So many of the bomb markers on the map are in a straight line, presumably the way they are dropped from the aircraft..

BTW, today is December 7; the day Pearl Harbor was attacked bringing the US into the war.

Just to keep some perspective, now, realise that we’d been at war, alone, since September 2009 when you think of all the movies showing us how they won the bloody thing for us.

My old man was in the Raf, my Grandfather was in the Great War, disfigured, never really talked about it, the old man however said he had the time of his life. I guess it depended on what happened to you, but the fact still remains as far as the bombing was concerned the Germans were carpet bombing London long before the RAF had capability to match what were really atrocity’s against the civilian population, taken because they couldn’t subdue the RAF fighters during daytime operations.

Londoners survived because they pretty much lived in Tube stations at night. My Grandfather lost his hardware stores, 3 of them pretty much wiped him out.

^^^

September 2009

1939 Maybe???

reading the replies on this thread reminded me of one thing , not so much the people that have given there lives in recent conflicts but the storys of the people of the WW2 era , my god it must of been scary as shit and of course why we give them 2 mins of thought a year.

A few happily recall chasing women/prams/children down the street shooting them up.

I’m actually pretty doubtful of this claim, yes they might have decided to strafe civilians but it’s pretty hard to pick out women and children when your doing 350 – 400 mph a few hundred feet off the deck. I’ve done just that in a single engined vintage fighter as a backseat ride – save for the strafing people part.

Also Germany didn’t start bombing London because they failed to subdue fighter command, they did it after bomber command accidentally bombed one of their cities (Berlin I think) instead of a military target.

All sides during the war seemed to be pretty guilty of some awful atrocities as well and I never buy the line “oh well they started it so they reaped what the sowed”.

bwaarp – Member

Also Germany didn’t start bombing London because they failed to subdue fighter command, they did it after bomber command accidentally bombed on of their cities (Berlin I think) instead of a military target.

What happened, one of theirs Bombed London first and it was an accident by an off course Bomber ditching its load, Churchill (possibly seized upon the incident)retaliated by Bombing Berlin and in a way sacrificed London precisely to save the fighter command airports that were getting hammered.

Either way at that time (1940 we didn’t have the longer range Lancasters that were to do the damage later in the War).

As to my reference back there to 2009 it was intended to illustrate the time period, from September 2009 until now, that England was fighting alone, Russia wasn’t attacked until June of 2011 and the whole thing was to continue until 2015, a bit like this recession only lots of folk were dying and bombs and then rockets were being dropped on us, and you wonder why some folk still hate Germans.

All sides during the war seemed to be pretty guilty of some awful atrocities as well and I never buy the line “oh well they started it so they reaped what the sowed”.

You really need to study what happened, read up on it, ‘they’ the Germans, and the Japs were a whole lot worse than the Allies, propaganda aside, Russia lost 20 million dead, 20 million!, that’s on top of the 6 million Jews slaughtered.
Don’t ever let any revisionistic liberal bullshit play that ‘both side were as bad as each other’ card, it really wasn’t like that at all, they were evil butchers, convinced of their own racial superiority slaughtering untermenscheng sub humans.

Do you actually believe if they won, they’d have simply turned our country back over to us as we did?

the population of Dresden didn’t talk much about the war either

You really need to study what happened, read up on it, ‘they’ the Germans, and the Japs were a whole lot worse than the Allies, propaganda aside, Russia lost 20 million dead, 20 million!, that’s on top of the 6 million Jews slaughtered.

Yet you don’t mention a great number of those 20m dead were caused by their own side. Stalin was no less evil than Hitler. No surrender, rape, murder, clearing minefields with infantry to save the tanks, starvation, executions……his tools were similar and his intent the same.

Perhaps our greatest war crime was our alliance with Stalin

Back on topic; very sobering. We have indeed as they say, never had it so easy…

Londoners survived because they pretty much lived in Tube stations at night

actually – only a tiny fraction of the population of london could fit into tube stations. A census in 1940 showed that 27% were spending the night in Anderson Shelters in their gardens, 9% in public shelters only 4% in underground stations. That leaves 60% who weren’t in any kind of shelter at all (although some would be on duty rather than at home)

The Morrison Shelter was devised to address this as the Anderson Shelter had two flaws – one was being in a tin box made the bombs sound terrifying and people would sneak back into their homes where they felt safer – the other was not everyone had a garden to put a shelter in. Ellen Wilkinson brought together designers and engineers to devise a solution and put it into manufacture – they arrived, she briefed them then shut them in the room on the understanding that they wouldn’t get out again until they had a solution ready to go to manufacture. Within 48hrs the shelters were specced ready to go into production. There was some really nice psychology in the design – the shelter was designed so you could use it as a kitchen table, as the best place to site them was on the ground floor and the kitchen floor was most likely to solid rather than over cellar. In bomb blasts walls on houses nearest to the blast would get sucked out leaving the floor to fall in one piece and crush the people inside – the shelter was designed to catch the collapsing floor, rather than be bomb proof in its own right, and be deformable so that it would absorb some of that impact.

For her initiative Ellen Wilkinson was immortalised by having the shelters named after her boss. Nice.

I really like the shelters – built a replica one once. The were pretty much the first bit of self assembly flat pack furniture most people would have ever bought. Love the instructions – ikea instructions should have a pipe smoker!

Interesting – I’d always thought they looked a bit useless, but that’s some clever design going on.

I guess it shows that you will always reap what you sow.

Having recently visited Hiroshima, and met a hibakusha (A-bomb survivor), I cannot agree with you. Her story was harrowing, as were the artifacts of the children caught in the blast. 3,000 Japanese citizens still die every year as a result of the bombing, many/most/all innocent. How can you condone that?

That backs up the story I was told that the neighbours house was hit. That was in Colindale Avenue. All the ceilings were still battened when I grew up there. Just down the street from RAF Hendon which seems to have got off lightly.

As to my reference back there to 2009 it was intended to illustrate the time period, from September 2009 until now, that England was fighting alone

Britain and England are not synonyms.

I’d always thought they looked a bit useless, but that’s some clever design going on.

Its a bit of switched on thinking really. the Anderson shelter was designed before the war – ariel bombardment was something that had never happened before but it was something that was bound to happen.In the run up to the war it was genuinely feared that there would a million casualties in the first night of bombing alone. Nobody knew what it would be like so they had to guess at the solutions. The anderson was designed for what the blitz might be, the morrison was designed for what the blitz actually was.

Britain and England are not synonyms.

they were in the 40s 🙂 Britain and England meant the same thing, linguistically if not geographically – the distinction is quite a modern one

3,000 Japanese citizens still die every year as a result of the bombing

Do you have any evidence of this extraordinary claim?

Q4. What percentage of A-bomb survivors within the study populations have died?
As of 2000, about 45% were alive, but more than 90% of those exposed under the age of 10 were still living. Projections suggest that in 2020 those percentages will be about 20% and 60% respectively.

Based on the total combined population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time being 600-700k people.
And approx 240k people died within 4 months of the blasts.

Those figures above don’t seem right ?

Based on the total combined population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time being 600-700k people.
And approx 240k people died within 4 months of the blasts.

Those figures above don’t seem right ?

The population the day before the bomb dropped is only one factor though – people who moved into the cities in the years that followed could/would be effected by the legacy of the bombs as would those born to survivors or settlers in the cities

The population the day before the bomb dropped is only one factor though – people who moved into the cities in the years that followed could/would be effected by the legacy of the bombs as would those born to survivors or settlers in the cities

Fair point.

I’ve still never seen anything that suggests 3000/Year (or any other figure) are still dying as a result of the bombings ?

I very much doubt it’s true.

And it certainly isn’t going to possible to prove it is true.

Do you actually believe if they won, they’d have simply turned our country back over to us as we did?

Are you forgetting the part where we handed control of half of Germany and most of Eastern Europe to a psychopathic dictator? Many people who fought for the Allies couldn’t even go home after the war 🙁

I’ve still never seen anything that suggests 3000/Year (or any other figure) are still dying as a result of the bombings ?

not defending the 3000 I was just pointing to the effected population being larger than the figure resident on the day. You’ve got the resident population, any settlers and then all their offspring. Someone who was a child on the day could quite sensibly be both alive today and have 3 or four generations of offspring – two or three children, 6 to 9 grand children, 18 – 24 great grandchildren all alive now and all subject to the effects to varying degrees. Feels like theres one too many zeros, even for an estimate though.

Yes, also extremely difficult to say that one particular person died as a result of the bomb – if they die of cancer, maybe, but even then it’s tricky, and what about if they just have poor health because of it but die of something else? How about if they die in a car crash because of bomb-induced cataracts (okay, that was a facetious example, but you get where I’m coming from).

jonah tonto – Member
the population of Dresden didn’t talk much about the war either

ha try discussing that with someone who gives a damn what happened to War time Germans
They lost 25,000, London lost over 30,000 and over a much longer period, Not to mention Liverpool, & Bristol details of which were kept quiet because things were so bad, then there’s Coventry the template for the whole affair 550 bombers in waves lasting 12 hours none stop.

RichPenny – Member
Do you actually believe if they won, they’d have simply turned our country back over to us as we did?
Are you forgetting the part where we handed control of half of Germany and most of Eastern Europe to a psychopathic dictator? Many people who fought for the Allies couldn’t even go home after the war

CaptainSlow – Member
You really need to study what happened, read up on it, ‘they’ the Germans, and the Japs were a whole lot worse than the Allies, propaganda aside, Russia lost 20 million dead, 20 million!, that’s on top of the 6 million Jews slaughtered.
Yet you don’t mention a great number of those 20m dead were caused by their own side. Stalin was no less evil than Hitler. No surrender, rape, murder, clearing minefields with infantry to save the tanks, starvation, executions……his tools were similar and his intent the same.

Perhaps our greatest war crime was our alliance with Stalin

Without Stalin and the alliance with him we’d have lost, no question, as it was it was a damn close run thing.

By the time the infamous Yalta conference which seeded all that territory, we were a spent force and Roosevelt was seriously ill, plus he’d lost more than the Allies put together and couldn’t trust the ‘capitalist’ west so needed a buffer zone, I’d have done exactly the same in his shoes, there were already Maverick Yank Generals like Patton spoiling for a fight with the ‘commie bastards’. They like us had been at war for four years the yanks had only been engaged for two and hadn’t suffered anything like the losses.

It was a nasty business, but we were in no position to dictate terms and lucky to come out of it retaining what we did and even then the seeds were sown for the passing over of control of large tracts of the ‘Empire’ to the Yanks, who settled our hash once and for all at Suez in ’56.

My flat took a direct hit.

They lost 25,000, London lost over 30,000 and over a much longer period

Have a look at this link:

WW2 Casualties by Nation

That says that there were 67000 civilian deaths in the UK, compared to 1100000 to 3250000 civilian deaths in Germany. I’ll stick my neck out and say that the German people suffered more from WW2. Not as much as the Polish did though. 16+ percent of the population killed. Christ.

For anyone in liverpool there are some good pictures in the old Lewis,s windows near what used to be Rapid Hardware of the bombs damage to Liverpool, also if you go for a ride up past crosby coastguard staton youll find a long beach wall made from broken bricks these where from all the damaged homes, they dumped them there.

Do you have any evidence of this extraordinary claim?

We were given this figure by our volunteer tour guide while we were standing in front of the box in the Peace Park which contains the names of all the victims of the bombing in Hiroshima. Every year they open the box and add the names of victims who have died that year. I’m certain she said 3,000, but it is possible she meant 300.

Of course, this isn’t evidence of causation, but when you’re stood in a place like that, talking to survivors, the last thing on your mind is questioning their scientific rigour.

about a month ago a massive bomb was found in a central district of Muinch.

some builders were knocking through a wall and found a massive RAF bomb. it had just been bricked up behind a wall.

anyway, the detenation didn’t go according to plan and there was an almighty bang. the straw that had been used to dampen the sound/explosion caught fire and set the surrounding buildings alight…

went past the site a week or so after and you could still smell the explosives and charred reamins of the no-longer-there buildings.

when i first arrived in germany i would sit on the train and look at the old people and begin wondering what they or their folks got up to during the war…

there is a guy that lives in the same neighbourhood as the GF’s folks that has numbers tatooed on his arm. why he decided to hang around is beyond me, but he now gives talks at schools and such.

the Bavarian parliment building has lots of pock-marks on its facade.

if you are ever in the Botanical Garden entrance building in Munich and the staff are not looking lift up the massive round carpet in the foyer. you’ll see a massive Swaztika there…

at one of the workshops i used to work at (workshop has now moved) there was a stone eagle on the roof. the the head of the eagle was a Swaztika. and this was just some random barn in a field…

Munich was pretty much flattened yet it is hard to believe when you see the city now. so much of the city centre was rebuilt according to pre-war plans.

in all my five years in the Vaterland i’m yet to meet anyone who is proud of what there forefathers got up to. many will speak on a very neutral, matter-of-fact level about what happened but no one is proud.

although saying that there are some dodgy groups, respectable but with close ties to the NPD (National Partie Deutschland) that have some rather suspect members and idealology.

Jawohl! Schneller!

Of course, this isn’t evidence of causation, but when you’re stood in a place like that, talking to survivors, the last thing on your mind is questioning their scientific rigour.

That’s fair enough.

But when you are no longer stood in a place like that, and have had some time to think about it, it’s probably best not to quote such unproven guesswork as if we’re in any way true ? 🙂

Without Stalin and the alliance with him we’d have lost, no question, as it was it was a damn close run thing.

By the time the infamous Yalta conference which seeded all that territory, we were a spent force and Roosevelt was seriously ill, plus he’d lost more than the Allies put together and couldn’t trust the ‘capitalist’ west so needed a buffer zone, I’d have done exactly the same in his shoes, there were already Maverick Yank Generals like Patton spoiling for a fight with the ‘commie bastards’. They like us had been at war for four years the yanks had only been engaged for two and hadn’t suffered anything like the losses.

It was a nasty business, but we were in no position to dictate terms and lucky to come out of it retaining what we did and even then the seeds were sown for the passing over of control of large tracts of the ‘Empire’ to the Yanks, who settled our hash once and for all at Suez in ’56.

I wasn’t suggesting we should not have got into an alliance with Stalin, history is clear we had little choice.

I was pointing out that Stalin was an arsehole just as much as the rest of those considered by history as being evil.

When I was growing up in east London, 40 years ago, any area of derelict ground was called a bomb site. Looking at that map I realise that some of them really were.

… it’s probably best not to quote such unproven guesswork as if we’re in any way true ?

Frankly, when you’ve got arseholes on this thread who think that killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people is justified for the decisions of their military, I couldn’t give a ****.

Frankly, when you’ve got arseholes on this thread who think that killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people is justified for the decisions of their military, I couldn’t give a ****.

Fair enough.

Carry on repeating made up statistics then.

Its not the best way to make your point. But it’s up to you.

CaptainSlow – Member

I was pointing out that Stalin was an arsehole just as much as the rest of those considered by history as being evil.

Ask a fair number of French and they’ll reckon Churchill was an arsehole, for pulling out the airforce too soon and sinking their fleet and some Germans blame him for starting the war in the first place, it’s all a matter of perspective. Wars bring arseholes to the surface and gives them purpose. Anyone want to talk about Kitchener in the first bloodbath?

Ormondroyd – sorry haven’t been on here for a bit – no, it wasn’t Reading, it was Penzance. He reckons they were after the telegraph cable link to the US and got the wrong building.

some fascinating recollections and stories in this thread.

also fascinating is how determined forum posters can be to have the last word on a subject

It’s ironic that Kitchener gets a mention, I have my Step Fathers Uncles bronze death plaque and bayonet from the First World War. I was sorting through some old letters and found one addressed to his brother saying how sorry to hear about his brothers death in the Dardenelles (Gallipoli). I’ve been reading up on the campaign and that is truly shocking at what happened on both sides. Omaha was bad but Gallipoli was savage and when you read about the monumental cock ups and decisions that were made by Kitchener, Churchill and other commanders it makes you realise that the lives on the ground seem so expendable to them.

What happened, one of theirs Bombed London first and it was an accident by an off course Bomber ditching its load, Churchill (possibly seized upon the incident)retaliated by Bombing Berlin and in a way sacrificed London precisely to save the fighter command airports that were getting hammered.

That was the one.

So Churchill used civilians to protect the military in a way that you would expect of HAMAS not a western leader, right?

We don’t really have a right to complain about “atrocities” committed by the Germans against us during the war because there were very few. Whilst German, a country in which the majority of the population never voted for the Nazi party during their rise to power suffered millions dead. Someone will probably mention that they got what the deserved due to the holocaust but I’m not so certain they did deserve this, the German people that is. The Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe and the Navy were never really that keen on the Nazi party and individual accounts show that they were often horrified and contemptuous of the SS – it’s certainly not a cut and dry issue. In any case I prefer to think of the Germans an people as victims of the Nazi party.

Some posters on here really need to STFU considering our involvement in hilarious genocidal escapades such as Ireland, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the ‘accidental’ deaths of Boers in internment camps during the Boer war, the Mau Mau uprising and our all round general imperialism that revolved around annexing countries smaller than us.

Oh but you’re a dirty liberal if you think the morality of a war is only that which is decided by the victors – when Britain kills foreigners it’s because we were showing those dirty savage jungle bunnies how to live properly and educating them, when Germany does the same it’s because they’re evil.

We have the same bias today with terrorism. According to the west “People like Saddam and bin Laden hate us for our freedom while we love freedom”. The US/UK’s close alliance with Saudi Arabia as well as their support of Colombian death squads demonstrates this love of freedom.

Mass slaughter and destruction are OK when we do it because we are spreading democracy and freedom such as protecting the Iranian people from themselves by overthrowing democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. When they do it, its because they are spreading fear and hatred. Another difference between “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Terrorism” and Terrorism is that we have God on our side and they don’t. Whether an act of violence is terrorism or “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Terrorism” also depends on who perpetrates it. If the act is committed by leftist guerrillas in Colombia, socialists or communists in Latin America, Islamic extremists, Basque separatists, or Palestinian militants it is terrorism. If it is committed by American Backed Banana Republics including Colombia, the United Kingdom or Israel, then it is “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Terrorism”.

I **** hate people.

Gallipoli – Dad’s dad was there in one of the early waves. About the only one in his little lot who got out alive and he was badly injured. You couldn’t get him near the medical profession after that (I can remember his describing all doctors as “horse butchers”, which I strongly suspect was a memory from Gallipoli). Afterwards he got posted to the Somme and then Ypres where he served in the front line, but he managed to survive the whole show from 1914 to 1918 and ended up an expert on posion gas. Oh yes and the family got totally bombed out twice in Plymouth in the second war before Dad got evacuated to Penzance as a schoolboy (and then bombed there, see above story).