Connelly Compare And Contrast Essay

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Both articles concern the highly contentious subject of the British strategic bombing campaign in Germany during the Second World War. This subject focuses around the historical debate that the British government knowingly targeted civilian cities in Germany, killing hundreds of thousands of non combatants while also gravely misinforming the British public as to the purpose and results of their strategic bombing campaigns. In the years after the war the debate had come to light due to the renewed interest in the strategic bombing campaign. The articles by Mark Connelly and Alex Bellamy are products of this renewed interest. This essay seeks to compare and contrast the articles on three grounds: the different methods hat each historian uses …show more content…

This substantiates his claims more than Bellamy as one of Bellamy's primary arguments is that the public in a liberal society would be against the use of “terror bombing”. However, as Connelly elaborates more on the use of surveys to highlight public opinion,it is clear that the British public were in favour of “revenge bombing” against Germany. This certainly highlights the discrepancy between the two articles, because while Bellamy references Connelly's (accentuating Connelly's reliability as a contemporary historian) research into public opinion on area bombing, he leaves out vital information in the survey such as the location of those being bombed, which played an extremely important part in public attitudes to retaliation against Germany. This is something Bellamy fails to point and and therefore this damages the integrity of his argument and allows us to come to the conclusion that for the most part of his argument, Connelly is the most …show more content…

Bellamy argues differently, and less convincingly than Connelly, that the government assumed the public would not support the strategic bombing campaign of Germany if they knew of the aim of “undermining of the moral of the German people”. Therefore claiming that in liberal societies such as Britain, the population generally do not support the killing of non-combatants in war time. These different views stem from the use of the New Statesmen's mass observation survey in 1944 which found that people wanted the bombing of Germany to continue, however both historians interpret it

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