[tomder55]

Flashback the September and the last months of 1943 . The Italy campaign. The Brits and Canadians cross over from Sicily to the toe of the peninsula. The US forces converge on Salerno to march on Rome. The Italians promptly surrender .But the Germans dig in . So a war of attrition begins that lasts well into 1944.

That is what history tells us . What doesn't often get mentioned is the price Italian civilians paid to get liberated . The record shows that 150,000 Italians were killed during the campaign. Air power ;artillery were routinely used to dislodge the Germans .Many of of the civilians were casualties of the troops sent to liberate them.

Flashback June 6 1944 D Day . A key objective was to liberate the city of Caen. In fact the whole region of Normandy was bombed before and during the invasion . But I concentrate of Caen. Brit General Montgomery ordered a massive bombing of the town to dislodge the Germans. 450 aircraft were used. The Brit pilots dropped their payloads well short of the front lines so Brit troops would not be subject to friendly fire. More than 2,000 French civilians were killed by the raids .Overall 20,000 French civilians were killed in the Normandy campaign.

This news was carefully censored out of the war reporting by the press.

In Vietnam the press was opposed to the war . So the truth of warfare was being reported . Peter Arnett famously reported a quote from a US soldier . 'We had to destroy the village to save it " .

How many Vietnam civilians were killed ? Who knows . The use of Agent Orange alone must've resulted in thousands .

The examples are endless. Iraqi and US forces set out to liberate the city of Mosul from ISIS . It took weeks of fighting . Iraqi troops aided by US air power and artillery killed at least 10,000 civilians.

The difference today is information and how the press chooses to report it . Civilian deaths in Gaza are routinely reported because the press wants to emphasis the tragedy of civilians caught in the cross fire .

[jlisenbe]

It's true and has, as you point out, been true in every war. It seems to happen in three ways. One is the inadvertent loss of life due to combat such as a building being bombed which sadly has innocent civilians in it. That is what seems to be the case in Gaza in practically every case. The second, and more sinister, is the bombing or shelling of areas where civilians live in an effort to diminish the will to continue the fight. This was the case with much of the night bombing of WW2 and certainly with the use of the two nukes in Japan. The third, and worst, is when civilians are raped and murdered by ground troops. This probably occurs more frequently than is known, and certainly was brutally carried out by Moslem extremists in Israel, but it does not seem to be the case with the IDF in Gaza.

[tomder55]

I know French people who still curse the Brits for the bombing of Caen. I'm sure the Brits thought it would help liberate the city ;but all it did was create rubble for the Germans to hide behind. The town was supposed to fall on June 6 .It took until July 19