"Stigers, Greg [And]" wrote:

> It had been my understanding that until Hitler, Western nations had made a
> habit of, for centuries, leaving civilians entirely alone. This may have
> been no better a strategy than wearing red uniforms and marching in straight
> columns across a field of battle, but that is how things were explained to
> me, and one of the problems we faced with the atomic bomb.
>
> I may have misunderstood you, but you seem to be stating that in W.W.II,
> Allied powers blew up Dutch cities. There may be much more to this. I am
> aware that we bombed Germany from the air, in a day when we only had dumb
> bombs that kind of sort of worked, and if they landed in the wrong place,
> probably exploded anyway. While our targets were military/industrial, that
> was hardly the reality. Is this what happened in Holland, or is there yet
> more to it than this?
>
> Greg Stigers
> http://www.cgiusa.com

Greg,


There is more to it, a city like Enschede/Hengelo that was on the border with
Germany and had a small rail connection with Germany was blown up for a part.
The miss hits were bigger than necessary, and the timing was bad, just before it
was liberated.

You mentioned bombing Germany, Dresden for example was a city behind the Elbe
and was supposed to be liberated by the Russians (agreed upon at the conference
of Jalta). The western Allies bombed it, so what was the idea behind this, did
the Cold War already start at that time?

The bombs on Hirosima and Nagasaki can hard be explained by the Nazi Genocide,
the Japanese never used Genocide during W.W. II it was based on a protection of
the Allied forces (atleast that was what we were told on school), an invasion of
Japan might have taken about 500.000 lives of Allied soldiers and a lot of
Japanese lives too.

It is hard to say that it was a good or bad desision at that time. Now it seems
like a bad one, I am glad that I did not have to deside about it.

What I do not understand is that in the Korean War some people in the Pentagon
wanted to use the Weapon again, fortunately the White House did not.

Enough about, I getting a bad feeling of the discusion.


Regards,


Jan Gerrit