Vorkosigan

? I can't find a record of a bombing run on Essen before June 1, 1942, which was prior to (edit: oops, I mean AFTER) the run on Cologne on May 30, though it now seems those dates are so close together they might as well be considered part of the same effort.

Cologne was bombed over 150 times prior to the Thousand Plane Raids; many attacks were small. Essen was hit frequently, the most recent major raid prior to the 1000 Plane Raid was on march 5, with no serious results. It was hit after Cologne in June with a 1,000 bomber raid. Bremen was hit a month later.

Well, that certainly doesn't do much to improve my opinion of Harris!

<shrug> The weapons, tactics, organization, equipment and doctrine can only be validated by actual use. So Harris had no other means at his disposal to test the effectiveness of massive city-killing raids other than assembling one to see what it could do. I would have done the same thing.

However, to his credit, he did apparently (I guess?) believe that such displays would hasten the end of the war. And it is terribly sad that the Nazis were nevertheless able to wield power for so much longer.

Everyone thought before the war that the bombers would destroy everything. In point of fact the Allies could have finished Hitler by strategic bombing, had they chosen electric power plants and been able to hit them consistently. But they didn't.

Harris' ambitions that I find disappointing--he knew, or he must have known, that he was striking a city of significant historical importance. Yes, the Germans had done the same to England, but not on anything like the scale Harris brought into play. I'm sure Coventry was in the minds of the British, but the thing is, they went on to do the same to city after city throughout Germany (even though the concept of the "thousand-bomber raid" was done away with.) The British themselves went after Bremen, another city of great historical importance, immediately after Cologne. Again, I can understand the desire to hopefully (naively?) intimidate the Nazi state into submission. But did the Allies understand the irrevocable nature, and absolutely unprecidented scale, of the historical destruction they were inflicting?

Yes, that's probably why they did it, you know. As a way of very publicly announcing "we are going to absolutely ruthless and spare nothing." As a way of introducing terror into the civilian population. It wasn't very effective....

Thankfully, nowadays it can, yes. I agree with the previous poster that the point of defeat depends upon the situation, but we're able to get to that point with much fewer casualties, both human and material, with contemporary technology and strategies.

I disagree. Korea involved massive desitruction on an unprecedented scale; North Korea was leveled. Vietnam was limited by political considerations. Iraq simply lacked the resilience of Nazi Germany, Vietnam and North Korea. Don't be fooled. Modern weapons are much more destructive than those of WWII. Pinpoint bombing is still a myth, unless you use missiles and smart weapons.

Vorkosigan

contracycle

... unless the US government is telling us why "collateral damage" will be minimal.

the_cave

I wondered as much. Thanks for the info.

Fair enough, but I'm just perturbed by the riskiness of his endeavor. I suppose many military strategies are like that, though.

Well, they should have! Of course, it's very easy to criticize in hindsight. But that doesn't mean we can't admit we made mistakes...

Well, look, clearly in the end, it was worth it, I'm not disagreeing with that. What I'm not finding in popular culture is a sense of the loss that was incurred--some of the greatest, perhaps **the** greatest, destruction ever wreaked in the history of the world--save perhaps for the mention of Dresden (though this has been changing recently). Again, there's no question it was for a just cause, and there's no question the tradeoff was worth it. I just don't feel theres a sense of this dimension of the sacrifices we made to win the war--because it was a sacrifice; we sacrificed a great deal of German civilization to rid the world of the Nazi scourge. I think people don't really understand that.

Maybe what I'm really getting at here is something larger, or more poetic--desire for a larger acknowledgement of what we (necessarily, because we had to) did to Germany, because I think that acknowledgement would bring out a greater sense of the tragedy that the Nazis were, no only for their victims, but for the German people themselves--indeed, for the entire world, America included. In America, at least, I feel there's a sense that the past can, well, simply be bombed, and destroyed, and that's that--and then let the future bring new things in its place. Those who shed tears over the loss of the past are often in a minority. I think that's part of our ahistorical character, and while it can be liberating, it's not always a positive trait.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's a greater awareness of these issues than I thnk.

Vorkosigan

No, I don't think there is. I think people just really don't want to know how sick, mad, and stupid the war really was and how badly we behaved, or how badly it was necessary to behave in order to win. Once you get rid of the deliberate killings and brutalities of Germany and the Japanese; there wasn't a whole lot of difference between the behavior of the respective militaries, save that the US had a much higher proportion of newbies who were less likely to have been brutalized by war.

Have you read Fussell's magnificent Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War? I think you would absolutely love that book. It covers the war from the point of view of how people understood it, and understand it still, through literature, advertizing, and so on. There's a whole chapter on swearing and its importance, and another on fear. It's absolutely brilliant; beautifully written by a nasty old literary curmudgeon who was an officer in a rifle company in WWII western front. I can't recommend it enough. We used it when we taught a course in WWII at RPI a few years ago, and the students loved it. As Fussell says, quoting Barbara Foley, the real war is inaccessible to the ideological frameworks we have to understand it.

Vorkosigan