Content-Type: text/html

# World War II/Talk

HomePage | World War II | RecentChanges | Preferences | Random Page
You can edit this page right now! It's a free, community project

Some estimates for Dresden deaths are as low as 25,000 (and as high as 250,000). Low estimates for Hiroshima at 66,000 deaths and Nagaski at 40,000 may support Dresden as the worst but some etimate the Tokyo firebombing at 83,000 to 100,000 which would make it greater. The US airforce credits defeated German generals and Communist propaganda with inflating the Dresden causualty figure. Initial British figure of 8,000 dead are undoubtledly low but many other German cities received far more tons of bombs, even more tons of incendiaries than Dresden so the high figures are hard to justify.

Certainly we should have a page to discuss the questionable practice of firebombing or carpet bombing in general.

and the use of flachette-rounds on civilians

Note that in the cases of both Dresden and Tokyo, the casualties were completely out of proportion to the tonnage of bombs dropped. This is because in both cases the continuing fires started by the bombing did much more than the bombs themselves. This was probably the intent in using incendiaries against cities with many wooden buildings, but it is unlikely that the allied miitary expected quite as many deaths as actually happened.

By contrast high explosive bombing, and incendiary bombing against targets that were not so easy to burn, in many cases involved a lot more bombs for a lot less deaths.

It is reasonable that Tokyo would have more wooden buildings than the average Western city, but was Dresden notably more wooden than Hamburg where firebombing probably killed 50,000? Berlin as the capital may had more stone and brick buildings but it was bombed so many times it is hard to find death numbers for a specific raid. All of these numbers are hard to imagine.

"America rebuilt the rest of Europe"! Did the rest of Europe have no role in rebuilding itself perhaps?

Maybe we should avoid using the term Nazis except where we are actually discussing the activities of the Nazis proper rather than the German army? Not all Germans were Nazis, and many were antipathetic to the Nazi cause.

- The German military was an instrument of government policy; so long as the government was Nazi, then any government activities, including military activities, can be called Nazi. The exception would be where the millitary was pursuing activities independent of government policy, though I don't know of any cases of this.

I think we need to put some more emphasis on the push to open a second front and the political manouevrings behind the scenes e.g. the abandonment of COSSAC, the reasons for the appointment of Bernard Montgomery, etc.

V-E Day and V-J day (and their respective dates, May 5 and Sep 2, I believe) should be incorporated.

Surely Stalingrad deserves at least a sentance. Because of Hitler's 'no retreat' policy, it was in many ways the turning point of the war.

- I agree. Please add it. sjc

HomePage | World War II | RecentChanges | Preferences | Random Page
You can edit this page right now! It's a free, community project
Edit text of this page | View other revisions
Last edited August 16, 2001 6:52 pm (diff)
Search: