Re: OT: Genocide? Bomber Harris - John Thaw Full Movie (BBC 1989)

On Jun 29, 2024 at 2:23:56 AM EDT, "ermintrudethecat" <ermintrudethecat>
wrote:

Thanks for that information from a German source which is unusual. My
main point is that if the Dresden raid was a war crime, the UK and the
USA are equally guilty, as both participated.
It's worth mentioning too that in 1940 during the German invasion of
France and the Low Countries, it remained British policy to fly by day
using light/medium bombers and to attack only military targets. The
result was an absolute slaughter of Blenheims, Hampdens, Wellingtons and
Battles, with little or no damage to the Wehrmacht.
 

Nazi Germany led the way with aerial attacks on civilian population at
Guernica in 1937. After that, since "Germany started it," most of the WWII
nations not only matched the effort, but turned it into a science. Coventry in
England got burned to a crisp by Germany during the raid on 14 November 1940
using incendiary bombs. Dresden followed on 13-14 February 1945, which some
have suggested it was Churchill's revenge for Coventry. All this rapidly pales
before the non-nuclear firebombing of Japan by the US between 1942 and 1945,
killing between 210,000 and 900,000 people, which dwarfs the atomic bomb
attacks of 35,000 to 50,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 100,000 in Nagasaki.

As to morality, from Wikipedia comes this quote: "According to Robert
McNamara, who served as an officer in the Army Air Forces under General Curtis
LeMay during the bombings of Japan, LeMay once said that had the United States
lost the war they would have been tried for war crimes, McNamara agrees with
this assessment. McNamara believed that, "He (LeMay), and I'd say I, were
behaving as war criminals." and that "LeMay recognized that what he was doing
would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if
you lose and not immoral if you win?"

-Owen