Is Condemnation of Dresden Bombing Justified?It

It was a legitimate target and civilian deaths were collateral damage to factories and huge rail yards.

 

There were a number of bombings over a number of days...I think the use of incendiaries indicated the deliberate targeting of civilians...25k civilian deaths is not an insignificant number...personally I think it was an unnecessary overkill.

 

Unjustified, in my book.

 

I thought it was justified. At least the Allied media could use pictures of Dresden dead and pass them off as victims of the gas chambers.

 

Useless, did not result to anything than a destroyed City.

 

plain and simple-...no different than any other bombings of cities in Japan or Germany

 

That's it. Once in a while, largely due to weather conditions, a raid would be unusually devastating, like Hamburg or Tokyo. The only way to avoid it would be to take city bombing off the table and confine attacks to clearly identifiable military or industrial targets - which was both British and American policy early in their bomber campaigns. That would drastically curtail night bombing and significantly impact daylight operations as well, requiring good visibility to be predicted ahead of time and to actually occur as predicted over the target. And of course there was the fighter issue in daylight.

 

..th

....thanks for the reply..good point on the daylight bombing/fighters
...I thought I remember reading that the Schweinfurt bombings did do some damage--but they said fire bombing would've been ''more effective'' for disrupting production/repairing/etc = wasn't fire bombing less accurate than general purpose bombs?

....even with ''modern'' bombing with high tech aircraft/computers in Vietnam, they could not destroy/curtail strategic targets ....even tactically, they hit friendly forces

 

Fire bombing generally wasn't trying to be accurate; they usually used clusters of small incendiaries, as little as 4lb each, which broke apart after leaving the bomb bay and scattered over a wide area. I suppose they could have used incendiary bombs comparable to GPs if that was considered desirable. Also firebombing was generally done at lower altitudes (at night) than day bombers usually flew.

 

Nothing achieved. After Schweinfurt the Swedes sold anything the Allied thought destroying. So only destroyed and killed Air Force.

 

There's a couple of points that are often overlooked. One, the war was almost over, so the bombing wasn't going to shorten the war even a little bit. Secondly, Dresden probably had some war production going on but by this time Germany's war economy was devastated, little or no fuel produced, and its transportation system shattered; therefore whatever they made was useless and the Allies knew this! In short it was an exercise in killing for killing's sake.

 

The war was almost over.....but at the time of the bombing of Dresden the Rhine hadn't been crossed, and V2 rockets were still falling on London in considerable numbers. London's population had been under fire for five years - it may look very unpleasant to us, 75 years later, but at the time there wasn't too much sympathy. Rightly or wrongly, it was the context of the time.

 

At the time, there probably was little sympathy from the British public but from what I've read, public opinion changed after the war when the details came out. Even Churchill started backing off from his love affair with Bomber Command.
I'm sure the definition of a war crime whether on life and property is when it is not necessary or even desirable in a military sense.

 

Then again, Sir Arthur Harris had decided after BoB to bomb the Germn cities to kingdom come.. And that´s what he did.

 

Churchill's 'backing off' from Bomber Command - after his instruction to Portal to 'baste the Germans in their retreat' which was a contributory factor in the Dresden raid - was not his finest hour. Btu then, he was a politician.

 

Yes indeed. You would have thought Churchill would have won any voting but...

1945 United Kingdom general election

1945 United Kingdom general election - Wikipedia

The caretaker government, led by Churchill, was heavily defeated. The Labour Party, led by Attlee won a landslide victory and gained a majority of 145 seats. It was the first election in which Labour gained a majority of seats and the first in which it won a plurality of votes.

 

It was unncessary, but so is war.

 

Reminiscent of Captain Renault in Casablanca: "I'm shocked to discover bombing going on here!"