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

@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

oralloy, You do have a "short" memory span;

Nope. My memory is just fine.

cicerone imposter wrote:

we used firebombs in Iraq.

So?

cicerone imposter wrote:

What are you trying to prove?

I'm just defending the truth, as usual.

cicerone imposter wrote:

I remember the reporting of napalms being used soon after our invasion.

So do I. What's your point?

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

And you have been contradicting yourself, most glaringly in the matter of whether or not there were any "fuel" for a firestorm on the morning of February 14.

That is incorrect. I haven't contradicted myself.

Setanta wrote:

Your backpeddling ignores that the RAF raid did not attack the city center where the marshalling yards are located.

My backpeddling doesn't exist, so it would be hard for it to either ignore or not ignore anything.

Everything I've always heard says the RAF attacked the city center. Do you have evidence that the RAF didn't attack the city center???

If so, how was the city center destroyed by a firestorm before US bombers ever got there?

Setanta wrote:

Yet you want to continue to assert that the RAF raid burned up the only available fuel. You just cannot make the pieces of your story (and a story is all that it is) hang together.

The truth is more than a story. And the firestorm started by the RAF did consume the only fuel load capable of sustaining a firestorm.

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@hamburger,

hamburger wrote:

Oralloy wrote:
I am not sure if using radar guidance to try to take out the railyards constitutes a "precision attack", but our attack was in fact an attempt to destroy the railyards, and we had nothing to do with the UK's firestorm.

it most likely was an "attempt" to destroy the railyards , but the american (and british) bomber crews were not kamikase fighters who didn't value their lives .
quite often bomber crews when encountering either fighter attacks or heavy anti-aircraft fire would "unload" their bombs without being concerned about "precision" bombing .

True. Such things unfortunately happen in war.

I'm not sure I'd call the use of WII-era radar guidance to hit a target "precision bombing" though. (Although it is better than just targeting an entire city.)

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@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

The firebombs used at the beginning of the war is a contradiction of your "unfair" statement.

The firebombs used at the beginning of the war do not contradict his statement in any way.

cicerone imposter wrote:

It is also estimated that more than 100,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed by this war.

Are we including disease and "Iraqi vs Iraqi" violence in this estimate?

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You have indeed contradicted yourself--you've done it repeatedly in this thread. You also continue to make statements from authority to which no fair-minded individual has any reason to lend credence, because you provide no evidence to support your story.

And it is a story--it's not the truth, because if it were the truth, you'd have evidence to support your otherwise unproven statements from authority.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Iraq Body Count has documented civilian deaths at 89,600 to 97,828 (the discrepancy is from disputed incidents, and possible duplication).

Unfortunately the Iraq body Count (unless they have changed their methodology since 2003) counts any death that is widely reported in the media. So every time the Saddam government in 2003 (or the insurgents since then) made some sort of bogus claim of huge numbers of casualties from an attack, if that bogus claim was reported in multiple media sources, it got added to the IBC tally.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

You have indeed contradicted yourself

No I haven't.

Setanta wrote:

you've done it repeatedly in this thread.

No I haven't.

Setanta wrote:

You also continue to make statements from authority to which no fair-minded individual has any reason to lend credence, because you provide no evidence to support your story.

And it is a story--it's not the truth, because if it were the truth, you'd have evidence to support your otherwise unproven statements from authority.

The truth is not just a story.

And I did refer to a link:

http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/dresden.htm

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@oralloy,

oralloy, How do you know that? Have you spent time in Iraq to verify and confirm all the dead Iraqis killed by our military vs all other causes?

What's your source? Please provide it.

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@oralloy,

Yes you have.

Yes you have.

Your story is not the truth.

The source to which you referred had already been linked by me. I have made clear my objections to the nature of the report, and explained why i had used it. You apparently want to erect it as an authority on the order of holy scripture. The report does state that the RAF bombing started fires. It does not state that all the available fuel was exhausted as a result of the RAF raid. It does not mention the term firestorm.

Therefore, by your criterion, neither the RAF nor the USAAF caused a firestorm, because the 1953 report does not say so.

You have no case, you just have your own unsupported statements from authority.

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Others have addressed this issue in, roughly, the same vein in which I consider it, but perhaps not as vigorously: The notion of War Crimes and Rules of War is, essentially, obscene.

I can understand why a righteous victor might wish to apply some semblance of the Rule of Law to its end game when it was this very rule it believed it engaged in war to defend, but this is a deliberate construct, not an inevitable product of universal justice.

Nevertheless, war is hell. Do we really need any more novels or films to convince us of this?

Yes, there is a romantic warrior thread within our culture and it has ties to reality, but there is absolutely no shortage of accounts from the front to inform the romantics among us that it ain't all glory and conquest.

War = Killing the enemy.

If you render the enemy and all adjacent targets into slabs of bloody meat by virtue of bombs dropped from a plane that is flying 10,000 feet above its target, is that any more or less legitimate than personally bursting into a room and machine gunning every person therein?

Creating rules of war has helped to perpetuate war, and is an admission that we, as a species, can never live without war.

For all the decades the world has passed through with rules of law and war crimes, how many wars have been avoided as a result?

What is worse, how many wars have been less horrific in their brutality as a result?

Whether or not the Allies were guilty of "war crimes" is, in my opinion, a ridiculous question, and it has nothing to do with who won.

Taken to its logical conclusion, a nation that abides entirely by the so-called 'rules of war" will be conquered and occupied before it breaks any of them.

How utterly ridiculous.

War crime trials are a way for the "good guys" to deal with the really bad eggs of the "bad guys" and still manage to promote the virtues for which they fought, but an effort to apply such a construct to the WWII Allies, in some sort of equivalent manner, is a demonstration of a dangerous naivety, or academic insouciance.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

War crime trials are a way for the "good guys" to deal with the really bad eggs of the "bad guys" and still manage to promote the virtues for which they fought, but an effort to apply such a construct to the WWII Allies, in some sort of equivalent manner, is a demonstration of a dangerous naivety, or academic insouciance.

Nonsense. Ostensibly, we prosecute others for war crimes because there are conventions to which we are signatory (Hague and Geneva Conventions) and which we consider the lowest acceptable denominator for military behavior. For us to apply one standard to the vanquished, while tolerating another on the part of our own military forces and those of our allies is not simply hypocritical, it a certain way to destroy any moral authority we may claim for future corporate action by any united body of nations--which doesn't just mean the United Nations, but can apply as well to a group such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In any other case, trying vanquished enemies as war criminals becomes no more than exercise in petty vengeance.

Your remark about promoting the "virtues" for which we allegedly fought becomes meaningless if, in trying Albert Speer, we don't also try Arthur Harris. To hang Yamashita for Japanese behavior in the Philippines, while ignoring the fire-bombing of Japanese cities on the orders of Curtis LeMay beggars any claims to moral high ground, or virtue.

You quoted a remark which i made earlier in this thread. That was not a statement from a moral point of view, it was a statement from a pragmatic point of view. We did not start the war, and if we sink as far as the enemy in our prosecution of the war, that may be understandable (if not "morally" justifiable). However, this thread has not concerned itself with war crimes, and i consider that to have held war crimes trials after the war for those who lost, with a pious indignation, while ignoring what our own military men did, is not justifiable in any moral sense, and beggars any remarks about virtue.

I consider the behavior of both the RAF and the USAAF in regard to Dresden to have been criminal military behavior. I don't call for those responsible to be prosecuted (i doubt that many, if any, of the responsible parties are still alive, of course), but i consider claims about "bad guys" to be smarmy hypocrisy.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

finn wrote :

Quote:

Nevertheless, war is hell. Do we really need any more novels or films to convince us of this?

war movies and games have become a brisk business and probably keep thousands of people "employed" (i'm using that term loosely) .
historians are kept busy trying to analyse the punic wars , the destruction of carthage .. you name it .
are we becoming more peaceful through all this activity ? i have some doubt about it .

as we can see in the balkans , old wounds are being re-opened because someone has found a reason - supported by some analytical/historical research - to start fighting again for the rights of this or that group of people .
instead of finding common ground for a peaceful co-existence , some - often small groups of agitators - will find reasons for fanning the flames again .
unfortunately we can see this in many parts of the world .

if the moneys spent on wars and war-like actions were spent on "peace and prosperity" - who knows what we could achieve .
of course , there would be little cause for victory parades , waving of flags and the like - i'm sure some people would miss that - especially many politicians looking for votes .

let me repeat what finn wrote :

Quote:

Nevertheless, war is hell. Do we really need any more novels or films to convince us of this?

hbg

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@Setanta,

Thanks, Setanta, I hadn't exactly known who Harris was, whose funeral procession I saw on its way to St Paul's cathedral, and I appreciate your explanation. At least I can vouch for the fact that all along every street of London people turned silently their backs to the car bearing his coffin. For that gesture alone I think the Brits deserve respect as a great and decent people.

As to the Iraqis in the 1920's, we should have learned from that debacle, as well as from the various Afghan wars in prior years - sadly we didn't.

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@McTag,

That also happened in Dresden, though for some reason not in Moscow, which got bombed by German planes. I don't know if their train stations and basements were dug deeper than Dresden and Hamburg, or if there was no firestorm in Moscow because there just weren't enough planes, or if no incendiary ordnance was used.

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@Steve 41oo,

LOL Steve - nice to see you again, btw!

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@High Seas,

I doubt that you can compare the "bombing" of Moscow with any of the bombings discussed here.

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@High Seas,

Thanks HS what did I say? Wink

All war is a criminal waste of life. Nevertheless we will go on killing each other, and we will attempt to codify modes of killing as being legitimate or not. I would not have objected to shooting a few bad guys out of hand after the war. But to dress it all up as a trial, to make them face charges and be found guilty of "war crimes" is farcical. If the losers are guilty of war crimes, then the victors are too imo, the bombing of Germany in 1945 being a case in point.

Oralloy, by your reckoning, if the RAF were to be charged with war crimes at Dresden, the prosecution would have to show that the particular citizens killed there were blown to pieces or incinerated by British bombs dropped by the RAF and not American bombs dropped by the USAAF, as being blown to pieces or incinerated by American bombs was not, in your opinion, a criminal act.

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By the way, i would like to make something more clear in my response to Finn's post. I have said that there is more justification for the actions of someone who has been attacked than there is for the attacker. By that standard, i do not seek to excuse criminal military operations (such as Dresden, or the fire-bombing of Japan), i simply point out that if someone sucker punches you, and you get a chance to sucker punch him in return, for whatever morality one might acribe to your action, the self-justification is understood, and founded on solid grounds of provocation.

But i don't agree with war crimes prosecution. Prosecution for crimes against humanity, for that matter, leaves us to ask if people like Arthur Harris and Curtis LeMay ought to have been prosecuted.

I cannot for the life of me see how anyone can ascribe "virtue" or "morality" to an argument to justify American participation and operations during that war. Virtue or morality had nothing to do with it. We were attacked by the Japanese Empire, and within days, German and Italy declared war on the United States. If any "virtue" can be ascribed to American actions, the only reasonable one would be that the United States didn't lie down and roll over. We did not go to war in 1941 for any great moral principles--we went to war because one nation attacked us, and two others declared war on us.

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@Setanta,

Its always puzzled me about the underlying reasons for American involvement in WW2. Of course most people are thankful Roosevelt did lead the free world against nazism and japanese militarism, me included, but if he had been absolutely determined to keep the United States out of another European war - as many Americans wanted - he surely could have done so. I know its all counter-factual stuff and maybe involves elements of conspiracy but I just think if Roosevelt had not been so partial towards Britain and had not put the squeeze on Japan in the way he did, America could have stayed out of the war, at least in Europe. Of course America would have to live with the consequences, that is the distinct possibility of a nazi dominated Europe. Perhaps that was after all the real motivating factor, and as I said I'm thankful for American involvement. But at the time Churchill could barely contain his glee for he knew with Britain USSR and now the USA at war with Germany, the allies would ultimately prevail.

then I just read Set's post again

Quote:

We did not go to war in 1941 for any great moral principles--we went to war because one nation attacked us, and two others declared war on us.

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Yes i believe that bombing civilians is a crime
When the IRA were doing it in London - it was a crime
When the twin towers in New York were brought down THAT was a crime
A woman blowing herself up in Iraq - a crime against humanity-- of course what else could it be? Innocent people are killed for what? For revenge against a country's leadership.
The allied bombings of Germany -I believe, were a crime- not just because of the terrible murder of innocents, but because of the psychological damage done - mostly to children.

I am not here to argue - that's just my point of view
I would, though - be interested to hear what people thought of this

http://able2know.org/topic/123087-1#post-3414858

Extracted from Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut
From The Sunday Times
June 1, 2008

1 Reply

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

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