Submitted by Frank Natoli, Jan 15, 2008 18:19

None of the Republican candidates at the recent debate was willing to second guess the rules of engagement that could have resulted in severe damage to a U.S. aircraft carrier transiting the Straits of Hormuz. But President Bush had no problem second guessing the Eighth Air Force and the Roosevelt Administration for events that occurred sixty-three years ago. It is true that there were photo-recon flights in the vicinity of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The N. Y. Times a few years ago published some then recently declassified photos that had been taken of the I. G. Farben chemical plant near Auschwitz-Birkenau. SOP for the photo-recon P-51 was to switch cameras on a short time before overflying the target, so there were some frames before and after the target. It occurred to some latter day genius that Auschwitz-Birkenau lay under the path to the Farben plant, and examination of the photo-recon footage might reveal some things of interest. Indeed, those reels revealed the first ever movie film of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp "in action". You can clearly see the lines of people walking from the trains to the gas chambers, and you can clearly see the smoke billowing from the crematoria. But there's a big difference between an unarmed photo-recon airplane and a bombed and fueled B-17 or B-24. Poland was too far for round trips from England. When Stalin stopped his forces just east of Warsaw in July 1944, and the Polish underground rose against the departing Germans, and the Germans turned back and ruthlessly wiped out the Polish forces and razed the city, there was nothing that could be done by the Allies to help them, an inaction for which many Poles have never forgiven the Allies. And the Russians refused to allow Allied aircraft from England to land in Russian held areas, refuel, and return to England [no complaint from the Poles on that account]. Long range fighter escort, courtesy of North American P-51s, was not available until early 1944. Flying into the Reich, never mind across the Reich into Poland, without fighter escort was suicide. Almost all operations by American and British "heavies" in the first half of 1944 were absorbed by Operation Interdiction, the campaign to bomb out German approaches to the Normandy invasion area, upon which the freedom of all of Europe depended. But it seems everyone has forgotten this, from the President of the United States down...

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