Perhaps you can also work on capital letters and punctuation.
Sorry about that. Was going from memory and obviously it was faulty. Also, didn’t see your post.
Given the OP’s unorthodox keyboard skills, it’s difficult to say for sure.
If he is failing to capitalise “Shiite”, then yes, it’s likely a slur.
However, he may be mis-spelling “shite”, which is a British variant of “shit”, which would not be a slur, just an orthographical error.
It is a bit of a puzzle.
Actually, there was considerable controversy in 1983 when Reagan laid a wreath at the Bitburg Military Cemetery in Germany, especially since the cemetery included members of the SS among the dead.
That you are as astute on recent history as you are on WWII history?
Suicide: You’ve got to pick up the pieces. C’mon, sort your trash. You better pull yourself back together.
Bonzo goes to Bitburg then goes out for a cup of tea. As I watched it on TV somehow it really bothered me.
My brain is hanging upside down. I need something to slow me down.
Moderator Note
Suicide, as has been pointed out, “jap” is generally considered a derogatory word today. Let’s refrain from using it in the future.
Since you’re new here, here’s a word of advice. You’ll have more credibility and earn more respect here if you make a minimal effort to use capitalization and proper punctuation, and in general try to post in a more literate fashion.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The only times I can ever think of pure aerial bombardment actually “working” has been NATO actions in the last 15 years or so where there’s been no willingness to send in ground troops. And even then there were soldiers on the ground, whether KLA or anti-Gaddafi fighters. And those had modern planes, effectively unlimited range, air superiority, guided weapons, and additional options like cruise missiles.
How about this as a counterfactual? Would the B-52 have enough speed to hit targets inside Germany without a fighter escort? I mean, obviously you’d love to have the B-52 capability in the Pacific but the question was about Europe. Or if you want to get it a bit closer to WWII, how about the B-36? I guess to be unescorted you’d need a combination of speed and ceiling advantages.
Heck, as long as we’re giving the Allies a time machine, there’s got to be a better way to avoid the war. Killing Hitler is the cliche, but how about modifying the treatment of Germany after World War I to something far less punitive instead?
I’m not sure how much it mattered. By the end of the war, we had total air superiority over Germany and were already carpet bombing the major cities and industrial centers. Most of this bombing was already well outside fighter escort range anyway. Even that wasn’t sufficient. Better planes might have made the bombing more efficient, but I don’t see why that would make surrender any more attractive that it already was.
What was a sufficient inducement in Europe was boots on the ground, particularly the Russians from the East. And even then, that was after Hitler was dead. The guy wasn’t planning on surrendering at any point under any circumstances.
I think one reason there may be more lingering sentiment about the Japanese wrongs in WWII than the German ones is because for the Germans, everything is overshadowed by Hitler and the Nazi Party, whereas for Japan, any such core group of players behind the worse actions of the war aren’t really well known in the US.
I mean, I’d be willing to bet that a lot of Americans would be hard-pressed to know who the nominal ruler of the Empire of Japan was in WWII, let alone anything about internal political parties or factions. Much of that probably complicated by the fact that Japanese culture is just that little bit more alien to Americans than German culture is, making such things a bit more opaque for those not inclined to do a deep study into the topic.
But yeah, I think for the most part the original question was answered. Most of the folks planning D-Day didn’t know about the nuclear bombs, many of the few who knew of the bombs didn’t know if they would work, or if they’d go the way of numerous failed projects (including most of the American attempts at cruise missiles and jet fighters up to that point), and many of those fewer who thought it would work didn’t know if it’d be ready in time to make a difference, or if it’d even make any difference at all (the RAF was already dropping 10 ton trans-sonic earthquake bombs on German cities, and both the RAF and USAAF were burning centuries-old German cities like Dresden down to their foundations, and the Germans showed no immediate signs of folding for that.)
I think versus WWII German aircraft, the ceiling of a B-52 would have been more protection than it’s speed. Also for that era’s anti-aircraft artillery.
D-day had been planned for years. U.S. army staff wanted to invade in 1942. It was repeatedly delayed until the forces on hand were overwhelming in the summer of 1944. If it had been called off, numerous generals and politicians would have opened themselves to massive criticism for investing all the buildup and effort, ending many of their careers. By summer 1944, failing to launch the Normandy invasion was a political impossibility.
It may seem tragic that thousands of servicemen lost their lives, perhaps unnecessarily. But the guys doing the dying weren’t the ones responsible for the decision to invade. To the decision makers at the top of the chain of command, going ahead with the planned operation was way less risky to their careers than calling it off.
This isn’t a very accurate picture of the politics of the time. Churchill and the British had to be dragged into agreeing to the invasion. There was certainly no political advantage in it for them.
In the United States, the general political mood was to defeat Japan first. So the invasion of Europe wasn’t the politically popular choice.
I’ll grant you that letting Germany win the war probably would have cost some politicians the next election. But I like to think that wasn’t their only consideration for wanting to defeat Germany.
This. BUFFs could / can cruise & drop from well above the highest reaches of WWII fighters or WWII AAA.
If we further assume some easy (nowadays) tweaks to their modern EW gear to detect & jam the primitive German radar, the bombers could arrive all-but unseen.
The real value of their speed, which is about 2.5x WWII bombers & about 1.5x WWII fighters, is to shorten the available warning & reaction time for the defenders. e.g. if defenders visually spot them crossing the Rhine bound for Berlin the defense now has, say, 30 minutes to get the defense ready instead of the 90 minutes they’d have if it was B-17s inbound.
As well the vastly larger bomb load per aircraft would mean either a lot more tonnage dropped or a much smaller formation to acquire visually or via radar, audio, or whatever. Greater speed might also translate into the ability to execute 2 or even 3 sorties per day vice just 1 for a WWII bomber. Assuming the Allies had enough aircrew per aircraft.
Finally, the greatly improved bombing accuracy would mean a ton of B52-dropped bombs would do a lot more useful damage (10x?) than a ton of B17-dropped bombs. The effect would not be so large when simply carpet bombing cities, but much of that campaign was simply by default as B17s etc. simply couldn’t hit anything smaller reliably.
in his famous ‘date that will live in infamy’ speech fdr uses the word ‘jap’…was he purposefully trying to slur the enemy or has the meaning of that word changed in seventy five years? i’ve also seen the front page of the ny times and other papers and it says ‘japs surrender’ when the war ended…or is it just that political correctness did not exist in 1945?
In the climate of the time, slurring the enemy was rather more acceptable than it would be today. Does that surprise you?
Listen to him again, no he doesn’t.
Even if he did, this was the '40s. Racism was endemic, segregation was practised, we interned ‘enemy aliens’ based on their origins. Propaganda against Japan was about as racist as they could make it. We’ve moved on, somewhat.
FDR’s speech is, indeed, one of the most significant in US history. It is easily available on the Internet. You have misquoted it.
Also, please heed the moderator’s request on using capital letters.
You seem to have overlooked the Nazi’s participation in WWII which many believed made yet another invasion of Fortress Europe necessary.
I found this in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time, about the Teheran Conference.
Meanwhile, back at the Manhattan Project, the reactor used to produce plutonium had only just come online.