Re: Bombing targets
Eberhard Weber (eweber@cati.csufresno.edu)
Mon, 3 Jun 1996 23:46:09 -0700
Kevin Murray wondered why allied bombers did not consider bombing
the deathcamps, knowing it will cost many lives to do so but
perhaps save many more from their eventual fate.
Kevin - there was supposed to have been a US officer in Vietnam
who defended the action of his unit destroying a village by
saying "we had to destroy the village to save it".
I would not only agree but place a mandate on civilized societies
to bomb the gas chambers and administration buildings and the
military barracks of those camps because today we can send missiles
down a chimney, any particular window of a building or hit any
target the size of a car. Or smaller.
But in those days, precision bombing was still a shotgun approach.
There was no way at all to single out any particular building.
Other than for a slim margin of luck, a bombing raid would almost
certainly have killed hundreds and more likely many htousands
of innocent civilians. This would have given Hitler much
satisfaction. It would have created uproar in the United States
and among other allies. I can understand your thinking, but you
stop short of thinking it through in all of its consequences.
Neither Germany nor the allies had any particular concern for
civilians during the war, or any war. But these camps stood for
the victims of that regime, and bombing the victims is wrong in
principle, as a strategy and as a policy, even if you are willing
to sacrifice them in hopes of sparing others. It would not have
spared them, believe me. Once a system decides to kill people
on an industrial scale, they may change the technology, not hte
policy.
Eberhard Weber
The Berlin Schoolboy