Monday, November 3, 2014

Do as We Say...


"The term, 'war crimes', includes murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during a war." The U.S. State Department to the British Ambassador in Washington, October 18, 1945 - the rub of course being that these two countries had already incinerated approximately a million women, children, refugees, the elderly, etc. in an "area bombing"  campaign (the Brits in Europe and the Americans in the Pacific theater) that quite literally had zero strategic value....Oh, and if you don't think that these fellows knew what they were doing, the official name for the Hamburg mission (which consisted of 9,000 TONS of bombs - most of them incendiary - and which left more than half of the city in rubble and created 45,000 corpses) was "Operation Gomorrah" (the goal clearly being to wipe the city from the map).

9 comments:

Rusty Shackelford said...



I realize you aren't an O'Reilly fan Will but his new best seller Killing Patton has some pretty good insight about the politics involved during the war.

dmarks said...

I wonder how far his series will go, Rusty. What's next, "Killing Marvin Gaye"? Followed by "Killing Time".

Les Carpenter said...

Grisly s*it. Question is how much more grisly would it have been if Germany and Imperial Japan had not been stopped when they were.

Million dollar question I suppose. Interestingly enough it seems human kind lacks the ability to learn from the past.

Wars, the struggle for power, continue. And so it goes.

Don't forget to vote today. For all the difference it will make. ;-)

BB-Idaho said...

IMO, the London Blitz was an example of sewing the seed and reaping the whirlwind. War is Hell.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

A few additional points (and I DO give O'Reilly some points for understanding the brutality of the Brits) - a) It isn't entirely certain who started the civilian bombing. Many of the sources that I've seen had Germany accidentally hitting a civilian area during a strategic hit and Churchill using this as a pretext to hammer Berlin. But even if the Germans did start it, two war crimes don't make a right....... b) Most of the territory that Hitler took from Poland and Czechoslovakia (Danzig and the Sudetenland land, for example) was territory that was taken from Germany after WW1 and was predominantly German speaking. The fact that England would give a war guarantee to Poland (while knowing this) when Germany had zero designs on England (and actually wanted to form a pact with them against the Russians) was well beyond stupid, in my opinion....... c) England was responsible for tens of millions of deaths in India. Russia was responsible for tens of millions of deaths in Ukraine. And France was responsible for more than a million deaths in Algeria. For the U.S. to have refused peace talks with Japan in the years leading up to Peal Harbor for the latter's occupation of China (which was admittedly brutal) is as close to absolute hypocrisy as you can get -again, in my opinion.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

And according to A.C. Grayling's book, "Among the Dead Cities", the vast percentage of these civilian attacks took place when the war was all but settled and hence could be observed only as punitive measures.

Rusty Shackelford said...



I agree Will....I think Dresden and the bombing of Berlin were in part due to the German atrocities uncovered the final two years of the war.

Rusty Shackelford said...



.....and dmarks I think O'Reillys next book will be killing Dervish Sanders....

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Now that one I WILL buy!