X-Message-Number: 16717 Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 17:03:44 -0700 From: Olaf Henny <> Subject: OFF TOPIC Bombing Civilians References: <> ?In Message #16675 IGGY <> wrote >WHY this happened, that's important - we can agree to >disagree and that's the beauty of it. Russians, British, and Americans >bombed Germany and occupied Europe very heavily, however I don't believe >there was rational calculations to "killing civilians" over "hitting >military targets." Japan is somewhat a different story - civilians were >targeted, not armories, tanks, or vessels. This is a thing to ponder over. >II am sure that this idea was ripe for its time - again, one of the >paradoxes. WRONG! Sir Arthur Harris developed the strategy to concentrate bombing raids on civilian targets in order to demoralize the German army. This was fully supported by Churchill and executed by all Allies. Case in point the bombing of Dresden on February 14, 1945, the biggest killing of civilian population in one night in world history. There were no military targets other than Hospitals in Dresden. German figures (still during the war) put the casualties of indigenous Dresdeners at 225,000 with an estimated equal number of refugees from the eastern parts of the country, who had camped in the parks along the Elbe river for a total of over 400,000.-. Soviet reports after the war basically jived with those figures. However in the western press they were quoted at 125,000 to 150,000.-. The truth lies probably somewhere in between, although I see little strategic purpose for the Germans in inflating these figures, since impact on the moral of Germans had become an issue in those last days of the war. However the Soviets clearly *had* an interest in inflating the figures, while the West had one in deflating them. Bombing raids by the soviets were negligible and almost exclusively limited to support for their ground troops Best, Olaf Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16717