A thread for discussing WW2 bombing (by all sides)

My grandfather did too - in the US army since he came here as part of the US Army and was wounded in France in 1944. My other grandfather had a severe limp due to childhood polio so could not fight but served in the fire brigade, which was scary enough and horrific enough when the Germans decided to bomb the hell out of Plymouth. Amongst other things they scored a direct hit on the maternity unit of Freedom Fields hospital. My grandad had to go in there and recover all the dead babies.

But as Eisenhower said to his troops when they uncovered the horrors of the camps, to those who might have doubted what they were fighting for, it was at least now clear what they were fighting against.

We must always be prepared to fight against evils such as that, especially when those evils are intent upon world domination.

For a time this evil Nazi tyranny bombed the hell out of us. But thanks to that good old English Channel, the Royal Navy, and the RAF, they couldnt get at us in any more direct way. There were those, notably Halifax, in the cabinet who wanted to seek terms. But we were indeed fortunate in another very crucial respect. In spite of a chequered career up to that point, getting as many things wrong as he had gotten right,  Winston Churchill was very much the right man in the right place at the right time. He knew that the alternative to fighting on would be slavery. And he inspired the British people with the will not to give in as well. Because deep down most of them knew it too.

Because we fought on Hitler was left to throw his thunderbolts of anger at us as an expression of his anger and frustration. Our parents or grandparents took it with a firm resolve, knowing what was at stake. They called it the blitz.  Until in frustration Hitler turned and attacked east, then later declared war on the USA. At that point Churchill knew victory would be ours, though it would take more years of sacrifice to finally get there. From that point Hitler was doomed to lose, his evil extinguished.

But for the year between the fall of France in June 1940 and the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, our stand under Churchill and his Tory/Labour/Liberal coalition made victory possible. Had we gone under, Hitler would most likely have defeated the USSR and the USA would never have come in and even if it did, Britain would never have been available as a base for an invasion of the continent. In short, had we gone under, Germany would have won the war. And what we discovered in the camps in 1945 - the newsreel footage we have all seen - is clear enough evidence of the kind of evils we would have been subjected to.

Everyone who picked up a gun and fought against the evils of Nazism - our parents, grandparents or great grandparents - and everyone who bought food to our shores, worked the land, piloted an aircraft or served on a warship, or worked in a factory building guns tanks and planes, we owe them our freedom and should never forget that. And we should never be allowed to forget what that meant and what the alternative was. The camps we uncovered showed us that. The holocaust should never ever be forgotten, because to do so devalues what our own heroes risked their lives fighting against.

Indeed. And German propaganda deliberately whipped up anger and hatred for what they called the terror bombers. Civilians were pretty much encouraged to lynch any baled out bomber crews they encountered. For those living in terror from the bombing who had lost loved ones to the bombs, actively whipped up into a frenzy of hate and given sanction to take the law into their own hands, the result was a number of baled out aircrew who made it to the ground safely ending up being murdered by enraged German civilians. Very few of these murderers faced justice after the war. 

It tied down nowhere near that many men. That is at least half a million soldiers. Most men in Germany were not there to fight the bombers. Only those manning the anti aircraft guns or flying fighters could do that. And even an extra half a million soldiers on the eastern front in any case would not have been enough to change the outcome anyway. Most of the men in Germany were above military age or unfit for service and it was mostly these and those still too young who worked in the factories and manned the anti-aircraft guns.  There was also the Reserve Army consisting of new units being trained for the front or withdrawn home for refitting. The anti aircraft guns were mostly German 88s which were also highly effective anti-tank weapons. But had all these been sent east it would not have changed anything either. The need for the Germans to retain aircraft in Germany as night fighters did remove aircraft from the fighting fronts which helped the Allies win air superiority, but the majority of night fighters were not the Germans best models. Only in 1944 when the first class America fighter, the Mustang, was equipped with extra drop tanks that greatly extended its range so that bombers in daylight could have fighter escort all the way to Berlin did the Germans find it necessary to challenge with the best fighters. This greatly facilitated Allied air superiority elsewhere but it was not until 1944  with the withdrawal of fighters to defend Germany did Allied air superiority at the front become overwhelming. From early in 1944 the cream of the Luftwaffe began to be shot out of the skies by the Mustang bomber escort fighters. But bomber and fighter losses on the Allied side continued to remain very high for the first few months before the Luftwaffe was completely overwhelmed

The manpower it used up was mostly those too old or young or crippled to fight, and slave labour. And it is mostly mythical that the bombing had much negative impact on morale. Just as when the Germans bombed us it tended to shore up morale as a kind of defiant reaction. It also had very little negative impact upon production of u-boats or anything else until the last months of the war. Indeed, German tank and aircraft production in December 1944 was the highest it had ever been, though it declined rapidly thereafter as the centres of production themselves began to be overrun

As for the War in the Atlantic, had only a fraction of those long range bombers been redeployed into the Atlantic they would have done far more substantially sooner to win the fight against the U boats.

None of which is meant to detract from the sacrifices of the bomber crews. Very brave men all of them.

As for Dresden, the questionability of it was that it served no useful military purpose, there was little military industry there, and it was designed solely to kill as many German civilians as m possible in an attempt to undermine morale, which had never worked before, was pointless so close to the end, and in any case failed to recognise that as a dictatorship, the morale of the people had little bearing on decision making.

Ok, in order to separate the issue of bombing from the issue of the Holocaust I've decided to create a separate thread.
In this, everything from the raid on Taranto, Pearl Harbour, the thousand bomber raids on Hamburg, Nuremberg etc can be discussed as well as the US daylight raids on Nazi Germany.

Anyone care to start, or shall I?

Firestorms to that extent were created only on a handful of occasions. And even after that kind of devastation production soon resumed.