Comments by "doveton sturdee" (@dovetonsturdee7033) on "Disturban History" channel.

Isn't it odd how some would argue that a soldier who fires a gun is fair game, but the 'civilian' who manufactures the gun or the projectile fired from it isn't? Or, put in simpler terms, there are no civilians in modern industrial war.
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@theaninova If I was saying that, I would have written it. The bombing of civilian areas was an inevitable consequence of industrial war, as the Germans had already demonstrated in 1917, during the Spanish Civil War, at Warsaw, and at Rotterdam. In terms of children, the British evacuated their children out of cities to safer rural areas in 1939. The Germans never bothered to do the same.
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Only if you believe figures produced by Goebbels, and repeated by his apologist David Irving. 25,000 is the figure determined by a post war German study.
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As a naval historian, I am no fan of Arthur Harris, but I entirely agree with one comment he made : ' I would not regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. '
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How easy to display pious outrage 80 years after the event, from a comfy chair. Perhaps, had you been in an American, British, or Soviet position, about to attack a German defensive fortification, in 1944/5, you might have had a different opinion?
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'unjustifiably.' How so? Should the allies not have attempted to degrade the German ability to produce weapons?
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But there is ample justification for destroying the German ability to produce the weapons and equipment necessary to continue the war. Surely you do not consider the lives of servicemen to be of less value?
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@cobusprinsloo They were essentially the same thing :- strategic bombing, approach to aerial bombardment designed to destroy a country's ability to wage war by demoralizing civilians and targeting features of an enemy's infrastructure—such as factories, railways, and refineries—that are essential for the production and supply of war materials.
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@cobusprinsloo Easy to say from the comfort of a nice chair, in front of a laptop, 80 years later, isn't it? I wonder if you would have been quite so pious, had you been in a US, British, Canadian, or Russian trench, about to attack formidable German defences, in 1943-5? Or perhaps you might explain one mystery to me? Why is it perfectly acceptable to kill a soldier who fires a shell at an enemy tank, but it is not acceptable to kill the factory worker, male or female, who manufactured the shell the soldier fired? Even simpler, in an industrial war, there are no civilians.
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@cobusprinsloo As part of my degree, I was fortunate enough to interview a number of veterans, one of whom, who had served on a sloop in the Battle of the Atlantic, remarked 'Sometimes you had to do things you didn't like doing, or the ones who did like doing them might have won.' You post 'no excuses.' I say that you have no answers to the arguments I have made. Have another coffee and a cookie or two, settle down in your comfy chair, and stop posting self-righteous nonsense.
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@cobusprinsloo What Le May said in full was :- “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at the time…. I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal….. every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you are not a good soldier.” He also said :- “If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting." Actually, isn't he right? Indeed, the war was won by 1945. Perhaps you mght ask yourself why, in that case the Germans and Japanese didn't simply surrender? 'The burning of Dresden was completely unnecessary - it was done to appease the Russians.' Not to 'appease' them, but to support an impending Soviet offensive. Clearly, you find allied deaths preferable to German or Japanese ones. By the way, in terms of Japan, have you actually looked at the US estimates of probable casualty levels, on both sides, had Operation Olympic been necessary?
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