At Yad Vashem, Bush says U.S. erred in not bombing Auschwitz

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial's chairman said.

Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial calling it a "sobering reminder" that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith.

Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.

Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev.

"Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes," Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said."

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[Captain Hilts]

1. True, but we were able to bomb Germany only later in the war because of fuel and landing rights. nt

[DJ13]

2. Bush says U.S. erred in not bombing Auschwitz

"President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial's chairman said.


So lets kill all the prisoners because we dont like the selective killing the Nazi's were doing?

Yep, sounds like Bush.

[atreides1]

4. What did he say about his grandfather

And his grandfather's business partners, at least they were his partners until 1942.

[msmcghee]

5. The Nazis lived in their own barracks separated from the . .

. . prisoners. A great deal of damage could have been done killing the guards and officers - destroying the railroad tracks that brought the prisoners to the camp. Destroying the ovens, etc. Probably some prisoners would have died in those attacks. Ar least we could have given them some chance of escape from a certain cruel death through starvation and/or gassing.

I predict the mindless Bush hatred coming from much of the left is going to greatly diminish our party's effectiveness in the not-too-distant future. I despise Bush greatly but politics is not about hate. It's about smart. Think it over.

[Girlieman]

21. We did not have the kind of precision bombing you suggest

It was hard enough to hit factories and military targets. I doubt very much that it would have been possible to bomb the nazi barracks, even if we could have identified them.

Bush's comment was just a mindless political comment. I guess his way of showing empathy.

[Captain Hilts]

6. This is an issue often debated, at the time and today.

US bombers - with no inflight refueling capability - did not have the fuel capacity to make it to Germany and back until later in the war, when the benefits of bombing the camps had diminished compared to the value of doing so earlier in the war. By'44 we knew we were going to win and, perhaps, rescue those in many of the camps.

The Soviets, also, did not want to grant our planes landing rights. This was an issue in Europe and the Pacific. So, we had to be able to turn around.

[msmcghee]

8. You make a good point.

Perhaps my suggestion was impractical. But I think we should have tried to figure out a way to do it. We devised many long range raids that suffered great losses because of the range of the targets. The Doolittle B-25 raids on Japan, the B24 raids on Libyian oil depots, etc.

I'd like to hear from some of our military historians here like bemildred and Magistrate - if they think there was no possible way to bomb any of those camps - or if the Allies thought it just wasn't too important in the whole scheme of things.

[Captain Hilts]

9. The Doolittle folks had to abandon their planes in China.

How many camps were in Poland? I wonder what the bombing distances were for the Soviets by late '43, for example.

Henry Morgenthau, Sec. Treasury - and FDR's neighbor - I believe brought this issue to the fore pretty early on.

[Adsos Letter]

10. It is something in-between your two choices, msmcghee...

the greatest consideration was given to bombing the rail facilities which would be utilized to transfer the Jews of Hungary to the death camps.

There was considerable debate over the merits of bombing the camps (and being responsible for inflicting massive casualties due to the accuracy and bombing techniques used during the war)and accepting the responsibility in order to slow further mass-killing by thee Nazi's...

In the end it was decided that ending the war as soon as possible trumped diverting air assets to these targets.

An excellent book on this whole discussion is "Auschwitz and the Allies" by Michael Gilbert

http://www.amazon.com/Auschwitz-Allies-Martin-Gilbert/dp/0712668063/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200084470&sr=1-1

[msmcghee]

11. Thanks for that!

As usual, reality turns out to be a lot more complicated than first impressions suggest. :thumbsup:

[Adsos Letter]

12. You are welcome...

and, yes, reality is usually more complicated. That is one of my main sources of anger at MSM...very little of the complications of the things we, as citizens and voters, have to decide upon is given a hearing...

EDIT: I haven't done much reading on this in awhile, but I think the unwillingness to bomb the camps themselves may also have been associated with Britain's pre-war restriction on allowing Jews to emigrate/escape to Palestine, and America's limitation on Jewish immigration during the 1930's...I'm very hazy on this, ands I am sure someone will correct me if wrong, but I think there were also issues of public perception regarding the allies inflicting Jewish deaths...although, in retrospect, it could certainly be argued from a different perspective...

[LeftishBrit]

27. Very interesting...

will have to read Gilbert's book.

[bemildred]

19. It's not something I have paid much attention to.

Without doing any digging now, my feeling is that there were two reasons they were not bombed:

1.) The scale of these operations was not fully understood until rather late.

2.) It was not a military priority, attention was focused on expeditiously ending the war, and one can easily argue that that was the best way to help ALL of the peoples oppressed by the Nazis.

One can also point out that this was a time when we were fire-bombing cities and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians at a whack. Sensibilities were different, and projecting back from now to then may be fun, but it does not mean much.

I have read in several places that the Nazis diverted war materiel to these camps from combat needs. Hence one can argue that bombing these camps and putting them out of commission might have made the war longer by ending this foolish diversion. It is one of the more remarkable indicators of just how wacko the Nazis were about this that they continued to do that, divert resources into this nutball death project, right up to the time the camps were taken.

Bombing is a very inexact science even now, back then it was like throwing darts in the dark. They didn't call it "saturation bombing" for nothing. Now, if you consider what that means in the context of a concentration camp, you may well kill lots of prisoners and yet fail to put the camp out of operation for very long.

[azurnoir]

13. I not sure about that theory

US bombers had the fuel capacity to reach Poland from at least the time we became established in Italy, which was 1943, also I have a WW2 bomber crew jacket that has a patch on the inside written in Cyrillic script with American, British, and I believe French flags, I asked a Russian women I work with if she could translate it for me, she said that it said that the person wearing the jacket was a member of Allied forces and should be assisted rather then taken as a POW.

The most likely theory I have read for not bombing the camps ans railways leading into them was that the Nazis were diverting troops, rail cars, munitions and other supplies needed on the eastern front to run the camps.
Seemed almost poetic justice that the Nazis greatest evil was also a part of their downfall.

[Adsos Letter]

16. Yes...I had forgooten that point...

...I think it fits into the overall argument of "ending the genocide by more quickly ending the war..."

[rockymountaindem]

15. The US and Britain flew many "shuttle missions" against distant targets

and landed in the USSR or Soviet-held territory, and then mounted similar missions in reverse to return to Britain. It would have been feasible. The issue of landing rights was an issue in the Pacific theater because the USSR was not at war against Japan. However, in the European theater, there was no such problem. See the June 2, 1944 entry at this link:

http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/chrono1.htm

[Captain Hilts]

17. Right, in '44 it was possible. But the Soviets often did not return the planes. nt

[dbackjon]

3. Bush cried?

Will there be hours spent on this by the MSM?

[Adsos Letter]

7. Telling comment?

~snip~

"I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls - young and old - stood strong for what they believe," Bush said.

~snip~

I believe Bush was trying to honor the lives of those who suffered unspeakably under Hitler's regime; however,
I wonder if President Bush realizes that, whether they "stood strong" for what they believed or not, there was no "opt-out" choice for Jews in the Nazi system...I just wonder, once again, about this guys understanding of history.

On Edit: I am editing to say that my comment is not intended in any way to diparage the suffering of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime...the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto is just one example of Jewish defiance during the Holocaust...my point is only that there was nothing a Jewish person could have done, legally, to avoid marginalization and eventual extermination in Hitler's Germany.

An excellent book on this is "Racism: A Short History" by George M. Fredrickson.

http://www.amazon.com/Racism-History-George-M-Fredrickson/dp/0691116520/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200085117&sr=1-2

[damntexdem]

14. Wrong, it erred in not bombing the railroads that ran to the concentration camps.

The U.S. couldn't penetrate as far as the camps themselves until late in the war.

[bemildred]

20. A much better alternative than the camps themselves, yes ... nt

[Violet_Crumble]

22. They did bomb Buchenwald in 1944...

But it wasn't done to save Jewish lives, but to destroy the armament factories there. And from the stuff I've read on what the Allies knew of the Holocaust and when they became aware of it, their priorities were purely military and there wasn't a whole lot of interest shown about the fate of European Jews at the time...

[bemildred]

23. "Some estimates of inmate casualties from this attack number as high as 8000."

http://www.thirdreichruins.com/buchenwald.htm

That was my feeling too. I don't think they were much into saving lives in any sense except as it affected the war effort. The priority was stomping the Axis in the most expeditious way. I read all of Churchill's WWII history (which was a long paean to just how right he was, and how soon he was right, and what an effort it was to get everybody else to do the right thing too, and how ungrateful the British were) and I don't remember any thought being expended on saving even British lives except in the context of the war effort, let alone worrying about anybody else. I would not swear it was never mentioned.

Churchill's History is quite interesting, and often is not tedious at all.

[Howardx]

24. the brits knew as early as 1941

from the polish resistance.

[Violet_Crumble]

25. Yeah, the Allies were aware of what the Einsatzgruppen were doing...

The US still had an embassy in Berlin until December that year, and other embassies in occupied parts of Europe until early 1942. A lot of information was coming from the embassies, but reports of what was happening were appearing in the newspapers in European countries, so there's no way the Allies could have feigned ignorance....

[patch1234]

26. do you mean bombing the track?

c'mon. too easy to fix

[applegrove]

18. Duh!