Nuklear bomb

[Dozer_EAF19]

Originally Posted by Madfish

To me, air combat always was the cleanest side of the war. But the very same thing Hitler was despised for, taking innocent lives over his cause, happened in these days of the first RAF bombing runs or the two atomic bombs etc.
If the bombs really do get added people will mod them. You can imagine the scenarios people will come up with for such a weapon, can't you? I'm unsure if the game should allow such mass destruction. There was and is absolutely NO reasonable target for the use of such bombs. And remembering 9/11 makes clear that it doesn't even take an atomic bomb to turn a whole country into hell - I don't think these weapons do belong into the realm of modern developed society as they are a weapon of inferiority and cruelty and not a weapon of reason and logic.

There is no comparison between the bombing of cities, and Hitler's genocide.

"The defeats of 1944 had cost the Germans 1.8 million men killed. In the first five months of 1945, whilst Speer was encouraging his Fuehrer to one last show of resistance, 1.4 million German soldiers met their deaths, 450,000 in January alone. Nor does this include the tens of thousands of civilians who fell victim to Allied bombing. To describe the destruction of Germany in 1945 in the language of the Holocaust is both obscene and inaccurate. This was a war, not a massacre of the innocents. It may have felt like a slaughter to those on the receiving end, but this was an effect of the means used, not the ends intended. The Western Allies broke no law of war that had not been breached by the Wehrmacht a hundred times over. The Red Army behaved barbarically in the territories it occupied, but the Soviets did not perpetrate a genocide. Nazi Germany had challenged three of the greatest industrial powers on earth. It had taken them five long years to bring their industrial might fully to bear. But now their war machines were fully assembled and in the first five months of 1945 they cut their way into the territory of Germany with truly horrendous effects. The Allies waged war with a volume of firepower unlike that ever used in any previous conflict. The results were nightmarish and would have been even worse but for the fact that the policy of 'Germany first' meant that the Nazi regime was destroyed before the atomic bomb was ready for use."

That is an extract from "The Wages of Destruction - the Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze, who's an economic history lecturer at Cambridge (, England). The comments I made in my last post, about Hitler's motives, are also based on this book.

The late-war destruction of their cities came because the German government wouldn't surrender when it was hopeless, preferring to keep fighting almost to the last man, putting as high a human cost on the nations they'd attacked as possible in the hope of getting a better position at the negotiating table. The Allies needed to get Germany to surrender as soon as possible, because every day of war had a huge cost in Allied lives, and bombing the cities was a legitimate if tragic way to try to force a surrender. (This is true of Germany; I don't know about Japan, or their negotiations with the USSR.) There is no comparison with the German policy of enslaving the populations of the territories they conquered and then working and starving them to death or gassing them in concentration camps.