Damduster bickering thread
- Thread starter Sankari
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Soldato
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I read this thread with utter disbelief. Fortunately there are some intelligent people here (Rilot, Athanor, Amp34 and Werewolf to name a few), and some morons (not named).
I offer this quote, as a comment, "If you're reading this - thank a teacher. If you are reading this in English - thank a soldier".
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but war is war... and what's more it was a world war. Everything goes, I'm afraid. You can not simply apply morals of today (which, are wrong in most places, incidently) to the past. A lot has happened with humanity in the last 60yrs...
This reminds me of a letter in the Manchester Evening News the other day calling for the armed forces to be dispanded and the money poured into the countries infrastructure as "we have no enemies anymore". I'm sure similar was said in the 1930s. "Si vis pacem, para bellum".
I offer this quote, as a comment, "If you're reading this - thank a teacher. If you are reading this in English - thank a soldier".
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but war is war... and what's more it was a world war. Everything goes, I'm afraid. You can not simply apply morals of today (which, are wrong in most places, incidently) to the past. A lot has happened with humanity in the last 60yrs...
This reminds me of a letter in the Manchester Evening News the other day calling for the armed forces to be dispanded and the money poured into the countries infrastructure as "we have no enemies anymore". I'm sure similar was said in the 1930s. "Si vis pacem, para bellum".
Caporegime
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every single person that says people don't have the balls to make the decisions needed. its the EASY choice to sacrifice what you believe to be right to take an easier path. IT takes balls to stick to your convictions and do the right thing. Each and every single last one of you who go on about having to do what you have to in war would fall into the weak minded catagory who are so scared of losing you'd literally change who you are in the chase for it.
At the end of the day this argument is pathetic as most people aren't arguing the same points and twisting stats. Claiming they had a 66% hit rate because they hit 2 of 3 dams is ridiculous, their aim was COMPLETE desstruction of all 3 dams, they failed to do this to all 3, none of the targets took the intended damange and none were damage beyond repair. Even in the case of not complete destruction they had planned on massive downtime with hopefully all the dams out of commision for a long period of time which again was not even close to achieved. Its the same as, i dunno, bombing a munitions factory, one bomb out of 10 hit the target, but it was actually a old unused shed in the corner, didn't cause the munitions to go, showered workers with glass which caused production to shut down for 2 days while they were treated, then they all went back to work. Officially, you COULD count that as a hit, but every target to shut down that factory was a complete failure.
AS for doing what you have to in war. Collateral damage is inevitable, no one has said it isn't and no one saying just being in War isn't a reason to do anything you want has mentioned that every single accidental civilian death is morally reprehensible.
In big picture, lol, saying we can't count genocide is one of those ridiculous statements that people make. Hmm, i can't win my argument with that in it, so I'll simply say without a shred of logic that it can't be included, Huzzah, i win.
The mass murder of jewish people is just one of the many things the Nazi's did that led to us joining the war. It was part of who and what the Nazi's were about and this is largely what convinced us to stop them. No we didn't know about the concentration camps before time, but we did know they were killing Jewish people, we knew what the Nazi's were about and we knew they wanted to literally take over Europe. THese were all factors in deciding to go to war. It was a genocidal, essentially insane political party bent on imposing those views on everyone else. They were the wrong side.
not everything the Germans did was morally wrong, , they could have murdered every last prisoner, while they did kill plenty I'm sure, plenty of POW's were kept alive in camps when as pointed out, the guards could have been doing other things. Blanket bombing of cities to take out munitions factories was essentially unavoidable, but its not necessarily the wrong choice morally either. If taking out several factories will stop another city being taken over with lots of civilians killed in crossfire and so on, its a trade off.
The bombs dropped on Japan were an unbelievable vile thing to do, and if there was a set of scales out there with unspeakable acts on one side and doing the right thing on the other, those two bomb's weighed heavily on the dark side
The Allied forces could have done far worse things than they did, and I'm sure some things we did were simply not good at all. AT the end of the day, if just because we were at war we could do anything, we could have sent fleet after fleet on air raids at civilian targets until the Nazi's surrendered, we didn't do that, if you would have for a quick victory I'm not even sure you'd be classed as human.
At the end of the day this argument is pathetic as most people aren't arguing the same points and twisting stats. Claiming they had a 66% hit rate because they hit 2 of 3 dams is ridiculous, their aim was COMPLETE desstruction of all 3 dams, they failed to do this to all 3, none of the targets took the intended damange and none were damage beyond repair. Even in the case of not complete destruction they had planned on massive downtime with hopefully all the dams out of commision for a long period of time which again was not even close to achieved. Its the same as, i dunno, bombing a munitions factory, one bomb out of 10 hit the target, but it was actually a old unused shed in the corner, didn't cause the munitions to go, showered workers with glass which caused production to shut down for 2 days while they were treated, then they all went back to work. Officially, you COULD count that as a hit, but every target to shut down that factory was a complete failure.
AS for doing what you have to in war. Collateral damage is inevitable, no one has said it isn't and no one saying just being in War isn't a reason to do anything you want has mentioned that every single accidental civilian death is morally reprehensible.
In big picture, lol, saying we can't count genocide is one of those ridiculous statements that people make. Hmm, i can't win my argument with that in it, so I'll simply say without a shred of logic that it can't be included, Huzzah, i win.
The mass murder of jewish people is just one of the many things the Nazi's did that led to us joining the war. It was part of who and what the Nazi's were about and this is largely what convinced us to stop them. No we didn't know about the concentration camps before time, but we did know they were killing Jewish people, we knew what the Nazi's were about and we knew they wanted to literally take over Europe. THese were all factors in deciding to go to war. It was a genocidal, essentially insane political party bent on imposing those views on everyone else. They were the wrong side.
not everything the Germans did was morally wrong, , they could have murdered every last prisoner, while they did kill plenty I'm sure, plenty of POW's were kept alive in camps when as pointed out, the guards could have been doing other things. Blanket bombing of cities to take out munitions factories was essentially unavoidable, but its not necessarily the wrong choice morally either. If taking out several factories will stop another city being taken over with lots of civilians killed in crossfire and so on, its a trade off.
The bombs dropped on Japan were an unbelievable vile thing to do, and if there was a set of scales out there with unspeakable acts on one side and doing the right thing on the other, those two bomb's weighed heavily on the dark side
The Allied forces could have done far worse things than they did, and I'm sure some things we did were simply not good at all. AT the end of the day, if just because we were at war we could do anything, we could have sent fleet after fleet on air raids at civilian targets until the Nazi's surrendered, we didn't do that, if you would have for a quick victory I'm not even sure you'd be classed as human.
Man of Honour
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I could be way off but I suspect it has something to do with the bouncing bombs themselves, as ideas go it is a lot more captivating than that of most bombs - "it's big, it falls down, it goes boom". It doesn't hurt that the Dambusters March is such a rousing piece of music either to keep it in the public conciousness.
I don't see the problem with the argument in post #1.
From what I can tell, Evangelion is arguing that such a mission would not be carried out today. Also that it was also deemed a success when it was carried out, but with the benefit of hindsight it could be seen as a failure due to the large numbers of civilan and allied losses, and the relative ease with which the Germans recovered.
No one is disrespecting the pilots, or the country in general. As far as I can tell, the OP is just applying hindsight. There's nothing wrong with that...
Just because it was a World War over 60 years ago, does not mean we can't critically analyse the events today.
From what I can tell, Evangelion is arguing that such a mission would not be carried out today. Also that it was also deemed a success when it was carried out, but with the benefit of hindsight it could be seen as a failure due to the large numbers of civilan and allied losses, and the relative ease with which the Germans recovered.
No one is disrespecting the pilots, or the country in general. As far as I can tell, the OP is just applying hindsight. There's nothing wrong with that...
Just because it was a World War over 60 years ago, does not mean we can't critically analyse the events today.
It hasn't got anything to do with taking the easy route. Of course you try to save those who are not in the war. But those civilians are the ones creating the weapons, the supply change and all the other resources. You have to make decision on how to win the war. Those decisions will at some point or not mean attacking target that will cause heavy losses. It certainly is not an easy choice to sacrifice these people, it's the hard choice.
genocide. what genocide. It was a war.
wealth, power and land. The germans did not invade france to kill aload of jews.
I cant believe how plain ignorant and irrational some people in this thread are.
War is war, its part of human nature.
I was saying the holocaust was not part of the war effort, it would have carried on regardless of us joining the war or not, I dont need any evidence to back that up, and I doubt there has ever been a shread of evidence to suggest the extermination of the Jews was a military stratergy. If on the other hand the Germans rounded up millions of men and women and indiscriminately killed them to stop them fighting that could have been classed as genocide in the name of war, but that didn't happen (on the whole).
You may not realise but it wasn't just the Germans who hated Jews, in general the British and most of europe didn't like 'them' either, the only difference is the Germans decided to eradicate them. That was one of the smaller reasons Britain declaired war on Germany.
What I was stating is that in acts of war (ie operations and things done to win the war) we were no better/maybe even worse than the Germans
The Germans, contrary to what some people may want you to believe (especially during the war, for propaganda purposes) were actually not that bad when fighting, there were the occasional bad apples (ie the SS, although again a lot of what they did wasn't part of the actual war effort, more for 'fun', although they did do some terrible things in the name of it) but on the whole they abided by the Geneva convention, including the proper treatment of POW's and other nations fighting men, just as we did. As you state, morally it seems very wrong to blanket bomb cities now, but in a time of total war here sometimes is no option.
But we did, towards the end of the war we were sending over bombers night and day to destroy almost wholely civilian targets, Dresden was one that was almost entirely flatterned, and there were dozens of towns and cities that had the same treatment. Morals go out the window in times of war, we keep some but a lot are chucked out.
Well said. (And an excellent book)
Lots of things said in this thread that fit well in a Europe thats had (more or less) 63 years of peace.
People forget back then things were very very very different.
The Dambusters was an incredible achievement of flying & engineering and it sent Nazi Germany a message that they got loud & clear.