Israel Uses the Dresden Bombing to Justify Its Ongoing Atrocity. My Uncle Spins in His Grave.

And a military history lesson learned in World War II is STILL ignored

Its almost Halloween and I can hear the ghost of my Uncle Justin screaming No, you maniacs, that’s not what we learned! He’s screaming about something Kurt Vonnegut understood even better than he, about lessons unlearned, about mass murder. He’s screaming about this

being used to justify this

The top picture is Dresden, Germany in February 1945. The bottom is Gaza last week. They are connected by Israelis like the ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, who zippily said on October 16 that:

“There were many, many civilians [that] got attacked from your attacks on German cities,” she told a Sky News anchor. “Dresden was a symbol, but you attacked Hamburg, you attacked other cities, and altogether it was over 600,000 civilian Germans that got killed.”

Comparing the militarily occupied Palestinian population to Nazis, Hotovley continued: “Was it worth it in order to defeat Nazi Germany? And the answer was yes.”

and

“600,000 Germans were killed in your attacks on Hamburg and Dresden,” she declared to the Talk TV host. “Why? Because you knew this was the only way you could defeat the Nazis,’ the ambassador insisted.(Source: The Gray Zone quoting Sky News BBC) corrected 10/29/2024

There’s just one problem with this neat rationalization—the terror bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and other cities did not help defeat the Nazis, and didn’t end the war one day sooner than it would have if they had never happened.

The mastermind of the bombing campaign was British General Arthur “Bomber” Harris. He’d been itching to bomb the shit out of Dresden for at least six months before it happened. It hadn’t because the Allies knew that the city had no military bases, no war industry, no military value whatsoever. They also knew it was crammed with tens or hundreds of thousands of refugees who had fled the advancing Soviets in the east. It was a “hospital city,” so most of the German troops who actually were there were wounded. There was also a POW camp there holding some 25,000 Allied prisoners, including one Private Kurt Vonnegut, US 106th Infantry, captured at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge two months earlier.

Dresden was also the only major German city that hadn’t had the shit bombed out of it yet, and apparently that drove Harris up a wall. He didn’t get the go-ahead till after the FDR/Churchill/Stalin Yalta Conference, when Stalin requested a major Allied bombing campaign in eastern Germany to help his advancing armies. This was all the excuse Churchill, and Bomber Harris, needed.

The Allied airmen who flew the missions and the public which first learned of it on newsreels were told that Dresden was a major German transportation center packed with German troops going to fight their Russian allies. In fact, Allied pilots were told to target anything that moved, including masses of people, because they were German troops.

They weren’t. The British came at night and dropped thousands of tons of incendiaries, starting a firestorm some 3000F in temperature that literally dissolved human bodies(and everything else around) and melted people’s shoes into the pavement. The Americans, including my uncle, came the following day and destroyed railroads, bridges, any way out of the burning city. Crowds of refugees were strafed, trains crowded either with German civilians or Jews being moved from one concentration camp to the other, were bombed. Thousands died this way.

At the time, the Germans(and the Allies immediately after the war), thought at least 200,000 people were killed in two days and nights of bombing. Now, today’s milquetoast Germans have reduced that figure by a factor of ten(source: History.com), but it’s just not credible. I know better because my uncle knew better.

He went there after the war ended in May, you see. He saw what he had done with his own eyes, had a nervous breakdown, and was discharged from the US Army Air Force. He decided he wanted to build after the war instead of destroy, so he became a civil engineer and helped design the interstate highway system, in particular the stretch of I-70 from Denver to the Utah border.

Some 35 years later, I got him drunk and high in the garage of his Austin home, and he told me the story, after I used the wedge of a book written by Kurt Vonnegut which described his own experience, Slaughterhouse Five, to pry the story out of him. He’d seen the mass graves, the destruction, and had talked to the survivors.

He told me that all of the carpet bombing of cities didn’t do a damned thing to end the war with either Germany or Japan any sooner. The official line was that it would make the civilians so sick of the war that their morale would collapse and that would force Hitler and Tojo to surrender. I still remember him scoffing at me when I made that suggestion as he reloaded his pipe, saying that if the Blitz in 1940 had only strengthened British resolve, then an Allied blitz a thousand times worse sure as hell wasn’t going to weaken German resolve.

“How,” he said, “can you expect people who you’re trying to kill in their homes or factories or offices every damned day to want to surrender to you when you are doing those things to them? All it does is make them more stubborn.” Which is why, he explained, he turned against LBJ and the Vietnam War with the first bombing of Haiphong, and defended his son who dodged the draft, at a time when that attitude just wasn’t acceptable in middle class Texan society.

My dad was a personal friend of LBJ. My uncle skipped a family reunion at Thanksgiving over that after they’d had quite the argument about Vietnam the year before. They said he was sick. Decades later he told me the truth. He didn’t want to bring it back up because then he would remember Dresden.

The Germans bombed the shit out of London and Coventry and other British cities because they’d done the same to Rotterdam in 1940 and the Dutch immediately surrendered. The British didn’t. Neither did the Germans. Neither did the Japanese. Neither did the Russians at Leningrad and Stalingrad.

Neither have the Palestinians.

If one considers the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II from a military perspective of being attempts to shorten the war by breaking enemy morale and destroying his industrial base without actually having to do a ground invasion, one must conclude that they were an abject failure.

This was obvious to many at the time. Bomber Harris was confronted by a reporter after the news of the civilian death toll broke and asked how he could justify it. He said, “It only takes the Germans a few weeks to rebuild a factory we bombed, but it takes them 21 years to replace a worker.”(source: The Zoomer Historian)

Clearly, the purpose of the Dresden, and dozens of other terror bombings was to kill as many Germans as possible, period. Mission accomplished.

There was revulsion against the bombings in the years immediately after World War II, so much so that a new protocol was added to the Geneva Conventions in 1949 banning the collective punishment of civilians who are doing nothing to directly threaten a belligerent power.

Now along comes Israel, straight up lying through their teeth about the Dresden bombing accelerating the end of the war and about it being necessary to defeat Hitler. All carpet bombing does militarily is to give the defender more rubble to hide behind, which is probably why a lot of Israelis have serious misgivings about a ground invasion of Gaza, and they damned well should.

More than that, though, the tone of the Israelis is like a teenager demanding his parents let him do the same bad thing his older sister did years earlier because it isn’t fair to him if he can’t! It’s my turn!

That’s why my uncle is spinning in his grave this Halloween week. The lesson he learned, the lesson he taught me and that thousands of other veterans taught their kids, is being ignored and more women and children are dying horribly. I cannot sit here and say nothing just because it’s fucking Israel doing the dirty deed. It doesn’t matter who does it.

The only purpose of the saturation bombing of a densely populated area is to kill as many people in that area as possible. It’s mass murder. It’s an atrocity. It’s a war crime, no matter who does it or what bullshit excuses they bleat.

Thanks for the lesson, Uncle Justin. I still remember you for being a good man who had a conscience. Rest in peace.

Thank you for reading. Good night, and good luck.