Reply to post: Re: Space, not quite as above and beyond as before

Re: Space, not quite as above and beyond as before

@Voyna i Mor

"'The British Lancaster bombing campaign in WW2 was also much less effective than claimed."

Naturally, RAF and British propaganda of the time over-stated its effectiveness. The first casualty of war is truth and all that. But the US study which is often claimed as evidence of RAF bombing being not very useful was in itself rather flawed - it didn't take into account the fact that at the start of WWII, Germany hadn't converted to full war production (on the grounds that Blitzkrieg tactics would make that unnecessary), but after few years had gone over to total war production staffed in many cases by slave labour. So the fact that war production hadn't gone down was missing the point rather. And so on.

One thing which I gather was right was switching the Allied bombing campaign from an attempt to wipe out cities to aiming at targets such as fuel production plants; but that wouldn't have worked earlier in the war because bombing precision wasn't good enough then. None of it's straightforward.

The whole subject is rather grim to my mind. Back in the early 1980s I visited the Buchenwald concentration camp - and Dresden (school trip to the DDR). That's when I really understood that horrors were perpetrated by all sides in that conflict, not just the other side. Yes, yes, the Germans slaughtered almost unimaginable numbers of innocents in cold blood, far more than were killed by Allied bombing. And yes, of course the RAF bomber crews weren't particularly wanting to slaughter civilians. But shelters full of frightened women and children and old men suffocating to death due to the firestorm above is still an unspeakable horror.

Lancaster bombers did terrible damage to Germany, along with other aircraft types. Try reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to get an idea.

It's no use saying "they started it" to justify anything. Oh, the war had to be fought and won: Germany had to be defeated, no doubt about it. And I don't blame those in charge on the Allied side for using whatever weapons they had in the way they thought best. That's war - and it's horrible.

Let's try to remember that history, and try not to repeat it.