Jjdd is a product of the government schools. I didn't know they had gotten this fucking bad. I appreciate his post.
I think the Poles and the Russians would strongly disagree with you.
The siege at St. Petersburg is one of the most horrific losses of civilian life in the war.
I’ve stood in the ruins in Warsaw, though there’s not much left to see in the city from the bombing—Hitler told the Luftwaffe he didn’t want one brick to stand on another and the bombers executed Hitler’s wishes with deadly efficiency. That was before we even entered the war.
There are still concentration camp fences and pock-marked concrete walls standing across Poland. Polish civilians paid a deadly price for resisting the Blitzkrieg.
Jjdd is a product of the government schools. I didn't know they had gotten this fucking bad. I appreciate his post.
The public schools don't teach sympathy for nazi Germany.
The London air raids on civilians were retaliatory. From a British account:
"So little did [Hitler] relish the idea of long-distance raiding that he initiated no attack of this kind in the first ten months of the war (see the following chapter for the facts). The German air force was then the most powerful in the world. Its bombers may not have been, individually, as good as ours, but there were more than twice as many of them; and our anti-aircraft defences were notoriously weak in the early part of the war. Then, if ever, would have been the time to launch massed air attacks on Britain. No such attacks came.
They showed their stupidity when they kept on harping, once the raids on London had begun, on the retaliatory nature of the attacks on the city. Again and again the German official reports emphasised the reprisal element in the action of the Luftwaffe. They kept screaming, in effect: We are hitting you because you hit us first. If you stop bombing us, we’ll stop bombing you. That, too, was the recurrent note in Hitler’s periodical denunciations of our air offensive. He added to his diatribes a good deal of sob-stuff about war on women and children—as if the German airmen had never machine-gunned the pitiable refugees crowding the roads in France."
The allies opened up this front of the war and then took it to the next level in deliberately aiming to incinerate hundreds of thousands of civilians. The Germans used this as motivation to carry out their atrocities, being sent off to kill Polish women and children and told the same thing was being done to their women and children at home.
Totally legit to bomb civilians:
1) war is hell, hell isnt nice
2) civilians are the military's source of funding, fighters, food and fuel. A disabled/crippled civilian force cannot fund feed fuel and staff a military
3) the civilians voted in or otherwise tacitly supported the politicians who created the war conditions
4) many of the civillians want or approve of the desires/ends/aims of the war being fought
5) war is hell
Well, unless the hypothetical elected official ran on a platform of "I am going to declare war on everyone" or something. But even then, you've got the minority (possibly even a majority if you take into account nonvoters) who didn't vote for this person. But the truth is, "war is hell". It's a cliched quote, but it's true. I look at war like I look at more personal uses of violence. If you're concerned with a fight being "clean", you shouldn't be fighting. If you're not prepared to pull the trigger, you shouldn't draw the gun. Trying to make war "tolerable" is what leads to wars that stretch on forever. Ideally, both winner and loser get taxed to such a point that they become willing to settle the disagreement that led to war in the first place at the peacemaking table. I tend to reference Star Trek too much, but the original series episode "A Taste of Armageddon" is an excellent example.