https://x.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/1890185907724271820
Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden
— Jake Shields (@jakeshieldsajj) February 13, 2025
America and England firebombed the entire city deliberately killing up to 250,000 civilians
The vast majority were women and children since all the men were off fighting a war
Germany never deliberately bombed civilians
A day that will live in infamy.
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Less than 25 000 - 50000 civilians perished. About one tenth of the fabled 250 000v Nazi propaganda number.
Which is still an astronomical amount of people within one night, combined with horrors like fricking pyromantic tornadoes creating air vortexes from their rising hot air, which literally sucked civilian kids and women into burning furnaces.
The events were so horrific that when kraut rescue squads arrived to many underground station shelters, they found disgusting green liquid slurries with human bones drifting in them - the overhead streets were so incomprehensibly hot, that people in underground shelters, directly beneath these pyro tornadoes from the intense firebombing cooked the people beneath them into literal biomatter soup
The night left such a bad taste within the mouth of many of Bong hight command, that Churchill even explicitly left out thanking the Bomber command out of the victory parades celebration, when commemorating all the various services like navy/army/special-forces/ect, because Total War strategic carpet bombing was called into question as tempers cooled. And while startegic bombing onto military targets was successful in degrading Nazi infrastructure and ability to wage war, strategic bombing over civilian areas was deemed less than worthless
On the other hand, we only know of Dresden BECAUSE of intensive Nazi propaganda, and nazis had spectacular prpaganda efforts in filmmaking. Dresden wasn't even the deadliest night in all of Bong bombing throughout the war, but the fact that it was chosen explicitly for its refugee, and connection towards roads, was deemed in controversial arguments by Bongs themselves to have been utterly barbaric, and had influence in the postwar zeitghesit in drafting concepts like warcrimes against explicit civilian targets.
Reminder that warcrimes as we know them today, literally didn't exist as legal concepts during WW2, even though Geneva conventions had principles many countries had willing participants
But because of the argualble depravity of dresden, many non-historians take the 250 000 numbers at face value. Much worse and crueler bombing had taken place all over the war, including famously by nazis themselves, into strategic bombing, but Dresden is only the famous one because modern Werhaboos regurgitate nazi propaganda \
!historychads
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Yeah, throughout human history, war has generally been fought between tribes/clans/nations/civilizations as what we might now think of as "total war", where conquest means the death or effective enslavement of everyone, and where a negotiated peace typically meant one side being societally disarmed and forced to pay perpetual tribute or endure collective punishment, that sort of thing.
The large-scale atrocities, destructive power, and media coverage of industrialized warfare in WWII led to this kind of widespread revulsion, a kind of gut-level sense that some acts of war are just incompatible with our self-conception as honorable human beings, and gave rise to these ideas that there ought to be (or even could be) limits on what is "permissible" in warfighting.
It's still a relatively early experiment, this notion that we can get everyone to respect a sort of gentlemen's agreement about how far we are willing to go...
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It's such a fricking weird concept as well
I understand that there are fricking different gradations to how one might die, but pretending that catching someone in barbed wire and letting him bleed out in the fricking mud is fricking somehow more honorable than cooking him with phosphorous is fricking just absurd
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I mean, it's a bit less weird, conceptually, if we choose to start with the example of thermonuclear attack on civilian population centers, instead of choosing to start with mustard gas against literally entrenched combatants.
But yes, even if we steel-man the concept, it is still a weird thing to contemplate: how far is too far, in the defense of your homeland, your family, your civilization? Those of us who live in big and powerful countries get the privilege of pretending to ourselves that attacking civilian targets can never be done in "defense", but that conception does not really align with human history and the rationale of warfare since all time.
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Attacking civilian targets, specifically the civilians of the bigger force, is just a dumb idea. It just galvanizes the enemy and gives them more leeway to not follow any rules themselves. Whatever damage you can do to the bigger force's civilians, they will be able to do to yours much more destructively.
The most effective civilian targets are always minority groups. Nobody really does anything when terrorists bomb innocent Shia Muslims in Afghanistan or Christians in Sri Lanka.
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America literally ended WWII by attacking civilians. It has been an extremely effective tactic, throughout history.
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I think the theory is barbed wire is targeted and can't waft into civilian areas.
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I would argue that perception probably started in WW1, which was arguably one of the first industrial wars of its scale. It's also when chemical warfare really took off.
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!goyslopenjoyers would you dare to drink the green germoid goygoo?
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Also
@Lv999_Slime_God
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I'm sorry about drinking your ancestors
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Splattering Germans with hot, incendiary (syphilis) loads on Valentine's Day
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Arguments like this rely on knowing that it wasn't effective against civilian targets which they didn't at the time. In retrospect we know that they should have focused on industrial targets (which would still have caught huge amounts of civilian housing as the accuracy of a bomber was measured in miles) but at the time they were just trying what worked. Besides Dresden was chosen because it had one of the last surviving major rail hubs that was moving materiel not because they wanted to bomb refugees, it was a valid military target not just trying to roast Germans. The only strong arguments against things like Dresden that don't rely on Bomber Command having a time machine or technology that didn't exist yet are things like them diverting resources away from anti-UBoat patrols for petty reasons.
The fact the British government was horrified by it shows the innate moral superiority of the Anglo, they saw what happened when they efficiently bombed logistics hubs and decided to change tact while the Teuton or Slav would have probably orgasmed.
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My heckin bombs m m murdered people?
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it was about the self-perception of valor, and gunning down the defenseless was seen as ignoble. Valor and hnour was a pretty significant part of the self-image for people of that era
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Not one single person is gonna read all that
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false
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presumably Dresden was still too hot to cool off
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I mean there's this heinous shit we did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Kumagaya
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Nips aren't people though, so
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If you're sitting at the table with a nazi, then you're a nazi
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if theres 249,999 people and 1 nazi, you have 250,000 nazis
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It was fricking 10'000 at best, mostly from disease
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I say 100, you say 10000, it's still a tragedy!
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Yeah a tragedy it wasn't much higher
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Allergic reaction to being set on fire?
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And Slaughterhouse V. I guess indirectly if Vonnegut got it from Nazi propaganda. Almost every burger teenager in high school was supposed to read that book about a dude broken from the Dresden bombing and write essays and stuff on it.
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