[AMF]

Just read this...all I can say is WHOA!

Will refute later.

At work now

Originally posted by Thermodyne:
Hey guys, you are all missing a major point here. In an all out war like WW 2, civilians are legitimate targets. Civilians make the materials of war. Farmers contribute, wives contribute and a 15 year old can be expected to be under arms an two to three years. Any building can be used for shelter, and any city is a legitimate target. The destruction of the civilian infrastructure was as important as bombing transportation and industry.

Also, while the massive 1000 plane raids over Europe were very much a welcome propaganda tool, they were also the end result of pure economics. When you can produce enough bombers to overwhelm the local defenses, and then carpet bomb the whole urban area of a city, you win. You no longer need to hit a small target. And you no longer worry about a single hospital or school. You bomb them all and they get lost in the weight of the raid as a whole.

In a nut shell, governments do not make war, Nations make war. And as citizens, we are all libel for the actions of our nations. The allies knew that the Germans were on the verge of a fission bomb, and they knew that the V5 (4?) was a few technical problems away from flying to the eastern seaboard of the US. The Allies were in no position to not press their advantage once they had gained it. Also, people tend to forget that England was done for by 1944-45. Two major wars in less than thirty years had gutted her manpower, and the people at home were very tired of war. The V1?s and V2?s had driven moral down to levels not seen since 1940-41, and the fiasco that was Market Garden had spent a vast portion of her offensive capability. Also there was the issue of supplying the troops on the continent, their maximum numbers were dependant on how many tons of supply that could be trucked to them from the few working docks on the coast.

Let?s look at a few points about how small the allied advantage could have been in the winter of 44-45. The allied armies had shot their bolts and were in need of extended re-supply and refit. The ground pounders were being rotated for rest and replaced with green troops. The allies had reached their limit as far as supplying troops at the front was concerned. Fuel was being allocated on tactical level. Only the air forces were still able to maintain the offensive, but winter is not good air weather in northern Europe. The Americans were trying to bury the actual casualty figures for their armored units. The Sherman?s were death traps, only the weight of their numbers and the ease with which they could be repaired made them viable. But crews were refusing to fight them against German armor. The English were very busy trying to eliminate V2 launch sites and were very much in defensive mode. Turning south to pinch off the bulge used up their reserves. And while Patton made one hell of a tactical redeployment to strike the southern side of the bulge, he ran the tracks and wheels off of his army in so doing. Then the Germans launched a second counter offensive. The allies had to be wondering just how beaten Germany was at that point.

Now what if the Nazis had developed the bomb? We knew they were close. What if they tested their first one on the Soviet armies in Poland? Then mounted the second on a V5 and dropped it on London? Or, what if the V2?s began to carry gas, what if the Soviets ran into clouds of nerve agent when they crossed into Germany? There was still a lot that could have gone wrong late in the war. And the Government of England was not completely stable. The people of England had been at war a very long time and were worn down by the weight of it. Were you in a position of authority at that time, would you have left 2500+ heavy bombers to chase trains and bomb factories here and there? Or would you have used them to cut the heart out of Germany?s rotting carcass? And let?s not forget that Germany had done the same to England early in the war. Not quite on the same scale, but thay had sent everything that would fly on more than one occasion. No, I don?t think the allies can be faulted for the bombings, to do so is just more of the revisionist liberal crap that is so popular these days. I think these people should take a moment and remember why they are free to have these heated debates on an open medium like the internet.