Today's discussion questions

[sabotabby]

It's another one of those long days at school and I won't be around, so here are two discussion questions for you. Fight talk amongst yourselves.

1. What do we think of this news story? There's a lot in there, so let's pick it to pieces.

2. Speaking of genocide, the Toronto District School Board has a new history course dealing with the subject. It officially recognizes three genocides: Armenia, the Holocaust, and Rwanda. What's missing, and why do you think they chose to exclude the genocide that happened in the country where the course will be taught.

Have a happy Friday!

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Does he have any idea of what "bombing" meant in the forties? Does he really want to have killed everyone in the camp, inmates and all, except for a few random survivors? Maybe this is what liberation means to him.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

It would have been technically possible to have taken out the railway lines leading to Auschwitz, at least by late 1944, but they would have been fairly easy to repair. While the kind of area bombing you link to was the normal type of operation, especially for the British and Canadian night bombers, much more precise operations were possible. Examples would include the "Dambuster" raid, the bombing of the Tirpitz and, perhaps most spectacularly, taking out one wall of Amiens jail so that Resistance members held by the Germans could be busted out.

Probably the biggest problem involved in any kind of air operation against the extermination camps would have been that, being in Poland, they would have been at the extreme of the western allies bomber force's operational range. Out of range before the autumn of 1944 I'd imagine. It was the same problem that made it almost impossible to send supplies to the Warsaw Rising.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

*nods* all good points, thank you. (I had somehow managed never to read about Operation Jericho before, so that will be an interesting thing to research today.)

I was wondering about the operational range of bombers, too (particularly since earlier I noted his stress on how the US, rather than the Allies, should have done this, and wondered how on earth the planes were going to get across the Atlantic twice. Was it really a common thing for the USAF to carry out bombing raids against the European mainland, and did they do so from London or somewhere like the RCAF did, or does he maybe just think the Allies were called "the US"?)

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

There were significant USAAF bombing operations carried out from bases in the UK and Italy. (In fact my local hospital where I grew up was built by the USAAF). The problem would have been that any kind of precision operation would have had to be carried out in daylight, which means, in effect, by the Americans. To avoid very high loss rates they would have needed fighter escorts. The range (round trip) of a P51D with external tanks was 2600km so SE Britain to Poland would have been theoretically possible. I don't think it would have been practical though as, in practice, the Luftwaffe would probably have engaged the escorts over Western Europe on the outbound leg forcing the pilots to ditch the external tanks (aircombat with external tanks on isn't really feasible) and turn back early leaving the bombers exposed.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

That (and what's before that) is illuminating, thanks. In a somewhat loosely related historical note, the U.S. (I'm quoting Norman Finkelstein here (as in "I don't really know anything on the subject myself")) did not support Israel much prior to 1967, when it began using it as a strategic ally.

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

Another possibility could have been sending the bombers to Russian held territory to refuel after the mission. Churchill suggested doing as much when to Stalin during the Warsaw uprising (except sending supply planes instead). But Stalin, true to his character, denied that there was even an uprising happening at the time to Churchill's emissary (who was the head of the London based Polish goverment).

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I was aware of the history of trying to use Russian bases for air operations so considered that to be a non starter from the off. The Russians wouldn't even allow British planes to be based on their territory to cover the Arctic convoys.