75 years ago today



I learned the other day that it could have been worse (and I’ve read some British PoW accounts which are harrowing about the devastation) but some of the planes got lost and I think Prague got bombed instead.
 
Dresden survivor says bombing 'turned him into psychopath’ - can’t post the link sorry. It’s in the mail quiet a dreadful read
 
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It's a thorny issue to this day.

Bombing civilians was something both sides were not supposed to do.

Ultimately, the allies turned it into a finely tuned process at the cost of millions of lives.
Iirc Harris said that the Germans ‘sowed the wind but now they will reap the whirlwind’.
The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
 
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Probably seen as nessasary to shorten the war. Dresden was the transport hub for the East.
The Nazi death camps had also recently been discovered so possibly anger influenced the decision to bomb.
 
I spent last night watching 3 documentaries about the bombing of Dresden, a place I’ve visited whilst working in Leipzig... also I was in Sunderland Royal in early 2017 and in the bed next to me was an old chap who had been a bomb Aimer during WWII, I don’t know his name but he was from Murton. On one occasion he started to talk about his experiences and they clearly didn’t sit well with him. He talked of “thousands burning” and soon stopped talking about it “I don’t like to talk about it”. The best conclusion I can draw is that hindsight is a wonderful thing. Yes, when we look back now “our” actions seem extreme and controversial but as one old chap said in one of the documentaries last night “2.5 million had been bombed and killed in Poland, god knows how many in Russia, Coventry and London had been levelled, all the industrial towns in the North... they were still applying the final solution, 10,000 killed every day”. Talk of Dresden being a transport hub to reinforce the Eastern front now seems far fetched, it was a cultural capital for Germany, Germans moved there to avoid the bombing of the industrial heartlands, Bomber Command knew exactly what it was doing and it worked. The will of Germany and Germans was broken, the war in Europe was brought to an end... was it any worse than anything else any side did to the other during those years of conflict? Probably not, but it was on a par.
 

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