American and British planes targeted Saint-Lô, a road hub, as part of the grand plan to neutralize communication routes to prevent German reinforcements from repelling the landing, and the city, with its station and garrison of a thousand enemy soldiers at the Bellevue barracks, was a necessary target, as were the coastal towns along the dunes hit before Saint-Lô, as well as those also struck that night: Coutances, Flers, Lisieux, Caen, Vire, Condé-sur-Noireau, Pont-l’Évêque. Saint-Lô, a necessary target, whose inhabitants the Allies thought they had warned by dropping leaflets urging them to leave before the bombs, leaflets alas scattered far from the city in the bad winds of that June night. Saint-Lô, a martyred town sacrificed to liberate France.
Up to 20,000 French civilians were killed during the Normandy invasion in 1944 - by the Allies. AP last year described scenes of civilians being bombed while digging out other bombing victims.
And the bombed out cities then looked a lot like Gaza today.
It is more than a little ironic that the President of France is willing to justify the deaths of tens of thousands of French civilians in order for the Allies to win a war - but extends no such understanding into Gaza where the militants are even more embedded in the cities than the Nazis were in France.
He emphasizes that the Allies tried to drop leaflets, but never mentions that Israel does far more than that to minimize civilian losses. No, the Allies of 1944 considered the civilians on their own side to be a necessary sacrifice to win a war against an evil enemy. There were no trials of Allied generals who made these terrible decisions.
In fact, the civilian deaths were swept under the rug for 70 years. France never even held a national ceremony for the civilian victims of the Allied invasion until 2014.
Can you even imagine the uproar that would follow if Israel called Hamas' civilian human shields a "necessary sacrifice to liberate Gaza"?
Hamas is no less evil than the Nazis. The only reason it has not built gas chambers is because of ability, not desire. October 7 proved that Hamas is just as dedicated to wiping out all Jews in Israel as Hitler was to wipe out all Jews in Europe.
And it is a supremely moral act to do everything possible to stop Hamas, even if that means some civilians who are in the way get killed, too.
This was the calculus of the Allies, a decision being praised by the president of the country that lost so many. Israel's military decisions are exactly the same - yet the world reaction is the polar opposite.
(h/t Irene)
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