View Full Version : News Worthy??
Check this out. It's a little long but well worth your time.
Lebanon (http://www.seconddraft.org/streaming/pallywood.wmv)
Incredible. :eek: :mad: :rolleyes:
Unreal. Wonder who taped that...
x SF med
07-24-2006, 20:33
And once again - the winner is..... the media.
Victimization is an industry in every arena; from obese people blaming McDonalds and race baiters (Al and Jesse) to I guess now the poor, poor Palestinian people. Disturbing video.
The Reaper
07-25-2006, 08:23
I believe that this article has relevance.
TR
TOO NICE TO WIN? ISRAEL'S DILEMMA
New York Post
July 25, 2006 -- WHAT if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?
What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?
What if this triumph of universalism is demonstrated by the Left's insistence that American and Israeli military actions marked by an extraordinary concern for preventing civilian casualties are in fact unacceptably brutal? And is also apparent in the Right's claim that a war against a country has nothing to do with the people but only with that country's leaders?
Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants voluntarily limits itself in this manner?
Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Didn't the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn't that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?
What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
If you can't imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any American leader you could imagine doing so?
And if America can't do it, can Israel? Could Israel - even hardy, strong, universally conscripted Israel - possibly stomach the bloodshed that would accompany the total destruction of Hezbollah?
If Lebanon's 300-plus civilian casualties are already rocking the world, what if it would take 10,000 civilian casualties to finish off Hezbollah? Could Israel inflict that kind of damage on Lebanon - not because of world opinion, but because of its own modern sensibilities and its understanding of the value of every human life?
Where do these questions lead us?
What if Israel's caution about casualties among its own soldiers and Lebanese civilians has demonstrated to Hezbollah and Hamas that as long as they can duck and cover when the missiles fly and the bombs fall, they can survive and possibly even thrive?
What if Israel has every capability of achieving its aim, but cannot unleash itself against a foe more dangerous, more unscrupulous, more unprincipled and more barbaric than even the monstrous leaders of the Intifada it managed to quell after years of suicide attacks?
And as for the United States, what if we have every tool at our disposal to win a war - every weapons system we could want manned by the most superbly trained military in history - except the ability to match or exceed our antagonists in ruthlessness?
Is this the horrifying paradox of 21st century warfare? If Israel and the United States cannot be defeated militarily in any conventional sense, have our foes discovered a new way to win? Are they seeking victory through demoralization alone - by daring us to match them in barbarity and knowing we will fail?
Are we becoming unwitting participants in their victory and our defeat? Can it be that the moral greatness of our civilization - its astonishing focus on the value of the individual above all - is endangering the future of our civilization as well?
jpodhoretz@gmail.com
Airbornelawyer
07-25-2006, 09:25
Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
JPod makes a fairly good argument, but he supports it with an all too common fallacy that is a peeve of mine.
The United States "did not have it in [itself] to firebomb Dresden." The RAF did that. Between 7 October 1944 and 17 April 1945, the U.S. Eighth Air Force conducted six air raids on Dresden's marshalling yards and one on its industrial zone. In these six raids, it dropped 3,800.3 tons of HE and 640.9 tons of incendiaries (4,441.2 tons in total) on what were military targets. The American raids were daylight raids, putting our aircrews at greater risk from the Luftwaffe and German FlAK defenses, but improving accuracy in the targeting.
The "firebombing" of Dresden was a night raid on 14 February 1945 by the Royal Air Force Bomber Command on the main Dresden city area. The RAF dropped 1,477.7 tons of HE and 1,181.6 tons of incendiaries on the city as a whole. Bomber Command's primary intent was "to devastate the city area itself and thereby choke communications within the city and disrupt the normal civilian life upon which the larger communications activities and the manufacturing enterprises of the city depended." Secondarily, destroying the entire city would theoretically destroy German industrial capacity spread out through the city and not concentrated in the industrial zone.
The Eighth Air Force not only put its crews at greater risk by primarily bombing in daylight, but as anyone who has ever read any history of U.S. strategic bombing in World War II (or anyone who watched a lot of Hogan's Heroes) knows, the U.S. also expended a lot of effort to produce more accurate technology for bombing, such as the Norden bombsight.
The Pacific Theater is a different story, and while there were technological reasons for relying less on precision bombing (the B-29s and the Norden bombsight had a lot of problems with accuracy due to jetstreams), the U.S. also seemed more inclined to repay Japanese savagery in the conduct of war in kind.
Airbornelawyer
07-25-2006, 09:37
Back on topic, I don't really have time to fully dissect JPod's argument, but while I would agree with elements underlying his thesis - we seem to have forgotten, or no longer have to stomach to realize, that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs - I am not sure if he, or those who think we'd be better off if only we had killed a few thousand more Arabs, recognize that you can't make an omelet by throwing a bunch of egg cartons at a wall and hoping some of the splatter ends up in the pan.
Somewhat less glibly, I would note that there are several recent examples of relatively "no holds barred" military strategies which haven't exactly resulted in victory - the French in Algeria, the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya and the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.
I am not sure if the flaw isn't Western morality, but Western rationality - the belief that we can arrive at technical solutions to non-technical problems. Our Air Force has certainly seemed to have spent the last 60 years on a quest to prove the validity of strategic bombing theory by building more accurate weapons, rather than exploring the human dimension of whether PGMs really "shock" or "awe".
The Reaper
07-25-2006, 09:48
Well, the Germans had not bombed US civilian population centers (not sure if that was for moral or technical reasons). They bombed the hell out of British cities when they could during the Blitz, then used V1 and V2 raids on population centers when they no longer had the manned capability.
As you note, the Japanese had attacked our civilians and would have done much more, had they been able to.
The USAAF did in fact, hit Dresden with a daylight raid on 14 February, in the wake of the previous night's fire bombing.
Good history lesson, AL.
TR
Airbornelawyer
07-25-2006, 10:28
Well, the Germans had not bombed US civilian population centers (not sure if that was for moral or technical reasons). They bombed the hell out of British cities when they could during the Blitz, then used V1 and V2 raids on population centers when they no longer had the manned capability.
As you note, the Japanese had attacked our civilians and would have done much more, had they been able to.
The USAAF did in fact, hit Dresden with a daylight raid on 14 February, in the wake of the previous night's fire bombing.
Good history lesson, AL.
TR
Just to clarify, the 14 February daylight raid, as well as another by the 8th Air Force on 15 February, were on the marshalling yards.
"Bomber" Harris often claimed that his Bomber Command's preference for nighttime bombing was a force protection measure, but Bomber Command lost 55,573 killed in action in 364,514 operational sorties. Flying at night required flying in close formation, which increased the risk of planes hitting each other and made for riper targets for night fighters and FlAK. By comparison, U.S. heavy bomber crew combat and accident losses in the European Theater of Operations were 4,358 from June 1943 to 1945, in 257,214 effective sorties.
The Reaper
07-25-2006, 10:36
True, but the Brits were bombing early on with horrendous losses, and by the time we started, the Luftwaffe (both aircraft and flak batteries) had been significantly attritted.
Are you maintaining that the Brits lost more during comparable periods while primarily flying night missions than the US flying daylight profiles?
TR
Airbornelawyer
07-25-2006, 13:20
True, but the Brits were bombing early on with horrendous losses, and by the time we started, the Luftwaffe (both aircraft and flak batteries) had been significantly attritted.
Are you maintaining that the Brits lost more during comparable periods while primarily flying night missions than the US flying daylight profiles?
TR
Is that the inference? Is a loss rate almost exactly nine times greater (8.998%) explained solely by the losses earlier in the campaign? Keep in mind also that the major Bomber Command effort did not begin until 1942-43, so there was not a lot of lead time between them and the Americans. Losses were significantly higher in the early raids, especially in 1941 and 1942, when smaller groups of aircraft would venture into much better defenses.
However, as regards the specific question - "Are you maintaining that the Brits lost more during comparable periods while primarily flying night missions than the US flying daylight profiles?" - I'm going to have to go with yes, although the numbers appear somewhat closer than that 9-to-1 difference.
The RAF Bomber Command monthly diary doesn't maintain crew losses, but reports aircraft losses and sortie numbers. Unfortunately, in most cases it doesn't summarize and I don't have time to collate the numbers, but if you want to check the totals, you can (link at bottom). I can only pick what may be representative examples.
Since the infamous Dresden raid was in February 1945, we can start here. Unfortunately, the Army Air Forces Statistical Digest doesn't break down heavy bomber losses by month. However, for 1945, heavy bomber 1st line aircraft losses (combat and accident) were 1,110. The heavies flew 83,921 effective sorties, so the loss rate per effective sortie was 1.3% (a drop from 1944's 2.3% and 1943's 5.9%, so we too were learning lessons and attriting the enemy, plus the P-51 effect and having fighter escort bases on the continent).
RAF Bomber Command statistics for major raids in February 1945:
• 1/2 February 1945 - 1,273 sorties, 10 aircraft (0.8%) lost
• 2/3 February 1945 - 1,252 sorties, 21 aircraft (1.7%) lost.
• 3/4 February 1945 - 510 sorties, 12 aircraft (2.4%) lost
• 4/5 February 1945 - 678 sorties, 5 aircraft (0.7%) lost.
• 7/8 February 1945 - 1,205 sorties, 10 aircraft (0.8%) lost.
• 8/9 February 1945 - 1,020 sorties, 17 aircraft (1.7%) lost.
• 13/14 February 1945 - 1,406 sorties, 9 aircraft (0.6%) lost.
• 14/15 February 1945 - 1,316 sorties, 23 aircraft (1.7%) lost.
• 20/21 February 1945 - 1,283 sorties, 22 aircraft (1.7%) lost.
• 21/22 February 1945 - 1,110 sorties, 34 aircraft (3.1%) lost.
• 23/24 February 1945 - 666 sorties, 17 aircraft (2.6%) lost.
The average for these is about 1.5%, slightly higher than the US average for the year. One more reference from 1945:
• 1/2 January 1945 - 598 sorties, 1 aircraft (0.2%) lost; 5 a/c crashed in UK.
• 2/3 January 1945 - 1,069 sorties, 9 aircraft (0.8%) lost.
• 5/6 January 1945 - 1,000 sorties, 37 aircraft (3.7%) lost.
• 6/7 January 1945 - 788 sorties, 11 aircraft (1.4%) lost.
• 7/8 January 1945 - 822 sorties, 17 aircraft (2.1%) lost.
• 13/14 January 1945 - 550 sorties, 4 aircraft (0.7%) lost.
• 14/15 January 1945 - 1,214 sorties, 17 aircraft (1.4%) lost; 14 a/c crashed in UK.
• 16/17 January 1945 - 1,238 sorties, 30 aircraft (2.4%) lost.
• 22/23 January 1945 - 598 sorties, 2 aircraft (0.3%) lost.
• 28/29 January 1945 - 770 sorties, 12 aircraft (1.6%) lost.
That's 1.8%. Again somewhat higher than the U.S. average for the year (actually, about 70% higher).
These are just quickly thrown together. With time, we could cull out raids here which weren't by heavies, so we aren't comparing any Mosquitos to Flying Fortresses. But it seems evident that even toward the end, when German defenses were seriously degraded and Mosquitos flying from bases on the continent could stay with the Halifaxes and Lancasters, RAF flying at night was still much less safe than US flying during the day.
Another factor about aircraft losses versus aircrew losses: a Halifax in Luftwaffe gunsights often meant a dead crew, while a B-17 was often able to limp home, such that the aircraft might have been lost, but not the whole crew. This, as well as the difficulties for the RAF earlier on, might partially account for the discrepancies between aircraft loss rates (50% to twice as high as the AAF) and crew losses (9 times as high, as noted).
Bomber Command Campaign Diary: http://www.raf.mod.uk/bombercommand/diary.html
Army Air Forces Statistical Digest (most tables, HTML format) - http://www.usaaf.net/digest/index.htm
Army Air Forces Statistical Digest (all tables, but PDF format) - http://afhra.maxwell.af.mil/aafsd/aafsd_list_of_tables.html
Airbornelawyer
07-25-2006, 13:47
If you take the Mosquitos out so that you are only looking at the heavy bombers (Lancasters and Halifaxes), in most case the percentages go up. For example, 2/3 Feb 1945 becomes 2.0% and 3/4 Feb 1945 becomes 3.3%.
The Reaper
07-25-2006, 14:27
AL:
Great explanation and analysis, thanks. Kind of destroys the Memphis Belle image and the myth of the difficulty of making the 25 missions, eh? Thirteen .50s (B-17G) for defense sure beats six .303s (Halifax) or eight .303s (Lancaster) any day of the week.
I agree, the Flying Fortress got many people home who would have otherwise been dead. Some of the stuff you see limping in, shot to pieces, to crash land on a grass strip reminds me of the A-10 footage from modern times.
"This B-17 met a head-on attack by three Focke-Wulf FW-190 fighters. The gunners exploded two of them, and the top turret poured a stream of shells into the cockpit of the third. With a dead man at the controls, the fighter screamed in, and at a closing speed of 550 miles per hour smashed head on into the number-three engine. The tremendous impact of the crash tore off the propeller. It knocked the heavy bomber completely out of formation as though a giant hand has swatted a fly. The fighter cartwheeled crazily over the B-17. It cut halfway through the wing, and then sliced a third of the way through the horizontal stabilizer. The top and ball turrets immediately jammed, the radio equipment was smashed to wreckage, and all the instruments 'went crazy.' Pieces of metal from the exploding, disintegrating Focke-Wulf tore through the fuselage, and a German gun barrel buried itself in the wall between the radio room and the bomb bay. Crews of nearby bombers watched the collision. They saw a tremendous explosion, and the bomber hurtling helplessly out of control, tumbling as she fell. They reported when they returned to base that the Flying Fortress had blown up, and that the crew must be considered dead. The old Queen hadn't blown up, and the crew was far from dead. The pilots struggled wildly in the cockpit, and somehow between them managed to bring their careening bomber back under control. The gunners shot down a fourth fighter that had closed in to watch the proceedings. And then they brought her all the way back to England, and scraped her down for a belly landing on the runway. Postscript: not a man was injured." –Martin Caidin, in his book Black Thursday
Great old war bird. RIP, those who flew to combat in her.
We now return you to the actual topic of this thread.
TR
112thSOLCA
08-15-2006, 09:03
Here is another piece that gives a closer examination to the information the media provides us.
http://www.aish.com/movies/JP/PhotoFraud.asp
Great link. Only reconfirms what any honest minded person already knows..that the media does not give the news...they tell stories. :mad: