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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Here's a fun historical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"

What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)

This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.

5 years ago an interview with air marshal Arthur Harris from 1978, originally created as additional learning material for Royal Air Force cadets, and of course restricted material as such, was made public, and interestingly he addresses this specific issue. His response basically was: as many deaths as militarily necessary, stemming from the main consideration that the French didn't fight well at all when they had to in 1940, so trying to spare their lives out of some sort of benevolent political consideration is foolish.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UCWK-O7cKvc?si=mRrlXuHGzsl7brSo

(at the 31:45 mark, for example)

To give a concrete example, he did oppose proposals to carpet-bomb the town of Bordeaux, but only because he judged that such an attack would have zero military value.

You'd think the brits would have some consideration for those that covered their retreat at Dunkerque and allowed them to have a war to fight instead of a total defeat, but Harris always had a total warrior mentality rather than that of a man of honor. For good or ill.

I ... assume that the view under consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

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