Dresden Bombing. Holocaust?

Hi Chandernagore,

If that is what it takes at the third time of asking to find out what you mean by "monster", then yes, I would be happy if you would teach me English. You introduced the word "monster". What do you mean by it?

It is patently obvious that you have no grasp of Taylor and have never seen the book. Your entire knowledge of it is second hand through the internet. This is no substitute for (1) reading Taylor's book and (2) if you are then suspicious of it, following up the sources he gives.

If you will now not give details of a single book you have on the subject of Dresden, I think it reasonable to assume that not only have you not read Taylor, but you haven't read any other book on the subject either. Why are you either avoiding sources or concealing them? As long as you do that you can have no credibility on this subject.

Is there something wrong with directing you towards sources I have not read myself? If you ask a question that I do not have an answer to but instead put you onto a source, do you consider this "dishonest"? Why? If you are going to charge everyone who offers you help with being "dishonest", nobody is ever going to have any incentive to assist you.

I have already told you the essence of Harris's reply to Churchill, and I have given you the sources for it, as you requested. If you now want to know the exact words you will have to go to the Public Records Office and do some personal reaearch yourself. Remember, it is not me that is questioning this issue. It is you. The responsibility is yours to follow this up. As I have now said four times, I can lead you to sources, but I can't make you read them.

Nope. I never said Taylor was simply "authoritative". If I had, I am sure you would have come up with details of the exact post. Taylor is merely the most authoritative publication we have currently available. He is currently most authoritative because his bibliography indicates that he has not only consulted the earlier English- and German-language publications on Dresden, but done primary archive research in both Britain and Germany as well.

Er, no. We haven't established that Harris attacked Hamburg because it was "symbolic" to him. All we have is your claim that he did. I would again ask you for your source for this, but last time I did you said that you yourself were!

In case you haven't noticed, it has never been any secret that I have Taylor's book in my library.

Yup. Taylor does know what the factories produced. The details are in the source that I am now giving you for the fourth time: "Oberkommando des Heers: Liste der Fertifgunskennzeichen fur Waffen, Munition und Gerat." (Berlin, 1944, reprinted 1977 and 1999.) Just the title alone tells you that all were engaged in the production of weapons, munitions and other apparatus for the High Command of the German Army.

Nor does Taylor state that they were all inside the city centre. That is another of your personal inventions.

Taylor does substantiate his claim by providing numerous original German documentary sources and, it if you read his book, numerous eye-witness accounts as well. Short of having been personally in Dresden at the time, Taylor could hardly offer more primary sources! If you have any doubts about these sources, it is up to you to follow them up. They are all there in black and white in the book, in the conventional manner used by all responsible historians in every country.

Getting desperate now, are you? Trying to imply that I made a racial statement regarding Romanians? I think that resorting to such a low blow is about as conclusive an illustration as it is possible to have that you have lost the argument.

Cheers,

Sid.

Hi Chandernagore,

Still being cavalier with the facts, I see.

"The last days of the Reich were already scheduled for April-May?" Is that a serious proposition? Who scheduled them? Wars do not run on a mutually agreed timetable. They are over when they are over. Fighting continues until then. The end of the war was still three months away when Dresden was bombed. Many hundreds of thousands of allied citizens had still to die when Dresden was bombed. The last V-2 didn't fall on London for several weeks after the raid on Dresden. Nope. This was not a war that was over at the time Dresden was bombed.

Dresden was the largest unbombed industrial city in Germany. In February 1944 its production was continuing. As long as this was the case it remained a legitimate target.

It was easy to transport Dresden's products to the front. Until the raid its railways were untouched and the front was only fifty miles away. In the last days of the war Dresden's partially rebuilt railways were the last rail line linking the Reich from north to south. It could legitimately have been bombed as late as early May!

If the Germans were in a hopeless situation, (and they definitely were), it was up to them to recognise this fact and surrender.

The responsibilty not just for the totally wasteful loss of life in Dresden, but for the wasteful loss of all German life from August 1944, (at which point it was clear that the war was lost), until the end of the war, rests above all with the German leadership.

Facts are the building blocks of history, not fantasy. Please stick to them.

Cheers,

Sid.

Sid, how old are you ???

I made my case Sid. I won't let you drag me into the argument again because when I do you , you just dodge. When I give up, you come back and vomit Taylor on the table. It's pretty girlie attitude. Each time I've been trying to discuss a fact or interpretation you refuse to engage and dismiss everything on the ground that I did not read the latest book of Taylor in it's entirety. You didn't read the latest book on Hitler either : am I right to assume that you know nothing about the third Reich and the sum of your previous experience can be totally dismissed ?

You have only one weapon : references (which you didn't even have the intellectual honesty to consult yourself). You base your position entirely on one single piece of literature written in one of the perpetrator's country. It doesn't command respect. Sorry to spoil it for you Sid. I won't loose anymore of my time with you. You can indulge in the satisfying experience of having the last word and take some more potshots in my back. There you can at last excel. Enjoy it. I won't retaliate

This post has been edited by Chandernagore on June 04, 2005 12:48 pm

Sometimes I sincerely wonder how some people can have WWII history as a hobby and have close to zero understanding of war (I can't put it in a more polite way). However the answer to this would need to be shoved in another folder. Perhaps a folder over war production could be created, it would be about the whereabouts of production such as manpower, raw ressources, the assembly procedures, delivery patterns, standardization etc...

This post has been edited by Chandernagore on June 05, 2005 09:32 am

Hi Chandernagore,

Nope. You have made little or no case because you include few accurate facts.

What you have done is offer an often poorly informed opinion.

It will remain a poorly informed opinion until you stop dismissing informed and up-to-date sources you have neither read nor attempted to acquire.

If you want to moralise on the subject of Dresden, please continue. As I have said before, there is definitely a moral case to be made against the way the bombing of Dresden was conducted. I would only ask that, in doing so, you stick to the facts.

You can best acquire these facts by buying Taylor's book on Dresden. As I have said before, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Cheers,

Sid.

Sid, I did not manage to read all of your dialogue with Chander, but may I remind you both of what is in my opinion the main point/question about Dresden: why was bombing Dresden necessary in 1945?
The Allies had 3 years at their disposal to eliminate those 127 factories and 20 army depots etc. did they target Dresden before 1945 on such a large scale? Did they apply the same interest in destroying those factories before 1945, when certainly they had far more resources to process and to sustain their production efforts, than in 1945?


take care

Hmm, so it was unbombed. Why?
And what did they produce, does Taylor provide some useful details? It would be interesting to see what raw materials they relied upon.

Well, that would be important given that by 1945 Germany lost Romanian and Hungarian oil, Greek crome, resources from conquered russian lands, and I think also the produce of French and Norwegian mines.
Given the context, 127 factories would become liabilities, not assets.

Hi Imperialist,

Due to problems of range, intervening German defences, lack of fighter escort, etc., Allied bombing was necessarily first heaviest in the West and only later in the East. Dresden is in the East. Thus, all other things being equal, it would only have been bombed later in the war anyway. In the case of neighbouring Bohemia-Moravia, military production peaked in December 1944 and January 1945. Dresden's war industry was also still undamaged in February 1945.

Add to this the fact that the major German war industries were in the Ruhr basin in the West and that neighbouring Silesia to Dresden's immediate East was the second largest industrial region, and it is quite easy to see why Dresden was not intially a national or regional priority target. However, once these were flattened or over run by the Red Army, Dresden necessarily rose up the list of target priorities. Its misfortune was that it reached the top of the list long after Germany should have surrendered but three months before it actually did.

Dresden's single most important industry was optics. It produced high quality optics used in such things as bomb sights, artillery sights, tank visors, submarine periscopes, range finders for flak, high altitude reconnaissance cameras, etc. Every branch of the Wehrmacht benefitted from this industry alone. Without high quality optical devices not a single major German weapons system could function efficiently. As far as I am aware, the optics industry required no imported raw materials.

Cheers,

Sid.

By february 1945 you had perhaps an optic device industry but you hadn't much artillery, tanks or submarines available to put them on and ever few personal willing or able to use them.

Plenty of soldiers willing to run away however.

In my view the most fantastic success of the raid was in mass-killing citizens. That really broke the will of the German population to suppport the troops... No wait it didn't.

Hi Chutzpah,

Germany was still in the field in February 1945 with tens of thousands of artillery pieces, thousands of tanks and hundreds of submarines, all of which needed optics to function. These weapons were sstill to kill hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers.

However, even if Germany only had one artillery piece, one tank or one submarine left, the bombing of Dresden's optics industry remained a legitimate target.

Yup. The biggest impact of the raid was probably in killing civilians - some 35,000-40,000 of them. There is a definite moral question about this that was recognised at the time.

Do not be under the illusion that German civilian morale was not affected by the bombing. Goebbels' diary makes clear how much this worried him from 1942 onwards. One indication is that the absentee rates of German workers in 1944 were enormously higher than those of foreign workers, who had no family ties locally and whose attendance at work was compulsory. (See Richard Overy's book ).

Cheers,

Sid.

Soviets, Rumanian, Polish and Jewish casulaties on the east front don't matter I guess

What can be questioned is wether this hard to quantify lowering in civilian morale had any effect on the course of the war and the speed of the Reich downfall. Given that the Soviets had to blast into the bunker and the chancellery to force a surrender it is doubtfull that the civilian attitude had much impact on the Nazi suicide drive. I recall reports from some high level Nazi representative scoffing at civilian casualties in Dresden, too bad I dont' have the source at hand. Not to mention Hitler's last days tirade over the fate of Germans...

Sincerely

And here we part company

Soviets, Rumanian, Polish and Jewish casulaties on the east front don't matter I guess

What can be questioned is wether this hard to quantify lowering in civilian morale had any effect on the course of the war and the speed of the Reich downfall. Given that the Soviets had to blast into the bunker and the chancellery to force a surrender it is doubtfull that the civilian attitude had much impact on the Nazi suicide drive. I recall reports from some high level Nazi representative scoffing at civilian casualties in Dresden, too bad I dont' have the source at hand. Not to mention Hitler's last days tirade over the fate of Germans...

Sincerely

The source is Die Deutsche Wochenschau from 1945. See the Goebbels speeches on this issue.

Guys, I think you should browse the whole thread before posting, some things have been discussed over and over again.
IMO we can reach a common point only on the fact that the doctrine of targetting civilians was criminal. Targetting civilians in order to avoid military casualties in military confrontations is criminal.
It's exactly what the terrorists do. Hitting morale and avoiding military confrontations. Now if this was legit in WWII then it's certainly legit now. I dont think it was, though it made sense from a cold military point of view.
Moreover, the US military was well armed, well trained and professional, so their excuse of hitting the soft civilians to avoid military casualties in combat with a similarl army is even weaker than the terrorists' of today excuse, because the latter have basically no chance in open and direct confrontations with their enemy.