Subj: Re: Japan and Germany declared War on the U.S. before we
declared War on them ????
Date: 3/6/2003 12:51:27 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: jmarch@prodigy.net
To: jdbrophy1@attbi.com, pmancus@prodigy.net, Restoreliberty@aol.com
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For the record, I believe that the real reason for the Dresden firebombing was to show Stalin what would happen to Moscow or "Stalingrad" if he decided to go toe to toe with the western allies following the Nazi collapse.
The risk of the US/Brit forces on one side and the Russian forces on the other meeting in the middle and going at it hammer and tongs was not at all unrealistic; the historical evidence of Stalin's goals and intent (not to mention morals, or rather lack of them) has been spectacularly well documented elsewhere (Gulag Archipelago!) and need not be recounted here.
Patton's views on the subject are fairly well known. (There WERE in fact some disorganized firefights and a definite last-minute race to grab as many Nazi scientists and technologies as possible, but there was no coordinated policy of such combat coming from the Kremlin.)
If that was what was going on at Dresden, I for one heartily approve. Even assuming that US nukes would have gotten Stalin under control in such a hypothetical "World War 2.1", the number of deaths between the time of the actual victory in Europe and the US's ability to crank out nukes would have been horrific, and *then* Moscow would have been subjected to "gamma ray urban renewal".
That said, many of the Dresden deaths were caused by suffocation with minimal actual burning. The pattern of firebombing by the Allies resulted in the air being sucked out of the center of the city. Hence the picture may in fact be real.
My response to the squeamish involves the old saying about eggs and omelets...
Jim March