacked - not the other way round. Once a war kicks of you can choose to win it or lose it and I think there isn't a rational single person who wouldn't want Hitler to be defeated - and the sooner the better. While the British were bombing cities he was cheerfully still shipping Jews off to their deaths and kept on doing it right up to the end.

I'm no fan of Harris as a commander but what choice did they have? Call a Peace Conference?? :ugh:

The better idea would of course have been, by the UK, to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler, even a separate peace, in 1940 once France and the Low Countries were overrun.
That way, nobody who lived in a place that was now ruled by the Third Reich could accuse any of the Brits of being warmongers. I am sure that the Dutch would have eventually adapted to their new reality, secure in knowing that they weren't associated with any warmongers as allies and liberators. :ugh: :yuk: :rolleyes:

OK, that's enough sarcasm for one morning.

I'd just put a word in for the Dutch people. A more troublesome population for the Nazis to lord it over would be difficult to imagine. They had 5000 German Police to try to keep them in order and the Netherlands had a greater percentage of SS than any of the other Western European countries (as we found to our cost in Market Garden). I had the privilege with my crew of dropping a token stick of paras into one of the Arnhem DZ's on the anniversary date. The enormous extent of its heathland was full of Dutch people, leaving only a postage stamp sized DZ for the stick to land in, which they managed to do. The hospitality was humbling and the anti German sentiment still palpable. BTW, did you know that Audrey Hepburn was Dutch and survived the Hunger Winter as a young girl? It is what drove her to dedicate herself to UNICEF in later life.

Lonewolf, your snipe at the Daily Mail is your prerogative of course, and will gain you much favour amongst those who castigate it even while quoting from it. It has the largest circulation of any UK newspaper and to my mind is no more a bucket full of swill than any of the others. As has been already established though, my objectivity is open to question...

What makes it so hard to look at this like a human among humans? Instead of top down, "us against them" "we" won, kind of flagwaving? Is it strong or weak? For what I said, why does it matter if I have a Dutch flag in my profile, or a Turkish, American or Chinese one? I served? My race? My religion? Skin? The size of my house? Shouldn't we look at the message instead of the messenger?

Maybe we and our pre ancestors were programmed that way. We, but "them" even more of course. Keeping moral distance, focussed, blind when required, trained to stand behind superiority walls we didn't erect. Rewarded for getting the job done. Like the millions of executors in the bloody twentieth century.

Hopefully the twentieth century remains the bloodiest one for ever. WW2 being the blackest pages in the book. I have a slight hope communication these days is so quick, widespread, two way, it becomes hard to steer, embed, dismiss, manipulate. Harder to hide because in your face in minutes. Also if it doesn't fit agendas / desired perceptions. However the recent fake-news / manipulation revelations and their effects are worrying..


Thank you for the link, never saw this page. Lot's of observation that surprise me, being raised here. Would it be valuable if all wiki pages on national topics can be written by anybody but nationals? I think probably most history books are written the brits, likely the best one too. But I would avoid reading a book on Brittish recent history, written by a British citizen. Let a skilled writer / team from elsewhere have an objective look..

Perhaps we should remind keesje about South Sulawesi.

https://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/asia...0March%201947.

I can accept that keesje's first language is not English, but am I the only one who has given up trying to follow?
James Joyce's Ulysses springs to mind., and without the naughty bits to entertain.

I still don't get your basic point. Once Hitler was in power and started his overt aggression - what was the appropriate response? Appeasement was tried - and failed miserably (if anything, it made Hitler more bold). Yes, war is horrible - probably unimaginably so to those of us fortunate enough to have not experienced it first hand. However sometimes the alternative is worse - with WWII being the prime example of that. Once Hitler's motives were clear, there was really only one choice - surrender or fight. Fortunately for you (and the rest of us), the choice was made to fight - with whatever means were available. Churchill, Harris, and millions of others did whatever they could to defeat and destroy the evil of Nazism. For that they at least deserve our respect, since our lives are much better for their efforts (and millions of lives would not otherwise even exist if Nazism had been allowed to persist and flourish).
Oh, and at the risk of piling on to what Lonewolf posted, there is this little bit:
Russia (or more accurately the Soviet Union) had a major hand in the start of WWII in Europe. Most historians agree that WWII in Europe started when German invaded Poland - causing France and the UK to declare war on German.
Do you remember what happened next? The Soviets invaded Poland - as had been previously arranged between Stalin and Hitler! The Soviets were on the side of Germany when Germany overran most of Europe (including your home). For the first two years of WWII in Europe, Stalin/Soviet Union were allied with Germany. It was only after Hitler turned his attention east and launched Barbarossa that the the Soviets suddenly became our allies.
Yes, the Soviets suffered horribly during WWII, but a great deal of that can be blamed directly on Stalin.

Few would disagree Stalin was an paranoid, evil man, killing millions of his countryman. But he was trying to avoid / push out war with the Germans.
It seems everyone was, except Hitler. The battlefields of WW1 were still fresh in everyone's minds.

https://books.google.nl/books?id=nQE...oland.&f=false

I think we are moving a long way from the subject, Bomber Harris.

keesje :-
I'm not very interested in your twitter type posts re good and bad on all sides, we are all guilty in a way, things will be different from now on, and similar platitudes. I strongly urge you to study the history of your own country and its people. In 1940 each and every one of them was faced with a moral dilemma; do I resist or do I collaborate? Mercifully we were spared that in the UK thanks as ever to being an island.

You expressed surprise at the Wiki link I posted re the Occupation of the Netherlands. So here is the story of those who resisted :-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance

and those who chose collaboration :-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichs...at_Niederlande

There wasn't much time for long drawn out debate. You had to decide to go along with all of this or not. Try and put yourself into that situation and honestly ask yourself what would I have done? In the meantime I agree with brakedwell. This thread is about Bomber Harris, not about you and your world view, nor mine for that matter. If you can defend your quote above alluding to Harris then do so. Otherwise, enough already!