That’s a pointless question. How is anyone supposed to know whether an act is necessary or not without benefit of hindsight?
I liken this whole debate to whether it is a crime for a police officer to unload his gun into an armed attacker who has already shot at him once and may again. Sure you can argue in hindsight that the officer only needed to put one bullet into the arm of the assailant, and that it was unnecessary for the officer to shoot the assailant in the heart, lungs, and liver, and kill him. But the officer has a defensive right to err on the side of caution and to make use of any conceivable advantage available to him, if he believes his life is in danger.
Again, all is fair in love and war. Without clear evidence of purposeful negligence, you have to be very cautious about war-crimes accusations in wars like WWII where the very existence of the various parties is dependent on the outcome.
This question makes little sense. Our current ideas of what war crimes are were largely formed after WWII and as a direct result of the things that happened during WWII. Of course some actions, and Dresden’s bombing is one of them, would be viewed as war crimes today. However, it’s highly questionable if they could be viewed as war crimes by the standards existing at the time.
Also, in addition to the hindsight and holding the bombing to a higher standard than existed at the time, there’s the issue of precision. A Dresden like bombing would be a horrible war crime today, but that’s largely because today our bombs hit within a few feet of their target. During WWII, almost 10% of the bombs dropped were more than 1000 feet off target (and that’s at the end of the war, earlier it was even worse). When precision accuracy is defined as ‘within three or four football fields from the target’, wholesale destruction is more understandable. Still horrible, still a massive waste of life, but a lot more ‘that’s why war is hell’ than ‘crime against humanity’.
And that, perhaps, is the Nazi’s greatest crime…
Finally, someone has the guts to say it. 
It should be noted that quite a number of German bombing raids were not intended to strike industrial production at all, and were in fact terrorism.
The raids on Sheffield are a case in point, the Germans had free run with very few defences to impede them, they had accurate maps, and they had highly experienced pathfinders to locate and mark their targets.
You might have thought that they would have gone straight for the major steelworks, these were absoloutely crucial industrial assets and made a critical contribution to the British war effort, and yet, they didn’t.
Recently discovered Luftwaffe maps reveal the targetted areas, it had been assumed that the bombing of the major population area of Sheffield had been an error, however it was not. Those maps show that Sheffield City Centre was the primary target, the steel works was of only secondary importance. The raids on one night alone killed 600 and made 40 thousand homeless.This had always been their intention, and they hit what they aimed at.
Try to imagine the scale of that all you non-com luxury dwelling folks, this is one raid, on one night, on one city in a five year war, and it was specifically targetting civilian living areas and not inudustry - and if you’ve ever seen the size of those steelworks before they were scaled back, you then realise that the Germans could have struck them at will.
So now it comes to Dresden, after years of rations, deprivation, pain, of long working hours and frequent loss of friends, neighbours, loved ones, after years of defeat and hanging on close to the edge of annihilation, you tell me just how much sympathy the British must have felt?
Those who say ‘unfair’ seem to think that the war was somehow refereed, with time outs for naughty boys, that the blood wasn’t real, that cities were not devastated in Britain, from a merciless enemy that really was trying to eliminate entire populations, then tell me about Dresden.
Look, you start a fight, you pick one and you use every single dirty trick, murder genocide and any abuse you can imagine, and one day the victim finds a way to pay you back, and how - somehow you then blame the victim for being just too good at exacting revenge and punishment.
I suggest some of you need to make a move to somewhere like Korea and then tell me about unfairness - perhaps you could set yourself up in a Zimabwean township, then talk about unfairness, but, you were not in the war, you never experienced it, nor suffered any of its direct effects, you live a couple thousand miles away and chant like craven chatterlings from the gutters.We had plenty of effects after the war too, it cost us so much that we were still having short rations 10 years after it finished, and somehow its the British who are to blame for the the Dresden war crime?
You can still walk around in British cities and see shrapnel marks, gap toothed rows of housing and all too new city centres - stripped and devoid of their Victorian heritage.
Compared to Warsaw, Dresden got off lightly, guess who destroyed the former city?
Yeah, your right! That means it’s just an accusation of War Police Brutality. But then it was justified because they were resisting arrest.
This topic is thoroughly examined in the book:
“Dresden”
by: Frederick Taylor
Bloomsbury Books, London, 2004
The author makes a very detailed, and compelling, case that Dresden was throughout the war a legitimate military target for both industrial and political reasons.
He makes a detailed exposition of all the military industry which was in full production in the city throughout the war; all this in addition to the fact it was a transportation hub, particularly to the “Eastern Front”.
In addition to its industrial capacity, Dresden was a hotbed of Nazism. This despite its legendary position as a city of the “arts”. Seems in Dresden the artistic types were the most fervent Nazis.
He then makes the point that at the specific time of the bombing, it was a city packed with refugees. The irony is that a huge proportion of these refugees were not German, but other nationalities including Russians who were attempting to escape their fellow Russians. The highest casualty rate was amongst these non German refugees.
He maintains that at the specific time of the bombing, the war was lost and Dresden was totally incapacitated; therefore the bombing had no significant effect on the outcome of the war.
However, Churchill was afraid that the Russians would continue through Germany, all the way to the English Channel; therefore this demonstration of Allied air power was his attempt at dissuading them from doing so.
Therefore, the allies bombed Dresden, and numerous other smaller cities, for the specific purpose of demonstrating to Stalin the power of bomber command.
Evidently this plan was successful.
Except this is more like shooting the family of the attacker, as well as a bunch of hostages.
Pure garbage.
Except as pointed out at the time of the bombing the war was lost and the Allies were in no such danger. And such bombing wasn’t even very effective; it was the useless indulgence of bloodlust on both sides, not a good military tactic.
If the family of the attacker is helping and nourishing and protecting the attacker, feeding the attacker bullets and financial resources, and is holed up with the attacker in the same house from which bullets are emerging, I think the cop cannot be faulted for erring on the side of caution by emptying his clip in the house’s general direction.
Personally, if I was transported back in time and put in a position to stop the bombing, I would. With hindsight I do not think it saved lives. I think it was wrong. It possibly saved some allied lives, but probably not enough to make it worth it (though I think it would be a fair argument to make if it saved even one allied life). But I would err on the side of caution when making proclamations of “bloodlust,” and of the tactic being known at the time to have no military significance. Do we have any hard evidence of that?
- Germany never attacked us.
- If you can rationalize the wholesale slaughter of civilains because they are “helping” your enemy, then all American citizens are fair game too, and there is no such thing as an illegitimate target. America has done a lot of shitty things that we would all be incredibly outraged about if another country had done it. Just cop to it. There was nothing defensive about the fire bombing of Dresden. It was pure terrorism.
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Germany was trying to take over the world. At the time of the Dresden bombing, the Germans were still killing our troops, attacking our allies, annihilating non-military targets as a rule rather than as an exception, dumping poison into rivers, and systematically committing genocide. Saying “Germany never attacked us” is a grossly underwhelming point.
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What do I have to keep telling you Dio: shades of gray.
I don’t what you mean by “us,” but the Germans repeatedly attacked Americans in the field, and they tried to attack the US mainland. They also declared war on America on before America declared war on them.
I’m pretty sure that the German navy attacked US shipping. Of course they could claim that Lend-Lease gave them the right…
I’d say the bombing of Dresden was a war crime. I don’t think it shortened the war one bit and the Allied leaders probably knew this if they stopped to consider it. (I believe that Hiroshima/Nagasaki saved lives and was not a war crime.) The only defense is that the Allies had been at total war for 3+ years and it’s awfully hard to back that off even when it’s obvious that the war is coming to a close.
They defended themselves us against our military. That’s not “attacking” us, unless any defensive military action can be defined as an “attack.” The lengths that people will go to to defend American atrocities is ridiculous.
Ha! Dio you’re too much. “The Germans never attacked us… it was defensive military action!” That is just tops. Especially your “the lengths that people will go to defend…” follow-up. Well played.
Well, that means nothing was a war crime. If I tortured the babies of German soldiers, that would probably help end the war. How can we know if it was necessary to end the war?
According to Taylor (cited above), this bombing had a very practical component.
As the war wound down, the Allies found themselves with a huge stockpile of ordinance.
This stockpile was considered an unacceptable peacetime hazard; so what to do with it?
Also, they found themselves with a large number of aircrew who were sitting around twiddling their thumbs, getting increasingly bored. This was starting to present a significant discipline problem.
So it was decided to kill two birds with one stone: the bored aircrews were sent on relatively risk free missions over Germany to dump the excess ordinance.
As a consequence, any two buildings standing together in Germany could expect a visit from Bomber Command.
Problem solved.
I don’t really know how I feel about it, mostly because I only learned the details of the event this month. Were the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Blitz in London, and the bombing of Hiroshima war crimes or just acts of war? Whatever they were, I think the bombing in Dresden falls into the same catagory.
I wasn’t pleased, though, to find a holocaust denial site that claimed it was worse than the attempt to exterminate the jews because here are some pictures of corpses in Dresden, and here are some pictures of Jews who don’t look like they were (at the time of the photo being snapped) being abused in concentration camps 
So of course the bombings of Sheffield, specifically civilian targets were defence?
Really?
I think I may treat this remark with the contempt it deserves.
I am in danger of doing the same with the speaker who seem to me to be well beyond that boundary.
Have you never heard of the concept of alliance, you know, the one where I step in and feel the pain when my allies are harmed.
Just because German bombs did not land on US cities, the US was still feeling the pain of its allies losses.That’s plenty justification for retaliation.
Dio, you are fast becoming offensive.
Why do you say stuff like this, Dio? It’s completely irrelevant to the thread, and it’s wrong. Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941 and had been attacking us and our allies ever since.
Whether the bombing of Dresden was a war crime is arguable, and I’m reading this thread with great interest, but if you feel it necessary to preface your argument with such a bold-faced attempt at misstating history, there’s something wrong with your argument.