Andreas

This topic has been discussed in a bit of depth a few times. If you do a search for "smk" maybe with my membership number attached, you should be able to dig those old discussions out. SmK was the term used for the armour piercing ammunition issued to the German MG34/42. The reason the German HTs are a bit better protected is that they were, IIRC, designed to be SmK-proof. This was achieved by armour slope and thickness. 7mm unsloped is not SmK proof. All the best Andreas

Well... Not all of them, and I won't guarantee for 100% accuracy of the descriptions. Site will be updated as I find other scenarios or develop new ones. Blast from the past Hope you enjoy the ability to download them directly. Thanks to Kingfish, Richie, and as always Junk2Drive, because he is what he is! All the best Andreas

It's a book. A person who read it and whose opinion I care about think its rubbish. All the best Andreas

I blame the AI. Although, had you played me it would have been similar. All the best Andreas

In any case, thanks to Kingfish, Richie, and me finally getting how the search function works in OS 9 when multiple HDDs are present, there will soon be no problem in retrieving my old CMBO scenarios. All the best Andreas

Since you did not email me or contact me in other way (e.g. here on the forum), it is somewhat beyond my ken how you may think I am not willing to send it to you. Maybe before telling nonsense and lies about others you should check with them first. My guess is you mean '5th Glosters go East'. Regards Andreas

Excellent, they were the ones. Cheers Andreas

A Byte Battle called 'The Farm', and another one set in Holland, called 'Nought for Nought'. If somebody has them and could email them to me, that would be much appreciated. Thanks a lot. All the best Andreas

Bugger - does that meant the icons don't exist one by one? Oh, and if you email me, I can show you what I want to do with them. All the best Andreas

I am in the process of doing, err, sumfink, and would need the BMP numbers for the opponent symbols in CMBB and CMAK. I mean the indication of which forces are playing depicted in the scenario listing (e.g. Guards vs. Romanians etc.). If someone could email them to me, I would be most grateful. Thanks in advance. Andreas

painfbat - I am just anal about the distinction between Heer and Wehrmacht. I have no doubt you know far more about the details of Rotterdam than I do. All the best Andreas

I agree on 4) and 5a) but I am not a lawyer. As I stated for the purpose of the discussion we assume that it was in fact the Henschel factory that was targeted - due to the distances involved from the actual target marker (less than 500m according to Wiki) I'd say it would not have made a difference. As for the intent - granted, but one would presume that today they would say that the intent was to minimise civilian casualties, but that those were regrettably unavoidable. And then do what they would have done anyway. All the best Andreas

What are the limits of this, though? Is, for instance, a tax payer a legitimate target if his pennies help his government to wage a war? If so, is targetting civilians condemnable at all? </font>

I did not pick up on it because it is the modern law. It is important to note however that it is by no means absolute. There is considerable wriggle room in 5b) where it states that attacks are outlawed that are disproportional. Now, was the death of 10,000 civilians during the night of October 22/23 1943 in Kassel disproportional, and would it therefore be illegal today (let's assume the aim point was the Henschel plant in the city centre)? Even a cursory glance at production stats shows that the Germans may have lost the production of at least 50 Tiger I tanks, or a whole Abteilung. If each of these had destroyed four enemy tanks, this would have been one UK armoured division, or one Soviet Tank Corps, with consequent losses in soldiers. Add to that the production losses of the Wegmann and Fieseler plants, and in locomotives at Henschel. Discuss. All the best Andreas

Minor point - the Heer asked the Luftwaffe for air support. They were both part of the Wehrmacht, together with the Kriegsmarine. Carry on. You can find the questioning of Kesselring at Nürnberg (as a witness) regarding this attack on Nizkor.org. The somewhat bitter irony is that it is the British prosecutor who is giving him a grilling on the matter. All the best Andreas

Unless civilian housing is not of 'major civilian value', you are wrong. I have seen a number of photographs of attack effects that show that. What was mostly hit was AIUI the area in southern Rome along the main railway leading to Napoli (Ostiense area), close to where the Commonwealth Cemetary now is. Allied bombardments of Roma and other Italian cities such as Milano were heavily hit, with destruction of monuments and civilian areas. All the best Andreas

The effects I noted above had nothing to do with an attack on anything specific, they were just the result of the air war. Diversion of gun production to AAA, sole focus on producing defensive fighters instead of offensive planes, and heavy loss of pilots were these effects. What was needed for the campaign to have this effect however was an objective whose destruction Germany could not accept. That rules out dropping leaflets. As 1943 showed, day attacks were not feasible without fighter cover. So the only way to attain the objective were the less precise night attacks flown by the RAF. The air war over Germany was a brutal battle of attrition in which in the end the allies prevailed after very heavy losses. The term 'war crime' has a specific meaning (see below). In my opinion it is best not to use it too loosely, because like many things it will loose its meaning in the process. A bit like calling politicians who do something one does not agree with 'fascists'. I think if you said something like 'morally questionable/reprehensible; not fair play; just not on; etc., all of which are perfectly valid opinions, you would get a much better reception by other posters, since then you would not be claiming that aerial bombardment was something that it demonstrably was not. From the online Cambridge Dictionary: "war crime: a crime committed during a war which breaks the accepted international rules of war" Aerial bombardment does not qualify. All sides engaged in it, and it was not outlawed by the then existing laws of war. That makes it different from unrestricted submarine warfare, which all sides engaged in, and which was outlawed. Alles Gute Andreas

But the civilian populace was not out of it - the German government asked it to produce weapons. And they were producing weapons to help Germany win the war. You can not have it both ways - in a modern industrial war the civilian producing weapons is as much a combattant as the soldier using them. The egg was that the German government used factories in cities, crewed by civilian workers, to produce the weapons with which it prosecuted the war. Should the RAF not have bombed Kassel, where in the downtown residential areas (250m from Am Stern, where today the university I went to is) Tiger I tanks were produced? Where in Bettenhausen Fieseler (later the AEG works) produced planes and later V-1? Where Wegmann im Loch produced and repaired tanks and halftracks right next to other residential areas? Where significant military installations were along the Kohlenstrasse, close to Wehlheiden? I have seen this argument before, and it holds absolutely no water, and MacNamara is an idiot, in my view, if that is what he really thinks. If the civilian population produces weapons to put into the hands of soldiers fighting on the front, in factories that are interspersed with their settlements, they are a legitimate target in the WW2 context, and it is the responsibility of their government to figure out what to do about it, not of the enemy governments to consider losing the war for fear of hurting Germany's civilian population. The only way the destruction of German cities could have been avoided was for Germany to seek peace in early 1943. Given that the leadership pretty much knew that it was game over after September 1942, that would have been the logical thing to do. One should also not forget that in the end the air war over Germany was a significant contribution to Germany losing the war. The amount of production that had to be diverted by the Germans to feed it crippled the Luftwaffe and significantly reduced German artillery and anti-tank power as well as fuel supply on all fronts. The German government could at any point in time have stopped the attacks, by simply surrendering. That it did not, but instead chose to fight into the Götterdämmerung is not something the Allies can be blamed for. The guilt for the destruction of German cities, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Allied bombardment is resting squarely with the German government and military leadership who did not make peace when they could have, and should have. All the best Andreas

The salting is disputed, and in any case, the Romans rebuilt a new city pretty much on the same spot, after they had made their point (which roughly was: "We are really powerful, don't mess with us, or be prepared to suffer the consequences.") http://www.crystalinks.com/carthage.html But negotiation? :confused: All the best Andreas

Hard to see what the difficulty is. You appear to be arguing that a place can be considered undefended because the only defences it has are, ummmm, defensive in nature. What grass mod are you smoking? </font>

That prohibition only applies to undefended cities or villages, i.e. not to any of the German cities (including Dresden) or indeed other cities (such as Warsaw, Rotterdam, or Stalingrad) that were turned into rubble. All the best Andreas

Krautman I was not making a moral judgement, strictly a judicial one. If you want to disagree with me on that, you are free to provide the judicial documentation showing that mass bombing was a warcrime in 1939-45, at your leisure. It should not be difficult, Yale University has the texts of all the relevant agreements online. Please note that MacNamara's views on the Vietnam war are highly irrelevant to the judicial question, since the legal situation had changed by then. They can only be relevant when we look at it from a moral perspective (see below). As for the moral side, I have my own views, and they are more differentiated, and not completely firmed up, so I won't get into them here. John Somebody who manages to write stuff like this: "Eisenhower, in his personal letters, did not merely hate the Nazi Regime, and the few who imposed its will down from the top, but that HE HATED THE GERMAN PEOPLE AS A RACE. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible." is certainly capable of inventing fictitious vets. I see no reason to trust anything written on that webpage. All the best Andreas

There is a map with the box overlay in Ritgen (op cit). For Totalize the bombing plan was far more complex, as can be seen from the map in Reid 'No holding back'. But in both cases it was a targetting of German resistance in the main path of the advance regardless of which unit was there. All the best Andreas

It is just plain wrong, and lieing to boot. Why it is so has been outlined in this very thread, and in other threads e.g. on the AHF linked to here. It is a piece of rubbish full of lies written by someone with an agenda that is certainly anti-Eisenhower, and probably anti-semitic as well, who can not make his points using facts so instead resorts to lies and distortion. That's the only thing I find disturbing about it. All the best Andreas

That's my point, they did not target 89th in Totalize, or Panzerlehr in Cobra, or 70th on Walcheren. All the best Andreas