500N
I meant in terms of huge numbers of people / civilians killed,
not how the bombing was carried out.
But the motives for why the bombing was carried out play a big role in determining the justifiability/criminality/heinousness of the attack.
From what it appears, regardless of death-toll, Dresden was a far more heinous attack due to the fact that it was not done to hit targets of value, but simply to smash and burn a city down and kill lots of people. That's why Dresden has been much more of controversy than say Hamburg.
Pontius Navigator
Of course targetting civilians takes two forms.
There is the strafing of a refugee column with the sole purpose of creating mayhem and blocking a road
From what it seems, that happened in Dresden...
of shooting then population of a village pour encourager les autres
What does pour encourager les autres mean? I don't speak French.
Chugalug2
So here goes again:
The best USAAF got was a radius of 2 miles by day.
You're just giving me numbers -- I could throw around numbers. Where are you getting your numbers from.
the reality was that, like the RAF, they flattened cities and killed civilians. So on the one hand the Brits flattened cities at night, killed civilians, and are guilty of war crimes. On the other hand the USAAF aspired to bomb precision targets by day, resulting in flattened cities and killing civilians, but are not?
What goes into factoring criminality into an act isn't just the act itself, but the intention of the act. If the intention was to flatten cities and kill civilians -- then it's a war-crime. If the intention wasn't to -- it isn't. It's the same reason that manslaughter gets a lighter sentence than say premeditated murder.
The RAF's aim was to flatten cities and, uh, "de-house the working population" which was basically a pretext for attacking civilians. Of course, any time the USAAF was operating with the intention of flattening cities and killing civilians en masse -- then it would too be a war-crime.
Either that or you must be a lawyer.
I'm not a lawyer, but I suppose you'll probably think I have the mindset of one. Of course there's a difference in that I'm not simply out to win the argument -- I'm simply pointing out the difference in intent and result.
Pontius Navigator
Chug, I posted the 400 yard CEP figure.
I saw that number elsewhere as well, but I failed to take into account regardless that it means that half the bombs fall within that figure.
pr00ne
On the Dresden raid industrial and military areas were not even marked on the crews maps, they were merely aimed at zones of the city. The point at which the marker flares were aimed was a wooden sports stadium in the middle of the city. The railway marshalling yards, perhaps THE most militarily and industrially important target in the whole of Dresden, were not even in the target area.
The target was the city and the population of Dresden.
Yeah, it was just a mission to kill huge numbers of civilians under the idea that it would terrorize the German people into rising up against their government and replacing it with one that would end the war. That didn't happen.
In fact I'm not even sure that happened with the nuclear-bombing against Hiroshima or Nagasaki -- if I recall the government simply surrendered.
Harris was no war criminal
No, he was. A war-crime is a violation of international law. The Hague Conventions (1907) specifically forbid the targeting of civilians.
It certainly contributed massively to it, but that wasn't the claim made by Harris, he claimed that there was NO NEED for the D-Day landings or the Battle of the Atlantic, that strategic bombing alone would win the day. It didn't.
He basically believed that if he smashed enough cities to rubble and killed enough civilians they'd rise up in terror and in an effort to preserve themselves, would overthrow their governments and replace them with one that would terminate the conflict.
Of course, the problem was that Harris was so convinced (and one could argue deluded) that this was the way to win, that even when it didn't work -- he simply figured they next time it would.
Winston Churchill basically felt that Germany's Prussian militarism, which was around since the 1700's had to be completely uprooted. So, he was fine with Harris bombing city after city off the map.
He didn't want to concentrate on oil or ball bearing targets, as proposed by the Americans, he even opposed the Dams raid. He was totally focused on a campaign of dehousing and destruction of CITIES.
Correct
At the end of the war German industrial output was still rising and there was no shortage of material or equipment. What there WAS was a massive shortage of oil and ball bearings. The Americans were right, Harris was wrong.
Yeah, and there are still people who hail him as a hero.
R.C.