Bombing of Civilians

One of the problems of the internet is disinformation.  Routinely information from sources such as wikipedia appears with no credit and remains uncorrected after the original article has seen alterations.

Some days ago I was "informed" at an internet site that the Luftwaffe bombing of civilians in England only began after the Germans had suffered civilian losses when the British had bombed over Germany.  Given that the actions of Bomber Command - Dresden and Wuerzberg, for example - are so troubling - the suggestion that the British kicked off the practice was one I felt I needed to look into.

The utter absurdity of the claim becomes apparent when you see the photographic evidence: Britain entered the war with the German attack on Poland.  The first documented indiscriminate bombing of civilians in WW II is the German bombing in Poland at the very onset of the war.

The sinister suggestion that the British kicked off this round of aerial bombardment of civilians is chilling given what we know about Bletchley Park, Enigma machines and popular claims that the British had known in advance that Coventry was to receive a major attack in late 1940 (said to have motivated a revenge firestorm in 1945 in the historic core of Dresden.)  A similar suggestion is debated concerning American intelligence bearing on the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Even if I wished to track this issue of misinformation even as relates to divergences in reported facts across wikipedia articles written in western European languages, the blog format appears inadequate.  Even filecards most days seem more useful - especially if encoded in a McBee style (edge-notched.)

Without an effective research "browser", even pursuing a relatively recent topic such as information and misinformation concerning the effectiveness of high-tech ordinance in the bombing near or in Hanoi late in the Vietnam War (1972) becomes a challenge.  At the moment the best tool available to me remains Microsoft One-Note 2007.

One symptom: today Google Documents rejected my recent Chrome bookmarks as too large a file (the format is HTML.)  Browser bookmarks themselves prove to be of such limited usefulness unlike simple file cards and margin notes in an actual bound paper text.

For research cutting across languages (in my case several, including Polish and Russian) a number of otherwise useful tools prove unable to handle UNICODE even as UTF-8 (in this regard, Microsoft Notepad proves a useful scratchpad once a document is saved as UTF-8 due to its prefixing with BOM.)

As I am also looking a Curl-based multi-text browser/viewer for literary notes across translations, I am hopeful to make some progress on a useful tool for adding notes by topic without the serial post limitations of the blog format.  It is not simply that the blog does not have adequate full-text indexing or contents trees, but chiefly that its edit format is "single post" within a given browser session.  A multi-applet Curl research browser seems to me to be an appealing alternative (UNICODE-ready versions of ObjectIcon and Rebol3 are also appealing as are the possibilities open to Seaside-enabled Smalltalk app's.)

Note: the en.wikipedia.org article on the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden fails to note that the bombing of the core of the city of Würzburg even occurred - let alone on March 16, 1945 - the Churchill memo discussed in the article is shown as dated March 28, the second April 1 (according to that article.)  Furthermore that article is not tagged with "aerial area bombing" or "aerial incendiary bombing": even using the best linux Gnome browser, only 2 tags would be available for a "bookmark" of that article and no place to annotate the limitation or flag a TODO in the browser.  Supposing that I were not intent on updating the article but only comparing with German and Russian versions, the existing browsers, so far as I am aware, are inadequate to these simple browse-and-note tasks.  In my view they are not yet true browsers: they remain simple page viewers. A variety of FireFox 3 plugins have proven so problematic - even those with remote store which should facilitate working across machines (such as my XP PC and my linux netbook) - that I have returned to using Google Chrome and occasionally linux Epiphany.