War Loss Quotes
This is a significant quotation because the bombing of Hamburg was somewhat controversial. The Germans had bombed Warsaw, London and many other cities contravening the them accepted laws of war. The allies retaliated by bombing German cities where there was extensive war manufacturing; however, there were some allied war planners who saw the bombing of German cities as a way of breaking morale and shortening the war above and beyond the damage to the factories. A new technique had been used in bombing Hamburg—firebombing. Many thousand coordinated incendiary bombs ignited fires throughout the city which combined into a huge firestorm, killing even people with heat that were in air raid shelters. More than 100,000 Germans died—a greater toll than would later take place at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was some allied criticism that the firebombing just killed people but made the survivors even more adamant about continuing the fight, This quotation, from a leading German officer, supported the view that there was a strong positive military effect. The technique was repeated in Tokyo to even greater effect before the atomic bombed were ready. (The Japanese had also bombed civilian cities first as well as committed other atrocities.
This was his description of the Vietnam War in which he commanded the American Forces.
The CIA and others had known that the Vietnam War was not winnable, yet the CIA Management and the Defense Department were stating the contrary. Gates was then an analyst for the CIA and it was his first job out of college. There was a rationale for the politicians and military leaders to lie about prospects in Vietnam. If we could not win, we wanted to negotiate a settlement on as good terms as we could get. However, if Ho Chi Min and the North Vietnamese knew that we did not think that we could win, they would have no incentive to concede on any points or compromise at all. To be successful in the negotiations, we had to persuade the Vietnamese that we thought we could win and would keep up the fighting and bombing unless they would concede some things. Unfortunately, by the time that we started negotiations, it was too late to be very successful in negotiations. All the parties to the negotiations at that point realized that we could not win. The only people who thought the contrary were a large block of American patriots who had been deceived by the politicians and the military leadership.
This was the same man who as a Senator only 4 years before threatened the North that the South was economically and militarily invincible.
