No, those cities were defended. They had AA guns, garrisons, etc. They were not “Open Cities”. The definition of “belligerent” is beside the point. It has always been legal to attack enemy cities. Your cites do not say otherwise.
Also the Law had not been updated.
Although the 1907 Hague Conventions IV – The Laws and Customs of War on Land and IX – Bombardment by Naval Forces in Time of War prohibited the bombardment of undefended places, there was no international prohibition against indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in defended places, a shortcoming in the rules that was greatly exacerbated by aerial bombardment. With the rise of aerial warfare, civilians became extremely vulnerable and were inevitably collateral targets in such warfare potentially on a much larger scale than previously.[6][7]
However, due to the absence of positive or specific customary international humanitarian law prohibiting illegal conducts of aerial warfare in World War II, the indiscriminate bombing of enemy cities was excluded from the category of war crimes …
I just love how some non-lawyer reads a hundred year old treaty, which was modified many times by other codicils etc, and thinks he’s a legal expert, superior to the greatest jurists of the 20th century. (rolleyes)
This has to be the singularly worst circular argument possible. They had AA guns because they were being bombarded. The Allies would much prefer that there be no AA guns, fighters or night fighters to deal with; they would have bombed the cities anyway. Do you imagine that had Germany ordered all AA guns to remain silent, all night fighters to stay on the ground, and all searchlights to remain turned off that the crews of Bomber Command would have said shucks, Jerry isn’t falling for it tonight, guess we go home without dropping incendiaries on German civilians tonight.
I’m curious about the thought process of starting a GD tread, spitting out random comments and not following up on it.
You are aware the US did attempt “precision” bombing in WWII, right? The problem was that they couldn’t come close enough with conventional bombs, but they could with nuclear ones.
They were targeting the center of the cities and not the military areas.
Let’s just say that a thinking process that believes, “Our only options are burning innocent civilians alive in horrible agony or letting people die in China elsewhere in large numbers by the day” really lacks for problem-solving creativity.
Or given the Japanese hoi polloi a real and definite reason to be angry at the US and keep fighting to the bitter end.
Bomb their shit and you can still say “hey, your Emperor is the one making us do this, take it up with him”. Bomb their Emperor and they can say “these dogs killed a living god ! You think they’ll stop before *everyone *is dead ?!”
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This has to be the singularly worst circular argument possible. They had AA guns because they were being bombarded.
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No, quite the opposite in fact.
The history of air defence is quite paradoxical : first came WW1 bombers that dropped their loads on the front lines and military installations (that were away from cities). This caused a fear that the development of bigger, better bombers would let unscrupulous individuals shell civilians with impunity, and so first laws were drafted to forbid that, then (because laws and war… yeah) AA guns were installed in major cities - thus turning them into legit military targets per the conventions on the laws of war at the time. Military materiel present = military target.
And since there were already lots of AA guns there people figured that hey, why not *also *put military industries & troop barracks around major cities, where they’d be protected by all that flak ? Compounding the “legit military target” aspect of course.
And thus, the paradox : out of a will to protect defenceless civilians from bombers, strategic minds ended up putting them dead center in the crosshairs. But then, I guess it’s easier to spot the flaw in hindsight.
This isn’t to say that Allies and Axis alike didn’t *also *go out of their way to blow up civvies - they sure did. Shit, Bomber Harris was pretty open about the fact that his goal in life was to “de-house” as many Germans as he could. Such a charming euphemism…
And presumably they would have done that even absent the “we’re attacking military targets, honest” rationale at some point anyway, as the brutalization of the war went on incrementally. But we’ll never know. As it stands, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legit military targets.
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They were targeting the center of the cities and not the military areas.
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Considering we’re talking nukes here, would shifting the target half a klick this or that way have made any meaningful difference wrt the end result ?
I don’t remember which city it was (Nagasaki of Hiroshima), but there was a coastal plain and mountains terminating at the plain - creating valleys up from the plain - these valleys became the residential areas. There were two - one was predominately Christian, the other Buddhist. The idea was to bomb the (industrial and commercial) coastal plain. 1945 bomb sights caused the bomb to hit a residential area - the Buddhist one at that.
Bad Karma.
Anyway, with the Japanese of the time big on the Samurai Ethic - they were preparing to fight machine guns with spears, for crying out loud - yeah, I can see planners thinking that they had to be absolutely defeated - either by house-to-house slaughter or a couple of bombs.
A huge shame-inducing term of surrender was the stationing of foreign (and round-eyes at that) on sacred Japanese soil.
Whatever else was accomplished, Japan is no longer big on the Samurai Ethic of “Death Before Surrender”, and are one of the biggest fans of Pacifism.
Close, but the argument has more substance. Please see my post earlier in this very thread.
This was just a little side track where the poster was attempting to pick a nit instead of offering a meaningful argument.
Nope. Please read the thread.
One shouldn’t take The Last Samurai as a documentary. It, like this, is fiction. It may resemble the truth is you squint hard enough, but it’s a gross characterization.
Cities have long had military industries and troop barracks in and around them; that does not make the entire city and all of the civilian inhabitants in it in and of themselves a legitimate target. There is of course a difference between what is legitimate and allowed and what can and realistically is expected to actually happen. Prophets of air power in the inter-war years such as Giulio Douhet openly advocated the mass bombing of enemy cities with the intention of breaking the enemy’s will to fight:
He also advocated the use of poison gas; again because it could realistically be expected to be used regardless of its legality, as it already had been on a wide scale in WWI:
Thankfully the world was at least spared that particular horror in WW2. The mass bombing of cities and civilians was fully expected to happen though; Britain evacuated 3.5 million civilians from cities in Operation Pied Piper starting September 1, 1939, two days before Britain was even at war. It’s actually more surprising that it took until 1940 for mass bombing of civilians to begin in earnest.
They did. Harris and LeMay didn’t bother with the “we’re attacking military targets, honest” fiction; they were quite open that their targets were the enemies cities and their civilian inhabitants.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had legitimate military targets in them. The entire cities themselves were not legitimate targets outside of total war theory, in which everything is a legitimate target and no laws are relevant.
Yes, and their superiors had to sign off on the orders as well.
One of the largest considerations for targets was that the US wanted to cause as much destruction as possible, so they actually had a target cities not bombed prior to the atomic bombs. The planning shows that they were more concerned about creating a big hole rather than take out any specific targets. In fact, in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the military targets were out of the population centers.
It seems to me that total war is judged as a war crime when the belligerent countries are utilizing that strategy for their own gain, but not a war crime when used to defeat said countries.