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The Dam Busters
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: The Dam Busters (in reply to estebanana)
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The British military historian Max Hastings wrote an excellent book on the subject entitled Operation Chastise, published in 2020. The Lancaster bombers and their brave crews came in unbelievably low to escape German detection, and for the most part they succeeded. And the specially designed bombs were a technological marvel. As in all such actions, the catastrophic flooding caused the death of many civilians, most of whom were not Nazis, or even Germans. Rather, they were mostly female East European slave laborers. There will be those who natter on about British "atrocities," etc. Unfortunately, the primary goal of winning the war, in the case of Britain a life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, cannot always be accomplished by adhering to the Rules of Queensbury.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date May 11 2023 14:46:22
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: The Dam Busters (in reply to mrstwinkle)
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Sticking strictly to actions taken during World War II, the statement "Churchill /Hitler /Stalin /Roosevelt. Same murdering ****s." remains absurd. Britain stood alone against the Nazis while Stalin had made his pact with Hitler with the Molotov-Ribbontrop Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the USSR. He was perfectly content to see Germany mounting aerial attacks against Britain. Only when Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941 did Stalin change his tune. There were atrocities on both sides, as there are in all wars. But to compare Churchill and Roosevelt to Stalin and Hitler as being the "Same murdering****s" without distinguishing between the aggressors and the defenders in a military conflict, and the overall barbarism of the Axis, including Japan, is to either deliberately or inadvertently leave out context entirely.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date May 27 2023 19:10:30
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: The Dam Busters (in reply to Brendan)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Brendan
Britain was a worldwide empire. You can’t judge it or its leaders just by looking at what happened in Europe.
In the early 1920s, the RAF got some useful bombing practice in Iraq. The use of air power to suppress colonial revolts was eagerly supported by the war minister at the time, one Winston Churchill, who at one point suggested using the same methods in Ireland.
This is not to suggest that Churchill was just as bad as Stalin or Hitler. But he was an imperialist who was willing to do whatever was necessary to sustain the empire, including aerial bombing of civilians.
The emotional sticking point, the indigestible body of historical fact for British patriots is not Dresden or the Dambuster raids or anything else that happened during WWII. It’s the empire.
Okay let’s play the ‘who’s the most infamous imperial power of the turn of the 20th century’ game
Contestants are:
Japan
Germany
Spain
Italy
Britain
Holland
France
USA
The playing field:
Indonesia
Manchuria
Polynesia
Micronesia
The Philippines
Hawaii
North Africa
India
Let’s just play this game and never talk about a specific event and be as completely self righteous as possible, how about that game?
Oh I forgot Belgium and the Central African region. Right up there in brutality with Britain and Japan.
I’ve lived in a place in Micronesia that underwent going from a pre western contact island to being subjugated by the Spanish, the Germans and the Japanese in a matter of decades, not centuries. On you tube recently I found drone video footage from some Micronesian historians where they flew over the ruins of each colonizer’s administrative buildings. When I lived there briefly it was an opportunity to study and take in the effects and marks left by each successive colonizer and then contemplate what it meant for that region to be a US trust territory. That was my introduction to studying colonialism. Part the deal was to be able to talk to people who were under Japanese occupation from the 1920s until after WWII when the US was the protectorate country. I was told that prior to Japanese occupation the population was over 30,000 and after the war it was 5000. When I’m talking about the war, which I’m deeply interested in, I’ve thought a lot about the human cost, but I keep trying to hold myself in a position of responsibility and dispassionate objectivity.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date May 28 2023 2:31:38
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Brendan
Posts: 353
Joined: Oct. 30 2010
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RE: The Dam Busters (in reply to estebanana)
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Hum well, we’re talking about Britain and Churchill rather than any of the other guilty empires and imperialists because we’re talking about the Dambusters. Bill (not you!) said that Churchill didn’t bomb civilians before Hitler. This is not strictly true: Iraq.
Now, if you as OP want to put your foot down and insist that this thread is solely about WWII, fine, your prerogative. It’d be a loss though, because the British who fought the war were shaped by their empire. When Britain stood alone against the Nazis, it was the British Empire, not the British nation. This matters, not least because we don’t want to erase the contributions of empire servicemen, but also, in this discussion, because the British who fought the war were products of empire. Guy Gibson was born in India and Barnes Wallis had a pre-war career designing military aircraft because the empire needed planes. The schools they attended were part of a whole system tuned to producing an imperial officer class. Etc. Churchill was a florid product of the same system. If you want to understand the British in WWII, including Churchill, this is the stuff you need. And if we’re looking at the ethics of state violence, it’s as well to consider what people regarded as business as usual along with what they did while engaged in a war of national survival.
Of course Britain is only one of the guilty empires. Both my favourite countries are on your list. I’ve never visited Japan, but I’m sure I’d like it. BTW you’ll hear from Armenians if you don’t put the Ottoman Empire on the list too.
Incidentally, the Dambusters film is an utter jewel-box of telling moments for the British view of the British war in 1955. I’m especially fond of the moment when Gibson chooses his second-in-command on the grounds that the man distinguished himself as a rugby blue at stand-off half. Or the point in the raid when several aircraft have been lost but none of the bombs has worked. The air commander looks at Barnes Wallis, who looks at the floor. No dialogue needed. All the stuff about overcoming lack of resources with ingenuity (the sixpenny bombsight, the spotlights). The lone genius against the desk jockeys of the air ministry. It’s great stuff. It reminds us that these men were both inexpressibly brave, climbing into the aircraft night after night knowing that it was just a matter of time before they bought it, and also casual racists (Gibson’s dog). Gibson was killed in action at the age of 26.
I’m all for responsibility and generally pro-objectivity but I don’t think a properly functioning human can be dispassionate about this stuff. I wouldn’t wish it on you.
If you’d care to tell more about your fieldwork (maybe on some other thread), I’m a reader.
_____________________________
https://sites.google.com/site/obscureflamencology/
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Date May 28 2023 12:37:44
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: The Dam Busters (in reply to Brendan)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Brendan
Hum well, we’re talking about Britain and Churchill rather than any of the other guilty empires and imperialists because we’re talking about the Dambusters. Bill (not you!) said that Churchill didn’t bomb civilians before Hitler. This is not strictly true: Iraq.
Now, if you as OP want to put your foot down and insist that this thread is solely about WWII, fine, your prerogative. It’d be a loss though, because the British who fought the war were shaped by their empire. When Britain stood alone against the Nazis, it was the British Empire, not the British nation. This matters, not least because we don’t want to erase the contributions of empire servicemen, but also, in this discussion, because the British who fought the war were products of empire. Guy Gibson was born in India and Barnes Wallis had a pre-war career designing military aircraft because the empire needed planes. The schools they attended were part of a whole system tuned to producing an imperial officer class. Etc. Churchill was a florid product of the same system. If you want to understand the British in WWII, including Churchill, this is the stuff you need. And if we’re looking at the ethics of state violence, it’s as well to consider what people regarded as business as usual along with what they did while engaged in a war of national survival.
Of course Britain is only one of the guilty empires. Both my favourite countries are on your list. I’ve never visited Japan, but I’m sure I’d like it. BTW you’ll hear from Armenians if you don’t put the Ottoman Empire on the list too.
Incidentally, the Dambusters film is an utter jewel-box of telling moments for the British view of the British war in 1955. I’m especially fond of the moment when Gibson chooses his second-in-command on the grounds that the man distinguished himself as a rugby blue at stand-off half. Or the point in the raid when several aircraft have been lost but none of the bombs has worked. The air commander looks at Barnes Wallis, who looks at the floor. No dialogue needed. All the stuff about overcoming lack of resources with ingenuity (the sixpenny bombsight, the spotlights). The lone genius against the desk jockeys of the air ministry. It’s great stuff. It reminds us that these men were both inexpressibly brave, climbing into the aircraft night after night knowing that it was just a matter of time before they bought it, and also casual racists (Gibson’s dog). Gibson was killed in action at the age of 26.
I’m all for responsibility and generally pro-objectivity but I don’t think a properly functioning human can be dispassionate about this stuff. I wouldn’t wish it on you.
If you’d care to tell more about your fieldwork (maybe on some other thread), I’m a reader.
Yes, I think you’d like the history podcasts and books I’ve been reading. By dispassionate I mean not being hyperbolic about what it means to take in history. If you blow a gasket and call all combat leaders mass murderers then that’s not a very intelligent way to process history. It’s not productive. For example when I read the book ‘The Last Zero Fighter’ which is a compendium of accounts from former Japanese navy pilots who finally granted interviews in the mid 2000’s I had to hold myself in a place of trying to hear the story from their side. I challenge you to read the same book and image you are an American reading about Japanese pilots experiences who were not at all sorry they attacked Pearl Harbor.
I live in a neighborhood that was fire bombed by American aircraft in WWII, my neighborhood was destroyed to make way for a potential US Navy invasion and when I look out our bedroom window in the morning I can still see the evidence of the war from going on 80 years ago, yet I work for the Japanese government now and am a valued member of my circle in the community.
My deep dive field work is on going. In my family there is a military historian whose writing is published in several international diplomatic journals, like Foreign Affairs and other academic journals. He wrote a brilliant summation of the US in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In closing he says. “We’ve seen the enemy, and the enemy is us.”
Now, Germany bombed the UK in a significant way at during WWI. In two separate waves. It was in 1915. Since Germany wasn’t under British colonial rule in the German homeland, there is a case for discussing straight across aggression between these two countries, and I add that in many ways the Blitz can be viewed as an extension of the bombing raids carried out by Germany in WWI.
So my interest in the Dam Busters isn’t cold and unemotional, but it’s controlled enough to understand why it happened and how it was strategized. To me the important thing in evaluating a general or a leader that sends troops into a death zone is how that person weighs his or her burden to be the person to send men to a battlefield. I can’t get in anyone’s head, but I feel there are leaders abd generals who took that responsibility more seriously and were harder on themselves than others.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date May 28 2023 14:10:40
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: The Dam Busters (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
and call all combat leaders mass murderers then that’s not a very intelligent way to process history. It’s not productive
It can be. Just that it leads to questions that nobody wants to ask among those who wish to uphold our current state model(s). You can find anything and everything in the archaeological record of our species. Such is the ingenuity of human beings. And yes, it includes examples of social organisations that are thought to have not placed such a high premium on violence as we do (and conversely social organisations that are thought to have placed a much higher premium on it than we do). Refusing to ask that question is like spending all of your time looking at how one slave owner cared deeply about the plight of his slaves while another was gratuitously cruel to them, but never bothering to question the institution of slavery that put people in that situation in the first place. Both lines of inquiry are interesting in their own right, but only the latter actually matters for future political change, which, to my mind at least, makes that one a lot more productive than the other.
"Wars are messed up, but until we figure out how to stop having them (...)" you say. Well, I'd suggest the starting point to figuring that out is to posit that all combat leaders are indeed mass murderers. That the social organisations we've developed require mass murder to function; as they say, it's a feature not a bug. Unfortunately the current paradigm is so firmly established that many don't actually believe in the possibility of a world without war. It's treated as a childish pipe dream, and often dismissed with arguments each more fallacious than the next (the "human nature" one wins the cake though. Geez that one is dumb...). In the meantime, when the topic of war comes up we're served with arguments which are essentially glorified versions of "he started it" or "he did it too", and these days even "I did it first but only because if I hadn't he would've". And somehow we're the childish ones...
In fact, I think the refusal to qualify all combat leaders as mass murderers is really an admission of not believing in the possibility of a world without war. We can't qualify them as such because we need them to keep our state model(s) running. And since we can't call into question our state model(s) either, then yeah, we have to create a categorical distinction that exempts those forms of killing from being considered murder. Many of the arguments used today to justify state killings date back to the Enlightenment. While not the sole reason for those arguments, it's not coincidental that they came at a time when Europeans were discovering new worlds, with their own forms of social organisation and, when asked, their own critique of what European society looked like. Not just on the topic of war, since many so-called indigenous societies also had a culture of war, but it did include that and many other topics. To exclude the possibility of combat leaders as mass murderers is to exclude the indigenous critique, and to refuse to consider the possibility that this state of affairs may have less to do with our "nature" and more with the choices we make in how to organize our societies. Hence why there is a very strong drive in that camp to belittle, and in some cases dismiss entirely, human agency.
In the same way as our views may change depending on the time-span we take into account, as per the discussion above, the same is true of the scope of social organisation we take into account. To say they're not mass murderers we have to limit that scope to a certain kind of social organisation and exclude all the others. It seems a bit too convenient if you ask me. If we broaden the scope even further and look at our two closest relatives in the evolutionary tree, we have one that raids and kills to solve disputes, and another that fùcks to solve disputes, with AFAIK not a single recorded instance of intra-species killing. I know of several well-regarded primatologists who don't shy away from using the term "culture" to explain that. Though granted, if I was told that to prevent WWII from happening my only two options were to either kill or fùck Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler... erm... yeah that's a tough one ngl ^^
None of that need get in the way of a proper appreciation of historical facts. We just need to be cautious with the usual exercise of separating fact from opinion. That's often more difficult than it sounds, but I'd suggest it is nowhere as difficult as when the opinion we hold is so widespread as to constitute a paradigm. In those cases, it's easy to not even notice that that opinion is there and coloring our interpretation of the facts. And sometimes, just sometimes, it isn't the "overdetermined leftist" who is struggling to separate fact from opinion...
Churchill was a mass murderer. Carry on.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date May 30 2023 11:06:03
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: The Dam Busters (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Piwin
quote:
and call all combat leaders mass murderers then that’s not a very intelligent way to process history. It’s not productive
It can be. Just that it leads to questions that nobody wants to ask among those who wish to uphold our current state model(s). You can find anything and everything in the archaeological record of our species. Such is the ingenuity of human beings. And yes, it includes examples of social organisations that are thought to have not placed such a high premium on violence as we do (and conversely social organisations that are thought to have placed a much higher premium on it than we do). Refusing to ask that question is like spending all of your time looking at how one slave owner cared deeply about the plight of his slaves while another was gratuitously cruel to them, but never bothering to question the institution of slavery that put people in that situation in the first place. Both lines of inquiry are interesting in their own right, but only the latter actually matters for future political change, which, to my mind at least, makes that one a lot more productive than the other.
"Wars are messed up, but until we figure out how to stop having them (...)" you say. Well, I'd suggest the starting point to figuring that out is to posit that all combat leaders are indeed mass murderers. That the social organisations we've developed require mass murder to function; as they say, it's a feature not a bug. Unfortunately the current paradigm is so firmly established that many don't actually believe in the possibility of a world without war. It's treated as a childish pipe dream, and often dismissed with arguments each more fallacious than the next (the "human nature" one wins the cake though. Geez that one is dumb...). In the meantime, when the topic of war comes up we're served with arguments which are essentially glorified versions of "he started it" or "he did it too", and these days even "I did it first but only because if I hadn't he would've". And somehow we're the childish ones...
In fact, I think the refusal to qualify all combat leaders as mass murderers is really an admission of not believing in the possibility of a world without war. We can't qualify them as such because we need them to keep our state model(s) running. And since we can't call into question our state model(s) either, then yeah, we have to create a categorical distinction that exempts those forms of killing from being considered murder. Many of the arguments used today to justify state killings date back to the Enlightenment. While not the sole reason for those arguments, it's not coincidental that they came at a time when Europeans were discovering new worlds, with their own forms of social organisation and, when asked, their own critique of what European society looked like. Not just on the topic of war, since many so-called indigenous societies also had a culture of war, but it did include that and many other topics. To exclude the possibility of combat leaders as mass murderers is to exclude the indigenous critique, and to refuse to consider the possibility that this state of affairs may have less to do with our "nature" and more with the choices we make in how to organize our societies. Hence why there is a very strong drive in that camp to belittle, and in some cases dismiss entirely, human agency.
In the same way as our views may change depending on the time-span we take into account, as per the discussion above, the same is true of the scope of social organisation we take into account. To say they're not mass murderers we have to limit that scope to a certain kind of social organisation and exclude all the others. It seems a bit too convenient if you ask me. If we broaden the scope even further and look at our two closest relatives in the evolutionary tree, we have one that raids and kills to solve disputes, and another that fùcks to solve disputes, with AFAIK not a single recorded instance of intra-species killing. I know of several well-regarded primatologists who don't shy away from using the term "culture" to explain that. Though granted, if I was told that to prevent WWII from happening my only two options were to either kill or fùck Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler... erm... yeah that's a tough one ngl ^^
None of that need get in the way of a proper appreciation of historical facts. We just need to be cautious with the usual exercise of separating fact from opinion. That's often more difficult than it sounds, but I'd suggest it is nowhere as difficult as when the opinion we hold is so widespread as to constitute a paradigm. In those cases, it's easy to not even notice that that opinion is there and coloring our interpretation of the facts. And sometimes, just sometimes, it isn't the "overdetermined leftist" who is struggling to separate fact from opinion...
Churchill was a mass murderer. Carry on.
Bill,
Would you like to field this one? Because I thought I made my position of seeking grace as transparent as I could.
S.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date May 30 2023 13:42:13
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