Was Allied bombing of Germany Jan - April 1945 a war crime?

Oralloy wrote:

At no time did they try to select a target with the goal of making sure they killed civilians.

When the commander of the XXth USAAF, Curtis LeMay, made the willful decision to switch from high-altitude, daytime "precision" bombing to low-altitude, nighttime incendiary area bombing, with the intention of starting firestorms to destroy the city centers, they were making sure they were killing civilians, and at that time offered the justification that they were trading the lives of Japanese for the estimated one million Allied casualties which it was believed would result from an invasion of the Japanese archipelago.

I notice you have no comment on the remarks of Robert McNamara with regard to his conversations with Curtis LeMay. Are you now willing to state that McNamara is a liar, or are you going to suggest that you know better than someone who was an eyewitness to those events, and who worked at the side of the man who made the targeting and operational decisions?

You claim to understand both the Geneva Convention and the UN, but your opinions contradict the understanding of both organizations of which the US is a "legal" participant.

Torture is illegal under the Geneva Convention, and the Iraq war did not have the approval of the UN - which made the war illegal.

You are obviously an ignoramus when it comes down to international laws and logic.

In "Fog of War" -- which opened recently nationwide -- McNamara, in his mid-80s, speaks agonizingly of his moral culpability in World War II and later in Vietnam in the '60s and early-'70s.

McNamara saw himself as a loyal soldier, who told the truth to his boss, the President of the United States -- that the Vietnam war was unwinnable, that the best thing the U.S. could hope for was an endless stalemate -- but who was overruled. Rather than resign in protest, as a way of perhaps saving tens of thousands of American (and many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilian) lives, he stayed on as a technocrat, positively spinning the war news while leading a disastrous campaign he knew made no sense. His soul was forever tarnished.

This is the opening paragraph of the 1953 report:

Quote:

The reasons for and the nature and consequences of the bombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied air forces on 14-15 February 1945 have repeatedly been the subject of official and semi-official inquiries and of rumor and exaggeration by uninformed or inadequately informed persons. Moreover, the Communists have with increasing frequency and by means of distortion and falsification used the February 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden as a basis for disseminating anti-Western and anti-American propaganda. From time to time there appears in letters of inquiry to the United States Air Force evidence that American nationals are themselves being taken in by the Communist propaganda line concerning the February 1945 bombings of Dresden. (emphasis added)

That's got whitewash written all over it. It is obvious that the 1953 report was written for political and propagandistic reasons. That makes its conclusions suspect. Alexander McKee writes:

Quote:

"The standard whitewash gambit, both British and American, is to mention that Dresden contained targets X, Y and Z, and to let the innocent reader assume that these targets were attacked, whereas in fact the bombing plan totally omitted them and thus, except for one or two mere accidents, they escaped."

The truth of this can be seen from reading the 1953 report, which lists several targets without subsequently stating that those targets were attacked.

Among these were dispersed aircraft components factories; a poison gas factory (Chemische Fabric Goye and Company); an anti-aircraft and field gun factory (Lehman); the great Zeiss Ikon A.G., Germany’s most important optical goods manufactory; and, among others, factories engaged in the production of electrical and X-ray apparatus (Koch and Sterzel A.G.), gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke), and electric gauges (Gebruder Bassler).

On 24 July, at approximately 00:57AM, the first bombing started by the RAF and lasted almost an hour. A second daylight raid by US Army Air Force was conducted at 2:40PM. A third raid was conducted on the morning of the 26th. The night attack of 26 July at 00:20AM was extremely light (due to a severe thunderstorm and high winds over the North Sea during which a considerable number of bombers jettisoned the explosive part of their bomb loads) with only two bomb drops reported. That attack is often not counted when the total number of Operation Gomorrah attacks is given. There was no day raid on the 27th.

On the night of 27 July, shortly before midnight, 739 aircraft attacked Hamburg. A number of factors combined to give the enormous destruction that followed; the unusually dry and warm weather, the concentration of the bombing in one area and that the city's firefighters were unable to reach the initial fires " the high explosive "Cookies" used in the early part of the raid had prevented them getting into the center of the city from the periphery where they were working on the results of the 24th. The bombings culminated in the spawning of the so-called "Feuersturm" (firestorm).

Quite literally a tornado of fire, this phenomenon created a huge outdoor blast furnace, containing winds of up to 240 km/h (150 mph) and reaching temperatures of 800 °C (1,500 °F). It incinerated some eight square miles (21 km²) of the city, causing asphalt on the streets to burst into flame, killing many that had both taken shelter and not. Most of the casualties (40,000) caused by Operation Gomorrah happened on this night.

On the night of 29 July, Hamburg was again attacked by over 700 aircraft. The last raid of Operation Gomorrah was conducted on 3 August.

Operation Gomorrah caused at least 50,000 deaths, mostly civilians, and left over a million other German civilians homeless. Approximately 3,000 aircraft were deployed, 9,000 tons of bombs dropped, and 250,000 houses destroyed. No subsequent city raid shook Germany as did that on Hamburg; documents show that German officials were thoroughly alarmed and there is some indication from later allied interrogation of high officials, that Hitler thought that further attacks of similar weight might force Germany out of the war. Hamburg was hit by air raids another 69 times before the end of World War II.