Iranian channel reminds the world of the Dresden massacre . I wonder why America keeps wanting to overthrow Iran
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Unthinkable things today were common practice in WW2. It was because the people of the West got together and agreed that WW2 was needlessly destructive that the various taboos against things like bombing the shit out of cities took hold.
And your analogy is bad. When you torch a building by hand, that's a precision and intentional act. When you bomb an area from 30,000ft with dumb bombs in a WW2 bomber, you can't aim at shit, and at best can blow up a general area. All these bombing raids had military targets. Sometimes these targets were in cities, like the rail yard at Dresden. I don't think there was ever an incident where the allies went out of their way to intentionally kill civilians except for the American firebombing campaign against Japanese cities + the nukes.
So the difference with "sitting in a plane" is that you aren't trying to torch that building, and don't know it has people in it anyway. You're trying to bomb some military target and it just so happens that the weapon you're using is so inaccurate that you're going to end up hitting a lot of other things in the general vicinity.
World War II was the exception rather than the rule. Prior wars did not have similar levels of civilian destruction. World War I had some, as did the Franco-Prussian War, but mostly executions for francs tireurs.
They were using incendiary bombs, intended to set the whole city on fire. So what 'general area' is that? The population center, of course.
I find it rather hard to believe that the main target was the 'rail yard', not the city, and that the city just happened to be destroyed as a byproduct. Besides, the allies had an explicit policy of 'dehousing' German workers.
Didn't Truman's diary say about Hiroshima that he was comforted by the fact that at least it was a military target? One wonders what the military told him.
What if I'm in a plane and I try to bomb a civilian area? Seems like a lot of people try to exculpate those who rain down death from the sky.
Note that allied bombers were often brutally murdered by the Germans in retaliation for what they had done.
That was purely a matter of technology. Prior to WW2 strategic bombing did not exist. Plenty of old wars were famous for the mass murder of civilians, such as the 30 years war. Back then, if you wanted to kill civilians, you had to get your hands dirty. It was because of wars like that that Europeans finally started to realize that mass murder of civilians was a terrible and unnecessary thing, and to work towards imposing a taboo on it.
WW1 had chemical weapons. That was a lesson learned well enough to prevent their use in WW2, even during Götterdämmerung. WW2 had strategic bombing, the excesses of which led the west to impose considerable limits on it after WW2, as seen in Korea, Vietnam, the Israeli wars, etc.
All WW2 bombing had some incendiaries. It just made since to do so since the idea was to use regular bombs to blow a structure apart, and then incendiaries to light the exposed material on fire. Dresden had a mix as usual The only time you can truly say the goal was to create a firestorm was the firebombing of Tokyo, where the bombers overwhelmingly carried specialized incendiary cluster bombs.
Politicians lie a lot to make themselves feel better. Technically you can call any city a military target since they all had factories in them. The purpose of the nukes was to break the morale of the Japanese leadership and it worked exactly as intended.
This happened plenty of times, most notably with Germany doing it in a very openly intentional way such as with Poland and later Coventry, the London Blitz, and much later with the Baedeker blitz. The Allies told themselves that they were morally superior, and to come extent they were, but they also sometimes crossed the line, most notably with Dresden.
And FYI I agree with Winston Churchill that Dresden was primarily a "terror bombing". Churchill wrote on 3/28/45: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land ... The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing."
People waaaaay overestimate the accuracy of WW2 bombers. There was no such thing as a precision raid on even a rail yard. A city was a reasonable size target to hit, and that's what they were doing.