Peenie Wallie

Sixty two years ago to the day, the British RAF and the United States Army Air Corps firebombed the city of Hamburg back into the stoneage. In a joint operation called Operation Gomorrah:

On the night of July 27th, shortly before midnight, 739 aircraft attacked Hamburg. Owing to unusually warm weather, along with the deliberate planning of the raids (which trapped the city's firefighters in the bombed-out center of the city by following-up with incendiary bombing of the periphery), the bombings culminated in the spawning of the so-called "Feuersturm" (firestorm). Quite literally a tornado of fire, this phenomenon created a huge outdoor blast furnace, containing winds of up to 150 mph (240 km/h) and reaching temperatures of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius). It caused street asphalt to burst into flame, cooked people to death in air-raid shelters, sucked pedestrians off the sidewalks like leaves into a vacuum cleaner and incinerated some eight square miles of the city.

In the waning days of the War, Dresden was firebombed as well. From February of 1945, to as late as April 17th of 1945(Germany surrendered on May 7th & May 8th), the USAAF dropped 580 B-17s dropped thousands of tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiaries.

Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed. An area of 15 square kilometers was totally destroyed... Although the main railway station was destroyed completely, the railway was working again within a few days.

The precise number of dead is difficult to ascertain and is not known. Estimates are made difficult...but historians now view around 25,000-35,000 as the likely range with the latest (1994) research by the Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert pointing toward the lower part of this range."

The goal was total warfare on the population of the cities. They were deliberately annihilated.

"Overall, Anglo-American bombing of German cities claimed ca. 400,000 civilian lives, nine times the 43,000 British civilians killed in German raids."

The destruction of the city provoked unease in informed circles in Britain. According to Max Hastings, by February 1945, attacks upon German cities had become largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war and the name of Dresden possessed a resonance for cultured people all over Europe — "the home of so much charm and beauty, a refuge for Trollope’s heroines, a landmark of the Grand Tour." He argues that the bombing of Dresden was the first time Allied populations questioned the military actions used to defeat the Nazis

After VE day in May of 1945, the 8th Air Force was transferred to the Pacific. Over 60 Japanese cities were firebombed by the USAAF, including Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.

General LeMay, commander of XXI Bomber Command, instead switched to mass firebombing night attacks from altitudes of around 7,000 feet on the major conurbations of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.

Curtis LeMay later said:

"I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal."

So, I'm no fan of the terrorists, but our moral high ground feels a little shaky to me, in light of our past excursions. I mean, it isn't like we are above killing non-combatants, if we feel it is justifiable. So, I'm not saying the terrorists are right, but I think it's a little bit much to be falsely implying or stating that we don't target non-combatants. We killed hundreds of thousands of civilian men, women, and children in WWII, and we did it deliberately.

Ask yourself this question. Do you feel the least bit uneasy about the number of innocent children we firebombed to death during WWII? If the answer is "No", then don't ask yourself how the terrorists could possibly consider killing non-combatants. You already know the answer. ;)