That time Dresden got firebombed

Dresden was full of small factories making things like instrumentation for U-Boats and aircraft. It was also a main transport hub for railways to the east.

The death toll was heavily inflated by Goebbels (and this figure was used postwar by the Soviets to make the western Allies look bad). The actual German police put the casualties at no more than 25,000. Still horrific, but such is modern total war. Everyone is in the front line.

BECAUSE DAVID IRVING LIED AND CLAIMED 200,000 PEOPLE DIED AND KURT VONNEGUT, LIKE A LITERAL RETARD BELIEVED HIM AND WROTE THE NUMBER IN HIS FAMOUS BOOK "SLAUGHTER-HOUSE FIVE"!

THE GREAT IRONY IS THAT DAVID IRVING LATER WENT ON TO REDUCE THE NUMBER BY AS LOW AS 50,000 AND CITY COUNCIL REPORTS ACTUALLY SHOW THAT ONLY BETWEEN 22-25,000 PEOPLE DIED.

IT'S A BIG HISTORICAL MEME.

nice cruise control

oh shit, forgot to turn of caps haha!

Because propaganda.
While Allied Bomber Air Command did consider Dresden to be of military value (it was a massive communications hub, and a minor industrial center and transportation hub), the propaganda put forth by the Germans was pretty damming. Others who did not appreciate the justification or considered it overstated felt like Dresden had ulterior and darker motives, and some critics caused a minor firestorm of bad press on the homefront, which called into question just what else the soldiers were up to in Europe.
The bad press and damage it had to the Allies' reputations caused a major shift in decision making for the bomber command, and caused them to heavily rethink the method for validating targets.

While I think you can argue both ways for whether Dresden was justified in a total war setting or not, the fact is that it was poorly received by the civilian population and even the military itself.
It was not a question of raw numbers, it was a question of validity. Hundreds of thousands of Germans were killed by strategic bombing and while some thought it inhumane the effects it had on the Nazi war machine were extremely noticeable. But did Dresden actually impact the Nazi war machine? Was there a justifiable reason for its bombing?

Even before Irving military heads were asking that, even when the number dropped from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands the underlying question was "did killing those people end the war any faster?"

It's that thinking that has pervaded until today and is still the primary way of thinking for how air assets are to be used. Dresden is half the reason the US got such a hardon for precision munitions. Ever since that day the US has spent an inordinate amount of money on being able to eradicate assets strategically while avoiding civilian collateral damage. Clearly, there is still room for improvement.

>strategic value

"Strategic value" wasn't the only, or even the most important, metric used to pick targets for area bombing. Cities were targeted because they were big and relatively easy to locate, whether they produced war materiel in any significant quantity was almost a secondary consideration. Even without making the case that, in total war, civilians are just another resource, it's simply what what limitations of the time predicated. Hell, we bombed Switzerland by mistake more than once.

Dresden was called "the Florence of the Elbe" mostly because it had a lot of baroque architecture but was generally regarded as a beautiful, cultural city similar to Paris or the Italian renaissance cities.

Why are there so many Jewish commie cunts on this sub? Fuck off, if Dresden was justified, then the extermination of Jews was ten times as justified.

>this sub
you have to go back

>this sub
filthy dumb crossposting scum

these are the kinds of scum the alt-right has attracted

Also it hadn't been that long since German universities were considered preeminent, at least in regards to science. The best hospitals in the world as well.

Many would have been household names as Oxford or the Mayo Clinic are to us now, especially since the German influx into America was only a generation or two old.

What does it matter anyway, Veeky Forums is literally r.eddit: the board , and not because of it's political opinions mind you.

FUCK OFF, RETARD.

GERMANY KILLED 60,000 BRITS DURING THE BLITZ, GO BACK TO RIBBIT.

>25,000 is equal to 6 million

Really makes ya think

British people are literally not even human, they are closer to rats, so he didn't do any harm

And nothing of value was lost

>crikey m8 remember the blitz 6 gorrillion english children were gassed to death by the lufwaffe

pathethic

25 000 >= 6 000 000 * 10

Get back to school you fucking keke.

Epic hypocrisy.

Really makes me think

le mental gymnastics

They were essentially testing out what a nuclear bomb might do to a city.

DO IT AGAIN BOMBER HARRIS

Germany was the enemy. Thats all the justification needed.

>Dresden was full of small factories making things like instrumentation for U-Boats and aircraft. It was also a main transport hub for railways to the east.
So why did they focused on the cultural centre instead?

Could they even focus this good at night? Seems more like the command pointed the center and let the bombs fall, where they fall.

>that time Warsaw got utterly destroyed

>That footage of the entire city in flames
Regular strategic bombing that doesn't deliberately target civilians I can understand. But Dresden was too much and should've been treated as a war crime.

BOMBER HARRIS DO IT AGAIN

>Could they even focus this good at night?
No. That's why they switched to firebombs, as those inflict more damage on medieval city centers

>Dresden was le was crim1!! they killed thousands!!!
>Well what about the 60,000 brits the nazis killed during the blitz?
>that doesnt count, brits d-deserved it!!

Really makes me think

>switched

Incendinary bombs were pretty common

>Germany bombed Britain
>The Allies bombed Germany
>The Allies were better at bombing Germany than Germany was at bombing Britain

It's literally that simple.

The same tactic Germany used during the Blitz. Both sides were 'guilty' of bombing civilian population.

Accuracy was pretty good; you could usually get 80%of the bombs within 600m radius of the target point. Navigation was the real problem, and I would hazard the bombed city centers because they could FIND city centers (most of the time)

"The Germans were operating under the foolish delusion that they could bomb as they pleased and not reap the consequences".

Queue that Goring pic

...

'but they did it too' is a pretty poor argument.

The government of Germany deserved it
The civilians of Dresden did not

Then the civilians should have rebelled against the govermnent that put them into a total war.

But then everybody would have called them cucks and doxxed them to the authorities.

Friendly reminder that /leftypol/ has also started concentrating its efforts on Veeky Forums because raiding one board wasn't enough for them

So we can kill all american women and children because of Vietnam and the fuck ups in the middle east?

Veeky Forums is just /pol/ with dates as most people said it would quickly become when people were asking about a history board on Veeky Forums and /int/.

No, you cant since you lack power to do so. Also neither Vietnam or middle east were total wars.

>Vietnam
Didn´t American civvies protested against war so hard it ended?

totally

>let's just ruin everything all over Europe
>literally every fucking thing
>wtf why you guys mad tho it was just a prank bros

The only bigger meme is the "stab in the back" propaganda that people still believe a century later.

>giving slavs that much land
Oh shit nigger what are you doing

Yup.

Sowed the wind, reaped the whirlwind, indeed.

Bomber harris do it again

I am windowing this thread.

I don't think you understand the point of terror bombing user, Germany had already tried it in the UK with the Baedeker raids, but they didn't have the air force.

>on this sub

Babababbait

>The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

>I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance.

>Attacks on cities are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and so preserve the lives of allied soldiers.

...

AGAIN

>That time London got firebombed

"Don't start nothin', won't be nothin"
-American proverb

You're free to try
>ww2 equivalent of crying syrian orphan videos
step up your "muh feels" psyops lad

>They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

get cucked g*rms

>So we can kill all american women and children because of Vietnam and the fuck ups in the middle east?
Happens all the time.

so it goes

t. butthurt kraut

>yfw you find out the hero of edgy left wing teenagers everywhere literally cited David Irving and Goebbels for his edgelord book

this is literally you

Cry more bitchboy

Anglo-Saxon genocide when?

Memes aside these Krauts have no reason to cry, on the Eastern Front alone 30 million soviets died. These retards war killed up to 50 million in Europe, 30K dying from one bombing raid is nothing.

That's not what I'm saying. The actions of the Allies and Germany were the same, yet the Blitz is just seen as 'something that happened' whilst Dresden is considered a war crime.

How many people need to die before an action taken during a war becomes a war crime?

>tfw people actually believe this

D O I T A G A I N

youtube.com/watch?v=3_QY3xsLQNI

>160k Allied airmen vs 500k German civilians

Were they really that inneficient, or did they took pity on the kraut?

>he doesn't see the irony in whining about Sherman and celebrating Harris

Slavs are the Master Race of the 21st Century

If Germany hanged on in the war longer, Dresden could have been nuked as well.

lole

...

this
>Germans want total war
>get eternally butthurt when they receive it
My grandma's cousin flew a Wellington bomber during the war, I hope he fried a lot of those servile cucks.