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#31 | Posted by snoofy at 2024-06-22 07:33 PM |
Never knew that about Kurt Vonnegut.
So instead of facts re strategic military value and importance of "strategic targets" in war you prefer to rely on emotional reaction of writer who was American POW of German descent whose anti-war opinions were shaped by sequence of unfortunate life events - losing his ROTC deferment, losing his mother to suicide from OD, being captured by Germans and becoming POW during Battle of the Bulge...
|------- ... Since Dresden served as a major center for Nazi Germany's rail and road network, its destruction was intended to overwhelm German authorities and services - and to clog all transportation routes with throngs of refugees. The Allied assault came less than a month after some 19,000 U.S. troops were killed in Germany's last-ditch offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, and three weeks after the grim discovery of the atrocities committed by Nazi forces at Auschwitz.
... On February 13, 1945, American POWs heard Dresden's fire sirens... German guards moved them into undergound meat locker.** When they came back to the surface, "the city was gone," remembered writer and social critic Kurt Vonnegut - one of the American POWs who witnessed the Dresden bombing.
British RAF's Pathfinders ("Blind Illuminator") aircraft dropped thousands of "visual markers" on prospective targets, to increase bombing accuracy . The main attack followed with over 500 "Lancaster" bombers. The U.S. Air Force followed the next day and launched another raid with 210 bombers on February 15. German Luftwaffe and anti-aircraft defenses were totally destroyed, with the RAF losing six planes.
Allied strategists were afraid of allowing the Wehrmacht to regroup within Germany's border if they eased the pressure. The U.S. Army alone had suffered almost 140,000 casualties from December to January 1945 and 27,000 in the week prior to the Dresden bombing alone - the heaviest losses by the Western Allies' in the war.
So while the Dresden bombing was devastating, it was part of a war in which such tactics had been widely deployed. Less than three months later, and eight days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, the German High Command signed the unconditional surrender.
It did not even stand out in the war's history of "strategic bombing" of cities. Most German cities had been flattened by 1945, and many left higher proportionate death rates and degrees of destruction. The bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 killed more than 30,000. The Luftwaffen raids on Eastern European cities such as Belgrade (more than 17,000 dead) or Warsaw (up to 25,000 dead) were far more deadly - to say nothing of non-nuclear city bombings in Japan.
Initial estimates of the number of dead seemed to suggest that the Dresden Bombing was unusually cruel. David Irving would claim in his 1963 book, The Destruction of Dresden, that Dresden bombing was "the biggest single massacre in European history." His estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 dead was significantly higher than previously published figures but became accepted and quoted without dispute, even though his assertion that Dresden was the "Hiroshima of Germany" lacked any evidence.
Irving became a "hard-core" Holocaust denier and National Socialism revisionist, "willfully misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis" and was found providing documents forged by Nazis, including Tagesbefehl 47 ("Daily Order 47", TB 47), a document promulgated by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and the claims by a former Dresden Nazi Hans Voigt, without verifying them against official sources available in Dresden.
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** It took Kurt Vonnegut 23 years to write "Slaughterhouse Five" about his traumatic experience.
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