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| A Lesson From Dresden: 1945 to 2008 |
| 2008-03-23 |
| 63 years ago the Allied Air Forces bombed the German city of Dresden into oblivion and thus accelerated the final defeat of the Nazi regime and brought a rapid end to the Second World War just four months later. Today's Islamo-Fascist Jihad is gaining ground against the non-Islamic world and the Islamists are now on the threshold of obtaining nuclear weapons. Pakistan, a Moslem country, is already nuclear. The failure of the West, including the USA, Europe and Israel to recognize and deal seriously with this existential threat could have catastrophic ramifications for the future of mankind in the relatively near future. It is therefore highly enlightening and educationally imperative to review the concluding events of WWII and thus gain a better perspective of how imperialistic Satanic-Fascist national cults have been successfully dealt with in the past. By Spring of 1945 the war in Europe and Asia against the Fascists had been won militarily yet the two primary Axis powers were still defiant and determined to fight to the end in the hope of causing the maximum number of American and British casualties even if defeat was inevitable. The large task that still remained for the Allies was the invasion and occupation of Germany and Japan. To this end the US and Great Britain intensified their aerial bombardment of Germany in preparation for the final assault. The allies decided to "upgrade" their tactics to achieve the maximum psychological impact on the enemy to teach him the folly of further resistance. This new campaign reached its peak in a massive bombardment of the city of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945. The RAF dispatched some 200 heavily-laden aircraft during the night that were followed the next day by 400 bombers of the US 8th Air Force followed by three more waves of bombings in March and April. The aircraft dropped incendiary bombs on one of Europe’s oldest and most beautiful architectural monuments, built from wood to a large extent, and succeeded in obliterating virtually the entire city. Some 100,000 German civilians were incinerated (some estimates range as high as 135,000) – as many people as were killed in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima six months later. Dresden had no military installations or strategic value other than being a communications center. The primary purpose of the bombing was to assist the advance of the Red Army and to demoralize the German population and further weaken their resolve to defend the Fatherland. The "success" of the attack on Dresden inspired a change of tactics on the Japanese front as well. Instead of high altitude bombing runs in daylight that caused little damage, low-level night-time napalm strikes were initiated with impressive results. The first, on the night of March 9-10, destroyed 25% of Tokyo’s flimsy wood buildings killing more than 80,000 people – twice the number killed at Nagasaki in the second atomic bomb attack, and made more than 1 million homeless. Similar raids followed against Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, and Yokohama. This phenomenal carnage was not "collateral damage" (an American euphemism for inadvertent killing of civilians) but targeted mass annihilation of civilian populations for its morale-weakening contribution to a military effort. The ultimate political goal of the above military effort was to destroy Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan – two nations whose organized national purpose, supported by their civilian populations, was to violently take over other nations by willful, indiscriminate and large-scale killing. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #6 Icerigger' "Patience". |
| Posted by: Spike Uniter 2008-03-23 23:30 |
| #5 Good point Ed. As the other Burgers pointed out, this author clearly hasn't got a grasp on Dresden's own part (location- uses). But let me be the first to say, "Mecca"? |
| Posted by: Icerigger 2008-03-23 19:25 |
| #4 The Soviets requested Dresden be bombed. It was a major railroad marshaling point for troops and supplies going to the eastern front. Also by that time, the major activity of all cities was war production. The British night area bombed with incendiaries and high explosives (to crack open the buildings). The Americans daylight bombed the railroad facilities with high explosives and incendiaries as well as area bombed when the railroads could not be identified. The firestorms burned most of the city. The accepted death toll is 25-30,000. Some other cities suffered even more dead. The wild estimates like 200-300,000 dead was Nazi propaganda or postwar Communist black propaganda to turn the West Germans against the British and Americans. So shame on this author for propagating this lie. It was the "AIDS was invented by the Americans" of its day. |
| Posted by: ed 2008-03-23 18:34 |
| #3 Those who showed the world how to do it at Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry, have very little to cover themselves as victims when payback is given with interest. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-03-23 15:27 |
| #2 Dresden was also a warning to the Russians. I don't think it was a voluntary warning since Roosevelt was still theoricly at the helm. After VE Day with Truam in cahrge there were a couple of large sacle air parades just to show the Russians some Allied air muscle. |
| Posted by: JFM 2008-03-23 14:28 |
| #1 Dresden had no military installations or strategic value other than being a communications center. I have read that Dresden was a center for optics and manufacturing, both items of military significance. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2008-03-23 13:16 |