From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Fri May 07 2004 - 10:23:57 MDT
[Jei]
"Maybe I think we would be better off if America hadn't bombed the shit out of Germany and Europe? Certainly the economy would have been doing much better, now that I think about it. Millions of people would still be alive and we wouldn't have had to pay for all the shit Russians wanted. Yeah, WWII was most likely a disfavor that America did to Europe, from my personal economical point of view."
[Jonathan Davis]
Jake, Rhino - are you sure you want to keep accusing me of delusion?
[rhinoceros]
So far, I have neglected to do so in so many words Jonathan. Dunno about Jake ;)
What Jei said was true, although I would not let the European leaders off the hook so easily. The most striking example was the wanton massacre in the German city of Dresden, just to pick one of the less controversial cases. Have you read Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five"?
The destruction of Dresden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
Dresden was widely considered a city of little war-related industrial or strategic importance, though, after the fact, in his memoirs Winston Churchill described it as a "centre of communications of Germany's Eastern Front." Dresden itself was most noted as a cultural centre, with noted architecture in the Zwinger Palace, the Dresden State Opera House and its historic cathedral (the Frauenkirche) and other churches. It was also called "Elbflorenz", i.e. Florence of the Elbe, due to its stunning beauty.
<snip>
3,907 tons of bombs were dropped. Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed. An area of 15 square kilometers was totally destroyed, among that: 14,000 homes, 72 schools, 22 hospitals, 19 churches, 5 theaters, 50 bank and insurance companies, 31 department stores, 31 large hotels, and 62 administration buildings.
<snip>
The precise number of dead is difficult to ascertain and is not known. Estimates vary from 35,000 to more than 135,000 dead. Such estimates are made very difficult by the fact that the city was crowded at that time by many unregistered refugees and wounded soldiers. The foreign forced labourers may represent a large number of dead, since they were usually employed in the squads to fight fire storms. (In comparison, some 100,000 died in the bombing of Hiroshima, about 50,000 in the bombing of Nagasaki and 100,000 in the bombing of Tokyo and 200,000 were killed in Warsaw during the Warsaw uprising 1944.)
<snip>
Or the more cynical British account:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/area_bombing_05.shtml
<snip>
This directive led to the raid on Dresden and marked the erosion of one last moral restriction in the bombing war: the term 'evacuation from the east' did not refer to retreating troops but to the civilian refugees fleeing from the advancing Russians.
Although these refugees clearly did not contribute to the German war effort, they were considered legitimate targets simply because the chaos caused by attacks on them might obstruct German troop reinforcements to the Eastern Front.
<snip>
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