The laws of war don’t criminalize civilian deaths. What they do is require a test of military necessity to justify civilian deaths and prevent certain, indiscriminate tactics that will generally also cause civilian deaths.
You mean like the destruction of Warsaw, or the immense damage in London, or Liverpool, or Hull, or Coventry, or Sheffield? For four full years before Dresden - do you mean that type of bombing?
Or the use of V1 and V2 weapons that could not possible targeting any specific, except perhaps a city?
How about the use of civilians in reprisals? Look, if you had been anywhere involved, and had endured those years of hardship, I reckon you would perhaps think rather differantly.
Are ou responding to me? Because if so…
…has nothing to do with the issue. The laws of war are rather clear that the calculus of military necessit can justify civilian deaths. Would I particularly enjoy being bombed, maimed, or having the same done to my family? Of course not. That doesn’t change what the laws of war are, or were during WWII, however.
I would be very willing to bet that those who had to endure those years of German bombing would not be quite so quick to judge whether Dresden was, or was not a war crime.
I would even go as far as to bet that the Aliied public not only accepted it, but also felt it as a case of ‘just desserts’.
This was not an attack on an innocent, helpless and blameless enemy, far from it, in fact it could not be further away from those criteria, the Germans got what they had earned.
If you can live through all that the Germans had to offer, and then stay your hand when you have the chance to dish it out back to them, well more power to you, but remember that those fighting the war had lived through WW1 in many cases, the '30’s depression and then WW2 - I would expect that after all that, they would be less than worried about what was fair - especially since Germany had been responsible for 2 out of those 3.
Post event revisionism is not history at all, its just imposing your outlook from an unrelated context. Mind how you judge your ancestors, your own antecedants may also be less forgiving of your own behaviour.
What are the laws of war on losing?
What do you owe your own citizens if in the process of ensuring that there is no unnecessary damage to your enemy you need to utilize another million soldiers getting half of them killed in the process? Most of those people were ‘innocent’ civilians before they were called up for service and they are your own citizens. You’re supposed to be protecting them from the enemy. What other reason is there to fight?
The other fact is we didn’t have cruise missiles and computer viruses that could shut entire infrastructures down with minimal casualties.
This is a separate issue, though. The scope of this thread seems to be was Dresden a war crime. The answer seems to be “Not as understood by the laws of war at that time.” The question of whether or not it would be now is answered best by “let’s look at what the current laws of war say and how customary law is understood.”
But whether or not the laws of war are ideal or pragmatic or should always be followed, or what have you, is quite another matter entirely.
Warsaw, Guernica and Rotterdam were tactical bombardments.
Warsaw was under siege, Guernica controlled an important defended bridge, as did Rotterdam.
I think that everybody, including the laws of the time, condones these kind of bombings.
Strategic bombings of factories, harbours and other infrastructures, like Coventry, Sheffield, Hamburg etc start to become iffy. Espescially when one just carpet-bombs the entire city without the effort to single out the “intended target”.
Excuses that it would be impossible to “precision bomb” those targets with the then current technology or that it would be too dangerous because of FLAK and other defences don’t hold.
The real net effect of strategic bombings is preposterously low, certainly in comparison to the civilian deaths they entail.
While these real strategic bombings are pretty shady already, the bombings of Berlin, London and Dresden were done out of pure spite. They weren’t done with any other goal as to kill as many civilians as possible. Nothing strategic about it, pure war-crime.
The bombing of London, Coventry and Sheffield were different in one very significant way to the bombings of Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin and Dresden. The German bombings were acts in furtherance of a war of aggression. Now one can still commit a war crime opposing a war of aggression, but waging a war of aggression is itself a war crime.
The bombing of London was as much about an attempt to break the morale of the British as much as anything else, and in that it can be called terorrism.
Those air raids were carried out for a variety of reasons, including several purposes at one time - so attacks might be partly aimed at industry and also intimidation all at once.
When it comes to the V1 and V2 raids - these could never be anything other than aimed at civilian populations with the only intention of killing them - these weapons accounted for almost 9000 civilian deaths and 24000 serious injuries.
Having endured 4 years of this, unlike the aplogists in this thread, the British (and Americans) found themselves in a position to strike back effectively and took the opportunity.
There is a point of view that the bombing of civilian populations was partly the result of poor pilot navigation, my own view is that WW2 was so intensive and widespread that ‘area bombing’ would have happened anyway and it was just a matter of that one spark, this site pinpoints the one particular raid that sets it off.
Standards have changed. The Dresden bombing wasn’t a war crime then. It certainly would be now.
Germany declared war on the U.S. Maybe they were stupid to do so (probably, as the Japanese alliance seems to have gotten them little), but once there’s a declaration of war, it’s on.
Dresden and Tokyo bother me. There seems little question the U.S. engaged in in terrorem bombing. But, they also faced foes who at the time seemed implacable. We know now that everything was going to wrap up by mid-1945. No one knew that for sure in 1944, though. The little fellas from the East were known to be to-the-last-man fanatics, and it wasn’t widely known that the U.S. had the atomic option. And no one took for granted that Hitler didn’t have some last wonder weapon or strategy that would turn the tide in Europe.
I wish Dresden hadn’t happened. But then, I wish the equally inhumane Blitz/V2 attacks on London hadn’t.
To the larger point and more cynically – we do know that winners can’t commit war crimes, right?
Dresden was a good start, but it lacked follow-up. The Germans still had plenty of cities standing by the end of the war.
nm, why bother
nvm
Since this thread persists I’ll throw in my real opinion on this subject.
I don’t care what anybody considers a moderm, or eldern definition of a war crime. There is no world government. So called war crimes are prosecuted by survivors of war, if they have the power, and feel like doing so.
The only real crime in war is starting one. Germany, Japan, and Italy committed war crimes by murdering and enslaving people. Once they started, any action which would in any way serve to end their crimes would have been moral. The only crime the allies could have committed was to prevent refugees from fleeing those regimes. No act of aggression on the part of the axis nations could be excusable under some concept of ‘moral war’.
This concept of ‘war crime’ fits into the pack of other nonsense like the M-1 humane rifle and eliminating land mines. People who start wars are murderers, who can be assumed to continue murdering, and can be stopped using any means. And those means are likely to be very messy. The responsibility for avoiding that messiness lies with those who start the wars.
I don’t advocate killing civilians for no reason other than they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, but people have to take responsibility for their where-abouts. Plenty of people left Germany, Italy, and Japan as the those countries headed into war. Those that remained sealed their fate by doing so.
So long as the bombing of Dresden served to shorten the war, even by stopping the death of one allied soldier, POW, or innocent victim of the agressors, no crime was committed.
Considering that you were just slapped down for this sort of slur in the last week, I would have hoped that you would refrain from repeating that sort of comment.
Let me make this more clear: whatever your views of Japanese, (“humorous” or not), you will stop posting slurs or you the staff will review your posting privileges.
[ /Moderating ]
Heh. Speaking of “too new” city centers, I’ve posted this before.
I think it’s sort of been assumed (both by the general public and in this thread) that an action as major as bombing a city would be undertaken only in furtherance of ending the war quickly, but IMHO a lot of actions, even those requiring major efforts and large cash expenditures, were undertaken for much more parochial and limited causes. Every service branch, every commander, every national politician, every war-production board and corporation was susceptible to consciously or unconsciously allowing concern for postwar position and influence to affect decisions made in wartime.
The air services of America and Great Britain definitely made deliberate efforts to establish themselves as equal branches of service to the armies and navies. This had already led to problems in Britain, when air planners spent so much effort on developing and fielding “war winning” offensive heavy bombers that they neglected fighter defenses, and some effort was later required to redirect production and pilot training (and probably other things like logistics, but I’m less confident) toward fighter defenses in time for the battle of Britain.
Similarly, US naval commanders have been accused of withholding assets that would have helped win the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats because they felt that the Pacific war offered more glory for the Navy in fleet-to-fleet combat than dreary convoy duty – a decision very definitely not based on winning the war, but on furthering parochial goals. And one that arguably doomed thousands of American sailors.
I don’t know if the insinuations are true that the bombing of Dresden was influenced at least partly by Western Allied determination to demonstrate strategic airpower to the rapidly-approaching Soviets. But I consider the question more nuanced than a simple “did it/did it not hasten the war’s end?” It certainly could have been ordered partly or entirely as a demonstration of airpower, to justify the existence of the strategic bombing force, or even for something so venal as to give the pilots something to do even at that late stage of the war.