Some New York Times article headlines from the war period. Unfortunately, the archives after 1922 are pay, so I can just give you headlines. Here are just a few describing the maltreatment and murder of Jews in German Occupied territory:
Wikipedia on knowledge of death camps among the Allies.
No, you claim that. I never said any such thing. The full nature of the death camps wasn’t made clear to the world until after the war. Bits and pieces were known or suggested during the war, but not the whole story.
Well, yes, facts tend to inculcate the condition known as knowledge. It was quite possible to conduct recon and photograph the camps in order to determine what likely target structures were
No no, magic Xbox wombat puppy dog range. Or, ya know, their actual combat range. Either way.
Ignorance often renders matters incomprehensible. DSeid already cleared this up for you, back when you didn’t even know what the full function of the crematoria was. Ah well.
Train tracks were not attacked with bombers, major rail yards maybe. Trains were attacked by fighter bombers. There simply was no way a bomber was capable of precision bombing. The cites you listed talked in terms of flying 100 bombers to destroy a target. That’s carpet bombing, not precision bombing.
I don’t remember what program did it but there was a TV show on the accuracy of WWII bombers and they tested ( B25?) with dummy bombs. The best the bomb sites did was get them in the ball park for carpet bombing.
Maybe a review of our exchange will clarify things.
Pretty straight forward.
You implicitly state that the Allies did indeed attack non-military targets, specifically targets that had propagandistic value.
I countered that targets of propaganda and for propagandistic effect are valid military targets, implying that those targets cannot be compared to concentration camps because the camps essentially had no propagandistic value.
To which you responded:
You responded “Sure they did,” giving the appearance that you thought concentration camps did indeed have propagandistic value. “They had no propaganda value.” “Sure they did.”
The above is why I presumed you thought the camps had propagandistic value, prompting my response (in part):
With that (hopefully) cleared up, I reassert my original point, which is that concentration camps, even had the Allies known their true nature and the extent of the atrocities, would likely not have considered them military targets. I contend that attacking a Nazi rally for, as you stated, “the propaganda value” is a legitimate military objective because of that propaganda value, which a big part of warfare, unlike the concentration camps which had no propagana value, mostly because, and as you indicated, the Allies likely did not have full knowledge of their activities due the Germans’ secrecy.
I was looking for something else and this link popped up
This is a pictorial view of conquered Germany , with trolley missions flown at low altitude and obviously nobody firing back.
Declan
Picture 17 shows an airfield with a bunch of Dornier DO 335’s (inline twin propeller) Wow. Found a video clip of one flying. Only a handful of these existed and this looks like the lot.
Wow again. Picture 30 shows a Mistel/Ju88 combination. They made bombs out of the bombers and carried them aloft below another plane. I was just reading about this today.
It’s worth also highlighting that we’ve been terribly Western centric in this discussion, and as this map linked earlier highlights a damned good chunk of the worst death camps are rather more accessible from Soviet air-front than the Western powers, and as memory serves, the Sovs had effecive air superiority by 1944.
In any case, giving the Sovs a pass and putting the weight on the US and UK is rather unbalanced. Of course the Sovs being bloody minded doubtless simply did not care. Not as if they did not have their own camps.
Doesn’t need one. You’re just spewing hatred at your own nation and your own people again. It makes you feel morally superior or something.
The war in Europe wasn’t about saving the Jews. For the Russians, it was about their own survival. For the British and Americans, it was about eliminating the political and military danger that Nazi Germany represented to the Anglo-American world. Pardon my cynicism, but if Stalin had been seen as the greater threat, the Brits and Yanks would gladly have allied themselves with Hitler.
Picture 2 of a destroyed airfield also coincidentally demonstrates typical bomb distribution in the day. There are at least 20 bomb craters visible, rather randomly (apparently-- I didn’t do a statistical analysis) distributed.
Now mentally superimpose that distribution onto picture 5 of Buchenwald. I’m not convinced that standard bombing could be expected to result in anything more than mass murder of prisoners, except by random chance.
Upthread is a quote from a German locomotive engineer saying that his was a notoriously dangerous job because locomotives were targets of Allied air attack. This is offered to support the contention that Allied air routinely engaged in high precision attacks, as on a single locomotive; thus targeting a single building, say a crematorium, should have been equally possible. What is not stated is the reality that such attacks on trains were made, not by bombers but by fighters or perhaps fighter/bombers, using primarily straffing fire rather than bombs. It’s much easier to line one’s airplane up with the tracks and straff a train from end to end than it is to target it with a bomb or bombs. Locomotives are not hardened targets, and are quite susceptible to such damage. Bombing was much more effective against rail yards, less so against single rail lines, as other pictures in this series demonstrate. Again, there is little to suggest that precision bombing was even possible, let alone common or routine.
I am still unconvinced that the Allies had any realistic ability to selectively damage or destroy only (or primarily) certain important parts of a compound like that shown in picture 5. Causing mass death for prisoners, yes, followed by more mass death of survivors by either the actions or inactions of the Germans on site.
Nor am I convinced that this scenario would have had any significant impact on the genocide program, given the number of alternative camps available as well as the number of alternative means to inflict mass death.
To amplify - in my opinion, on the debate as to whether the Allies could have disrupted the death camp operations, I am of the view that the better arument is that (1) the Allies knew all about the Death Camps pretty quickly after they were established and (2) if they had wanted, they probably could have disrupted at least some of them pretty effectively, albeit at some cost.
But why should they? The Death Camps were not doing the Nazis any good, militarily. On the contrary, they were a huge distraction from the war effort. In particular, they used valuable railway capacity. The Nazis were busy killing people they ruled. The various Nazi death camp slave labour schemes were mostly worthless in terms of actual military/industrial efficiency - dying people simply do not make good workers.
The only exception I’m aware of was the use of slaves in the V-campaign, and in that case, the Allies were keen to bomb them, as I recall (and the Nazis keen to protect them, locating the assembly plans in underground tunnels).
Yes, of course they did. But do you see a difference between that, and your statement that “you claim the Germans propagandized the extermination of Jews, yet kept it secret”
The allies had a enough information to make a reasonable judgment, and they had verified the gas chambers by '43. They could have, quite easily, crafted a propaganda offensive around the camps.
This sort of pointless squabbling and attacks on the persons of other posters was ruled out of order way back in Post #39.
Stop it.
[ /Moderating ]
From the Wikipedia link:
God damn. Those guys must have had testicles the size of baseballs.
Yes. I misspoke.
I can divine two reasons for the lack of a military offense against concentration camps:
Principally, and I believe most likely, they perceived…for whatever reason…little to no profit, in military terms, in doing so. The only other plausible option (IMO), that they just didn’t care, is possible; but do you really believe that is true?
This is essentially my argument up thread. Real war experience suggests that such raids ran a non-trivial chance of not doing any real damage to the machinery of death, and as the actual use of say P-38s shows (25% attrit in one raid), suffering serious losses of valuable, highly skilled air crews AND simply massacring prisoners.
Arm chair generals of course can look at paper profiles and in the abstract move planes around on a map, quite easy.
Precisely.
Several points in this thread are just odd.
While the USAAF’s claims for “precision” bombing were exaggerated, they were not false. The reason that most U.S. bombs were scattered across wide areas, (relatively) far from their targets had to do with the nature of the raids. If one sends 60 (or 500) bombers out to hit one target and they line up in single file to each take a crack at it, the flak gunners are going to have their range, altitude, and speed calculated pretty quickly and will simply shoot most of them down. Similarly, lining up in single file would have meant that they would have sacrificed their defensive combat boxes, making them easier targets for fighters. So, while giving lip service to their “pinpoint” bombing, the USAAF rarely actually employed it. Then, because their superiors knew that their tactics did not require that much precision, few pilots and bombardiers were given the extra training necessary to ensure their success with pinpoint raids. However, the planes and bombsights were quite capable of doing what was claimed for them when their crews were trained and they were sent out on special raids of smaller numbers.
Similarly, despite not having the Norden sight, the RAF did have their own accurate device, (that they simply limited to special raids rather than mass producing and placing in all their aircraft). They employed those sights, along with the Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs, to take out railroad bridges and tunnels on several occasions. (Recall that the Jewish groups calling for interdiction did not ask that the gas chambers be destroyed, but that the railroads be interrupted. Bombing miles of track would not have been of significant use, but removing specific trestles and tunnels could have rendered the tracks useless for weeks or longer.)
Ignoring P-38s, Lancasters, B-17s and B-24s were all available for various raids had they been deemed appropriate.
On the other side of the discussion, reading over the Wikipedia article on intelligence about the camps, it is not clear who among the Allied command actually received the information. Given the doubts expressed by many of the people receiving the information, it is quite possible that Churchill, Eisenhower, Portal, Harris, Arnold, and Eaker never really learned of the purpose of the camps during the fighting.
This is not a claim that no one knew of the ongoing murder of Jews and others. The Einsatzgruppen activities were well known and documented. The issue is whether the leaders actually knew that the people being sent to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and other camps were being murdered by the thousands every single day.
It would be interesting to see documentation that those leaders were specifically aware of the nature of the death camps. (I do not know that they were not; I only note that the evidence presented thus far in this thread is ambiguous.)
Well, there’s precision and then there’s precision. As you say, mass bombing raids produce randomized results for a number of reasons. And the Allies certainly had the ability to produce increased precision when willing to commit special equipment (planes equipped with precision bombsights), specially trained manpower (crews who knew how to use them and had practiced doing so in combat) and specialized tactics (including, as you note, the number of planes and their tactical arrangement). A competent aircrew, on a really good day, could probably put all or almost all their bomb load into a football field. In the 1940s that would be high precision.
Given the often competing interests and priorities of different field commanders and multiple political leaders, the decisions of how and where to target had to be defensible and aligned with an overall battle plan. (“We’re concentrating on this right now because that is happening, and something is about to get underway. We’ll get to your area (of interest) next week, I promise!”) Diversion of any resources, let alone highly specialized, skilled, and rare resources for raids of unknown or doubtful strategic benefit would be unlikely.
Surely the Allies knew full well that bombing “trestles and tunnels” would have a longer lasting effect on German war effort or genocide than bombing random tracks. I suspect that this was done routinely, all across the field of action, using whatever aircraft were available, precision or not. I doubt that there were many miles of railway devoted exclusively to serving death camps; railways are more like a web than a line, with multiple cross connections and serving multiple destinations. So it seems likely that virtually all railway bridges and tunnels were considered high value targets pretty much all the time, and unlikely that any were deliberately excluded from targeting simply because they served a death camp. The fact is, the Germans became really good at replacing such infrastructure, almost as quickly as it could be knocked out. The replacement bridge wouldn’t be as good perhaps as the original one, but it could handle a few trains. And whether it then fell down, or was bombed again, it could be thrown back together probably in a day or two.
Finally, even if a high precision strike intended to interfere with a death camp’s ability to commit mass murder was deemed desirable, results are not guaranteed. A lucky flak battery, a lost navigator, a fortuitous German fighter plane, or any of dozens of other random factors may interfere and the precision strike becomes something else. If the target was a railway trestle, any places the bombs actually hit are within the theater of war; they may be wasted, but any civilian lives lost are of no consequence in the context of the war. Lost Allied aircraft and air crews can be replaced, and the raid can be scheduled again.
However, while you tomndebb argue for targeting rail, upthread is a repeated call for precision bombing of the death camps themselves, with crematoria being the specific targets. Even under the best of circumstances, a perfect raid on a perfect day with neither flak nor fighter interference, only a tiny percentage of the bombs dropped could actually be expected to hit the targeted buildings. The rest are going to fall in a football field with the crematorium somewhere inside it. And that football field area is for a single plane. Every other plane, if it is as accurate, will place its own football field sized area of destruction somewhere nearby the first one, perhaps with or perhaps without overlap. Superimpose that image on the photo of Buchenwald. I find it hard to believe that, had this been done, the effect would have been as desired.
In the final analysis, I tend to agree with Malthus
Indeed, I could envision such bombing as a major propaganda boost for the Nazi regime. What might the rest of the world have thought of us obliterating a prison camp chock full of Jews? Would the explanation “It’s for their own good!” actually have flown?