70th Anniversary of D-Day

[Brian37]

HELLO MCFLY Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Those spared a lot of lives.

You have a lot of fucking nerve talking about sparing lives when your fictional super hero throughout that comic book wreaks of the stench of collateral damage.

War is hell, we both agree. Leave it at that because you are making a fool of yourself.

Listen this thread has been quite good until now, you are a loud mouth who deserves no respect. Fact if we had not use those bombs we would have had to fight for much longer with more dead on both sides than those two bombs caused, no one wanted to us them it became a necessity to save lives, there were many American moms and dads who were glad we did, they got their sons home, ALIVE.
Also I said we tried to spare civilian lives, today if we kill a civilian in a combat situation the world goes nuts.

GC

Yes I am a loud mouth, and?

I am with you in that war is hell, but you stupidly for some reason think life can be a utopia. If you had just left it at "war is hell" you would have been fine with me.

The reason you think that way is because you buy into the concept that morality is pulled out of a book and being part of a club is a requirement to be moral. The truth is morality is a result of our constantly changing evolution and any good or any bad humans do is a result of that and none of us are above evolution because of the clubs or labels we choose.

"We tried to spare lives". Yep and we imprisoned innocent Japanese and German citizens in WW2 as well. Not including our prior history of slavery and genocide of Native Americans. And even today we have religious people trying to control women's bodies and deny rights to gays.

Point being as soon as you think you are above human behavior and above evolution, THAT is the point you repeat the horrors of the past.

Just leave it at "War is hell", ok?

[Godscreated]

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Listen this thread has been quite good until now, you are a loud mouth who deserves no respect. Fact if we had not use those bombs we would have had to fight for much longer with more dead on both sides than those two bombs caused, no one wanted to us them it became a necessity to save lives, there were many American moms and dads who were glad we did, they got their sons home, ALIVE.
Also I said we tried to spare civilian lives, today if we kill a civilian in a combat situation the world goes nuts.

GC

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Yes I am a loud mouth, and?

I am with you in that war is hell, but you stupidly for some reason think life can be a utopia. If you had just left it at "war is hell" you would have been fine with me.

The reason you think that way is because you buy into the concept that morality is pulled out of a book and being part of a club is a requirement to be moral. The truth is morality is a result of our constantly changing evolution and any good or any bad humans do is a result of that and none of us are above evolution because of the clubs or labels we choose.

"We tried to spare lives". Yep and we imprisoned innocent Japanese and German citizens in WW2 as well. Not including our prior history of slavery and genocide of Native Americans. And even today we have religious people trying to control women's bodies and deny rights to gays.

Point being as soon as you think you are above human behavior and above evolution, THAT is the point you repeat the horrors of the past.

Just leave it at "War is hell", ok?

I'm not going to argue with you, my beliefs are different than yours and if you can't handle that you could be in the wrong place. This thread is about those who served and died for our right to have discussions here, we should honor them without making some kind of agenda out of it, okay.

GC

[Brian37]

Yes I am a loud mouth, and?

I am with you in that war is hell, but you stupidly for some reason think life can be a utopia. If you had just left it at "war is hell" you would have been fine with me.

The reason you think that way is because you buy into the concept that morality is pulled out of a book and being part of a club is a requirement to be moral. The truth is morality is a result of our constantly changing evolution and any good or any bad humans do is a result of that and none of us are above evolution because of the clubs or labels we choose.

"We tried to spare lives". Yep and we imprisoned innocent Japanese and German citizens in WW2 as well. Not including our prior history of slavery and genocide of Native Americans. And even today we have religious people trying to control women's bodies and deny rights to gays.

Point being as soon as you think you are above human behavior and above evolution, THAT is the point you repeat the horrors of the past.

Just leave it at "War is hell", ok?

I'm not going to argue with you, my beliefs are different than yours and if you can't handle that you could be in the wrong place. This thread is about those who served and died for our right to have discussions here, we should honor them without making some kind of agenda out of it, okay.

GC

No one but you has an agenda. You tried to paint a rosy picture as to taking the "moral high ground" by claiming we did our best to limit civilian death. No we did not. We did what we had to do, and I am glad we did, and the people who defeated Japan and Germany were brave in what they did. But it was messy and ugly and hardly perfect the way you want to paint it.

WW2 should not be treated like a Norman Rockwell painting. War is hell and that is where you should leave it.

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Now in all seriousness all kidding aside. I said what I said for a reason. When you say "we tried to limit civilian death" that is not true for the entire 4 year war. AND especially not for Hiroshima or Nagasaki. You not only insult the living ancestors of those two cities by saying that, you insult the the scientists who worked on the Manhattan project who were horrified at their creation knowing what it was going to be used for. And even some of the pilots on that plane were horrified knowing what they had done.

It is the willingness to accept what you are about to do you hate doing knowing you are going to hurt a fellow human being. That is humility, not glossing over reality pretending we can be or are perfect in what we do in war.

Like I said, leave it at war is hell and I have no problem. But don't gloss over history in the process.

[Tonus]

Oh so basically we let Russia do all the heavy work. Conservation of energy.

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Still though what the fuck was Hitler thinking attacking Russia in any case? What a delusional fuck.

You partly answered your own question; Hitler was not completely sane (and by that time, perhaps not even partially sane) when he launched the invasion of Russia. But he did have a plan, that being to seize the Caucasus (for oil) and the Crimea (for agriculture) as well as a more ambitious plan to wipe out the Russian army and grab a shitload of territory.

But it seems that he severely underestimated both the size of the army that Russia would eventually put on the field, as well as its willingness to fight once its collective back was against the wall. Hitler had expected that the dramatic early victories (which yielded millions of prisoners and quick progress into Russian territory) would cause the Russian armed forces to collapse, making the rest of the campaign much simpler to carry out. But that didn't happen, and Hitler decided to go ahead and try to grab all of his objectives and to pretend that winter wasn't happening, with the end result being that their main success in the end was taking the city of Stalingrad, and that turned into a disaster for them.

As for letting Russia do the heavy lifting, that was probably part of the plan on the Allies side. They had no reason to trust Stalin (who merrily partitioned Poland with Germany and seemed to have no interest in helping save western Europe early in the war) and may have worried that if Russia was strong enough at the end of the war, it would try to roll across Europe and replace the Nazi empire with a Soviet one. So they probably felt that it was better to let the German war machine wear itself out at Russia's expense. That, and every man and gun that went east wasn't in a position to make the re-invasion of Europe more difficult than it already would be.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Hitler was basically stupid for starting the war when he did. He thought that he was in 1914 instead of 1938. He didn't have a navy or an air force. All he had was an army, which was too small to control Europe and Russia. He didn't have the ability to invade and occupy the British Isles, which is just a few miles from France. His logistics sucked and he couldn't defend Germany from counter-attack. He should have waited until the 1950s or 1960s until he had the proper weapon systems. If he had had a better political doctrine he could have achieved his objectives through political means.

He lost the war when he fired the first shot.

[Minimalist]

Actually, he wasn't doing badly until he made a series of mistakes. 1- The Luftwaffe plan for crushing the RAF was working well until Hitler decided to attack the cities to crush British "morale;" 2- he decided to attack Russia; 3- he declared war on the US. On December 8, 1941 you would have been hard pressed to find an American who gave a shit about Germany but Hitler solved that problem for Roosevelt.

[Chas]

Yes we did, the British were bombing Germany at night and the US was in disagreement with this policy because there were to many civilian deaths due to night time bombing.

Dresden.

The firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945.

[Brian37]

I just watched a documentary on the invasion including letters from all aspects of the war, military and civilian. French civilians wrote about the carpet bombing of the allies that killed civilians. They hated it of course, but they also understood that they did not want to live under fascist rule of the brutal Nazis. War is messy and never perfect, and we should never gloss it over. It sucks that our species has yet to learn peaceful problem solving. But if we are to advance to more peaceful problem solving globally, we should never gloss over human death in war. We need to understand as a species that death is death and violence is never pretty, no matter the reason we use it.

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Hitler was basically stupid for starting the war when he did. He thought that he was in 1914 instead of 1938. He didn't have a navy or an air force. All he had was an army, which was too small to control Europe and Russia. He didn't have the ability to invade and occupy the British Isles, which is just a few miles from France. His logistics sucked and he couldn't defend Germany from counter-attack. He should have waited until the 1950s or 1960s until he had the proper weapon systems. If he had had a better political doctrine he could have achieved his objectives through political means.

He lost the war when he fired the first shot.

Regardless of Hitler being ultimately responsible, there still is a societal psychology that allowed him to gain power. And in human history our species still suffers from it. Germany got it's ass handed to it in WW1. We left them to rot. Well evolution always dictates that when you lack resources you will get to the point of fighting to get them. Hitler unfortunately sold Germany the a utopia where they would gain their dignity back and Germany would not be the embarrassing poverty stricken country it became. But, conversely, you look at both Japan and Germany after WW2 the allies finally did the right thing.

It really isn't that different in other contexts, like domestic crime, and the existence of gangs. You take away economic stability, the means to earn a living, humans will always seek survival. It is why in Africa today, the countries with high poverty rates are run by religious warlords and the rest of the populations of those countries follow the their tribal leaders who set up a gang system at a political level.

Starve any population enough and or create dependency through the sell of utopias, and you will have ready made lemmings ready to die for you. The same scare tactics are used by the right in America. The voting right in the middle class and working poor are convinced that the enemy is the left, and not the bad economics created by class warfare drummed up by the 1%.