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Real0ne -> RE: It's over.... (11/1/2016 6:58:17 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Dvr22999874
The V.1s and V.2s were aimed in the general direction of London R.O, NOT aimed at military targets as they had now way of aiming them. I can give you the locations of a few that landed but it's all rather pointless as you wouldn't believe it anyway.
I believe Dresden was a central marshalling yard and gathering point for replacement and reinforcement wehrmacht personnel, so no, it was not a military target.....................just like the London Docks and surrounding east end wasn't a military target Why not compare the photos you posted with some taken during the blitzes in London, Liverpool, Coventry, Southampton etc ?
You can 'believe' whatever you want.
The targets were calculated, and they were military targets, however in those days that is the best anyone could do, since electronic guidance systems as we have now did not exist, and required wind and atmospheric conditions to be calculated precisely.
The damage done by them was minimal.
Dresden
Are you also comparing premeditated murder of nearly 1/2 million in a nonmilitary target to the deaths of a few thousand at military targets?
quote:
Dresden - The Worst War Crime Of WWII - 600,000 Dead
3-13-9
"Generakfeldmarschall Keitel said 600,000 were killed in Dresden." - Randulf Johan Hansen¨
DRESDEN. THE WORST WAR CRIME OF WWII
Fifty-two years ago, the Allies decided to make of the city of Dresden a moonscape.
The holocaust unleashed on Dresden had no strategic or tactical advantage whatsoever for the Americans or the British. Dresden was one of the most beautiful cities in Germany, dubbed the "Florence of the Elbe" because of its world-renowned collection of Baroque architecture. It was known as a showplace of culture. It had no military bases, no major communication centers or heavy industry. It had no air defense. In the last months of the war, it was known as "Die Lazarettstadt" - it had been declared a hospital town. It was also known as the "Fluechtlingsstadt" - the City of the Refugees.
Norman Stone, Professor of Modern History at Oxford, wrote in the Daily Mail:
"Already, by 1944, it should hve been clear to most people in the government that we would have to deal with . . . Germans once victory had been won . . .
(W)e went on bombing German cities months and months after it had been clear that we would win, and that Stalin would be as potentially deadly an enemy. Some of the bombing was just pointless. In the last days of the war, we struck at the old gingerbread towns south of Wuerzburg, where there was no military target at all . . . just refugees, women and children. Of these acts of gratuitous sadism, the worst was the bombing of Dresden."
Victor Gregg, a British para captured at Arnhem, was a prisoner of war in Dresden that night who was ordered to help with the clear up. In a 2014 BBC interview he recalled the hunt for survivors after the apocalyptic firestorm. In one incident, it took his team seven hours to get into a 1,000-person air-raid shelter in the Altstadt.
Once inside, they found no survivors or corpses: just a green-brown liquid with bones sticking out of it. The cowering people had all melted. In areas further from the town centre there were legions of adults shrivelled to three feet in length. Children under the age of three had simply been vaporised.
It was not the first time a German city had been firebombed. “Operation Gomorrah” had seen Hamburg torched on 25 July the previous year. Nine thousand tons of explosives and incendiaries had flattened eight square miles of the city centre, and the resulting inferno had created an oxygen vacuum that whipped up a 150-mile-an-hour wind burning at 800 Celsius. The death toll was 37,000 people. (By comparison, the atom bomb in Nagasaki killed 40,000 on day one.)
snip
Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal had calculated that bombing civilians could kill 900,000 in 18 months, seriously injure a million more, destroy six million homes, and “de-house” 25 million, creating a humanitarian crisis that, he believed, would speed up the war.
This thinking was not trumpeted from the rooftops. But in November 1941 the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command said he had been intentionally bombing civilians for a year. “I mention this because, for a long time, the Government, for excellent reasons, has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets. I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.”
snip
Supporters of Britain’s “area bombing” (targeting civilians instead of military or industrial sites) maintain that it was a vital part of the war. Churchill wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland”. In another letter he called it “terror bombing”.
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