and that's your flaw a huge flaw at that. We did not have military supremacy, we did not have the resources, we weren't fighting a 3rd world army. These are the things that make it possible in current conflicts.
You are trying to compare and apple with an orange. they simply do not fit. It's very short sighted and you obviously have yet to comprehend how a world war works.
I'd really be worried if you were ever in charge of anything where you had a say in policy.
Its all well and good making the morale choices when theres little risk and you have military supremecy, thats not brave, nothing to even be proud of, its really the minimum expected of any civilised people. The whole point of that side of a debate would essentially be good vs evil. No one in this thread has once said anything the germans did wasn't awful. Bombing cities without a care for civilian casualties is a horrible thing. The difficult decision is, do you when things get desparate and tight make the easy choice of easier targets with less risk but morally are not good choices. Or do you do the RIGHT thing in times of dire need and still refuse to make the evil choice.
Essentially a question that has been posed on many occasions for many different circumstances. If you stoop as low as your enemy, do you not become just as bad as them?
For anyone that would blindly throw away the morale choices over easier targets just because things get difficult, you really are a disgrace. The Allied side surely did some bad things, and will have caused many accidental deaths, and sometimes a target is too important and civilian casualties are inevitable. But I think its fair to say we could have done a lot worse if we didn't at least try and make the right choice most of the time.
AT the end of the day, I feel proud that the side who didn't stoop to genocide and other attrocites won the day. But if we had another world war and , like several people in this thread think is fine, were doing badly and decided to start commiting terrible attacks just to win at any cost, I would not be proud.
Its how you act when it comes down to it in the most difficult of circumstances that shows how you personally, and we as a society really are, the mere fact you think morales don't matter in times of real difficulty is a horrific thing frankly, those are the only times we are really tested on how we will act if you can't do the right thing then, well, meh.
AS for the Dambusters, it was a failure. Evangilion mentioned that it was a significant blow to the Nazi's morale, I would hesitate to think that would be allied propaganda spread at the time.
When the enemy spends a lot of money, time and effort on a supposedly crucial mission and has a very small amount of success, sure the short term morale hit might have been bad. But in 2 weeks when the power was back and the Commanders let everyone know that the attack was no where near as successful as the British wanted thanks to the fantastic defence of the Nazi's(would be what he would say to his troops) and being able to tell them they are back online years before the British thought possible, large number of casualties to the Allied pilots and a large number of the people killed from floods were infact POW's would all have lifted morale.
Also as with anything, its unlikely the news of the attack would have spread that far with bad news being heavily censored and only the positive news 2 weeks later, which would essentially read "failed british attack + incredibly resiliance of the Nazi war machine already rebuilt dams, etc, etc, etc" would only have been good for the Nazi's.
AS Evan has said before, simple facts stand that the mission wasn't much of a success, a very very small success but compared to what they hoped to achieve it was a massive failure frankly.
All the other arguing is people bringing up irrelevant points. THe Allied deaths aren't the point, the morales aren't the point(in this mission), the only thing in question here is, they were sent to completely destroy 3 dams, they failed on all accounts, and frankly, without all 3 dams taking significant damage this is largely likely to be what helped the repairs go so quickly as they could still control the water by and large with one dam in place, the mission really required significant damage to ALL THREE dams to be a real success and that simply wasn't achieved at all.
You do wonder if they shouldn't have just targetted factories in the first place and done the usual bombing and would that have not been more effective and taking far less time and effort to put together. Had all the planes, pilots and crews been running missions for months bombing targets, rather than practicing and putting this mission together, would they not have done much more damage to the war machine?
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