WAR IN PERSPECTIVE

War in Perspective

On their way to destroy Nazi Germany, the Allies killed a lot of innocent French civilians who happened to be in the wrong places. How many? I always thought the number exceeded 12,000.
It did indeed. By a factor of five and then some.

Mr Beevor moves on to even more delicate ground when he explores the disregard
of the allies for the property and lives of French civilians. In the Normandy
campaign the Americans and British sought to minimise their casualties by
bombing places to smithereens before their soldiers went in. Asked how it felt
under the bombardment, one elderly survivor in the town of Caen replied:
“Imagine a rat sewn up inside a football during an international match.” As a
consequence of this tactic, 70,000 French civilians were killed by allied action
in the war, more than the number of British killed by German bombing.

WWII really was the most just of all wars. But it wasn't any less a war, for all that.

taken from : Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations