@oralloy,
oralloy wrote:
livinglava wrote:It's not relevant who did or didn't do it, only that it happened and it (and other historical events) changed the way war is waged and/or not waged.
I disagree. I think it is important that the US not be falsely accused of doing something that we did not do.
Look, when I mentioned the 'firebombing of Dresden' in a post, it was just an example taken from a well-known work of historical literature, Slaughterhouse Five.
I did not look up the exact text in the book or research the exact details of that particular bombing event because I was just posting it as an example along with the nuclear bombings of WWII, and the Gulf War 1 bombing.
The only reason I mentioned all these bombings is because they are memorable and thus it should be clear to anyone who recognizes them that they would deter anyone from wanting to openly declare war against the US or any other identity that would provoke such a bombing response.
For all I know, national governments are all puppets of each others' manipulations in various ways and so something that is historically recorded as having been done "by the US," such as the Hiroshima bombing could just as easily been manipulated by some external force who wanted to deflect blame for the bombing to the US.
Identity politics are separate from the politics of causing actions and events. The person who robs a store at gunpoint might not be the person who ordered and/or effectuated the crime.
Just for discussion's sake, let's say hypothetically that the Hiroshima bombing was undertaken covertly and it was only after the fact that the US president or other military leaders got the opportunity to choose whether to take responsibility for it or announce that US planes were hijacked to deliver the bombs. If that happened, how long would it be before history was informed of what actually happened, and would people even believe it or would they think it was some kind of conspiracy to revise history for propaganda reasons?
Anyway, my point with all this hypothetical talk is that your concern with accuracy as to whether the US was responsible for a particular military action or not brings with it all the smaller questions of what it means for a nation to be responsible for the actions of its military/government, what the relationship between interacting military regimes means for causal chains that provoke response actions, etc.
E.g. have you ever heard the conspiracy theory that Churchill knew about the Pearl Harbor attack before it happened but didn't notify Roosevelt because he wanted the US to have an impetus to enter the war? There may be truth to that or it may be made-up nonsense to attribute US decision-making to Churchill but either way the point is that very small details can make a big difference in outcomes, so when you are arguing over whether the US bombers started the fire in Dresden or merely kept it going, the bigger question is why/how on Earth did conflict and warfare reach a point in history where such large-scale bombing took place. Trying to answer that question without, for example, considering the role played by the development as Blitzkrieg as a tactic, or the evolution of urban-guerilla/underground movements, etc. etc. is moot.
It would be like trying to disentangle the use of napalm in Vietnam from the covert/guerilla tactics of the Vietcong. So you can say that burning down forests as a battle tactic is horrible, and it is, but so are some of the guerilla tactics you would hear about, and then it brings up the classic question, "what were we doing there in the first place fighting someone else's war?" etc. etc. but if you had access to all the decision-making that went on, you would probably find that there was a very logical sequence of provocations and responses, and that one horrendous military tactic doesn't evolve in isolation from all the others. War simply evolves, and if the RAF or USAF wouldn't have firebombed Dresden, then someone else would have 'firebombed' some other city and provoked an even worse response, maybe nuclear, if you can consider that worse, idk.
The point is that when some people are in a no-holds-barred fight, it's hard to determine who uses which tactic at which moment in the fight for what reason. You seem to know the details about the Dresden bombing, so do you know why there was so much firepower used? I.e. what the strategy was and why it was employed? I'd be more interested to read about that than whether RAF or USAF did it (weren't they working together at that point either way regardless?).
Also, I read your post claiming the the USAF only intended to bomb the railway station and not 'firebomb' more broadly, so thank you for posting that correction of my assumption, assuming that it is accurate, which it may certainly be (who would I be to judge?).
