Merged Roosevelt's Rotten Record:Communism, Treachery, Betrayal

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Sure, why wouldn't I? He was the C-in-C. Why? Are you arguing that he didn't have knowledge? That his administration had no control over or knowledge of what subordinate departments were doing?

Do you figure the government was just out of control?

Name one President that knew EVERYTHING that was happening in his administration.

 

[BazBear]

Name one President that knew EVERYTHING that was happening in his administration.

Oh come on GZ, everyone knows all U.S. Presidents are omniscient, clairvoyant, precognitive, and telepathic. Jeezum!

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Oh come on GZ, everyone knows all U.S. Presidents are omniscient, clairvoyant, precognitive, and telepathic. Jeezum!

And they have never heard of "plausible deniability" so they have to know everything every single one of their subordinates do, down the local letter carriers and that private standing guard over a garbage bin at Fort Kit Carson.

Given the above I guess we CAN stick FDR with the Tuskegee travesty. My bad.

 

[BazBear]

And they have never heard of "plausible deniability" so they have to know everything every single one of their subordinates do, down the local letter carriers and that private standing guard over a garbage bin at Fort Kit Carson.

Given the above I guess we CAN stick FDR with the Tuskegee travesty. My bad.

Yeah, that would take micromanagement to whole new (incredible) level. But it would seem that in SHC's world, any and all evil government things are possible.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Yeah, that would take micromanagement to whole new (incredible) level. But it would seem that in SHC's world, any and all evil government things are possible.

You just have to dumb down the Presidency to the level of Andy of Mayberry and there you go!

 

[Cl1mh4224rd]

You don't get to be right by default.

Neither do you.

 

[Hans]

Oh come on GZ, everyone knows all U.S. Presidents are omniscient, clairvoyant, precognitive, and telepathic. Jeezum!

That is a nice addition to his belief that the entire gub'mint is a monolithic organization....maybe FDR was an advanced human or alien from the future? lol

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

FDR isn't as evil as one of his minions, however. Capt. Beardall, his naval attache, bought into the conspiracy despite the fact that his own son was one of the people in the cross-hairs. I can just imagine it...

"Okay, anyone have an objections to just letting it happen? We really need to look like idiots so the country will rally around us while we wait for the Germans to declare war on us. Anyone? Captain Beardall?"

"No problem, sir! My slavish devotion to you trumps any affection I may have for the little peckerhead. Anyway, he always did like his mother more than me. AND I'm his beneficiary. That insurance money will buy me a new Cadillac once they go on sale again after the war."

"Good man, Captain. I'll promote you again in a few weeks. How would you like to be ambassador to Tahiti?"

 

[Dancing David]

True, the bomb is a bad thing. But that's today's evaluation. They didn't know much about the bomb except that it was A BIG BOMB when they were deciding whether to use it or not. In all my reading on this subject (and I've been paid to give talks about it) I've never read anything where they discussed or even mentioned lingering effects of radiation or the irradiation of people in the target area where it was to be used. Of course some scientists, like Oppenheimer, knew that pure uranium has hazardous, but the experiments done were in the lab, using small amounts and (happily) without a fission reaction of any scale being involved.

Quite simply, the Emperor stepped up after the second bomb and said, "Enough!" The Soviet declaration of war must be factored into this, those two events being the tip-over point.

Hi,
I was actually talking about the use of conventional weapons on indiscriminate civilian targets.

The use of the a-bomb is what it was, and what war is in general: a way of enforcing political power through force.

 

[Dancing David]

Are you actually arguing that our government was completely unaware of the risks of radiation exposure to humans? That our government didn't know that radiation was dangerous?

Do you have any proof of this?

You made the positive claim, the burden is on you.

 

[Dancing David]

I can respect the fact that people can reasonably disagree on the matter.





It did, but as stated, the effects were more indirect.

When Hamburg was largely burned to the ground in July of 1943 it had a tremendous psychological impact. Albert Speer stated that another half-dozen German cities wrecked in the same way in short order would "bring Germany's armaments production to a total halt." Erhard Milch stated that "If we get just five or six more attacks like those on Hamburg, the German people will just lay down their tools, however great their willpower..." But the RAF couldn't replicate what it had done at Hamburg, so Germany recovered. As it was some four months' of war production was lost in the city. That's not inconsequential. (Whether that was worth the cost in lives is another calculation entirely.)

More generally, the European bombing campaign produced the following effects. Quoting from The Crucible of War 1939-1945 by Brereton Greenhous, Stephen J. Harris, William C. Johnson, and William G.P. Rawling:




There are some noteworthy indirect effects in the above. Were those effects worth the cost in human lives? That's the harder question to answer. I personally would answer yes, because war is hell and whatever one can do to shorten the hell likely means fewer deaths overall.





The idea was sound—ball bearing production was one of the key choke points in war production. The problem was that at the time the USAAF attempted to knock it out it did so with an insufficiently strong bomber force (it wasn't really grasped just how many bombers were needed to truly knock out a target) and without long-range fighter escort. So that the results were ultimately disappointing should not be surprising.

The Allies were also misled in their bomb damage assessments. They get the post-strike photos of a target, see all kinds of wrecked buildings, would conclude the target had been destroyed, cross it off the list, and move to the next target. Only it was often the case that the damage on the ground was not nearly as severe as it looked from the air. So a wrecked facility wasn't really wrecked and production would be resumed in relatively short order.

The Allies also left some potentially decisive targets off the list. There was no campaign against the German electrical supply, for example, even though a sustained effort against it could have produced results as decisive as those obtained in the attacks against oil and transportation.

I agree with all this, I spent quite a bit of time obsessed about WWII, I just happen to feel that the bombing of civilian targets is wrong.

And Speer spent a lot of time compensating for the loss of ball bearing production, hence the comment by the Allied commander.

The choice of targets is not one I have looked into quite as much.

 

[Dancing David]

No, burden of proof lies with you. You don't get to be right by default.

Sorry, but that's just the way it's going to be from now on.

Nope you made the positive claim that the bomb makers knew all the dangers of radiation, so the burden falls to you.

Sophistry shall avail you naught.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Hi,
I was actually talking about the use of conventional weapons on indiscriminate civilian targets.

Guernica, Rotterdam, Nanking, the Axis doesn't have a lot of reason to complain.

The use of the a-bomb is what it was, and what war is in general: a way of enforcing political power through force.

War happens when diplomacy fails, and diplomacy picks up again after the war is over.

 

[Dancing David]

Guernica, Rotterdam, Nanking, the Axis doesn't have a lot of reason to complain.
War happens when diplomacy fails, and diplomacy picks up again after the war is over.

You won't find me defending the Axis.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Area Bombing was a result of the weight of losses to both German and British aircraft in daylight raids early in the war. Night raids aren't precise at all, you hit the general area. Later in the war with the advent of Radar and various other pathfinder techniques it becale more accurate and of course long range fighters made daylight raids sustainable.

 

[Myron Proudfoot]

Name one President that knew EVERYTHING that was happening in his administration.

George Washington, hour 1 of day 1. After that, not so much.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You won't find me defending the Axis.

Sorry if I implied that, didn't mean to.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

George Washington, hour 1 of day 1. After that, not so much.

Actually, no. The folks on the border between Georgia and then-Spanish Florida, as well as the folks on the western frontier, and up in Maine, were just a few of the folks doing things that day that George wouldn't hear about.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Area Bombing was a result of the weight of losses to both German and British aircraft in daylight raids early in the war. Night raids aren't precise at all, you hit the general area. Later in the war with the advent of Radar and various other pathfinder techniques it becale more accurate and of course long range fighters made daylight raids sustainable.

I agree with this, but it's not often brought out that there were actually improvements in the bombing accuracy.

Might as mention this here. I hear "less than 50% of the bombs fell within five miles of the target." Damning statistic or sound byte? The line is from the RAF's study of bombing results, done in January of 1940. Very early in the war, and it lead to improvement in the system.

 

[Corsair 115]

I agree with all this, I spent quite a bit of time obsessed about WWII, I just happen to feel that the bombing of civilian targets is wrong.

Again, I understand and sympathize with the point. But the point hinges upon the definition of 'civilian target' and when it comes to an industrialized nation-state engaged in total war against another industrialized nation-state, pretty much everything civilian feeds into the national war effort in one way or another.

The choice of targets is not one I have looked into quite as much.

Part of the problem there was that the Allies looked at German weaknesses through the prism of their own weaknesses. When the USAAF looked at the key choke points in the economy to target, it considered the electrical supply. But the U.S. had an ample electrical supply, so any attacks against electricity wouldn't produce significant results. They assumed that the same would be true for Germany, so the electrical supply was dropped as a potential target. For much the same reason oil production was a low priority target for a long time. It was only Ultra decrypts indicating how much attacks against oil were hurting Germany that got oil moved up to the top of the target lists.

The assumption that the enemy's weaknesses are the same as one's own happened on both sides during the war.