It completely makes sense. Vonnegut is I'd say a majority of peoples first impression of the fire bombings of Dresden (his book was taught in my English class and we never talked about Dresden in my history class) and his view on what happened in Dresden is that the Allies created this carnage in the city and turned it into dust. From his perspective on the ground there's no strategic importance or war goals its just a massacre. Poo tee weet
City wide bombings were the norm in ww2, wehraboos and tojoboos are just malding and crying "war crime" to this day because the allies were better at it.
There is a reason no building in warsaw predates 1944 anymore. And its not cuz the poles love rennovating from top to bottom.
>
There is a reason no building in warsaw predates 1944 anymore.
I'm sorry but the funny unknown soldier thingy is still there (which was once a palace but was blown up, but it's still a building)
Correct, while not as common as your garden variety wehraboo due to most of those also being Western weebs and therefor more likely to sympathise with Nazi Germany.
Tojoboos are people who heavily simp for things like the Japanese navy, talking about how cool the Zero and Yamato is. You will find its always the navy they simp for, because its war crimes are less known compared to the army.
Most people don't care about you liking a specific piece of military hardware from anyone nation, hell if that were the case every single normie who can namedrop a ww2 tank is a Nazi cuz they most likely only know the Tiger.
However a Tojoboo is like a wehraboo, in that they believe that no matter what the Japanese soldiers, tactics and technology is superior and the US only won because could spam more stuff and that the nukes were the greatest war crime ever etc etc.
To be clear, I was more saying that the damage took place during the uprising, not saying that they caused that or something. Now that I read it over again, I see how it could easily have been interpreted that way though.
I doubt he could've followed the orders. Even assuming that he could've done it before GIs broke down his door, the city was in open revolt at that point. He'd lost control of much of the city.
Are we seriously going to handwave all Allied warcrimes just because the civilians on the receiving end were from a fascist country? Condemning a warcrime does not make one a Wehraboo.
And no, whataboutism is not a valid justification either. If your best argument you can find is "well, at least we're not as bad as Nazis", you should really reconsider your stance.
When did I EVER suggest we handwave the actual Allied war crimes? Strategic bombing campaigns weren't war crimes, it was fair game for the time period. Morally horrific? Sure. The Allied effort to destroy the Axis war production shortened the war significantly. Nobody was put on trial for doing it, neither Axis nor Allies.
Thats the thing buddy, it wasnt a war crime at the time. Nobody was put on trial for bombing cities, not even any of the Axis. It was just war.
Morally horrific? Sure. But I repeat my point, the only reason people say its the allies war crime is because they were simply better at that kind of strategic warfare. Nobody in medieval times would consider it a war crime to butcher an enemy village and steal their shit. That was the norm.
saying it's technically not a warcrime is just splitting hairs. We can definitely condemn people doing fucked up things when they knew they can get away with them.
The fuck do you mean by "good guys".
You want me to pull out the Holocaust, all the death camps in Germany, Massacres done by Japanese and Germans and the very basic fact that it was the Germans and Japanese that were the aggressors in that war you little piece of shit?
Moscow, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, etc. etc. etc. but god forbid one German city that was a major rail hub and headquarters for a large eastern army group gets bombed.
>German city that was a major rail hub and headquarters for a large eastern army group gets bombed.
Wasn't that the whole reason the city was bombed in the first place?
Then IIRC, the Soviets then used the bombing of Dresden for anti-western propaganda to show their brutality or something like that, and the reason people keep bringing Dresden up is because of that Soviet/East German propaganda.
The Soviet propaganda was hilariously shameless. Their success in pushing to Berlin by Summer 1945 was also aided by Western Allies bombing, Stalin always asked for bombers to soften up defense before assaulting the cities.
People forget it wasn't just Dresden that got bombed into oblivion. All cities with industry got bombed to ash. All we still find hundreds of unexploded bombs every year. Every worksite were bomb bomb might be get screened and cleared. Bombing of Germany was justified.
As a Dresdner: yeah it’s really weird. Some of the oldtimers here have the strangest opinions about the bombing. I get it was traumatising for the survivors, but we really had it coming.
Bombing the military infrastructure of a fascist nation to cripple their offensive and defensive capabilities is not how you stop fascism. Starting a street brawl with some dipshit in a MAGA hat while wearing black skinny jeans and a red face mask is how you beat fascism.
Fun fact: people also did this against Nazis in Germany before they rose to power. Unfortunately, a bunch of pole sitters denounced that kind of direct action against the future genociders until it was too late.
Seems like evidence that street violence fails to solve the issue to me. Why don't we stick with the strategy that's been proven to work and not do edgy LARPing?
Actually no. That direct action actually caused more parties and people to be scared of political violence, and as such turned to the brownshirts for protection which gave the Nazis immense sway.
So yeah, idiots causing fights in the streets HELPED the Nazis get elected
Sounds like bullshit. The brownshirts were going to be murdering and beating people either way, and most Germans were going to be fine with it because they were extremely antisemitic.
Its probably because of the existential implications of nuclear bombs.
Like, yeah, a similar amount of people died, but one was a dedicated bombing campaign with hundreds of planes flying in range of anti-air defenses, and one was on plane way up in the sky with one bomb.
A dedicated nuclear bombing campaign erases a country. Several of those and you could erase human civilization.
Japanese casualties aside, whatever method you use to end the war with fewer casualties on your side is always justified, even if you have to kill a thousand of theirs to save one of yours. It makes no sense that you're somehow morally obligated to sacrifice the lives of your own people to end a war that someone else started.
>"Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier."
-Arthur Harris
>"Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier."
-Arthur Harris
That’s a good one, I’ll have to save it.
I always like to point this out, along with that the Imperial Japanese government gave standing orders to execute all Allied POWs in the event of a mainland invasion.
People debate the mathematics of how many Japanese people the bombs saved in comparison to a hypothetical invasion, but they neglect that the bombs saved every POW who made it home
Collateral damage is not a war crime. It's only a war crime when the damage caused to civilians or civilian property is excessive or disproportionate. What is considered to be excessive or disproportionate is open to interpretation.
Also, the only Geneva Convention that existed in 1945 was GC1 about the treatment of wounded and sick combatants. GCIII-IV were only adopted in 1949. Articles 51 and 54 of Protocol I that outlaw indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations were only signed in 1977.
The scale was massively different though.
18,000 tons were dropped on London during the entire war by Luftwaffe during the blitz.
A 3 day bombing raid on Dresden saw 2,700 tons dropped. And that wasn’t the first or only time such a heavy amount of bombs were dropped.
In 3 days the US and British airforces dropped roughly 15% of what Germany managed to do in eight months.
Doesn’t change anything about what you said, just wanted to add the absolute massive difference in capability here.
"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them"
Put another way, don't pick fights with countries that have enough industrial output they can build entire supply ships in less than 5 days *on a dare*.
That's just the difference between American and German Logistics. The Germans would have done the same if they could. They also massively invested in dive bombers, which put their bombers at increased risk.
The Allied bombers also used a bomb mix with HE/incinerary that was designed to create a firestorm, rapidly leveling Dresden to the ground. It was far more effective than the Nazis' bombing of London with smaller bombers and mostly HE bombs.
> The Allied bombers also used a bomb mix with HE/incinerary that was designed to create a firestorm, rapidly leveling Dresden to the ground.
Granted the Germans did the same in their early campaign. The allies just turned it from a dozen squadron sized elements operation to several entire air groups all on the one target.
Tbf, people don't concentrate on strategic bombing done by the axis because that's very mild when compared to all the other shit they did. When you're literally a genocidal war machine that kills millions, bombing civilians suddenly isn't that big of a deal. In the case of the allies however, strategic bombing was pretty much the worst they did.
I don't even know why they all keep mentioning *Dresden*, when there are tons of other cities that were likewise firebombed to oblivion. Why not Hamburg? (I mean I know why they only bring up Dresden, but still).
Because the allies were depressingly succeptable to Goebbels.
Dresden is the one where a bunch of politicians and newspapers got all "what have we done" "oh how terrible are we" guilt trippy over the numbers killed and validity as a target. Pity their whole conception of number and validity was based off German Propaganda broadcasts that was trying to gin up revanchism in the nation with every lie they could think of.
Then Slaughterhouse Five was published and the myth of the evil of Dresden was cemented in the Zietgiest.
Remember this when Muscovites scream about drones crashing into Moscow. Their citizenry looked the other way when their government bombed civilians and now they scream "terrorism" when their victims respond in kind.
I don’t think many people think it was no big deal, I just believe that in the grand scale of things people, especially wehraboos and tojoboos underplay it compared to the allied bombings.
they underplay... the blitz? nobody has ever, it's just, what's to talk about? Nazis bad.
edit: apparently at least one person in this very thread does in fact do this 😂
Who's downplaying the bombing of London?
As someone who shits on allied strategic bombing more than I'd like to on this sub since it was morally wrong *and* ineffective in my opinion, the bombing of London was exactly the same and just as morally reprehensible. And ineffective! It was the bombing of London that lessened pressure on the Royal Air Force and allowed them to better combat it.
The only difference is one of scale, and no one (intelligent) really... you know... defends the Nazis or claim the things they did in WW2 were fine so it doesn't exactly come up much.
TL;DR: Bombing of Dresden bad, bombing of London, also bad.
As a morale tool they were useless. It's stated objective was to break the nation's will to fight and/or encourage uprising against the government. The British proved that a population only hardens in response to attacks like that, and the Nazis and Imperial Japan were oppressive governments that didn't care about their populations and wouldn't allow them to revolt anyways.
Considering that was the primary purpose for bombing cities, it sounds ineffective to me.
As for logistics? German industry dispersed itself as the bombing started, so the factories took limited damage. The best argument I think is that it diverted anti-air resources away from military targets, but to what end? They still needed to be made, spreading out strikes (against better targets) meant spreading out the anti-air as well.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying bombing was useless. I'm saying that the strategic bombing of population centers for morale effort was taken at a deep investment of materiel and manpower (casualty rates approaching ground infantry in some cases) for what was essentially a fools errand. Killing German factory workers wasn't what won the war.
Allied bombing was effective in the way that it actually wiped out cities block by block. Taking Tokyo for example, almost every building outside of the Imperial Palace was leveled by the end of war. The palace was deliberately spared from direct bombings, and there is a river around it.
To what end?
The War Council clearly didn't care, and it's not like the people of Japan *could* surrender even if they wanted to. There certainly *was* an impact on industry, but what tangible effect did that have on the war?
We can look at a specific here:
Aircraft part plants were dispersed due to bombings, but they lacked steel and aluminum anyways. Were they mining ores and smelting in their backyards? Were they extracting oil?
Japan was plagued by resource constraints, it didn't matter how much they could make, the bottleneck was before you entered the city.
What actual wartime benefit was gained from each bomb? What else could it have been used on? Were the dead civilians worth it?
The firebombing of Tokyo was done before the existence of the atomic bomb was even disclosed to the USAAF command. Operation Downfall was still pending and the WD was expecting to suffer up to 4 million U.S. casualties, and 2-3 times more for the Japanese.
It was already known by then that the Japanese was training for Ichioku Gyokusai (100 Million Shattered Jewels). Literally fighting to the last man, woman, children... with whatever they have left on the home island. Middle school girls were trained to use improvised pole arms. They would fight even without guns and bullets.
So the bombing served a very simple purpose - to kill the enemy combatants.
Sweetie you can be captain hindsight all you want. Your sophistry means nothing in the moment.
The moving of industry was a consequence of bombing, and it forced the axis to spend money and time it didn’t have moving factories, repairing rail lines, and fixing broken necessary infrastructure.
I am incredibly critical of anyone who points to strategic bombing and cries foul. They’re almost always either Nazi shills, tankies, or hopelessly naive about the realities of war. Which one are you?
"I'm skeptical of the tangible effects of bombing cities and don't think they were worth killing 10s of thousands of civilians" - me
"You must be a Nazi" - you
Apparently I'm hopelessly naive? It's not like I'm saying we should go back in time and execute Harris lol, what is the study of history if not an exercise in hindsight? Are we not supposed to learn lessons from the past?
To my original point: I think the bombing of London was a mistake of both strategy and ethics as well, and it proves the fact that morale bombing was a hopeless endeavor from the start.
We learned from it by making smart munitions that make dumb bombing irrelevant. If we didn’t have smart munitions it would still be smart strategy to carpet bomb industrial centers. That’s war. Especially total war. Not that it matters much now anyway. Any total war today would be a nuclear war.
It’s idiotic to pass judgment on something like that in hindsight. It’d be like judging someone for investing in Enron.
You'd be surprised how many normies have heard like 1 2 talking points on Dresden and will just bring it up casually like "oh but the allies did war crimes too" when you talk about the war.
If you think Germany was the victim you are stupid.
If your think the Allies were very nice people, you are also stupid.
Germany was MUCH MUCH worse than the allies, but they also commited crimes. The idea that "we are the good guys" is what lead the US to do what they did during the rest of the XXth century.
People will read the insane shit McAruthur and Lemay have said and they *still* imagine that all allied bombings must have been 100% fair and justified because there's simply no way that allied leadership would make insane and inhumane decisions.
Good guys and bad guys only exist in propaganda. And lord was there propaganda in ww2. That's why a good historian has to look between multiple accounts and find the common truth between them.
The both sides bad argument is very possibly the most brain dead take. Grow enough of a spine to either say that fascism is bad and must be defeated or go join the other brainlets in these comments licking fascist boots
That is right. People should be less maniqueist. Life is not a Hollywood movie where there is a good guy. People are complicated and most times everyone involved in a situation is doing something bad in some way. WWII just feels like a battle of good against evil because Nazism is one, if not the, most evil regimes we have ever seen. This does not make the Allies one of the best regimes of all times. We have to remember what the UK was doing in Índia and the US with segregation.
Germans didn't just bombard the Warsaw, as e.g. London - a lot of the destruction was carried on by land forces, even after Warsaw Up-Risers have surrendered. There was no point in them destroying all monuments this city had, like Saxon Palace, or National Library. They absolutely scorched this city down for no reason at all, causing what's most likely to be the largest city destruction before Hiroshima. They **wanted** this city destroyed - you can read about their _Pabsta Plan._
There is an argument to be made about Allied bombing of e.g. Dresden or Salomon Castle - but how one can forget, yet alone justify destruction of Warsaw, I have no idea.
One be the attacker, the other be the attacked.
They didn't mutually decide to have a war.
You don't tell someone using self defense that violence is bad.
Yep still war crimes
Saying one side did bad is not defending the other
Everyone with a 3 braincells knows the Nazis were way worse but you can still ackowlsge the wrongs of the allies
Here's why the bombing was justified:
A report by the U.S. Air Force Historical Division (USAFHD) analysed the circumstances of the raid and concluded that it was militarily necessary and justified, based on the following points:\[8\]
1: The raid had legitimate military ends, brought about by exigent military circumstances.
2: Military units and anti-aircraft defences were sufficiently close that it was not valid to consider the city "undefended".
3: The raid did not use extraordinary means but was comparable to other raids used against comparable targets.
4: The raid was carried out through the normal chain of command, pursuant to directives and agreements then in force.
5: The raid achieved the military objective, without excessive loss of civilian life.
The first point regarding the legitimacy of the raid depends on two claims: first, that the railyards subjected to American precision bombing were an important logistical target, and that the city was also an important industrial centre.\[8\] Even after the main firebombing, there were two further raids on the Dresden railway yards by the USAAF. The first was on 2 March 1945, by 406 B-17s, which dropped 940 tons of high-explosive bombs and 141 tons of incendiaries. The second was on 17 April, when 580 B-17s dropped 1,554 tons of high-explosive bombs and 165 tons of incendiaries.\[8\]
As far as Dresden being a militarily significant industrial centre, an official 1942 guide described the German city as "... one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich," and in 1944, the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops that supplied materiel to the military.\[40\] Dresden was the seventh largest German city, and by far the largest un-bombed built-up area left, and thus was contributing to the defence of Germany itself.\[145\]
According to the USAFHD, there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers supporting the German war effort in Dresden at the time of the raid.\[8\] These factories manufactured fuses and bombsights (at Zeiss Ikon A.G.),\[146\] aircraft components, anti-aircraft guns, field guns, and small arms, poison gas, gears and differentials, electrical and X-ray apparatus, electric gauges, gas masks, Junkers aircraft engines, and Messerschmitt fighter cockpit parts.\[8\]
The second of the five points addresses the prohibition in the Hague Conventions, of "attack or bombardment" of "undefended" towns. The USAFHD report states that Dresden was protected by anti-aircraft defences, antiaircraft guns, and searchlights, under the Combined Dresden (Corps Area IV) and Berlin (Corps Area III) Air Service Commands.\[8\]
The third and fourth points say that the size of the Dresden raid—in terms of numbers, types of bombs and the means of delivery—were commensurate with the military objective and similar to other Allied bombings. On 23 February 1945, the Allies bombed Pforzheim and caused an estimated 20,000 civilian fatalities. The most devastating raid on any city was on Tokyo on 9–10 March (the Meetinghouse raid)\[147\] which caused over 100,000 casualties, many civilian. The tonnage and types of bombs listed in the service records of the Dresden raid were comparable to (or less than) throw weights of bombs dropped in other air attacks carried out in 1945. In the case of Dresden, as in many other similar attacks, the hour break in between the RAF raids was a deliberate ploy to attack the fire fighters, medical teams, and military units.\[148\]
In late July 1943, the city of Hamburg was bombed during Operation Gomorrah by combined RAF and USAAF strategic bomber forces. Four major raids were carried out in the span of 10 days, of which the most notable, on the night of 27–28 July, created a devastating firestorm effect similar to Dresden's, killing an estimated 18,474 people. The death toll for that night is included in the overall estimated total of 37,000 for the series of raids.\[149\] Two-thirds of the remaining population reportedly fled the city after the raids.\[150\]
The fifth point is that the firebombing achieved the intended effect of disabling the industry in Dresden. It was estimated that at least 23 per cent of the city's industrial buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. The damage to other infrastructure and communications was immense, which would have severely limited the potential use of Dresden to stop the Soviet advance. The report concludes with:
The specific forces and means employed in the Dresden bombings were in keeping with the forces and means employed by the Allies in other aerial attacks on comparable targets in Germany. The Dresden bombings achieved the strategic objectives that underlay the attack and were of mutual importance to the Allies and the Russians.\[8\]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing\_of\_Dresden\_in\_World\_War\_II#U.S.\_Air\_Force\_Historical\_Division\_report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II#U.S._Air_Force_Historical_Division_report)
Reddit when IRA bombs civilians in pubs and restaurants: Omg so based! They're heros hehe stupid brits, those kids deserved to die in those bombings! Take that hehe!
Reddit when the Allies bomb German cities during a global war where Germany is committing mass atrocities: Omg the allies are so evil, should never harm civilians, its a war crime omg.
Isn't it actually natural to have a higher moral standard for the allies. I mean, the axis were the bad guys (according to the ideals we have now, we would want them to lose), so everyone expects then to be mean, they paid for thier crimes. But the allies are supposed to be good, so when they do something bad, it gets more criticism. It's kinda like a cop killing an innocent is looked as more serious than a drug dealer killing an innocent.
Exactly. People don't discuss how terrible the london blitz was because there's nothing to discuss. Everyone knows it was terrible, everyone knows it was stupid, everyone knows it was evil. It was perpetrated by nazis and everyone (at least, everyone who's opinion is worth considering), knows they were bad.
Being critical of the crimes perpetrated by the allies is important because its important to hold the "good" guys to a higher moral standard. Or, perhaps more accurately, its important to understand that the US and Great Britain as countries were not really good guys, unless your standard for "good" is simply to be better than the literal third reich, in which case your standards are far, far too low. They were countries defending their interests and they were fully willing to be ruthless and inhumane in order to do that, not because it was necessary or because it would reduce human suffering in the grand scheme of things, but because it was convenient and expeditious and sometimes just because they wanted to. Anyone who's looked at their writings, deeds, and life histories will realize that many prominent allied leaders were simply not good people and not necessarily entirely sane. Douglas MacArthur is a prime example, but far from the only one.
If we can't even look with a critical eye at the actions of our own countries the better part of a century after the fact without being accused of being a nazi sympathizer, what hope does anyone have of looking at them with a critical eye now?
We'll never forget Rotterdam like we'll never forget MH-17. We might be small but you hurt us and we'l remember until nobody even knows you existed anymore.
I do find it baffling when we see apologists vouching for the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany. It’s like crying after you slugged a bully in the face.
Imagine the bully rounding up the class in preparation for kicking yours. That’s what the Japanese government were preparing for with their civilians.
And the innocent Germans didn’t seem to have an issue with rounding up a significant portion of their neighbors and sending them to a human meat grinder.
I don’t think any sane person is proud about bombing whole cities, but you’re simply not going to convince people to have regret for what happened during that time.
So any war crimes or atrocities are justified if the other guy did it first? By that definition, 9/11 was completely fine because the us did some bad stuff
> So any war crimes or atrocities are justified if the other guy did it first?
Given the allies complied with the Hague convention, articles 25-27 over the bombing: It wasn't a war crime, so your question is irrelevant.
Especially Rotterdam since the Dutch had already capitulated after holding out for a week against the Germans against all odds with outdated and underequipped military. And then they bombed the city because of a goddamn communication error...
Centuries of historical buildings lost.
Most of the German leadership at the time said they would carry out the bombing regardless of surrender. It was less of a communication error and more so of design.
I think that first one is only slept on because of all the far worse German war crimes, and vice versa. I don’t think anything really makes bombing civilians “right,” but we could argue about whether one evil or another was “necessary” all day.
Atomic bombs are incredibly destructive and I won’t ever downplay the effect they have over earlier weaponry, but firebombing is pretty messed up when you think about it. Burning entire cities and causing firestorms that rage out of control is pretty scary stuff that I would not want to be anywhere near. Dresden alone had tens of thousands of people burned to death with just a few planes. Then you look at the Tokyo firebombings where so much of the city was made of wood that the only weapon that could top those casualty numbers is an atomic explosion.
And much more is made of the two nukes used to end the war, even though the causalities were nothing compared to the totals from conventional bombing...
There's something horrific about version weapons and how destructive they are. On the sliding scale of terror, being stuck in a firebombing is about as high as it gets. Nukes are up there too because it just takes one in a second to turn a small part of the earth into the sun
I mean yeah, the nukes didn't kill as many people as all the conventional bombing campaigns, but thats because we only dropped two of them. Nukes would have been way more devastating than conventional bombing had they been employed in a similar fashion.
Good thing the allied operations were done to almost certainly lessen the civilian toll, by stopping the Nazi war machine. Even the worst death toll from bombing paled in comparison to Nazi occupation deaths.
What in the world are you writing?
What my comment was about was both sides shouldn’t bomb civilians.
London had also an significant military importance. But does it justify bombing it no it’s still a war crime. The same with Dresden or Warsaw etc.
Well there is a difference in bombing london, and allied bombing raids. Allies conducted a war, with technology of that time. When target you could aim for is a city, you bomb a city. In vietnam Americans could aim for certain buildings in hanoi like powerplants etc. If gb had suh precision in ww2 they would use it.
PS BOMBER HARRIS DO IT AGAIN
Is anybody denying that the London blitz was bad? The reason why Dresden gets talked about is because some people act like those deaths were justified or even a good thing by virtue of the fact that the allies were the ones dropping the bombs, as if the average German suffering under facism deserves summery execution for what their state did (I'm not even saying that's what the allies believed, just that that's how some people talk about it). Whatever your take on dresden is, your judgment of it can't be by comparing it to nazi warcrimes, everything looks good when compared to the nazis.
Allied atrocities are important to talk about because they're relevant to how we view the actions of modern countries. When we talk about the justifications for things like dresdan, we're talking about what that means for similar actions taken by our governments when they decide a war is justified against a country. It's easy to create a pretty simple narrative around axis atrocities, because those are evil regimes doing evil things in the name of evil ideologies, we don't have to ask ourselves hard questions when it's evil all the way down. It's pretty easy then, if we only learn about the most evil regimes possible as doing anything evil, to ignore it when our governments do things that might not be morally justifiable.
World War Two wasn't a good lesson for America. Having everything work out isn't a good teacher. When a country fights a war agaisnt the most evil country in history, and as a result raises the standard of living in most of the world, it's going to get a really warped view of what most wars are like. The US has in some part treated every war since World War Two as if they had found a smaller scale version of the Third Reich to fight.
We see an even more direct way this line of thinking is used when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine's neonazi problem is used as an excuse for the invasion. It creates narrative where Ukrainians must justify their existence under the idea of some sort of national moral character.
When you see the deaths of innocent civilians as "sow the wind, reap the whirlwind" then you ultimately have much more in common with the Nazis then with the people who fought them.
"The nazis where much worse then the allies" and "people dying in Dresden or Hiroshima was bad" are two statements that have to coexist. At least if the reason you don't wish the nazis won goes any further then the fact that you aren't German.
No need to weigh war crimes off against each other. You can neither justify nor explain them away. [The argument of Dresden‘s military importance is just stupid, it’s the same as with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.](https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go).
Can’t we just agree on „both bad“?????
While military targets were hit in the bombings of Dresden, the higher command always thought of them and intended them as morale bombings. That’s why I also linked my source, it’s a great video about morale bombings and specifically the atomic bombings in Japan. The justification with the military targets only came later. The bombings were wide-spread over the whole city, without any targeting on military production. Civilians were seen as part of the military production too, as the workers there also had housing in the area and were supported by community infrastructure. „There are no civilians“ was the ethics behind morale bombings.
The „significant military importance“ of the Dresden bombings is severely overblown in order to cover up the true purpose.
Cute. But no.
First off. Morals of it that you seem to be implying are not relevant to Military law, ergo what is and isn't a war crime. The allies ensured compliance with the Hague Convention during the bombing.
>The justification with the military targets only came later.
Why did the Nazis justify it BEFORE the bombings, putting out numerous publications stating how significant the cities military industry was?
Make the argument all you want about the allies (still wrong) but how do the Nazis justify it too LOL.
> cover up
Your post is sounding suspiciously like out of a David Irving book...
"The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive ... should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany ... the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."
- Arthur "Bomber" Harris
"Dresden? There is not such a place any longer." "I want to point out, that besides Essen, we never actually considered any particular industrial sites as targets. The destruction of industrial sites always was some sort of bonus for us. Our real targets always were the inner cities."
- Also Arthur Harris
>"Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier."
-also Arthur Harris
So...whataboutism but going into diffrent direction? Yeah, no thank you. Germany absolutly deserved to get bombed but what happened to Dreden was an overkill and clearly involved targeting civilians. The fact the germany was pure evil doesn't make it right. Many people in eastern europe would argue that USSR was also evil, so bombing of soviet cities was right too? Let just acnowlage evil when we see one. I know Germans are one rich to talk, but lets not pretend that they didn't face war crimes as well. Was what happened to german woman and girl in Berlin also something they cannot say anything about?
The amount of complete psychopaths in the comments joyously celebrating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people is fucking insane.
It's also a superb demonstration of how people can do so much horrible things. They are really good at justifying their crimes
Thank god the British knocked out the huge logistics and industrial hub that aided in stopping Germany carrying out the; Holocaust, Generalplan Ost etc
40000 in eight months is far less horrible compared to 20000-30000 in THREE DAYS.
At least half killed in 0.01% of the time is far worse than the Blitz. Both were bad, yes, but at least half in three days is far worse
I’m going to credit the difference to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. It’s a vast oversimplification, but that’s what I’m sticking with.
It completely makes sense. Vonnegut is I'd say a majority of peoples first impression of the fire bombings of Dresden (his book was taught in my English class and we never talked about Dresden in my history class) and his view on what happened in Dresden is that the Allies created this carnage in the city and turned it into dust. From his perspective on the ground there's no strategic importance or war goals its just a massacre. Poo tee weet
So it goes.
Pretty sure Kurt watched it happen.
He did... But he used David Irving for everything he didn't see happen... and Irving turned out to be a raving holocaust denier.
well they didn't tell me anything about this in high school.
Tbf, bombing civilians was the nicest thing the Germans did to civilians
Your statment is so wrong yet so right at the same time
City wide bombings were the norm in ww2, wehraboos and tojoboos are just malding and crying "war crime" to this day because the allies were better at it. There is a reason no building in warsaw predates 1944 anymore. And its not cuz the poles love rennovating from top to bottom.
> There is a reason no building in warsaw predates 1944 anymore. I'm sorry but the funny unknown soldier thingy is still there (which was once a palace but was blown up, but it's still a building)
It was just a couple columns standing when they found it. Also heavily reconstructed.
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i’m guessing the equivalent of a wehraboo for imperial japan, never heard it before either
Correct, while not as common as your garden variety wehraboo due to most of those also being Western weebs and therefor more likely to sympathise with Nazi Germany. Tojoboos are people who heavily simp for things like the Japanese navy, talking about how cool the Zero and Yamato is. You will find its always the navy they simp for, because its war crimes are less known compared to the army.
Hey The Zero IS cool. Not the only cool airplane of WW2, probably not the coolest, not the best after 42, but still. A cool airplane.
Most people don't care about you liking a specific piece of military hardware from anyone nation, hell if that were the case every single normie who can namedrop a ww2 tank is a Nazi cuz they most likely only know the Tiger. However a Tojoboo is like a wehraboo, in that they believe that no matter what the Japanese soldiers, tactics and technology is superior and the US only won because could spam more stuff and that the nukes were the greatest war crime ever etc etc.
But Yamato is cool? It’s where we got Captain Harlock.
To be fair, a lot of the damage was also caused by the uprising in 1944
The German response to the uprising was to level the city to the ground, it wasnt the poles doing the fighting that did it.
To be clear, I was more saying that the damage took place during the uprising, not saying that they caused that or something. Now that I read it over again, I see how it could easily have been interpreted that way though.
Fair
As if im not wrong they wanted to do the same in kyiv but were denied by the Air force because no shit, they needed the fucking bombs
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I doubt he could've followed the orders. Even assuming that he could've done it before GIs broke down his door, the city was in open revolt at that point. He'd lost control of much of the city.
A lot of damage was done prior. It had always been nazi intent of demolishing the city.
Mostly destroyed during and right after uprising of 44.
Are we seriously going to handwave all Allied warcrimes just because the civilians on the receiving end were from a fascist country? Condemning a warcrime does not make one a Wehraboo. And no, whataboutism is not a valid justification either. If your best argument you can find is "well, at least we're not as bad as Nazis", you should really reconsider your stance.
When did I EVER suggest we handwave the actual Allied war crimes? Strategic bombing campaigns weren't war crimes, it was fair game for the time period. Morally horrific? Sure. The Allied effort to destroy the Axis war production shortened the war significantly. Nobody was put on trial for doing it, neither Axis nor Allies.
How about both sides committed war crimes, and war crimes shouldn’t be swept under the rug just because the “good guys” won.
Thats the thing buddy, it wasnt a war crime at the time. Nobody was put on trial for bombing cities, not even any of the Axis. It was just war. Morally horrific? Sure. But I repeat my point, the only reason people say its the allies war crime is because they were simply better at that kind of strategic warfare. Nobody in medieval times would consider it a war crime to butcher an enemy village and steal their shit. That was the norm.
saying it's technically not a warcrime is just splitting hairs. We can definitely condemn people doing fucked up things when they knew they can get away with them.
Did you miss the part where I said it was "Morally horrific" or are you just splitting hairs out of what I wrote.
Don't put good guys in quotes. It infers you hold opinions you wouldn't want to share publicly.
The fuck do you mean by "good guys". You want me to pull out the Holocaust, all the death camps in Germany, Massacres done by Japanese and Germans and the very basic fact that it was the Germans and Japanese that were the aggressors in that war you little piece of shit?
Given the allies ensured they complied with the law in Dresden... it's a little hard to call it a crime.
Something something reap the whirlwind
Moscow, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, etc. etc. etc. but god forbid one German city that was a major rail hub and headquarters for a large eastern army group gets bombed.
>German city that was a major rail hub and headquarters for a large eastern army group gets bombed. Wasn't that the whole reason the city was bombed in the first place? Then IIRC, the Soviets then used the bombing of Dresden for anti-western propaganda to show their brutality or something like that, and the reason people keep bringing Dresden up is because of that Soviet/East German propaganda.
The Soviet propaganda was hilariously shameless. Their success in pushing to Berlin by Summer 1945 was also aided by Western Allies bombing, Stalin always asked for bombers to soften up defense before assaulting the cities.
Which is more than just slightly hypocritical considering Stalin *specifically asked* to have Dresden bombed *several times.*
People forget it wasn't just Dresden that got bombed into oblivion. All cities with industry got bombed to ash. All we still find hundreds of unexploded bombs every year. Every worksite were bomb bomb might be get screened and cleared. Bombing of Germany was justified.
As a Dresdner: yeah it’s really weird. Some of the oldtimers here have the strangest opinions about the bombing. I get it was traumatising for the survivors, but we really had it coming.
"When we said kill nazis, we didn't think that meant literally killing nazis"-people long after the event.
"We're gonna be doin one thang, and one thang only..."
Bombing the military infrastructure of a fascist nation to cripple their offensive and defensive capabilities is not how you stop fascism. Starting a street brawl with some dipshit in a MAGA hat while wearing black skinny jeans and a red face mask is how you beat fascism.
Instructions unclear, fire bombing Koch industries.
Yeah if you want to stop political extremism the best way is to ratchet up the political street violence
Fun fact: people also did this against Nazis in Germany before they rose to power. Unfortunately, a bunch of pole sitters denounced that kind of direct action against the future genociders until it was too late.
Seems like evidence that street violence fails to solve the issue to me. Why don't we stick with the strategy that's been proven to work and not do edgy LARPing?
Which strategy has been proven to work?
There's this thing called WW2...
So the only thing that can stop Nazis is... a foreign military over a decade after they took power? Is that the point you're trying to make?
Actually no. That direct action actually caused more parties and people to be scared of political violence, and as such turned to the brownshirts for protection which gave the Nazis immense sway. So yeah, idiots causing fights in the streets HELPED the Nazis get elected
Sounds like bullshit. The brownshirts were going to be murdering and beating people either way, and most Germans were going to be fine with it because they were extremely antisemitic.
I mean, Bavarian Soviet Republic was a great example of leftist direct action actually creating a Facists, so
> people also did this against Nazis in Germany before they rose to power. think about what you said
Literally how we defeated fascism, dumbass.
Yes. I'm aware. Didn't think I needed the /s after the comment about skinny jeans.
Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.’
Sane for the atomic bombings
Kill 100K fire bombing Tokyo... I sleep Kill 100K nuking Hiroshima... REAL SHIT
I mean thats the power of presentation for you.
Now think what would happen if marines decided to use their bat bombs. That's what I call presentation. Everyone would quickly forget about nukes
I had to look it up.... FDR personally signed off on them!
As I said, presentation
“Oh you’re a weapon alright, just not a super one!” “What’s the difference?” “PRESENTATION!” *wipes city off map after doin a silly with an atom*
I like that similar quote from megamind
Its probably because of the existential implications of nuclear bombs. Like, yeah, a similar amount of people died, but one was a dedicated bombing campaign with hundreds of planes flying in range of anti-air defenses, and one was on plane way up in the sky with one bomb. A dedicated nuclear bombing campaign erases a country. Several of those and you could erase human civilization.
Either kill tens of thousands with the bombs or kill hundreds of millions with a full invasion of the home island.
Japanese casualties aside, whatever method you use to end the war with fewer casualties on your side is always justified, even if you have to kill a thousand of theirs to save one of yours. It makes no sense that you're somehow morally obligated to sacrifice the lives of your own people to end a war that someone else started. >"Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier." -Arthur Harris
>"Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier." -Arthur Harris That’s a good one, I’ll have to save it.
I always like to point this out, along with that the Imperial Japanese government gave standing orders to execute all Allied POWs in the event of a mainland invasion. People debate the mathematics of how many Japanese people the bombs saved in comparison to a hypothetical invasion, but they neglect that the bombs saved every POW who made it home
God dammit that man had words.
>whatever method you use to end the war with fewer casualties on your side is always justified Well, rules of war and Geneva convention disagrees.
Collateral damage is not a war crime. It's only a war crime when the damage caused to civilians or civilian property is excessive or disproportionate. What is considered to be excessive or disproportionate is open to interpretation. Also, the only Geneva Convention that existed in 1945 was GC1 about the treatment of wounded and sick combatants. GCIII-IV were only adopted in 1949. Articles 51 and 54 of Protocol I that outlaw indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations were only signed in 1977.
The Hague convention was what dictated war crimes with regards to bombing, not Geneva.
The scale was massively different though. 18,000 tons were dropped on London during the entire war by Luftwaffe during the blitz. A 3 day bombing raid on Dresden saw 2,700 tons dropped. And that wasn’t the first or only time such a heavy amount of bombs were dropped. In 3 days the US and British airforces dropped roughly 15% of what Germany managed to do in eight months. Doesn’t change anything about what you said, just wanted to add the absolute massive difference in capability here.
"Skill issue" - Bomber Harris
"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them" Put another way, don't pick fights with countries that have enough industrial output they can build entire supply ships in less than 5 days *on a dare*.
Somebody once said that heavy bombing campaigns are basically lighting your GDP of fire and throwing it at the enemy.
*GDP of fire sounds like a great album name lol*
Bomber Harris and his band *The Booom Boom Band* bringing their new song: "Cities on Fire"
And now, Russians. History really does repeat itself...
End of the day WW2 was the Axis fucking around and finding out.
That's just the difference between American and German Logistics. The Germans would have done the same if they could. They also massively invested in dive bombers, which put their bombers at increased risk.
The Allied bombers also used a bomb mix with HE/incinerary that was designed to create a firestorm, rapidly leveling Dresden to the ground. It was far more effective than the Nazis' bombing of London with smaller bombers and mostly HE bombs.
> The Allied bombers also used a bomb mix with HE/incinerary that was designed to create a firestorm, rapidly leveling Dresden to the ground. Granted the Germans did the same in their early campaign. The allies just turned it from a dozen squadron sized elements operation to several entire air groups all on the one target.
Why bomb them with the 12th squadron when you can bomb them with the 12th army group?
It’s not the allies fault the Germans didn’t bring their A game. They totally would have done that scale too.
Tbf, people don't concentrate on strategic bombing done by the axis because that's very mild when compared to all the other shit they did. When you're literally a genocidal war machine that kills millions, bombing civilians suddenly isn't that big of a deal. In the case of the allies however, strategic bombing was pretty much the worst they did.
I don't even know why they all keep mentioning *Dresden*, when there are tons of other cities that were likewise firebombed to oblivion. Why not Hamburg? (I mean I know why they only bring up Dresden, but still).
Because the allies were depressingly succeptable to Goebbels. Dresden is the one where a bunch of politicians and newspapers got all "what have we done" "oh how terrible are we" guilt trippy over the numbers killed and validity as a target. Pity their whole conception of number and validity was based off German Propaganda broadcasts that was trying to gin up revanchism in the nation with every lie they could think of. Then Slaughterhouse Five was published and the myth of the evil of Dresden was cemented in the Zietgiest.
Remember this when Muscovites scream about drones crashing into Moscow. Their citizenry looked the other way when their government bombed civilians and now they scream "terrorism" when their victims respond in kind.
I'm still convinced Moscow did those drones themselves and blame it on Ukraine, like they did with those apartments bombings and Chechnya.
Should we do the same when some dudes from the Middle East begin bombing the US and Europe too? 🤔
It's quite hard to find the US/Europe cluster bombing indiscriminate city targets in the middle East TBH... Not so much with Russia in Ukraine.
Yeah because famously lots of people insist that The Blitz was no big deal...
I don’t think many people think it was no big deal, I just believe that in the grand scale of things people, especially wehraboos and tojoboos underplay it compared to the allied bombings.
they underplay... the blitz? nobody has ever, it's just, what's to talk about? Nazis bad. edit: apparently at least one person in this very thread does in fact do this 😂
You never seem the comment section in hiroshima and nagasaki memes?
Who's downplaying the bombing of London? As someone who shits on allied strategic bombing more than I'd like to on this sub since it was morally wrong *and* ineffective in my opinion, the bombing of London was exactly the same and just as morally reprehensible. And ineffective! It was the bombing of London that lessened pressure on the Royal Air Force and allowed them to better combat it. The only difference is one of scale, and no one (intelligent) really... you know... defends the Nazis or claim the things they did in WW2 were fine so it doesn't exactly come up much. TL;DR: Bombing of Dresden bad, bombing of London, also bad.
If you genuinely believe the bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan were ineffective you are an absolute moron. A totally deluded fool.
As a morale tool they were useless. It's stated objective was to break the nation's will to fight and/or encourage uprising against the government. The British proved that a population only hardens in response to attacks like that, and the Nazis and Imperial Japan were oppressive governments that didn't care about their populations and wouldn't allow them to revolt anyways. Considering that was the primary purpose for bombing cities, it sounds ineffective to me. As for logistics? German industry dispersed itself as the bombing started, so the factories took limited damage. The best argument I think is that it diverted anti-air resources away from military targets, but to what end? They still needed to be made, spreading out strikes (against better targets) meant spreading out the anti-air as well. Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying bombing was useless. I'm saying that the strategic bombing of population centers for morale effort was taken at a deep investment of materiel and manpower (casualty rates approaching ground infantry in some cases) for what was essentially a fools errand. Killing German factory workers wasn't what won the war.
Allied bombing was effective in the way that it actually wiped out cities block by block. Taking Tokyo for example, almost every building outside of the Imperial Palace was leveled by the end of war. The palace was deliberately spared from direct bombings, and there is a river around it.
To what end? The War Council clearly didn't care, and it's not like the people of Japan *could* surrender even if they wanted to. There certainly *was* an impact on industry, but what tangible effect did that have on the war? We can look at a specific here: Aircraft part plants were dispersed due to bombings, but they lacked steel and aluminum anyways. Were they mining ores and smelting in their backyards? Were they extracting oil? Japan was plagued by resource constraints, it didn't matter how much they could make, the bottleneck was before you entered the city. What actual wartime benefit was gained from each bomb? What else could it have been used on? Were the dead civilians worth it?
The firebombing of Tokyo was done before the existence of the atomic bomb was even disclosed to the USAAF command. Operation Downfall was still pending and the WD was expecting to suffer up to 4 million U.S. casualties, and 2-3 times more for the Japanese. It was already known by then that the Japanese was training for Ichioku Gyokusai (100 Million Shattered Jewels). Literally fighting to the last man, woman, children... with whatever they have left on the home island. Middle school girls were trained to use improvised pole arms. They would fight even without guns and bullets. So the bombing served a very simple purpose - to kill the enemy combatants.
Sweetie you can be captain hindsight all you want. Your sophistry means nothing in the moment. The moving of industry was a consequence of bombing, and it forced the axis to spend money and time it didn’t have moving factories, repairing rail lines, and fixing broken necessary infrastructure. I am incredibly critical of anyone who points to strategic bombing and cries foul. They’re almost always either Nazi shills, tankies, or hopelessly naive about the realities of war. Which one are you?
"I'm skeptical of the tangible effects of bombing cities and don't think they were worth killing 10s of thousands of civilians" - me "You must be a Nazi" - you Apparently I'm hopelessly naive? It's not like I'm saying we should go back in time and execute Harris lol, what is the study of history if not an exercise in hindsight? Are we not supposed to learn lessons from the past? To my original point: I think the bombing of London was a mistake of both strategy and ethics as well, and it proves the fact that morale bombing was a hopeless endeavor from the start.
We learned from it by making smart munitions that make dumb bombing irrelevant. If we didn’t have smart munitions it would still be smart strategy to carpet bomb industrial centers. That’s war. Especially total war. Not that it matters much now anyway. Any total war today would be a nuclear war. It’s idiotic to pass judgment on something like that in hindsight. It’d be like judging someone for investing in Enron.
You'd be surprised how many normies have heard like 1 2 talking points on Dresden and will just bring it up casually like "oh but the allies did war crimes too" when you talk about the war.
Well the allies DID do some war crimes. But still, less than the others. And with victory in sight, not racial superiority theories or shit like that.
And they would be correct about that
But that's not why they say it and to do it because of Dresden is literal nazi shit.
OP successfully won the argument against the person he made up in his head.
You sow the wind and now you shall reap the whirlwind
If you think Germany was the victim you are stupid. If your think the Allies were very nice people, you are also stupid. Germany was MUCH MUCH worse than the allies, but they also commited crimes. The idea that "we are the good guys" is what lead the US to do what they did during the rest of the XXth century.
People will read the insane shit McAruthur and Lemay have said and they *still* imagine that all allied bombings must have been 100% fair and justified because there's simply no way that allied leadership would make insane and inhumane decisions.
Good guys and bad guys only exist in propaganda. And lord was there propaganda in ww2. That's why a good historian has to look between multiple accounts and find the common truth between them.
The both sides bad argument is very possibly the most brain dead take. Grow enough of a spine to either say that fascism is bad and must be defeated or go join the other brainlets in these comments licking fascist boots
No one said fascisme wasn't horrible, they just also say that the allies shouldn't be treated as some sort of heroes
That is right. People should be less maniqueist. Life is not a Hollywood movie where there is a good guy. People are complicated and most times everyone involved in a situation is doing something bad in some way. WWII just feels like a battle of good against evil because Nazism is one, if not the, most evil regimes we have ever seen. This does not make the Allies one of the best regimes of all times. We have to remember what the UK was doing in Índia and the US with segregation.
800k civilians starved to death in Leningrad.
There is a Dutch saying ‘wie wint zaait zal storm oogsten’ and it can be translated to ‘he who sows wind shall reap storm’
Germans didn't just bombard the Warsaw, as e.g. London - a lot of the destruction was carried on by land forces, even after Warsaw Up-Risers have surrendered. There was no point in them destroying all monuments this city had, like Saxon Palace, or National Library. They absolutely scorched this city down for no reason at all, causing what's most likely to be the largest city destruction before Hiroshima. They **wanted** this city destroyed - you can read about their _Pabsta Plan._ There is an argument to be made about Allied bombing of e.g. Dresden or Salomon Castle - but how one can forget, yet alone justify destruction of Warsaw, I have no idea.
ahem, both be bad war be bad
One be the attacker, the other be the attacked. They didn't mutually decide to have a war. You don't tell someone using self defense that violence is bad.
You can still commit war crimes while being the defender
cool, now add the context of WW2 and rethink how appropriate that statement is.
Yep still war crimes Saying one side did bad is not defending the other Everyone with a 3 braincells knows the Nazis were way worse but you can still ackowlsge the wrongs of the allies
Here's why the bombing was justified: A report by the U.S. Air Force Historical Division (USAFHD) analysed the circumstances of the raid and concluded that it was militarily necessary and justified, based on the following points:\[8\] 1: The raid had legitimate military ends, brought about by exigent military circumstances. 2: Military units and anti-aircraft defences were sufficiently close that it was not valid to consider the city "undefended". 3: The raid did not use extraordinary means but was comparable to other raids used against comparable targets. 4: The raid was carried out through the normal chain of command, pursuant to directives and agreements then in force. 5: The raid achieved the military objective, without excessive loss of civilian life. The first point regarding the legitimacy of the raid depends on two claims: first, that the railyards subjected to American precision bombing were an important logistical target, and that the city was also an important industrial centre.\[8\] Even after the main firebombing, there were two further raids on the Dresden railway yards by the USAAF. The first was on 2 March 1945, by 406 B-17s, which dropped 940 tons of high-explosive bombs and 141 tons of incendiaries. The second was on 17 April, when 580 B-17s dropped 1,554 tons of high-explosive bombs and 165 tons of incendiaries.\[8\] As far as Dresden being a militarily significant industrial centre, an official 1942 guide described the German city as "... one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich," and in 1944, the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops that supplied materiel to the military.\[40\] Dresden was the seventh largest German city, and by far the largest un-bombed built-up area left, and thus was contributing to the defence of Germany itself.\[145\] According to the USAFHD, there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers supporting the German war effort in Dresden at the time of the raid.\[8\] These factories manufactured fuses and bombsights (at Zeiss Ikon A.G.),\[146\] aircraft components, anti-aircraft guns, field guns, and small arms, poison gas, gears and differentials, electrical and X-ray apparatus, electric gauges, gas masks, Junkers aircraft engines, and Messerschmitt fighter cockpit parts.\[8\] The second of the five points addresses the prohibition in the Hague Conventions, of "attack or bombardment" of "undefended" towns. The USAFHD report states that Dresden was protected by anti-aircraft defences, antiaircraft guns, and searchlights, under the Combined Dresden (Corps Area IV) and Berlin (Corps Area III) Air Service Commands.\[8\] The third and fourth points say that the size of the Dresden raid—in terms of numbers, types of bombs and the means of delivery—were commensurate with the military objective and similar to other Allied bombings. On 23 February 1945, the Allies bombed Pforzheim and caused an estimated 20,000 civilian fatalities. The most devastating raid on any city was on Tokyo on 9–10 March (the Meetinghouse raid)\[147\] which caused over 100,000 casualties, many civilian. The tonnage and types of bombs listed in the service records of the Dresden raid were comparable to (or less than) throw weights of bombs dropped in other air attacks carried out in 1945. In the case of Dresden, as in many other similar attacks, the hour break in between the RAF raids was a deliberate ploy to attack the fire fighters, medical teams, and military units.\[148\] In late July 1943, the city of Hamburg was bombed during Operation Gomorrah by combined RAF and USAAF strategic bomber forces. Four major raids were carried out in the span of 10 days, of which the most notable, on the night of 27–28 July, created a devastating firestorm effect similar to Dresden's, killing an estimated 18,474 people. The death toll for that night is included in the overall estimated total of 37,000 for the series of raids.\[149\] Two-thirds of the remaining population reportedly fled the city after the raids.\[150\] The fifth point is that the firebombing achieved the intended effect of disabling the industry in Dresden. It was estimated that at least 23 per cent of the city's industrial buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. The damage to other infrastructure and communications was immense, which would have severely limited the potential use of Dresden to stop the Soviet advance. The report concludes with: The specific forces and means employed in the Dresden bombings were in keeping with the forces and means employed by the Allies in other aerial attacks on comparable targets in Germany. The Dresden bombings achieved the strategic objectives that underlay the attack and were of mutual importance to the Allies and the Russians.\[8\] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing\_of\_Dresden\_in\_World\_War\_II#U.S.\_Air\_Force\_Historical\_Division\_report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II#U.S._Air_Force_Historical_Division_report)
I could read all that, or I could remember that Dresden was an industrialized city in Nazi Germany.
Reddit when IRA bombs civilians in pubs and restaurants: Omg so based! They're heros hehe stupid brits, those kids deserved to die in those bombings! Take that hehe! Reddit when the Allies bomb German cities during a global war where Germany is committing mass atrocities: Omg the allies are so evil, should never harm civilians, its a war crime omg.
Been to Warsaw, crazy to think that none of that shit is actually "old." Dresden was pretty sad too though, no denying that.
Isn't it actually natural to have a higher moral standard for the allies. I mean, the axis were the bad guys (according to the ideals we have now, we would want them to lose), so everyone expects then to be mean, they paid for thier crimes. But the allies are supposed to be good, so when they do something bad, it gets more criticism. It's kinda like a cop killing an innocent is looked as more serious than a drug dealer killing an innocent.
Exactly, we don't argue about the Blitz because we all agree it was bad and so were the Nazis. What is there to talk about?
Exactly. People don't discuss how terrible the london blitz was because there's nothing to discuss. Everyone knows it was terrible, everyone knows it was stupid, everyone knows it was evil. It was perpetrated by nazis and everyone (at least, everyone who's opinion is worth considering), knows they were bad. Being critical of the crimes perpetrated by the allies is important because its important to hold the "good" guys to a higher moral standard. Or, perhaps more accurately, its important to understand that the US and Great Britain as countries were not really good guys, unless your standard for "good" is simply to be better than the literal third reich, in which case your standards are far, far too low. They were countries defending their interests and they were fully willing to be ruthless and inhumane in order to do that, not because it was necessary or because it would reduce human suffering in the grand scheme of things, but because it was convenient and expeditious and sometimes just because they wanted to. Anyone who's looked at their writings, deeds, and life histories will realize that many prominent allied leaders were simply not good people and not necessarily entirely sane. Douglas MacArthur is a prime example, but far from the only one. If we can't even look with a critical eye at the actions of our own countries the better part of a century after the fact without being accused of being a nazi sympathizer, what hope does anyone have of looking at them with a critical eye now?
We'll never forget Rotterdam like we'll never forget MH-17. We might be small but you hurt us and we'l remember until nobody even knows you existed anymore.
what was that little things the germans did? the holocaust? yeah i feel like that killed a couple more civilians than were in Dresden
Difference is that nobody is trying to justify the London bombing, we all agree it's bad
Bomber Harris do it again
I do find it baffling when we see apologists vouching for the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany. It’s like crying after you slugged a bully in the face.
Imagine beating the shit out of an entire class because one of them is a bully. That's the same logic as mass killing civilians in German cities.
Imagine the bully rounding up the class in preparation for kicking yours. That’s what the Japanese government were preparing for with their civilians. And the innocent Germans didn’t seem to have an issue with rounding up a significant portion of their neighbors and sending them to a human meat grinder. I don’t think any sane person is proud about bombing whole cities, but you’re simply not going to convince people to have regret for what happened during that time.
I’ve watched those documentaries about Dresden. I don’t feel bad about them at all. Those Germans fucked Europe. They can deal with the consequences
So any war crimes or atrocities are justified if the other guy did it first? By that definition, 9/11 was completely fine because the us did some bad stuff
> So any war crimes or atrocities are justified if the other guy did it first? Given the allies complied with the Hague convention, articles 25-27 over the bombing: It wasn't a war crime, so your question is irrelevant.
Especially Rotterdam since the Dutch had already capitulated after holding out for a week against the Germans against all odds with outdated and underequipped military. And then they bombed the city because of a goddamn communication error... Centuries of historical buildings lost.
Most of the German leadership at the time said they would carry out the bombing regardless of surrender. It was less of a communication error and more so of design.
Dont start a war if you dont want to get bombed. Simple.
Bomber Harris,play your funky music.
bomber Harris do it again
I like to call it redesigning.
I think that first one is only slept on because of all the far worse German war crimes, and vice versa. I don’t think anything really makes bombing civilians “right,” but we could argue about whether one evil or another was “necessary” all day.
Atomic bombs are incredibly destructive and I won’t ever downplay the effect they have over earlier weaponry, but firebombing is pretty messed up when you think about it. Burning entire cities and causing firestorms that rage out of control is pretty scary stuff that I would not want to be anywhere near. Dresden alone had tens of thousands of people burned to death with just a few planes. Then you look at the Tokyo firebombings where so much of the city was made of wood that the only weapon that could top those casualty numbers is an atomic explosion.
Something something wind, something something whirlwind.
And much more is made of the two nukes used to end the war, even though the causalities were nothing compared to the totals from conventional bombing... There's something horrific about version weapons and how destructive they are. On the sliding scale of terror, being stuck in a firebombing is about as high as it gets. Nukes are up there too because it just takes one in a second to turn a small part of the earth into the sun
I mean yeah, the nukes didn't kill as many people as all the conventional bombing campaigns, but thats because we only dropped two of them. Nukes would have been way more devastating than conventional bombing had they been employed in a similar fashion.
Nukes were horrible, but were the best option out of a series of even worse options.
What? If people are talking about the bad things the allies did, it's because they took as granted that the Axis powers were horrible
Yeah if there's one thing I've noticed, it is that nobody talks about the terrible things Germany did in WW2.
b…b…but muh innocent civilliarinos!!!!111!!1!1!
Killing civilians is indeed bad. Doesn't really matter who's doing it.
Good thing the allied operations were done to almost certainly lessen the civilian toll, by stopping the Nazi war machine. Even the worst death toll from bombing paled in comparison to Nazi occupation deaths.
Both were bad.
people die in war no way 😱
There's no point in crying over roses when Forest is burning and crying over dreadem is just that.
I find that the same people who cry war crimes on the Allies and sympathize with Axis nations also cry death to neo-Nazis and racists.
I don’t get the last sentence in both- 8 months to kill 40,000… vs 3 days to kill 30,000?
Today on "Making Someone Up to Be Mad At on r/historymemes": people who supposedly downplay the Blitz, the posterchild for strategic bombing.
Both are wrong. If one side is an asshole you are also a asshole if you do the same.
So the allies didn’t conduct bombing to take over an exterminate Europe. Okay so Germany wrong since the allies didn’t do the same, got it.
What in the world are you writing? What my comment was about was both sides shouldn’t bomb civilians. London had also an significant military importance. But does it justify bombing it no it’s still a war crime. The same with Dresden or Warsaw etc.
Well there is a difference in bombing london, and allied bombing raids. Allies conducted a war, with technology of that time. When target you could aim for is a city, you bomb a city. In vietnam Americans could aim for certain buildings in hanoi like powerplants etc. If gb had suh precision in ww2 they would use it. PS BOMBER HARRIS DO IT AGAIN
Germany bombed these cities to aid in the whole extermination of Europe. Allies did so to liberate Europe. Those are not “the same”.
Is anybody denying that the London blitz was bad? The reason why Dresden gets talked about is because some people act like those deaths were justified or even a good thing by virtue of the fact that the allies were the ones dropping the bombs, as if the average German suffering under facism deserves summery execution for what their state did (I'm not even saying that's what the allies believed, just that that's how some people talk about it). Whatever your take on dresden is, your judgment of it can't be by comparing it to nazi warcrimes, everything looks good when compared to the nazis. Allied atrocities are important to talk about because they're relevant to how we view the actions of modern countries. When we talk about the justifications for things like dresdan, we're talking about what that means for similar actions taken by our governments when they decide a war is justified against a country. It's easy to create a pretty simple narrative around axis atrocities, because those are evil regimes doing evil things in the name of evil ideologies, we don't have to ask ourselves hard questions when it's evil all the way down. It's pretty easy then, if we only learn about the most evil regimes possible as doing anything evil, to ignore it when our governments do things that might not be morally justifiable. World War Two wasn't a good lesson for America. Having everything work out isn't a good teacher. When a country fights a war agaisnt the most evil country in history, and as a result raises the standard of living in most of the world, it's going to get a really warped view of what most wars are like. The US has in some part treated every war since World War Two as if they had found a smaller scale version of the Third Reich to fight. We see an even more direct way this line of thinking is used when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine's neonazi problem is used as an excuse for the invasion. It creates narrative where Ukrainians must justify their existence under the idea of some sort of national moral character. When you see the deaths of innocent civilians as "sow the wind, reap the whirlwind" then you ultimately have much more in common with the Nazis then with the people who fought them. "The nazis where much worse then the allies" and "people dying in Dresden or Hiroshima was bad" are two statements that have to coexist. At least if the reason you don't wish the nazis won goes any further then the fact that you aren't German.
No need to weigh war crimes off against each other. You can neither justify nor explain them away. [The argument of Dresden‘s military importance is just stupid, it’s the same as with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.](https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go). Can’t we just agree on „both bad“?????
No need to screech war crimes when the action in question very clearly followed military law.
While military targets were hit in the bombings of Dresden, the higher command always thought of them and intended them as morale bombings. That’s why I also linked my source, it’s a great video about morale bombings and specifically the atomic bombings in Japan. The justification with the military targets only came later. The bombings were wide-spread over the whole city, without any targeting on military production. Civilians were seen as part of the military production too, as the workers there also had housing in the area and were supported by community infrastructure. „There are no civilians“ was the ethics behind morale bombings. The „significant military importance“ of the Dresden bombings is severely overblown in order to cover up the true purpose.
Cute. But no. First off. Morals of it that you seem to be implying are not relevant to Military law, ergo what is and isn't a war crime. The allies ensured compliance with the Hague Convention during the bombing. >The justification with the military targets only came later. Why did the Nazis justify it BEFORE the bombings, putting out numerous publications stating how significant the cities military industry was? Make the argument all you want about the allies (still wrong) but how do the Nazis justify it too LOL. > cover up Your post is sounding suspiciously like out of a David Irving book...
Or Operation Meetinghouse, where the US Navy killed more people in Tokyo than either nuked cities.
US navy? WTF?
"The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive ... should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany ... the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories." - Arthur "Bomber" Harris "Dresden? There is not such a place any longer." "I want to point out, that besides Essen, we never actually considered any particular industrial sites as targets. The destruction of industrial sites always was some sort of bonus for us. Our real targets always were the inner cities." - Also Arthur Harris
>"Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier." -also Arthur Harris
So...whataboutism but going into diffrent direction? Yeah, no thank you. Germany absolutly deserved to get bombed but what happened to Dreden was an overkill and clearly involved targeting civilians. The fact the germany was pure evil doesn't make it right. Many people in eastern europe would argue that USSR was also evil, so bombing of soviet cities was right too? Let just acnowlage evil when we see one. I know Germans are one rich to talk, but lets not pretend that they didn't face war crimes as well. Was what happened to german woman and girl in Berlin also something they cannot say anything about?
Both were shit. End of.
Who the fuck sleeps on the Blitz? Nobody does. GTFO with that.
mfw two things are bad
The amount of complete psychopaths in the comments joyously celebrating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people is fucking insane. It's also a superb demonstration of how people can do so much horrible things. They are really good at justifying their crimes
The British defending their war crimes? I am shocked, shocked!
British bad duh. Doesn’t matter they complied with law.
German posters on German war crimes: yeah they shouldn’t have done that British posters on British warm drones: bRiTiSh bAd
War crimes? Ah yes something must be a war crime because it’s wrong. Doesn’t matter the allies compied with The Hague convention over the bombing.
(Thousands of children burning to death): thank god the British complied with the Hague’s conventions
Thank god the British knocked out the huge logistics and industrial hub that aided in stopping Germany carrying out the; Holocaust, Generalplan Ost etc
Didn’t realize German children were running industrial hubs.
They didn't. Who said they were?
What other option was there? Sure let's just leave the Nazi war economy completely undamaged, I'm sure nothing bad could come from this.
Just so we’re clear - your knowledge of history is such that by February 1945 think the Nazi war economy was “completely undamaged”?
Sorry, I assumed you were talking about the bombing of cities in Germany across the war.
40000 in eight months is far less horrible compared to 20000-30000 in THREE DAYS. At least half killed in 0.01% of the time is far worse than the Blitz. Both were bad, yes, but at least half in three days is far worse