Sunday, May 29, 2016

Noted

Not posting anything re Memorial Day partly because busy etc. right now, but the comment thread attached to this post has some interesting contributions, mostly the personal stories about parents' and relatives' WW2 experiences, etc.
Posted by at

2 comments:

hank_F_M said...

LFC

Well, I was going to post this to the comment thread, but their login didn't like me.

======================================================



One result of the [World War i's] trench warfare was there was a firm commitment that this would never never happen again. To the point that normal judgment was warped.

…

(When) the US and UK entered WWII there was a strong commitment to strategic and even terror bombing in parts of the Air Forces and in the Civilian leadership. Massive amounts of resources were committed to this at the governmental level. The Manhattan project was simply an extension of this program.


The terror bombing option was the result of what happened in the trenches in WWI. The memory burned so hard that even terror bombing looked like proportionally less evil than going back to the trenches. An attitude that would have been unthinkable before WWI and is becoming more so again. When we look at things like the RAF de-housing campaign in Germany or Gen LeMay’s fire bombing of Japan or the decision to use the Atomic bomb, it was made in a context where they saw a far greater evil. (Ironically the targeting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made with much more reference to military value than General LeMay's firebombing.)

. . .


A thought.

What in the name of "Hiroshima - never again" will we accept?




From a longer old post on the subject.




http://eclecticmeanderings.blogspot.com/2005/08/horror-of-trenches.html


Hank

Hank's Eclectic Meanderings

May 30, 2016 at 8:41 PM
LFC said...

"I was going to post this to the comment thread, but their login didn't like me."

I think that to post at Lawyers Guns & Money through their current log-in system, if you're doing it for the first time, requires e-mailing Robert Farley and getting a password. Which you may or may not want to bother with, depending I suppose on whether you think you might ever comment there.

On the substance, I agree that the Manhattan Project / A-bomb has to be seen in the broader context of 'conventional' city bombing in WW2.

I was thinking of posting something about Obama in Hiroshima, but I've been somewhat pressed for time lately and have not read the full text of his speech.

May 30, 2016 at 11:08 PM

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