[Merged] - Winston Churchill a war criminal? (2024)

Corsair 115 said:

Have you accounted for the fact that Harris was often bombastic, and therefore, perhaps, his words should not be taken quite as literally as you are? Have you accounted for the reality of industrial activity in cities of the time, which was quite different from today?

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Maybe, but I hope you're realizing that, for all the throwing around "revisionism" in this thread, you're the first one to propose that the primary sources are lying.

Also, let's remember that his statement was to the government, urging them to be honest about the goals of the bombing campaign. If you're saying that he was essentially straight-up lying to the government about the war, I dunno, man... that seems pretty dick-ish to me right there.

Corsair 115 said:

Except for the fact it might well have worked had another half-dozen or so German cities been hit as hard as Hamburg was in July of 1943, as testimony from some notable Reich officials stated.

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Maybe, but that has no bearing on my analogy with Vlad's campaign in Bulgaria. After all, even one raid caused the Sultan to stop a ground campaign in order to deal with it. If he could do about half a dozen more, he might have knocked the Ottoman Empire out of its conquest campaign for the next decade at the very least. In fact, accounting for the war of succession later, it might have knocked the Ottomans out of the war for the rest of the 15'th century.

Corsair 115 said:

You were in error about Nagasaki. That was the point. And I had to prod you into admitting the error, otherwise it seems you never would have acknowledged the mistake.

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Yes, I may have been in error about one red herring question that bears no relevance to the current discussion, and you considered it necessary to throw a fuss about my not getting derailed about that. But I suppose when you run out of other arguments, "OMG, THE BAD MAN REFUSES TO CHASE THE IRRELEVANT RED HERRING" is to be expected.

Corsair 115 said:

It took me only a few minutes of fact-checking to find out your statement about Nagasaki was incorrect. Perhaps you should have done the same rather than rush to use it as support for a point you were making.

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No, it took you only a few minutes to come up with something that totally doesn't address my point. You're exactly on par with Jabba going on about some irrelevant trivia about the shroud.

My claim about Nagasaki was that it didn't have much industrial output -- especially after its having been bombed conventionally several times already in the last year. And in fact, the US would have agreed, since not only was Kokura ahead of it on the list, but so were Kyoto and Niigata. In fact, Nagasaki wasn't originally even considered a target, and its ending up on the list had more to do with range than industrial output.

What you guys came up with was the totally orthogonal issue of what percent of the population was hired by the 4 factories there, and the importance of its port. Which port, btw, wasn't affected all that much by the nuke.

So, yeah, maybe if you actually engaged the brain instead of just blindly throwing whatever Google and Wikipedia show up, then I might take you more seriously. Throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks isn't even working when I try to sort underwear, much less when talking history

Corsair 115 said:

And you avoid my very simple question vis-a-vis the specific thing I mentioned. Just address the specific point I mentioned. Is that so difficult? I'll repeat it:

The emphasis in that statement is entirely your own. I have not altered it in any way, other that to remove the material preceding the above quote, since it was not related to the part I was commenting upon.

From your use of a capitalized "REALLY" it seems clear what you were emphasizing as the truly important factor over others. Or are you saying the comment I quoted you did not mean as stated? You were engaged in some sort of rhetorical device? If so, then it would seem you phrased it poorly, as I didn't read it that way (and I expect others didn't either).

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Regardless of what I may and may have not emphasized in one paragraph, it is dishonest as heck to impute me that I overlooked something... that was in the part of the same message that you didn't quote. WTH, seriously...