How Silent Fall the Cherry Blossoms
- Thread starter Geon
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Its easy to drench a city in gas.
Its a lot harder to create a big firestorm.
Why is Dresden so infamous? Becuase it was a standout.
You could hit a dozen German cities a night with gas attacks.
the British might go for Vegetarian.
Why?
The whole idea of trying to give cattle anthrax in the hope of them then giving it to people was a complete failure in Montana.
Its too inefficient, too ineffective and too slow.
The best way of killing Germans and crippling German war production and supply lines is to gas German cities.
I'm a little baffled why so many people want bomber command to do other than gas German cities. Aside from being the most effective and easiest retaliation Churchill would have been all for it:
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?33209-Winston-Churchill-s-Secret-Poison-Gas-Memo
In the circumstances of TTL Churchill would have been demanding this immediately - not offering Harris the option a week later.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?33209-Winston-Churchill-s-Secret-Poison-Gas-Memo
In the circumstances of TTL Churchill would have been demanding this immediately - not offering Harris the option a week later.
Dresden is 'infamous' because of the endless debates over whether it was necessary at that stage of the war; not because of the scale of destruction being unique.
And the basis of those endless debates was the widespread belief that it had received unprecedented destruction wiht hundreds of thousands dead.
If it had been know at the time that there was 'only' 20-25,000 dead then nobody would have remembered it.
In this timeline its going to be deliberate Allied strategy (whether publicly spoken or not) to kill as many Germans as possible.
And what we have seen from Japan to Philadelphia is that gas is the best means to achieve that.
It turns out that creating a firestorm in a Japanese city with all the wood and paper is 'easy'. In Europe, with brick structures, not so much. Iirc, the only firestorms in cool damp germany happened after a long drought.
So Dresden-esque firestorms are going to be rare-ish. Gas can be used anytime.
No the endless debates were because many people felt it was an unnecessary raid against a city of no strategic value and many others disagreed. I have never heard anyone claim before it was because it was uniquely destructive.
Really? Not how I remember the discussion.
It was widely believed and encouraged deliberately so firstly by the Nazis and then the East German communists that the WAllies had killed hundreds of thousands in Dresden, that the Dresden bombing was uniquely terrible for human killing.
The claim that Dresden had no strategic value was always rubbish and never believed.
It should be remembered that Dresden was heavily bombed twice more after the February firestorm by the USAAF.
Odd that they would be doing that to a place with no strategic value.
Really? I would think quite the opposite, that in the aftermath of the war there will be in time a very intensive moral debate about what has happened, particularly with the gas and long lasting side effects including the unborn. I am concerned about the desire for revenge and of acting without moral consequence of actions, though the debate will be different it will still be there.
Well I have never seen anyone offer up the interpretation you appear to be clinging to. The Dresden controversy was over the necessity; that's what every source I've ever read says.
Well I've never seen anyone offer up the interpretation you appear to be cling to.
If it had been about the bombing of non strategic targets then there were plenty of better examples.
If it had been about the bombing of targets late in the war then there were plenty of later examples.
In fact you could combine the two and say that if your interpreation was correct then the bombings Dresden in March and April by the USAAF would have been regarded as more controversial.
But they're not, in fact they're hardly known about.
What caused the controversey about the Dresden bombing was the number of people believed to have been killed.
Frankly at this point if you want to carry on with this feel free to start your own thread but I just can't be bothered to keep going round in circles.
I'd think part of the reason Dresden is so controversial is because of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" making it just that much more visible to the public than most other bombing raids.
What's more fun than going round in circles? Internet discussions would lost half the fun if we did.
I will point out the case of Wurzberg - bombed a month after Dresden and with far greater cultural damage.
Why isn't it much known about, let alone cared about - because 'only' 5000 people died.
It didn't give scope for the Nazis, East German communists and various self-hating Westerners to make comparisons with the holocaust and allege that the WAllies were morally equivalent to Hitler and Stalin.
Having just looked through my copy of Slaughterhouse Five what is clear is that it was the human tragedy of Dresden which affected Vonnegut.
The German refugee girls billeted in the slaughterhouse, the Maori POW who is killed by an infection picked up in the clearance aftermath, Edgar Derby shot for looting a teapot.
There's also references to 135,000 people being killed in the bombing and it being 'worse' than Hiroshima and it being 'the greatest massacre in European history'.
Vonnegut wasn't bothered about a few bombed out churches, it was the people that mattered to him.
The 135,000 dead claim has long since been debunked by the way. David bloody Irving ended up with egg all over his face after that additional fiasco.
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