History Repeats - Parallels between The Blitz and GOP actions oday

[LetTimmySmoke]

Read the wiki article on it - there are so many parallels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_blitz

In particular:

Ultimately, Hitler was trapped within his own vision of bombing as a terror weapon, formed in the 1930s when he threatened smaller nations into accepting German rule rather than submit to air bombardment. This fact had important implications. It showed the extent to which Hitler personally mistook Allied strategy for one of morale breaking instead of one of economic warfare, with the collapse of morale as a possible additional bonus.<19> Hitler was much more attracted to the political aspects of bombing. Where the mere threat of it had produced diplomatic results in the 1930s, he expected that mere threat of German retaliation to persuade the Allies to adopt a policy of moderation and not to begin a policy of unrestricted bombing. His hope was—for reasons of political prestige within Germany itself—the German population would be protected from the Allied bombings. When this proved impossible, he began to fear that popular feeling would turn against his regime, and redoubled efforts to mount a similar "terror offensive" against Britain in order to produce a stalemate in which both sides would hesitate to use bombing at all.

And later on the article....

The deliberate separation of the Luftwaffe from the rest of the military structure encouraged the emergence of a major "communications gap" between Hitler and the Luftwaffe, which other factors helped to exacerbate. For one thing, Göring's fear of Hitler led him to falsify or misrepresent what information was available in the direction of an uncritical and over-optimistic interpretation of air strength. When Göring decided against continuing the original heavy bomber programme in 1937 his own explanation was Hitler only wanted to know how many bombers there were, not how many engines each had. In July 1939, Goring arranged a display of the Luftwaffe's most advanced equipment at Rechlin in order to give the impression the air force was more prepared for a strategic air war than was actually the case.