The Final Fury of the Allied Bombing War - War Against Humanity 130
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- Опубліковано 28 бер 2024
- The bombing war in Europe comes to an end in a fury of fire and destruction. Spartacus takes stock of the human toll of this campaign and assesses the near futility of it all. On the other side of the globe, the USAAF ratchets up the firebombing of Japan further still. Countless more civilian lives will be cut short.
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Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
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Sparty, I've disagreed with you in the comments on these videos throughout these series having those livly discussions you talk about in this video. And even though we disagree on the effectiveness of the Allied bombing campaign and it's effects I still do have to say I have agreed with you in somewhere in the range of 80-95% of topics in your videos (I haven't been tallying them of course lol) and have completely enjoyed them and liked the knowledge they have spread.
Have you finished watching Masters of the Air? I think you guys (Sparty esspecially) should do a review of it. Talk about how accurate it was and what is showed of the Allied bombing campaign and it's effects on Germans. A topic discussed in the show that I don't recall being talked about in these videos was that the Allied bombing campagin also baited the German Air-force out so that it could be dystroyed over time so that when the Allies landed in France the German airforce was mostly dystroyed. Had the Germans been able to save their airforce until the Allies landed in France the push into Germany would have been much harder I would think.
@@PhillyPhanVinny The USA as a country too far away to can be bombed its easy to do something like that. Would be interesting how the fight would have been in the scenario without the bombing campaign
A chapter called Raid on Liberio shows things like this in Shingeki No Kyojin and while this specific means of carrying out bombs wasn't done, it might as well have been. To avoid spoilers, you might want to look it up for yourselves but it is good at showing war and complex motivation.
@@PhillyPhanVinny this is a good idea. Since _Masters Of The Air_ is drawing so much attention, Time Ghost History should get in on the action and do a commentary or discussion video.
It seems World War Two missed the boat on discussing the deeper levels of Allied strategic bombing - the "around the clock" nature of actions, and the daylight bombing campaign in particular meant to draw the Luftwaffe into action and away from the Eastern Front. Hopefully they will do a "special video" about some of these more in depth topics, as they wrap up the "daily" coverage of WWII..
@@williestyle35 I do agree! I think the video would do very well on YT right now because of how popular the show is and how large this channel is. A good chance for a million + view video.
The way that Sparty ends his reports often send chills down my spine.
Agree
I find this. His monologues are powerful.
Especially this one was powerful!
NO! Sparty is a f*ing hypocrite. He uses this high moral tone to disguise being just a white european racist. See his "coments" about what is going on in Gaza two or three episodes back. He feels "sad".
Yes. He found how impactful a good closing comment could be from his earliest episodes. I do miss that original set with its big clock...
My Great Uncle was a RCAF Lancaster pilot who flew many mining and bombing missions during the war. I inherited his papers and flight log from his younger brother (my grandfather who himself later served many peacekeeping missions.) He participated in the bombing of Dresden, many times in fact. I would have liked to have known his thoughts and feelings on it. He was shot down and killed this very week in 1945. His flight log ends with a double red line marked across the page with “FAILED TO RETURN” scrawled next to it. It was haunting for me. A thin double red line, the end of an entire man’s life summed up so simply.
Bless his memory.
@@spartacus-olssonThank you Sparty. I’d like to thank you for your criticism of Air Force policy (very justified) and acknowledging that air crews were humans who felt tied to their duty but also questioned the morality of what they were doing. Everyone felt different and it was complicated for everyone. I don’t feel right when people hold them up as untouchable gods who never did wrong. They were human beings like you and me.
To be fair, the person tasked with going through your Uncle's log book had no idea as to his fate, all he knew was that he had failed to return. Your Uncle could have been dead (actual result), wounded and captured, captured or possibly on the run and hoping to get in touch with a Resistance Cell to be fed into the Escape Network. This of course was a false hope if shot down over Germany, but a slim possibility over Occupied France or the Low Countries.
Mark from Melbourne Australia 🇦🇺
@@markfryer9880 Sorry for the late reply. He was actually shot down over Nuremberg where he is approximately buried. I have the location for his grave which I intend to visit if I ever get some vacation time or a deployment there. I’m in the RCAF myself now.
Humanity will learn nothing from WW1 and WW2. Prophesy says 100 million will die in WW3.
A historian of World War Two stated that if you believe that nuclear weapons were more horrible than napalm and conventional high explosives it means you have no idea how horrible napalm and conventional high explosives are.
Someone must reply, so I will. They are all deplorable. Some day... It's unfortunate that too many times most of humanity has forgotten such lessons
Sparty's dispassionate/passionate delivery is such a key to this series being neither a series of statistics or a maudlin focus on the misery of the victims. True history story telling and rare sharing of the inhumanity of humanity. Never forget!
This is probably the biggest compliment I have received under these videos. Heartfelt thanks.
Two comments. I am a retired parish pastor. I served a Lutheran Church in Pennsylvania 1999-2001. I spent hours listening to the anguished trauma of old veterans of the US Eighth Air Force who were still traumatized by what they had been a part of over fifty years ago. Second, a fellow Canadian pastor and close personal friend was a ten-year-old boy in Bremen, Germany when his city was bombed. He was ordered to go out to anti-aircraft sites and pick up body parts for a hasty burial. One bomb actually struck his own home but thankfully was a dud. Bombing campaigns cause all manner of casualties with life-long effects. I watched this video after I came home from our parish's Good Friday service. Like the Roman soldier's spear, every bomb drew blood from a child of God. Never forget.
Blessings on Good Friday, may your fellows be given the light this Easter. I feel the analogy to the Roman Legionnaire's spear is not completely comparable to the Allied strategic bombing campaign during WWII, largely due to the debased nature of the Axis itself. Nazism, Fascism, and Japan's Militaristic Nationalist authoritarian racist screed all rejected nearly any semblance of Christianity and anything resembling "Christian values" for the deification and adoration of "the leader" (or the god - king, in Japan), all contrary to anything I ever learned in Church or Sunday school. The very atrocious genocidal actions of Germany and Japan during WWII cry out for the justice of man and the Almighty - by whatever means available, imho
(full disclosure ; my grandfather was also a humble pastor in the area outside of Racine WI, and shares my first name (as do all my male line forefathers). I exist with his first and surname's because William Leroy Sanford studied at Moody Bible Institute, which led my father to return to Chicago after he was of age to move away from Racine).
But the Roman soldier was a child of god… right?
I am not a parish pastor, retired or otherwise. So, what did you say to those old veterans? I would call myself a half-hearted Christian and I know what I would say. I would tell anyone that they need to receive and bestow forgiveness. I would say the same to the boy from Bremen. I find it curious this hand-wringing over firebombing or the use of any weapon of mass destruction. This is war, what do you expect? There are only two laws that can change this and Jesus Christ gave them, “'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” You would think that Roland Freisler would know this since he was baptized a Protestant. I pray that my brothers and sisters in Christ remember these laws that Christ gives us. It certainly appears that Roland Freisler did not remember.
Don't start nuthin, won't get nuthin. They brought it upon themselves by acceding to violently expansionist governments, did they not? Regrettable and perhaps a morality lesson for us all...
Comments like this are why i keep coming back, much better than the bitter vengeful comments you see.
Thirty-nine years ago I was in my second semester of Freshman chemistry. Professor Martin took a break from the usual lecture schedule to tell us about the firebombing of Tokyo. He had first-hand knowledge of the attack as a crewman on a B-29. It was a perspective I never forgot.
Gosh….
My home room teacher in the 8th grade (1978) was a RCAF veteran who was a gunner on a Lancaster. Contrary to most common opinion at the time, he told me (when he realized I was strongly interested in history and we had a number of conversations) that there was far more concern about the morality of the bombing campaign amongst the crews than people realized.
@@Brett2998 The crews where the ones that had to live with carrying out those orders
@@Brett2998For an air crewman far above the carnage questioning morality is understandable. It's also a luxury. My uncle was a part of the island hopping campaign and was being prepared for the invasion of mainland Japan. He said him and none of the other marines thought they stood a chance of surviving that. The A bombs saved their lives. Ask them if they questioned the morality of the bombing campaigns.
@@danielschick7554 most likely it haunted the crews for their entire lives
To quote Downfall, Berlin has become a city of warehouses - "Where's my house? Where's my house?"
Or in the original German, "Hier waren haus, und hier waren haus..."
A city of were houses. There were houses here, there were houses there, but not anymore.
The command pilot of the February 3rd raid that killed Roland Freisler, was Major Robert Rosenthal, a Jewish American Lawyer, who would later work as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
Thank you for this tidbit of information.
😊
What was the post war Nazi hunter's name?
I think Rosie was shot down on that one or the following.
History loves irony.
@@Warszawski_Modernizm Yes it does
Paraphrasing an episode of MASH:
War is not Hell. War is War and Hell is Hell. Of the two, War is far worse.
Who goes to hell? Sinners and those deserving of such a fate.
Who is killed in war? Innocent civilians; men, women, and children.
War is cruel and there's no refining it. Get it right.
Fair point. ! 💛
@@31terikennedy Thank You William Tecumseh Sherman."The crueler it is the sooner it'll be over"
Best anti war show ever made.
There was a later episode where a B-29 pilot was shot down and came in with a broken leg. He comments to the doctors on how clean the war is for him and none of it is a big deal when he goes to bomb a target. Later a child is brought in after being hit from a bombing raid. The pilot comes in before the surgery and asks Potter:
“Was it their’s or ours”
“He didn’t sign it, what does it matter?”
“It does matter!”
“Not to her it doesn’t.”
The pilot breaks down, with Hawkeye comforting him by saying:
“This war isn’t as clean as you thought, 20,000 ft is a long way for anyone to come down.
When Freisler's body was discovered after the bombing raid, someone was heard to say: "It was God's verdict."
Even with the war, winding down the War Against Humanity just keeps getting bigger.
We only know in hindsight that the war was to end in 6 weeks or so. This wasn't the case in 1945
Unfortunately, still more to cover. Thank you for watching.
@@WorldWarTwo Would you consider covering the Normandy Massacres? It was a series of executions, ranging from individual murders to mass killings, that killed more than 150 Allied POWs during the Battle of Normandy. In one of these cases, 40 Canadians were murdered in a field in an gruesome precoursor to the Malmady Massacres. The wartime and postwar legal efforts are interesting too, with the public and prosecutors wanting justice but the military and the government wanting to move on since West Germany was becoming an important Cold War ally.
I can say the following from first hand communication to me by a German WW2 veteran. Much as Albert Speer may have increased weapons manufacturing during January 1945, it was not reaching the front lines. My friend Gunter Brauer was a teenager in the Herman Goring division in western Poland at that exact period of time and he told me that they had almost no ammunition most of the time. Even grenades were issued to him with no detonators. Ammunition was wasted executing Soviet POWs. At length they were unable to do anything to stop the Red army steamroller and Gunter's unit was bypassed in the night and taken prisoner. The men on the eastern front were only viewed as cannon fodder by the Nazi elite, and the death throes of the Third Reich were both utterly bizarre and truly beyond comprehension except as the last evil gasps of a completely degenerate and wicked regime.
The veteran is absolutely right… but that disruption of logistics was not achieved by the air campaign. It was the land advances that gutted the German ability to keep their troops supplied.
@@spartacus-olsson Yes, you are probably right Sparty, as you and your team have been able to do a very thorough study of the war. Gunter would only just shake his head and wave his hands as he talked about his short stint in the German army. He was born in 1927 and grew up almost entirely during the Hitler era. He was only 18 during his 4 months in the Herman Goring division before he was captured in Poland. He absolutely hated the war and all the destruction and suffering it brought on everyone. He partly blamed the German people themselves for having almost a herd mentality during the time the Nazis were in power, saying he could not even understand his countrymens' mentality of going along with what those who had seized power by underhanded means dictated to them. I think everyone in Germany sat in stunned silence for a while after the war and wondered how they got where they were. 🤷♂
The delusional Hitler kept them there, disbelieving the advice of General Guderian that the situation on the Eastern Front was precarious. In Early January 1945. Hitler dismissed Guderian's warning as idiotic, saying that that Front had "never before possessed such a strong reserve as now". Guderian responded that the Eastern Front was like a house of cards; only one breakthrough (by the Red Army) was needed to collapse the lot. And that's exactly what happened; between 12th and 27th January the Front collapsed and by the 27th the whole Silesian basin was overrun. That was essentially the end of Germany's coal and steel supply. Speers subsequent report to Hitler (Jan 30th) was: "The War is lost".
@@ktipuss That exactly coincides with what my now dead friend Gunter told me. His brother, a Knight's Cross winner, was killed in Poland in January 1945, as well. It was truly the end for the delusional Nazi regime, and 3 months later they were swept away.
I have a "friend"... an 86-year-old man of German origin, his father arrived in South America in the early 1910s on a nitrate clipper and fell in love with a woman from a port city.
This 86-year-old man has loved airplanes all his life, and like a true artist, he makes scale models of all kinds of aircraft from WW2 and the Cold War, both in wood and modern model kits.
But he has never built an English bomber.
He says that he has never been able to find any beauty in them.
Both of his uncles died in Dresden, they died of asphyxiation, the bodies were found outside a bomb shelter.
Excellent presentation. Talking to a friend who crewed a B17 over Germany, he told me he flies to Germany every night in his sleep. He has passed away and I hope he now has his rest.
Thanks for sharing and thanks for watching.
My Grandaunt who recently died, was a nurse in Frankfurt during the war where she tended to the many wounded after the bombings.
While my grandfather was in an Antiair defense unit. He was stationed on the island Hanöversand in Hamburg.
Bless.
Pity about all the prople who voted fo the National Socialist Workers Party knowing that they were murderous thugs.
Sparty- your eloquence in “Never Forgetting” moves me almost to tears every time. The depravity of war you (and Indy and the crew) so well document week by week still permeates the world, in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan, and so many places we hardly ever hear about. Add in the blunt sword of nuclear destruction we’ve lived under for decades (and are preparing for with “nuclear modernization” costing trillions of dollars), and the hatred surfacing in the political realm in the US (I’m Jewish and recoil in horror at the political rhetoric I hear), and around the world. And the ongoing destruction of our life support system on Earth. When will we ever learn? At least I can enjoy the wildflowers I work with, and the diminishing beauty and diversity of the natural world for a while.
❤
Comment for the algorithm, hope that they avoid getting censored again.
Thank you very much, never forget.
Praise the Omnissiah, may the algorithm compute.
@@mikiroony The Emperor provides--no, not Hirohito! The other one!
They've started censoring themselves.
War is cruelty and cannot be refined. It also reveals both the best and worst of what the human species has to offer.
The Jewish diarist, Victor Klemperer, was only spared deportation from Dresden because he was married to a Christian. But in early 1945 his luck ran out and he and the other Jews who had been spared were slated to be transported the day after the Dresden bombing. in the confusion, Klemperer, his wife, and many Jews removed their yellow stars and joined the throng of refugees leaving the city. He only survived because of the bombing. Things are mainly grey, not black or white.
The randomness of death and injury in war. No one is safe or doomed, only lucky or unlucky.
Is he related to Werner Klemperer?
@@DennisMSulliva They were Cousins i believe
I have read excerpts from the writings from a Klemperer family, iirc. Nice to know Victor and his family were able to wring salvation from the bombing of a city.
Bomber Harris was w ar crimal was a warcrimal crimal was a warr crimal, pure and simple. Bacuase Goring war a war crimnal was one that was wasn't make him ant less. Curtiss Lemay was also one, pure a simple. You don't bomb rerriblse and sim ure pure abd simple A A bom was to be used on Berlinn pure and simple, this us tried pure and suimle to Stop a world war, pore abs simle. Rhat ir did was pure san simpure and simple alog with the Sovet Union was that si-top ww2 wos thar simple, Japan had it sapke, it fhat simple. Fisr raite, pure abd sinple. Ask asy Iasiv Asuabn Bexuse Asiann or Pow, they were dying at a rate of 40000 petes month, beyhind Japanse lines, and rhe A-bombs, fire boms mores. One million, us casulies 10 nillion Japanese dead, Abd the US buliding more A-boms bombs the Axboms saved lives more humans,
The more I learn about people like Arthur "Bomber" Harris and Curtis LeMay, the sicker I get. They considered these massacres a "success."
Great coverage, Sparty, as always. You're a pleasure to watch, and you make subject matter like this tolerable, at least. ❤
Oh LeMay never changed. 16 years later as chair of the Joint Chiefs he was urging Kennedy to initiate a surprise nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. He was the inspiration for General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove.
Arthur harris literally made an holocaust 2.0...but its ok because its an allied officer 😥
@@kenoliver8913 Yep. And it's all the more disgusting to see people like him go on to be arguably *worse* people than they were before.
Gotta love people like you who pretend you understand the morality of war without seeing one. Hint hint: the "civilians that have nothing to do with this." Is rare except in cultures where dissent over conscience is a virtue. Neither Germany nor Japan in the 1940s fit that bill. Furthermore neither did north Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. Civilians mostly DID support those regimes.
As the war dragged on, people on both sides become hard, then harder. These people lost loved ones and friends.
It is very easy to criticize the feelings and butchery and the guilt, etc. Perhaps, we should seriously ponder what they suffered, felt and did, then try to work for peace.
The great Irony of Freislers death, being crushed under his own kangaroo court from a Bombing raid led by a Jewish Lt.Colonel, Robert Rosenthal.
Who then went on to prosecute Nazis at Nurenberg!
When you see Freisler screaming "MORDER?" at the kangaroo court for the trial of the July plotters,you think in that case,maybe divine justice for once was meted out.
Germany wanted “Total War”. They got it!
Fate can be both ironic AND poetic it seems...
Karma
My dad was a heavy bomber pilot with the RCAF, stationed in England; as was his younger brother (who was shot down and killed over France). His anecdotes were all about being on leave - never about his missions.
Many aircrew preferred to forget about each mission that they survived as fast as possible. Hence the heavy partying in the local pubs and while on leave. Live now, for we may have no tomorrow!
@@markfryer9880 He spoke once about the crash of a plane coming in for landing, and dragging the burning men/bodies out. It was the only time I saw him burst into tears.
“The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay” covers quite a bit of this, for those who are interested
I was born in 1959, the child of a WWII veteran (USN) and a mother who had lived through the war, but safely in the USA. The closest thing my family had to faith was the CBS Nightly News with Walter Cronkite. Even as a toddler I watched the evening news. We would discuss it around the dinner table, along with whatever was in the newspaper. And thus when we heard about how well the war was going in Vietnam, we utterly believed it because Walter Cronkite told us so.
One of the clearest memories I have from my childhood is that painful, wrenching broadcast where Walter Cronkite came on and told us we had been lied to by the government about what was happening in Southeast Asia, how North Vietnam was not collapsing, how the populace of South Vietnam did not love us as shining protectors, but rather saw us as yet another colonizing power. The progress of the war was a lie. And thus our church, the CBS Nightly News, was shown to have feet of clay.
I have been studying the WWII era for the past two decades now, ever since my father died. I have moved from a vision of the war as a Noble Crusade to one where no one came away with clean hands. Oh certainly the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese were absolutely foul in what they did, inexcusably so, wretched to the point where I would wish that history would never forget their vile acts ... but the Allies have more than their fair share of crimes against humanity as well. No, not as many and probably not quite as systematic, but still we, the descendants, are stained by them.
I have found War Against Humanity both deeply painful to watch but also probably the most important part of the whole World War Two series. I have met in my lifetime members of the American, Canadian, British, and French armed forces of the war; I knew a man who was lauded by De Gaulle personally for his acts in the French Resistance; I knew a man who, as a young teenager, acted as a scout for the Norwegian Resistance. I have met many people with terrible tattoos on their arms, survivors of the concentration camps. I recently was introduced to a man who is nearly 100 years old who was in the second wave to hit Omaha Beach. The acts of heroism of WWII are always remembered. The triumph over the horrors of the Nazi and Japanese regimes still sits before our eyes. And yet...
...and yet war is a madness and causes otherwise sane people to do the vilest acts.
No one is clean.
Respect from Serbia sir! I am 1959 too.
@@MilosBrajkovic-rc3ik Poštovanje Srbiji (I hope I got that right -- had to rely on Google Translate...)
Keeping it short, I'm in my 40s , an American grandson of a Pacific veteran. I started hard core study of the war about 5 years ago when my Grandfather died. I can relate to your comments about the painful part of what I'm learning from this series.... Just a thought....
@@henrybostick5167 As long as we can keep learning, it is well in the world :-)
I have never been a soldier or involved in the military, something I am grateful for every day. Still, ever since seeing Saving Private Ryan, I have been unable to watch older war movies because they seem...too nice, not brutal enough, thus not 'real'. I find Sparty's War Against Humanity series has had a similar effect on me. It contrasts brutally with the sanitisation of the war when I was growing up (70s & 80s). It has highlighted the fact that this war has made monsters of everyone, whether they wanted to or not, and also that it had to be done - probably the most criminal thing about it.
ok, first of all, my mother was a non-Jew born in East Prussia in 1924. In February 1945 she was both a refugee and a nurse working treating wounded soldiers in Dresden. Three times she tried to tell me about the bombing of Dresden but she could never get far before breaking down. This was during the 70s when I was an adolescent. She said her uncle died of asphyxiation, that the train platform melted and that she felt lucky to have been knocked unconscious by a piece of concrete hitting her head. Following Dresden, she was "fledding" the Soviets by running through the forest with a doctor; eventually reaching Greisbach in Bavaria. Of course, we cannot imagine this terror. But I can still feel the trauma of these events through my mother. The idea that people just got up from the firebombing of Dresden, brushed off their clothes, and went back to the work for the 3rd Reich like nothing ever happened is laughable. Would you have been unaffected by this bombing?
When a statue of Arthur "Bomber" Harris was erected in London, it came under fierce criticism. The statue was unveiled on 31 May 1992 by the Queen Mother, who was rather taken aback by the jeers which greeted the unveiling. I recall the news clips of the incident. Rather insensitive and reopening old wounds; the Mayor of Dresden lodged an opposition at the U.K. Embassy in Berlin.
did the germans complain to hitler when he had warsaw razed to the ground in august 1944
@@josephberrie9550 You kept your mouth shut in a regime like Hitlers if you wanted to live, so we will never really know. Some German sappers appeared to have misgivings as they refused to dynamite the tomb of the unknown soldier in Warsaw, which still exists.
A clue though to their faith in Hitler could be deduced from the behaviour of German troops who after late 1944 started to surrender in significant numbers and by March 1945 it became a flood. Indeed I once met a former German soldier who was captured on D-Day 1944 and he said he was only too happy to surrender and be out of the war.
@@josephberrie9550 The Germans are not erecting statues for the ones responsible. So that is a stupid point.
You have been the light for humanity throughout this series. Thank you.
🙏🏼
Book club recommendation for this episode: Slaughterhouse Five. It's, primarily, about the effect of being caught up in Dresden by the author.
Just read it yesterday, so it goes.
The Fire by Jörg Friedrich is the best book on the bombing of Germany.
Are you going to do an episode on the starvation Winter in the Netherlands 1944-45? My Dad mentioned it often as I was growing up!
I am. Coming very soon
A few years ago, my history tour group was given a tour of Bastogne by a group of fiery young Dutchmen. They'd all grown up hearing family stories of the Occupation, the Deportations and the Famine. As a consequence, even 70 years after the end of the war, they refused to have anything to do with German tour groups.
@@spartacus-olsson Please include Audrey Hepburn whose staunch support of UNICEF came from surviving the Hongerwinter. The lack of juvenile nutrition during that time had some pretty profound physiological effects on surviving children.
My mother-in-law was 16 in 1945 and lived through the Hunger Winter. For most of her life, she kept large stocks of canned fruit and vegetables and tubs of flour in her house just in case. A few years ago, she published her experiences of living under German occupation. One thing that makes her livid is when someone says something like "How did you come up with that? You have an amazing imagination."
Sparty's look today is sharp: blue glasses and vest, an elegant scarf to match his hair and some discrete glitter on both wrists. Pure class.
Why thank you, very kind of you to say.
Once again, I am brought to tears. After so many years of this series it never fails to break my heart. It's a strange feeling knowing that the coverage of the allied bombing campaign in Europe is now over. I suppose that is a silver lining, that eventually, even the darkest hour of humanities history has to end eventually.
Never forget.
I haven’t always agreed with your coverage of the air war, but I’m very grateful for you closing comments on the lack of moral equivalency between the air war and the Holocaust. Thank you for your great coverage! 👏
Thank you for the comment!
I was thinking the same thing.
I disagree. There was a moral equivalency. Fuck you if you disagree.
I thought you might like a story about how war isn't always hell. My mother-in-law was German and born 1933. In 1944 she was in her small home town in Bavaria when an parachutist landed in the town centre in daylight. He was American, injured and black (My assumption is he was a fighter pilot escorting a bomber stream, possibly one of the "Red Tails" but she couldnt remember his name or unit). He was unable to run or defend himself.
He was taken to the town's Mayor, who gave instruction that he was to be hidden until such a time as he could be returned to Allied forces, on the basis that handing him over to the proper authorities would do him no favours nor would do any good for the towns people, given that Allied victors might be less than understanding if anything had happened to their pilot at the hands of a very racist regime. He was given medical attention and kept hidden in various houses in the town, out of sight of local military forces, until the end of the war.
My mother in law said that she felt very sorry for him as she thought he was black because he'd been burnt
I love your outros! This episodes always make me thing more about the scale of cruelty in WW2
Unexploded bombs are still occasionly found to this day in europe
Gifts from their Anglo masters, Europe is still under occupation....
Your concluding statement is very well articulated. I have watched this channel from its beginning with WWI. I appreciate the warts and all approach. Many thanks too all of you.
Thank you for the kind comment.
Thank you.
(And time to read again *Slaughterhouse 5* by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., one of my favorite novels.)
Thank you so much for your ambitious work on the "War against Humanity" series. This is UA-cam at it's finest, providing free, high-quality learning for everyone. I also appreciate your reasoning at the end of this video.
Very moving words as always, Spartacus. Thanks for this coverage, TimeGhost
I had an older German woman from Dresden that lived next door to me when I was young. She was like a surrogate grandmother to me because my own Oma lived in Germany.
I later found out my neighbor lost her only son in the Dresden bombing. 😢
It didn't really matter how many planes and tanks and trucks Speer produced. I think that Speer was a genius, but he couldn't conjure petrol out of thin air, so his production achievements were meaningless
Bravo on your summation/epilogue! 💯
Yet another eye-opening episode... Thank you Sparty and crew for your research and War Against Humanity sub series
I think I've listened to, at least, 120 episodes of your War Against Humanity, and this is by far the best one. ,
Thank you
My father was a Jewish, Yidish/German-speaking GI medic who served from D17 through the Battle of the Buldge and occupation. As an aside, he said that during their withdrawal from the Buldge, the Nazis massacred the hospital staff of a Belgian hospital - I have not found any report of this war crime but I feel 100% sure my father was truthful about this as he mentioned it numerous times and he had very few war stories. Following the war, my father joined the military government in Bavaria and, being from NYC, he couldn't drive and my mother got a job as his driver and subsequently they attended medical school in Heidelberg on the GI Bill, married and moved to the US. I felt that my mother never accepted the wrongfulness of the German war effort and she believed the bombing of Dresden was wrong. But I believe her experience as a bombing victim left her with an extremely strong "feeling" against war. This was not an intellectual understanding that war was wrong, instead it was a gut-feeling. She had this split personality; she wasn't a pacifist but she had a phobia against her sons joining the military.
I saw an interview with a Belgian woman whose family and town had been overrun by the Nazis at the start of their Ardennes offensive of December 1944. She stated that a German soldier came into their house and shouted upstairs as to whether there were any people up there. Her mother said yes, just women and children and they were trying to hide. The German soldier threw a grenade upstairs killing several of the family including a very young child, turned on his heel and left. So I have little doubt killing everyone in a Belgian hospital actually happened. Those are the sorts of things done mostly by the SS.
Sparty's quotes at the end of these video's are some of my favorite parts about this entire series. I hope he keeps them up a little longer.
One of the best videos of this serie. Congratulations.
❤
Hi Sparty
War is almost end.
But so many people died for no reason but war.
Want to remember these innocent souls.
Never forget.
I knew a guy who had boxes of albums full of aerial photo reconnaissance taken after bombing of German cities.
There were probably 20 or so boxes each with 10-15 albums each with a hundred or more photos.
The devastation was astonishing and complete.
How they rebuilt Germany after WWII is beyond my imagination!
THANK YOU Mr. Olsson for your summation. Never forget.
Thanks for the video
Very important reportage, thank you.
And thank you for watching.
Jimmy Carter was one of the few Americans who really understood war. He once said that war is horrible. Sometimes it is a necessary horror, but we should never forget that it is horror.
At the Asakusa Temple named Senso-ji in Tokyo sits a little wooden bridge. It is the only part of the shrine that survived the Tokyo firebombing. As for Dresden, it may also be well remembered since a young American POW was there to witness the entire thing. His name was Kurt Vonnegut and he went onto write one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century that included his experience.
I have the upmost respect for the the whole production team!!and the whole ww2 Chanel team,great ,and amazing job!❤
Much appreciated!
thanks Spartacus and crew
That production doesn't fall doesn't prove that bombing had no effect. The effect could have been prohibiting further increases. We'd have to go through a hell of lot of records and time tables deliveries being canceled or delayed and start calculating how much could have been done.
EDIT: Of course any effect that did happen was much smaller then the wild expectations of the bomber commands.
If you chose to discard my coverage… fine, so be it. But perhaps you can find it in you to keep an open minds and begin to read the masses of scholarly literature that concludes the same. You can start by a book by the highly respected, and eminently competent historian Richard Overy “The Bombing War in Europe, 1939-1945.” It’s a popularized summary of his research. Very accessible and easy to understand, and will perhaps better explain it all in a more detailed way that you are able to better digest than my writing. I have a whole list of more works if you like, but they are more scholarly, and not as accessible.
Two big reasons for the bombing campaign were demoralising the enemy and just petty revenge. The first was deemed ineffective even by Arthur Harris in his book Bomber Command, the latter is understandable emotionally but of no military value.
The great opportunity cost spent on this by the Allies could have been used for other things with clearer military goals. It would also have spared occupied towns and enslaved workers, who were thrown under the bus with the Germans.
@@spartacus-olsson Why cant you keep an open mind? Or, are you the final authority?
@@user-hg1qy9yy3d 😂 I’ve been studying this war for 45 years now… but I’m most certainly not the final authority on anything regarding this war. However, _all_ the “authorities” on the bombing war agree with the conclusions I present here. There’s a range of findings from folks like Adam Tooze who argues a slight benefit for the war effort, to others like Richard Overy and myself who conclude a slight negative effect on the war effort. All of us agree on the wasteful nature of the strategic bombing. All of us agree that it failed to meet the set goals by a huge margin. All of us agree about the immortality and illegality of the effort.
I’m sure, that like myself we all entered into this with an “open mind.” I can of course only speak for myself, but in my childhood, when at first I became fascinated with WW2, my initial feeling was “great! Stick it to the bad guys!” Gradually I came to understand more, and the more I learnt, the more I wanted to know. What I’ve presented here are not my loosely formed opinions, they are the result of a massive effort by the entire community of specialists on the topic to sift through all the data, the first hand sources, and the interlinked events.
There are sloppy members of our community who present, or should I say regurgitate the public history of the early days after the war - these are opinions, and not authoritative accounts of what actually happened. These opinions were convenient at a time when the world was trying to come to terms emotionally with what happened, and most of the survivors of this tragedy were still alive. Those days are behind us, and for the last few decades, serious public historiographies no longer present such politically motivated errata. Academic historiographies have _never_ come to the revisionist conclusion that it was a great idea, essential to the winning the war, with much success.
Thought provoking & very impactful closing. Excellent work Sparty & team.
Brilliant episode,. Thank you and respect.
Thank you!
I sit on a sofa in an air conditioned home, with a full belly, and access to almost anywhere in the world through my computer. It is easy to be an armchair critic, to look back after many decades knowing the outcome and the price. We forget how savage WW II was, we forget that the possibility of losing to the Axis was real. We have a hard time understanding what was at stake and what would happen if the Allies lost. For the allied soldiers slugging it out in Africa, Italy, Western Europe, and the vastness of Eastern Europe, the fact that a factory was bombed in Germany that would cause less tanks and guns to be thrown at them, or less bullets and shells to be produced was a blessing that could have saved their lives. Rail yards unable to move weapons and ammunition that had been made and was ready to go to the front to kill the Axis's enemies was another small victory for those men. Every tank, gun, torpedo, airplane, rifle, bullet, hand grenade ect. not made or not moved to combat had the potential to save a mans life. It's also to forget the terror, the pain, death, and destruction that civilian populations during the war all to often found themselves in. We have a hard time imagining our entire town or city being obliterated in the middle of the night, friends and family dead or wounded, little or no food, water, or shelter and knowing that the next night it could happen all over again, anywhere we were lucky enough to find shelter.
Our generations watched a war unfold that was over in a month as guided munitions and cruise missiles took out military targets with great precision in Iraq during the first Gulf War. We live in an age where we guide weapons on the other side of the word from an office in America and hit a specific house with an tiny margin of error. But that was not the case back then, precision bombing was a concept not a reality. It often took an entire raid to put just a small number of bombs on a target. Flying through flack and being attacked, the high altitude, and bad visibility or even dropping bombs using radar or triangulation meant bombing was very inaccurate. So why spend all the money, resources, and especially lives doing it. Because of what I said before, every piece of war material that the enemy could not make, was destroyed, or could not get to the front saved the lives of allied soldiers, airmen, sailors, and civilians.
Was it a failure? I don't think it was a failure. For the cost of the 170,000 allied airmen, their machines, the crews and maintenance, and ordinance what did the allies get out of it. The tied up 300,000 Germans manning the anti aircraft defenses to protect Germany, they tied up thousands of anti aircraft guns that could be used instead to destroy tanks or soldiers on the front, they tied up two thirds of the Luftwaffe as it desperately tried to stop the waves of bombers and would eventually lead to the annihilation of the Luftwaffe in a bloody war of attrition. Without the Luftwaffe to protect it the Axis was subject to massive waves of allied air attacks, destroying communications, transportation, locomotives, airbases, ect, and making it extremely difficult and dangerous for the Germans to move during the day to stop the allies. This helped pull the Luftwaffe away from the Eastern front as well. The bombing helped reduce the amount of oil and other resources available to the Germans to build it's war machine. Even though Speer was able to boost German war production to all time highs under the bombing, imagine what he could have done without the losses to factories, energy, transportation, workers, and other resources which were constantly attacked by allied bombers. Don't forget the fact that all those bridges, rail yards, factories, and yes even homes had to be rebuilt further stripping resources away from the focus of making weapons to kill allied personnel and civilians. Yes, the allies paid a high price for their bombing campaign and you have the hard numbers to tell exactly what the allies paid, but the losses to the Axis, especially Germany were worse and almost incalculably high if you consider what the Axis was never able to produce because of them. Yes, it was only when Silesia was overrun by the allies that German production finally took a statistical downturn, their is an old saying "only boots on the ground can hold territory" but do not imagine for an instant that the bombing raids did not greatly hinder the true capacity of the German war economy.
As for the fire bombings, both in Germany and Japan. I find them to be an act of madness unleashed. They have seemed to me to have been more an act of vengeance than of military importance. That and it was like children seeing what their toys could do if they unleashed them all at once, on people they they did not value as human being, only enemy beings. Unleashing the most destruction for the sake of unleashing the most destruction. But I also think that the immense frustration and anger of not only fighting the war, but also the stubborn resistance the Germans and Japanese and what it meant in allied lives if it continued was another factor in these types of bombings. It certainly was a major factor in the dropping of the atomic bombs.
But now after generations have passed, most of humanity has forgotten the horrors of WW II, and it seams that yet again too many in the world are moving to repeat the cruelties of war because they just can't learn from history. Rest in peace all those taken from this world by the insanity we call war.
I remember reading about the American civil war and the gradual shift the conflict made towards utter brutality. Specifically general Sherman speaking forgivingly and kindly about the south early in the war. Then shifting towards desiring annihilation of the south by the end.
I feel as though much the same happens in all wars. Brutality moves from being the exception to the rule.
No where near the same. Sherman attacked businesses and houses, not people.
@@dezbiggs6363
When you burn someone's home down is that not an attack on them? He made no qualms about his methods nor his intended effect, so I'm not sure why you do. You don't have to be a confederate to recognize that some of the things we did as a nation during the civil war were beneath us.
@@crimsonking440 no lol
@@crimsonking440 Well, why don't you ask African Americans about that? Or should they have remained enslaved to ensure the sensitivites of the Conferate population was not violated?
beautiful words at the end, thank you for all of it
The closing words of Sparty were really something.
Thank You for your work and dedication!
War starts because of a moral justification then normal moral thinking goes out of the window when the fighting starts.
I once read how the cause of war could be distilled down to this:
They have it
We want it
Let's take it
The fire bombing of japan caused the people to turn start to turn their backs to the emperor. This actually happened with herohito finally coming out of his palace after the bombing of tokyo
Great as always. Thank you.
Thank you for watching.
Thanks again, Spartacus, for this sobering and necessary series. All too often, in the expediency of the moment, we easily forget, but we must never forget, lest we lose our humanity.
Absolutely Brilliant!!!!
Glad you enjoyed, thanks for watching.
Regarding German reactions to the bombing, I would refer you to the diary of Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini's SIL):"British aviation is striking hard....Hamburg is burnt to the ground..the German reactions is to call this a crime..they talk about the British bombing killing innocent woman and children..for a people always accustomed to dishing it out (but neaver having to take it) this is strange"
This chimes with Arthur Harris' opinion that it is childish of the Germans to attack and not to expect retaliation.
It’s also an outlier legal argument that an unwritten legal principle called “reciprocal response” made the bombing legal, despite that it violated several Hague conventions stipulations.
But both that argument, Cianos musings, and Harris opinions ignores another area: if it worked… it didn’t.
@stephenphillips4609 I agree with this Arthur Harris quote. It's so easy now for 21st century left of center historians to call the firebombing of Axis cities a "war crime" and even to claim that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, not the atomic bombing of Japan is what ended the war. Perhaps consciously or unconsciously they rightly or wrongly want to discredit their countries' old regimes they want to see "transformed" roughly 80 years later. It's even true that during World War II some Americans and some British although clearly a minority in those countries opposed Harris' bombing campaign on moral grounds.
But during the war most American and British people thought that since the Germans and Japanese had indiscriminately bombed Allied cities first, when the shoe was on the other foot the Axis powers and their civilians had it coming. After all even though Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were vicious dictatorships there's little doubt that those regimes had the support of the overwhelming majority of the German and Japanese people right to the end of the war.
It's also a fact that but for the atomic bombing of Japan the Japanese would have killed all their Allied Prisoners of war. See Prisoners of the Japanese, POWs of World War II in the Pacific (c) 1994, by Gavin Dawes, page 324. And no matter how close to Allied POWs Allied bombs fell, all POWs wanted the bombings to continue (Dawes at page 320).
@@stephenphillips4609 Putin and Russia continue this confounding legacy
Sowe the wind, reap the whirl wind.
By late 1944 it was total war, awareness was emerging of the holocaust, the gloves were off, it was now a struggle between nations not just militaries. The NAZI defeat had to be total.
Excellent commentary, my Father fkew a B 24 52 times into Germany and Northern Europe. He told me that out of his Aviation Cadet Class of 300 that only 46 made it home after the war. It affected him so much he never really talked about it and he never got on an Airplane again.
I love your work it’s both entertaining and informative
Thank you
When Spartacus goes on his rants, this is exactly why I love this channel. Self righteous, sure! Captivating as hell. And absolutely correct!
If what you say is true, how can it be self righteous? Unless you live your life with completely different morals than what you espouse with your words.
Intent really is key. An Axis victory would mean the holocaust continued. Allied victory meant the bombing stopped.
An essential point indeed.
My aunt was a teletpyist in Prague for the German Air force. She worked in the day warning Dresden that the city would be bombed.
It is slightly heartening to hear at 5:08: "It was the deadliest air raid against the German Capital" rather than "it was the deadliest air raid SO FAR ..."
I'll be honest, I knew about the fire bombings from my fascination with history but I never realized how intense, hot they were until Sparty mentioned people boiling alive. That's absolutely horrifying that even your refuge would kill you.
Dan Carlin has a series here on youtube called "super nova in the east" it covers a long period of time. Brought perspectives I hadn't heard of before and is a roller coaster of emotions from raw anger to the point of tears at the suffering that was caused to the people caught up in the machine that is war. He covered fire bombing of Tokyo and I couldn't imagine being in those peoples shoes. He used alot of primary sources such as authors writing down oral stories of Japanese civilians experiences in WW2.
@@jacksonthompson7099 Yeah, well it was all on the Japanese. The leadership of Japan could have surrendered at any time. They just didn't want to. If they want to put their people through hell, that was their decision not ours. BTW there are lots of horrible ways of dying in war. I feel sorry for the Japanese civilians who had to live through this...to a degree. I feel more sorry for the civilians in Manila who were tortured, raped and killed by the Japanese army when the Americans were approaching and asked for Manila to be an open city. The Japanese mercilessly ( and I mean MERCILESSLY) executed the citizens of Manila when there was absolutely no cause whatsoever. They did because they liked it. My empathy only goes so far.
@@user-hg1qy9yy3d Well that makes it alright then so long as the stars and stripes are dropping the bombs rather than the rising sun or the swastika. After all, London could have surrendered anytime as well - so the terror bombings of London were really the fault of the british government.
Absoloutely vile victim-reversal.
I've always understood the air war over Germany drew away desperately needed fighter aircraft from the Eastern Front. Also, the Germans had to expend vast resources to construct the defenses needed to protect themselves from the bombers.
That’s a great point, I also think that the 40,000 anti aircraft guns, 15,000 searchlights and million men to man them all, plus all the ammunition and logistics tail to supply it all is a vast amount that could have made a difference perhaps on the Eastern Front or Atlantic Wall.
Albert Speer said it was a critical factor in Germany losing the war.
@@dbassman27 Albert Speer a most self serving scoundrel ….
Also, whilst it's often quoted that German arms production actually increased, how much more would it have increased without the air offensive? Before the Dday landings, what difference would the thousands of German fighters, or 88s or 10s of thousands extra manpower have made at various points on the Eastern front. Would Germany have won the war, probably not, would it have continued longer and ultimately cost more lives-almost certainly. That's not to excuse some of the tactics used by the RAF and USAAF, especially in the last few months of the war, but even then we only know in hindsight that Germany collapsed in May 45, when the allies thought that It would be later in the year. We than have the spectre of the Abomb being used on Germany instead.
If you chose to discard my coverage… fine, so be it. But perhaps you can find it in you to keep an open minds and begin to read the masses of scholarly literature that concludes the same. You can start by a book by the highly respected, and eminently competent historian Richard Overy “The Bombing War in Europe, 1939-1945.” It’s a popularized summary of his research. Very accessible and easy to understand, and will perhaps better explain it all in a more detailed way that you are able to better digest than my writing. I have a whole list of more works if you like, but they are more scholarly, and not as accessible.
Thank you for the lesson.
Never Forget.
Harris' monomania is astonishing and frightening at the same time. His behaviour also borderlines insubordination, but somehow he manages to keep his post.
Do the German people carry the same emotional guilt in the bombing of Warsaw to that the allies do in the bombing of Dresdon, considering that Warsaw was the capital of a surrendered country at the time?
I know you are being rhetorical but i'm going ahead anyway. Currently Germans are pretty good at dealing with a horrible past.
At the time of course no, but a race to the bottom of morality with literal nazis isn't something to aspire to i think.
@@RedbadofFrisia I wasn't really being rhetorical, but I believe that there are few, by now if any, that should carry guilt - Germans included - of what our thrice or more predecessors have done. Ours is not to judge but to learn, to understand. The rights and wrongs of a war that killed more than 50 million people in a past that we had no control is less relevant to the reasons that they saw for doing it. Our strength is being able to recognise those pathways as unjust before we repeat their wrongs again.
Terror bombing, as we know it doesn't work. It just strengthened public resolve in Germany, England and Japan. Dresden's attack was an expansion on the idea of disrupting refugee movements to hinder military movement, amoung others. Warsaw was different. It was an act of spite - laying the boot in when the opponent was down. I've not seen anything else to the contrary.
It seems to me, though, that Arthur Harris and the men of all the Bomber Commands seem to be judged harshly by the post war world for doing what was asked of them.
“Terror is not our intent. It’s just a fortuitous byproduct.”
Well it was the intent of the Axis, that's for sure, they fucked around and found out B)
@@Jeyeyeyey two wrongs don't make a right.
@RedbadofFrisia I guess we should have let the enemy win then?
@@MrJeepmarine lmao straight to the absolutes, nice. There is a middle ground there, one Spartacus argues for. Like not killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and slaves from occupied countries for instance.
That last comment about the abyss gave me the chills.
It is downright chilling to hear Allied air operations described as terror bombing. And yet when presented with the vivid first hand accounts of both air crew and civilians, it seems an apt description. Thank you for your coverage of these difficult topics.
Albert Speer pulled wool over our eyes and escape true justice.
Read his book about his efforts in WWII….
He states the only bombing that really affected Germany was the oil and synthetic fuel industry….
Which was done haphazardly and briefly….
not really. he was who he was.
@@samsmith2635 no, he knowingly using slave labor and was as terrible as anyone of them but he got off by pretending to apologized and pretend he didn't know what was going on
He was hardly unique. Think of Wernher von Braun....
@@lawsonj39 von Braun is not the same. Sure he was aware of the use of slave labour and indirectly participated in it but he wasn't the man who implemented and continued it
As I recall, Albert Speer considered the bombing campaign significant, as a large proportion of the production of artillery and ammunition was used for air defence instead of going to the frontlines ( on average 10000 88 mm shells to down a bomber, how many to knock out a tank?).
Also Luftwaffe and its fuel stock bled out in the skies over Germany..
The air war was the second front Stalin demanded from Britain and the US.
And how many innocent civilians did the Germans kill daily on average? And the Japanese?
At that point the war in the east was lost and no amount of fuel or supply would reverse the pre-existing lack of experience, spare parts or ammunition which already struggled to reach the frontlines well before the red army began sweeping through eastern europe.
The last bit truly shows the nature of commentators from allied nations, "They did it, thus we are right in doing it as well" - an excellent slippery slope to making oneself equal to the crimes of the nazis.
outstanding episode
Very fair, even handed analysis of this portion of that war.
It is worth reading both Victor Klemperer's diary entry for "The destruction of Dresden" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5," which give similar, but also rather different, views of the nights of February 13/14, 1945.
Yes, basically Klemperer would have been dead if it hadn't been for the RAF and USAF.
@@davidmorris3981 The _day_ of February 13th Klemperer had been forced to hand out forced labor / deportation orders to many of the remaining Jews in Dresden. All of the recipients of these orders, according to his diary entry, viewed them as death sentences. Those orders were overtaken by events that night, and the survivors (not just Klemperer) viewed the bombing as their salvation.
So it goes.
Albert Speer cited the German need to move fighter aircraft from the Eastern front to fight the bomber offensive, as well as a million personell- he called it a second front. I doubt that it prolonged the war.
Albert Speer’s statements that you refer to were made post fact, during interrogation by the Allies, and in his biography. They were made in a situation where he was trying to save his own life, and later clean up his legacy. They don’t add up with his statements and actions during the war. Among scholars specializing on the topic, they’re not used for anything except proof of Speer’s state of mind after 1945.
Which was utterly irrelevant and only contributed to driving up the death toll among allied bomber crews. Had the fighters been kept in the eastern front they would have remained undersupplied and consistently out-paced by the soviet advances.
In a way this decision was more self-sabotage than anything else.
Another extremely well worded episode. Thank you❤
Thank you for watching!
I am truly shocked at just how horrible the allied bombing campaign was in WWII. When I was a kid I used to love watching documentaries (especially one by Walter Cronkite) that featured allied air raids, now I see the truth and realized just how one sided those old shows really were. Thank you very much for covering this and the other atrocities that all sides committed in the war in such detail, it is truly insightful and proof that we as a species must never let such a war happen ever again.
On a Caribbean cruise, I was wearing my airplane shit (much like a Hawaiian shirt) honoring my dad's surviving the attack on Pearl Harbor when I ran into a guy who was wearing a similar shirt honoring his dad surviving the raid on Polesti oil fields.
We talked about how lucky we were both to be there and both of our fathers contributions to WWII.
My grandpa participated in the Allied bombing of Italy and Germany. He was in the USAAF. Thank you for this channel. It helps me better understand what he went through.
As well as the effort of 8th Air Force and RAF Bomber Command, there was another dimension to the air war over Germany in 1945. With the Luftwaffe almsot destroyed, Allied fighters were freed to attack ground targets. This they did with great enthusiasm, often regardless of what the target was. So many civilian refugees were strafed in a strange mirror of the Luftwaffe's deliberate terror attacks on French refugees in 1940.
4:34 MST. Wow Spartacus I am impressed. I commented some time ago that I had trouble following your narrative as you would drop off the volume at the end of your sentences. I do not know if you read it, but your talk was pleasant and audible in this talk.
This is a great series. However, I am going to spew with a long, vehement disagreement with Spartacus Olsson on the effect of the bombing campaign. The conclusions expressed in this program are quite similar to a PBS Frontline broadcast about the allied strategic bombing campaign - that the bombing campaign was largely unsuccessful. I am going to make a few posts strongly disagreeing with these conclusions.
Do not forget that in 1943-1945, up to 80% of German fighter planes and air defense guns were located directly in Germany to protect the Reich from these bombings.
I would really not like these weapons to be anywhere near Kursk or Sicily.
Why? The proportion may have been different, but how many resources did the allies spend to achieve this? The German resources were spread thinner, but so too were allied resources. Bomber crews shot down over Germany were essentially lost, no matter if they survived, but the same was not true of German fighters or their crews. If these German planes, pilots, and AA guns had instead been located at Kursk or Sicily, they would have had a chance of being lost to the Allies, and the Allies would have had more men and planes in these areas who, if shot down, could potentially be recovered. in a way, the Allied bombing raids provided safer spaces for German pilots to get experience and skills in real combat. If we are being cold and logical only, spreading out Allied air power probably let the Germans maintain their air power for longer. And there is only so close you can get with AA guns near the front line before you risk them being destroyed by infantry, artillery, and tanks, their natural weakness, rather than being used only against targets they are good against.
"Up to" sounds like it's doing a lot of heavy lifting. And the situation in 1943 (when the Germans controlled almost half of Europe) was very different to that in 1945 (where the Germans controlled little outside Germany).
Wow, Spartacus! That's one hell of a speech!!! And so true. Thank you.
Thanks for your hard efforts to inform. War, hell on earth always ends until we forget and do it again. True hell is forever, be educated on both.