Pilots Survival
Monday, January 10th, 2011how did many British people respond, think about the RAF purposely bombing civilian populations of Germany?
and how many German civilians were killed by the RAF and US bombing? and how compared the two air forces in numbers killed of Germans ?
and how old were many of the pilots who flew over Germany to bomb civilian sites? and how they were maybe affected psychologically by this?
please explain what you can too about Germans survival during and after these heavy bombings? and were most peoples homes destroyed? which cities mostly and why?
WHICH YEARS AND MONTHS?
Did Arthur Harris ever give public regret for his orders?
thanks for your answers!
During the war the feeling was "they bombed us, now we are bombing them"
As to how many were killed you need to be very careful with trying to find figures. The famous one is Dresden where some people, (see the Ickle Fluffy bunny above) claim that hundreds of thousands died but the true figures are in the tens of thousands.
The average of of the RAF Aircrew was 22 years old.
I have met with dozens of these men and very few have ever had a problem with what they did. The biggest problem they have is the vitriol poured on them after the war by Revisionist Liberals who claim that we should not have been beastly to the Germans.
The Germans who survived these bombing usually did so because they found shelter in specially designed bomb shelters.
You can find pictures of the destruction caused by the Allied Air fleets across the web.
The vast majority of German cities that contained any sort of Manufacturing base or military importance were bombed from 1940-1945. heavily from 1943 to 1945.
Harris NEVER backed down from his belief that the orders he gave were correct.
To the comments from the Ickle Fluffy Bunny.
Yes Churchill commented on whether the bombing should be continued. As a Politician he distanced himself from the bombing whilst preparing to fight an election and he could see the way the bleeding Heart Liberals were gaining ground now the hard work had been done.
Fluffy Bunny says.
In his 1947 memoir, 'Bomber Offensive' Air Marshall Arthur 'Bomber' Harris implies that Churchill gave the order to incinerate Dresden: "I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself."
As always he manages to shoot himself in the foot. Churchill and others felt that the attack on Dresden was a military necessity. There was never an order given to "incinerate" Dresden. An attack on a manufacturing base of the enemy, producing war Materiel for the enemy forces, was ordered. The fact that it turned into a firestorm was pure luck, just as the fact that the Luftwaffe attack on London on 29th December 1940 just failed to turn into one.
This appears to be the Fluffy bunny`s new thing. As he cannot disprove the Holocaust in any meaningful way it would appear he is trying to make out that the Allies were beastly to the Germans because we bombed them.
Yes the RAF and USAAF gave Dresden a fearful hammering. Yes what happened was Horrific.
What can be said for it is the 127 factories in Dresden town that were producing war materiel for the German forces produced nothing meaningful until after the war.
The German`s plans to use Dresden as a strongpoint to be defended at all costs as per German records captured at the end of the war was ended.
The highest number of people that died according to any reputable source is 40,000 By reputable I do not mean either Josef Goebbels who took the intial estimate of 13,500 dead and added a zero on the end for international consumption, the Communist Soviet authorities who doubled Goebbels estimates and used them for 40 years to prove how horrible the West was or David Irving who is merely touched in the head and will spout any sort of garbage that will keep neo nazis paying him to come to their rallies to try and lend some sort of credence to their cause.
More recent estimates by the German Government are between 25 and 30,000 deaths. I personally think this may be just a shade low.
Fluffy Bunny refuses to believe any document about the Holocaust which has been "Discovered " since the war. Isn`t it amazing how he believes this report.Maybe because it agrees with his opinion.
I do notice that the question he asked about Dresden was deleted very quickly after I debunked his theory.
To the Fluffy Bunny
Of course it WAS deleted by Yahoo, not yourself? I mean you wouldn`t delete a question you had asked merely because an answer made you look stupid would you? It`s always the Yahoo witch hunters persecuting you isn`t it?
For the refutation of the claim that Dresden was a war crime please feel free to read my Standard Dresden answer here.
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AtXq1B7RkLVE84AVU76c_MMhBgx.;_ylv=3?qid=20101102120930AAaIMNE&show=7#profile-info-8c70e504c4d27d99f39441111ee561e2aa