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Very interesting pictures. Most photographs I have seen have been taken in black and white, and show the destroyed city in 1944/'45. My family had many tragic
by wuschel 13y ago
Very interesting pictures. Most photographs I have seen have been taken in black and white, and show the destroyed city in 1944/'45.
My family had many tragic memories of the ruins of Warsaw, for they were bound with the jewish ghetto uprising and the following uprising by the AK (armia krajowa, underround army).
On another note, many cities still show signs of the destructive effect on war on the jewels of our civilizaton: The battle for Berlin also had a great toll on the city and its inhabitants, and the battle for Stalingrad (Wolgograd) had the worst effect on the population of the city: just left a single, half destroyed house and very few survivors were left. But many more civilian deaths and destruction of settlement took place during the war - the fires of Hamburg and Dresden, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Blitz on english cities are well known, but the destruction of smaller settlements and villages are not mentioned that often.
These were terrible days. We should be thankful for the peace we have.
- theklub 13y agoSadly these pictures remind me of parts of Syria right now.
- lostlogin 13y agoBritain's War Machine, a book by David Edgerton, set me off on some fairly disturbing reading when he stated that the British army's total losses for the second work war were less than those suffered by the USSR in the campaign to take Berlin. The sheer scale of the war on the Eastern front is absolutely titanic.
- znowi 13y agoBeing curious I looked up the numbers. UK death toll: 326,000 military and 62,000 civilian. Russia: 10 million each. "Absolutely titanic" is about right.
- ternaryoperator 13y agoWhile it doesn't compare to Russian deaths, 388,000 UK deaths is a staggering number in its own right.
- vacri 13y agoCompare it to US deaths in Vietnam (60,000) and in Iraq/Afghanistan (~7,000). The irony is that for all the warmongering politics of the US, the population are highly sensitive to actually losing soldiers in battle. There were single days in WWI (and the US Civil War) that saw single countries having more combat deaths than the US has seen this century in total. The US public wants wars it can win effortlessly (conscription anyone? rationing perhaps?) but has no stomach for the realities of war. Hell, every time Australia lost a soldier in Afghanistan, the papers would do a double-page spread with portraits of all the soldiers lost so far. It's not a particularly difficult war if you can fit portraits of all the lost soldiers after 10 years in the field on a newspaper page. We've lost 40 soldiers... and in the same timeframe, we've lost 36 police officers in the normal course of civilian duty. We really have no idea what it's like to actually be a society at war.
- carlob 13y agoThis just goes to show how asymmetrical Afghanistan and Iraq are in terms of war. We just don't know what is like to be on the receiving end of war. Think about it: an Australian soldier in Afghanistan has made a choice (maybe forced by her economic condition, sure) to risk her life in Afghanistan. Afghan civilians didn't really have that choice. The estimates for civilian deaths in Iraq are above 100k, around 20k for Afghanistan and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight for this quagmire the US has put themselves in, so I really don't know what you mean by not a particularly difficult war.
- ansible 13y agoThe estimates for civilian deaths in Iraq are above 100k... That's just the best estimate for those killed in and around main areas of conflict. With all the ethnic cleansing, and general privation from the destroyed infrastructure of the Iraq nation, the total death toll is estimated to be 1 million or more. War is more horrible than most people (who haven't directly experienced it) can imagine. We the voting public should not take any decision to go to war lightly. As we have in the past.
- ekianjo 13y ago> the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Let's not forget that MOST of the Japanese cities were actually destroyed, not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki. US army used incendiary bombs on Japanese cities, causing massive fires (and according death tolls in civilian populations, largely exceeding the people who died from atomic bombs) across the country in all large cities. The whole country was effectively destroyed.
- Sharlin 13y agoYeah, in the grand scheme of things I think the A-bombs did relatively little damage, both in terms of human losses and material damage, compared to all the conventional bombing going on. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not destroyed in the sense many fire-bombed cities in Japan and Germany were.