Please tell me how Von Braun as a designer of a weapon…is different from Wallis…who knew his bombs would breach dams causing flooding of civilian areas?
Or did Chadwick think the Lancaster would be used to drop flowers?:rolleyes:
I’ve always thought that designers and the builders of the weapons…like the soldiers themselves…were doing what their national leaders directed.
Von Braun, Wallis and Chadwick were the brains behind the weapons.
If you have a complaint about the war, direct it to the leaders who directed the use of the weapons.
At the end of the day, are the civilians killed in Dresden any less dead than those killed in Hiroshima?
I’m sure a German family in Dresden praying in a basement as the temperatures rose might have envied those at Nagasaki’s ground zero.
Yes, it’s a pity that they died, but what about an English family killed in the blitz, a Jewish family in a death camp, a Chinese family in Nanking?
I’m not sure that the warhead was delivered by a V-2 or a simple iron bomb dropped by a Lancaster..or an atomic chain reaction really matters.
Both Chadwick and Wallis were trying to bring about an early end to the war, which would have been in everyones best interest; Im not sure that in ’44 with an obvious inevitability r.e the war’s outcome, the same could be said for Von Braun’s contribution, and I very much doubt that he thought the Nazis were going to put a man on the moon.
Comparing conventional bombing with (what we now know as) ICBM’S, there was no warning, just dead people, no air crew, risking their lives, man and machine against adversity, just a ton of high explosive arriving at the speed of sound, fired off from the comparative safety, somewhere in occupied territory.
The dropping of the A bombs was a conventional act, (indescriminant in its targetting), but conventional warfare thus far; I think it fair to say it that it did contribute the ending of the war, had the atomic bomb been ready in ’41, it may have altered the course of the war (considerably shortening it) and hundreds of thousands of people might not have died, but then maybe, at that time there was a need for “blood letting” all round, and it wouldn’t have.
For what its worth, if it was my decision, looking at it from 1945’s perspective, I’d have given the order; it has been said (and rightly so) that we have the luxury of hindsight, and from a comfortable arm chair as well.
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