# 65th Anniversary of bombing Hiroshima **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 9, 2010, 12:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698 "2010-08-09T12:39:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/201 "2010-08-11T17:39:53Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > [QUOTE=DragonAsh] > Well, to nit-pick - the US didn’t get into the war with Japan because of Nanking, and the US certainly didn’t get into the war to free Asia from Japan rule. The US didn’t get into the war with Germany to free the Jews. Those were unintended but obviously very fortunate consequences of the wars. Since, afaik anyway, no one is saying this, I’m unsure who’s nits you are picking. -XT [/QUOTE] **Villa** and **Shodan** have both used Nanking as a justification for the bombings of Japan. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/202 "2010-08-11T17:41:43Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > > [@Sailboat](#): > > > > I’m not defending area bombing, but it’s worth pointing out that in total-war ideology, the other side’s civilians were considered part of the war effort, and if they were in fact not materially contributing to the war effort, it wasn’t for lack of trying – most countries tried to mobilize their civilians for round-the-clock war production and/or support. > > > > In this case the Japanese civilians in Tokyo are arguably not AS innocent as the Chinese civilians in Nanking, since Tokyo’s population is supposedly contributing to the war effort of an aggressor state and Nanking’s population was essentially just sitting there going about the business of life when Japan invaded. > > > > Again, that doesn’t make area bombing right – I am merely addressing the conceit that both groups were exactly equivalently “innocent.” > > The Japanese children and babies we set on fire had moral culpability for what their goivernment had done? Uh, YES, _in terms of total-war ideology_. Note that I am not defending total-war ideology. But in terms of total warfare, every single human being on the other side is ultimately a _resource_. Ugly implications? Ugly as hell. But that’s how people at the time thought – and that’s how we might find ourselves thinking if it came down to the nitty-gritty again. Total war theory holds that those babies if left alone will eventually be turned into soldiers and sent to kill us. Again – not my intention to defend it. But hundreds of millions of people apparently believed in and supported such policies. (Although there was always thoughtful dissent, especially regarding area bombing.) I thought you were asking about the historical situation, so I gave a historical analysis. Really, the answer is easy. What we’re apparently confused about is the _question._ _Did toddlers count as legitimate targets in the time and ethos of the war itself?_ Yes. _Would toddlers count as legitimate targets in an idealized world?_ Of course not. _Would Dio have targeted them?_ No. _Would Sailboat have targeted them?_ Not with area bombing. _Possibly_ as occasional indirect victims (“collateral damage,” to use the ugly euphemism) of “precision” bombing against really important targets. See? easy, if we ask the right question. ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/203 "2010-08-11T17:42:05Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Are youi going to asnwer my question about whether you’d be willing tos et your own child on fire to end a war? All caveats about it being an impossible situation aside… Yes. I think anyone who wouldn’t sacrifice their own child, assuming there was no alternative, to guaranteed to prevent the Holocaust, for example, needs to reassess their moral compass. Could I live with myself afterwards? Probably not. But then again I couldn’t live with myself after if I spared my son thus condemning millions of others to death. Of course, it is a choice I am never going to have to face. But if we had to do 1939-45 all over again, I’d give Bomber Harris more resources rather than fewer, and God Speed & Good Hunting, Lancasters. ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/204 "2010-08-11T17:43:37Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > > [@xtisme](#): > > > > Since, afaik anyway, no one is saying this, I’m unsure who’s nits you are picking. > > > > -XT > > **Villa** and **Shodan** have both used Nanking as a justification for the bombings of Japan. No I didn’t. I used the prevention of future Nankings as justification. That you could happily sit back and read of the Rape of Dehli, and the Rape of Sydney, and the Rape of Honolulu, just as long as you didn’t have to get your hands dirty… ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/205 "2010-08-11T17:46:02Z")
> [@villa](#): > > > [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > > > Are youi going to asnwer my question about whether you’d be willing tos et your own child on fire to end a war? > > All caveats about it being an impossible situation aside… > > Yes. I think anyone who wouldn’t sacrifice their own child, assuming there was no alternative, to guaranteed prevent the Holocaust, for example, needs to reassess their moral compass. I think you’d have to reevaluate your moral compass if you even considered killing your own kid. And what’s so impossible about a scenario where your own kid is in an area targted for bombing? Unlikely, maybe, but not far fetched. Was there not a single westerner present in Japan at the time of the bombings? ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/206 "2010-08-11T17:48:16Z")
> [@villa](#): > > > [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > > > **Villa** and **Shodan** have both used Nanking as a justification for the bombings of Japan. > > No I didn’t. I used the prevention of future Nankings as justification. That you could happily sit back and read of the Rape of Dehli, and the Rape of Sydney, and the Rape of Honolulu, just as long as you didn’t have to get your hands dirty… What did you do to stop the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur? ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/207 "2010-08-11T17:50:17Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > What did you do to stop the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur? I’d have supported military action to prevent all three. Even if it had resulted in the death of some innocents. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/208 "2010-08-11T17:50:24Z")
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic] It’s called having a moral center. [/QUOTE] I call it being morally bankrupt, to be honest. > [@](#): > > You said you would answer the question and then you didn’t anwer it. I tried to make it simple for you by asking whether you’d be willing to bomb a target that you knew had your child in it, and if you think it’s contrived to say that dropping bombs will magically end a war, then how can you say that the bombings of Japan ended a war? No, you tried to put people into a false position in order to score some obscure points that only you seem to be able to see, to keep this hijack of the thread going along the lines that seem to amuse you for some odd reason. > [@](#): > > I’ll try to put it very simply, if you knew your own wife and children were right in the killzone for the bombing of Hiroshima (in an anrea where you knew they had zero chance of survival) would you still be willing to drop the bomb. You have no trouble pondring whether you’d do it to someone else’s wife and kids, so you should have no hesitation about doing it to your own, right? If I knew it would stop the war? Certainly I would. I’d be willing to be there as well, if I knew it would stop the war and halt the blood shed. Through inaction, potentially millions of people who didn’t die during WWII would have instead died. Let’s see about your own convictions here, DtC. Would you be willing to have your family as part of that additional death toll to maintain your odd convictions? To prevent the burning of Japanese children in atomic fire, would you be willing to have your own kids burned to death by Japanese troops as they attack places they never got to, due to US intervention? Would you be willing to sacrifice yourself to keep your hands clean, and by doing so, sacrifice not only your own family but potentially millions more for your convictions? -XT ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/209 "2010-08-11T17:51:38Z")
> [@Sailboat](#): > > _Would Sailboat have targeted them?_ Not with area bombing. _Possibly_ as occasional indirect victims (“collateral damage,” to use the ugly euphemism) of “precision” bombing against really important targets This is an important point. We weren’t bomibing military targets and causing collateral damage. We were intentionally targeting civilians. Even if I was to go along with the idea that collateral damage is defensible, there’s still a stark distinction between that and civilians as deliberate targets. When other people do that, we call it terrorism. ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/210 "2010-08-11T17:53:33Z")
> [@DragonAsh](#): > > Well, to nit-pick - the US didn’t get into the war with Japan because of Nanking, and the US certainly didn’t get into the war to free Asia from Japan rule. The US didn’t get into the war with Germany to free the Jews. Those were unintended but obviously very fortunate consequences of the wars. > > Otherwise we would have been warring with Britain over India, for example. Or with ourselves; the US colonization of the Phillipines was hardly US soldiers sitting around with their Filipino friends singing Kumbaya. > > There were lots of factors behind the US entering the war. Trying to stop atrocities like Nanking or the Holocaust wasn’t one of them. Sorta. The reasons for the U.S. trade embargoes (of oil, steel, and other stuff) was the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria and China in general. The reports out of Nanking definately contributed to the worsening of US (Presidential/Congressional) opinion against the Japanese prosecution of their war in China. Otherwise, it might have been more along the lines of “it ain’t our buisness”, which was closer to the man-on-the street opinion. The US wanted an “Open Door” policy in/with regards to China, as a potential market for U.S. goods. Specific to Nanking itself, there was a post-war war crime trial, which I don’t think would have happened if the U.S. (leadership) didn’t care about the atrocity. While I agree that there were many “smaller” cobblestones in the road to war, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the U.S. didn’t give a hoot about atrocities, at least at the national leadership level anyway, where it really matters. (Joe the cab driver can’t shape policy like Cordell Hull could.) ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/211 "2010-08-11T17:54:25Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > This is an important point. We weren’t bomibing military targets and causing collateral damage. We were intentionally targeting civilians. Even if I was to go along with the idea that collateral damage is defensible, there’s still a stark distinction between that and civilians as deliberate targets. When other people do that, we call it terrorism. The RAF wasn’t capable of precision bombing at the time. The best it could do was to bomb the industrial areas of German cities (and often not even that). There tended to be large concentrations of population in the industrial areas. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/212 "2010-08-11T17:58:31Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > Through inaction, potentially millions of people who didn’t die during WWII would have instead died. This is an unsupported premise. I don’t buy it for a second. > [@](#): > > Let’s see about your own convictions here, DtC. Would you be willing to have your family as part of that additional death toll to maintain your odd convictions? I do not accept the premise that there would be an additional death poll. > [@](#): > > To prevent the burning of Japanese children in atomic fire, would you be willing to have your own kids burned to death by Japanese troops as they attack places they never got to, due to US intervention? Yes. I am not going to kill somebody else’s children to save my own, or kill my own to save anyone else’s. I’m not setting any toddlers on fire. Full stop. > [@](#): > > Would you be willing to sacrifice yourself to keep your hands clean, and by doing so, sacrifice not only your own family but potentially millions more for your convictions? I would sacrifice myself in a second rather than kill a single child, but I don’t accept your premise that me not killing babies would cause millions to die. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/213 "2010-08-11T17:59:07Z")
> [@villa](#): > > > [@Sailboat](#): > > > > Again, that doesn’t make area bombing right > > Out of interest, what was the alternative to area bombing? _Not_ area bombing. Many studies and postwar analyses have cast doubt on whether area bombing (as distinguished from precision bombing) materially shortened the war. It’s also fairly clear that the bombing chiefs in every county’s ir forces tended to promote area bombing (and all strategic bombing) out of a belief that their arm of service could win wars by itself, and only would have a chance to prove it if strategic bombing was vigorously pressed. So that inherent conflict of interest means we have to view the statements of the air force high commands with a dose of skepticism. Better analyses come from some of the studies conducted by these same air forces during and after the war, and from modern historians. It’s not at all universally agreed that area bombing was militarily effective, leaving aside moral qualms. John Keegan (who is British himself) has argued that Britain’s “Bomber” Harris supported bombing the “built up areas” of industrial cities (a conscious euphemism for the apartments of the working class) out of class prejudice and nationalist blindness – he assumed that working-class people would be driven into a frenzy and eventually rise up against the German government, but ignored the fact that working-class Britons had cheerfully held up under the same kind of bombing during Blitz. Precision-bombing the oilfields and the _ersatz_ fuel production centers, on the other hand, seems to have helped a lot – I’ve seen statements that Germany would have run out of fuel and been unable to fight a modern war at about the same time it was overrun by the Soviets (so, in theory would have lost even without the Soviet invasion) and fuel shortages definitely constrained their operational decisions even as early as the Battle of the Bulge. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/214 "2010-08-11T17:59:59Z")
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic] This is an important point. We weren’t bomibing military targets and causing collateral damage. We were intentionally targeting civilians. Even if I was to go along with the idea that collateral damage is defensible, there’s still a stark distinction between that and civilians as deliberate targets. When other people do that, we call it terrorism. [/QUOTE] We would call it terrorism TODAY. But then, we are not in a total war, we have weapons actually capable of hitting a target closer than a 10 mile radius, we have air craft capable of hitting targets at night, and, our tolerance as a society (in the US and The West anyway) for such slaughter has grown much more stringent. -XT ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/215 "2010-08-11T18:05:20Z")
> [@villa](#): > > > [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > > > This is an important point. We weren’t bomibing military targets and causing collateral damage. We were intentionally targeting civilians. Even if I was to go along with the idea that collateral damage is defensible, there’s still a stark distinction between that and civilians as deliberate targets. When other people do that, we call it terrorism. > > The RAF wasn’t capable of precision bombing at the time. The best it could do was to bomb the industrial areas of German cities (and often not even that). There tended to be large concentrations of population in the industrial areas. There was no pretense to be bombng military tagets in Tokyo, Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The explicit goal was to kill civilians. Intentionally targeting civilians is the accepted definition of terrorism. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/216 "2010-08-11T18:06:46Z")
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic] This is an unsupported premise. I don’t buy it for a second. [/QUOTE] Yes, but again, you are an uninformed shopper who seemingly doesn’t know much about the subject, so your purchasing choices are pretty much inconsequential. If you’d like to explain WHY you think that millions more people wouldn’t die had the US not involved itself in WWII, you are, of course, free to do so. Simply saying ‘I don’t by it for a second’, when you seemingly know so little, is, well, rather silly, don’t you think? I’ll tell you what. You tell me why you don’t think millions more would have died had the US stayed out of the war, and I’ll explain to you why you are wrong. How does that sound? > [@](#): > > I do not accept the premise that there would be an additional death poll. That’s nice. People who think the earth is flat don’t accept satellite photos, but at least they give a tangible reason. Would you care to go into some additional detail concerning your convictions here? > [@](#): > > Yes. I am not going to kill somebody else’s children to save my own, or kill my own to save anyone else’s. I’m not setting any toddlers on fire. Full stop. Ok, so, you are willing to sacrifice your family, yourself and all those extra people you don’t believe would have died in order to not have to kill anyone. Glad we cleared that up. > [@](#): > > I would sacrifice myself in a second rather than kill a single child, but I don’t accept your premise that me not killing babies would cause millions to die. Well, YOU not killing children probably wouldn’t do anything, really. The point is America not killing any children (which is your way of pulling the heart strings card). -XT ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/217 "2010-08-11T18:07:06Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > [QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic] > This is an important point. We weren’t bomibing military targets and causing collateral damage. We were intentionally targeting civilians. Even if I was to go along with the idea that collateral damage is defensible, there’s still a stark distinction between that and civilians as deliberate targets. When other people do that, we call it terrorism. We would call it terrorism TODAY. But then, we are not in a total war, we have weapons actually capable of hitting a target closer than a 10 mile radius, we have air craft capable of hitting targets at night, and, our tolerance as a society (in the US and The West anyway) for such slaughter has grown much more stringent. [/QUOTE] We weren’t missing the targets in Japan. We were hitting them. The civilians WERE the targets. If that’s terrorism now, then it was terrorism then. I have no patience for moral relativism. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/218 "2010-08-11T18:10:04Z")
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic] There was no pretense to be bombng military tagets in Tokyo, Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The explicit goal was to kill civilians. Intentionally targeting civilians is the accepted definition of terrorism. [/QUOTE] :dubious: Do you have a cite for this? Because the air force dropped leaflets urging people to flee the cities prior to many of the bombings. Also, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all key military targets, rail heads, logistics centers and manufacturing centers that were certainly part of Japans military system. -XT ---
**Author:** ![jaxbus4000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c89c15/32.png) [@jaxbus4000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jaxbus4000)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/219 "2010-08-11T18:11:06Z")
Well having had family member who fought in the pacific, and one who suffered throgh the Bataan death march, I can assure you that the Japanese were fanatics who would have caused hundreds of thousands of americans if we had tried to invade. After all we had destroyed their air force, decimated their navy, taken Okinawa, and they still refused to surrender. If we had invaded, there is no way that it would have been a roll over for the american forces. Think about it, we dropped the first bomb and they still did not surrender, and considering the devestation, 3 days was enough time for anyone to understand that the war was over, yet they still did not surrender. Apologists for using the bomb on Japan simply do not understand the Japanese military mindset at that time. ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698/220 "2010-08-11T18:14:34Z")
> [@Sailboat](#): > > > [@villa](#): > > > > Out of interest, what was the alternative to area bombing? > > _Not_ area bombing. Many studies and postwar analyses have cast doubt on whether area bombing (as distinguished from precision bombing) materially shortened the war. It’s also fairly clear that the bombing chiefs in every county’s ir forces tended to promote area bombing (and all strategic bombing) out of a belief that their arm of service could win wars by itself, and only would have a chance to prove it if strategic bombing was vigorously pressed. So that inherent conflict of interest means we have to view the statements of the air force high commands with a dose of skepticism. Better analyses come from some of the studies conducted by these same air forces during and after the war, and from modern historians. > > It’s not at all universally agreed that area bombing was militarily effective, leaving aside moral qualms. John Keegan (who is British himself) has argued that Britain’s “Bomber” Harris supported bombing the “built up areas” of industrial cities (a conscious euphemism for the apartments of the working class) out of class prejudice and nationalist blindness – he assumed that working-class people would be driven into a frenzy and eventually rise up against the German government, but ignored the fact that working-class Britons had cheerfully held up under the same kind of bombing during Blitz. > > Precision-bombing the oilfields and the _ersatz_ fuel production centers, on the other hand, seems to have helped a lot – I’ve seen statements that Germany would have run out of fuel and been unable to fight a modern war at about the same time it was overrun by the Soviets (so, in theory would have lost even without the Soviet invasion) and fuel shortages definitely constrained their operational decisions even as early as the Battle of the Bulge. There’s a definite area for discussion about the efficacy of area bombing, and strategic bombing generally. I’d agree, with hindsight, that it certainly didn’t meet the objectives originally set out for it - the idea was that London would be destroyed in a matter of hours by the pre-war Luftwaffe, for example. But you don’t have hindsight at the time. The RAF did switch towards “precision” bombing as it became possible to do so successfully. But lets remember, precision bombing doesn’t involve no civilian casualties. And more importantly, especially early in the war, the RAF didn’t have the ability to do precision bombing. It was lucky to find the city, let alone a specific building. I also think a lot of this ignores the reality of German geography and urban planning. The areas with factories and communications targets weren’t out of city industrial estates to which the workers commuted in their cars. German workers lived close to the factories in which they built Panther tanks and MPG-42s and Messcherschmidts and made Xyclon B. Bombing the areas with industrial targets meant bombing the workers residences too. German also was heavily dependent on small scale bespoke production for much of its war effort, with small workshops producing many specialized parts for important weapons systems (partially because German weapons were often ludicrously complicated, and also partially a response to the Allied raids). Dresden, for example, contained large numbers of such small war producing targets. Once the Allies realized the German fuel situation, there was a shift in policy away from bombing cities towards bombing fuel targets. Not overly successful, to be honest, but it happened. I’d agree that individual bombing raids, and individual strategic decisions can and should be analyzed. It’s possible that Dresden wasn’t justifiable, given the stage of the war, but I’d come down on the other side on that. So, in the 1941-42 time period, for example, what would you have had the British do other than area bomb? They simply didn’t have the capacity to precision bomb without ruinous losses (and even when they tried, the results were far from precise). The idea of the British “cheerfully holding up” under the Blitz is largely propaganda - there were major effects on morale, and localized industrial action/civil disruption in particular as a result of the failure to adequately provide protection in working class areas, and the refusal to open the Underground stations. The bombing of Germany also demonstrably did affect German morale - in particular the aura of invincibility many Germans attributed to the Nazis. Goering in particular became a laughing stock because of his promise that no British bomber would ever come over Berlin. Germany was forced by the strategic bombing campaign to shift far more resources in manpower, fuel and machinery into air defense, which meant they were not available to go to the East. Lets also not compare the morale effect of the Blitz with the later raids on german cities and assume it is a level playing field. The 1000 plane raids were of a totally different scale. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698.md?page=10) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/65th-anniversary-of-bombing-hiroshima/549698.md?page=12)