Quote:
Originally posted by Martin Bull:
True, and many civilian targets and even individual civilians were 'strafed' too. The old 'World At War' documentary showed unforgettable footage of a solitary horse-and-cart in a field vanishing in a storm of .50s....
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As I see the Swastika-pop-up's are away...here we go again.
As for the purely academic discussion of what german resources had been tied down by the W_Allied SBC, take all that Reichsmarks, fighters, Hitleryouth AAA-helpers and transfer it to the East Front...and invest all those technique, men, US-$ and Pound Sterlings put into the SBC to the Soviet War effort. How many T-34s are worth one Lancaster?
As for "war crimes", espec. strafing civilians:
"Atrocities were committed by both sides. That fall [1944, A.W.] our fighter group received
orders from the Eighth Air Force to stage a maximum effort. Our seventy-five Mustangs
were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe
anything that moved. The objective was to demoralize the German population. Noboby
asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe
enraging them to stage their own maximum effort in behalf of the Nazi war effort. We
weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all
took off on time and did it. If it occurred to anyone to refuse to participate (nobody
refused, I recall) that person would have probably been court-martialed. I remember
sitting next to **** [name deleted A.W.] at a briefing and whispered to him: 'If we're gonna do things like
this, we sure as hell better make sure we're on the winning side.' That's still my view."
Cheers,