Laos and Cambodia weren't participants in the war but that doesn't really feel like it matters all that much. Whenever I talk about the bombings of Cambodia and Laos with Americans (who - liberals and conservatives alike feel they must always defend) I sometimes here "well we bombed cities in Germany and Japan in WW2 and no one talks about those being war crimes". But were they? I really don't know much about those bombings. My gut says yes they were also war crimes but we just accept them because they were combatant countries?
Laos had more bombs dropped on it by the US than all of WWII combined
Everyone should check out this visualization of the ordnance dropped in Laos... There are no words... https://youtu.be/4UM2eYLbzXg
[edit: it's not even a complete record, just the official US records from one record-keeping body (with gaps in data)]
Fuckers
I was in southern Laos about 15 years ago, went from Pakse to Attapeu by motorbike, there is UXO and massive bomb craters everywhere, and just the absolute nicest, kindest and most generous people it’s really fucked up. The war crimes of the US are on full display, and the fact that the US as rich as it is refuses to clean up its mess is icing on the cake
Bombing Axis civilians was OK because we did it.
When Axis countries bombed civilians it was unforgivable war crimes.
When the US government does it, it's OK, when others do it, it's not OK. Simple & easy. Remember this going forward, you're going to see it happen often.
If you want to see this in action in the present day; What America and Saudi are doing in Yemen is an order of magnitude more destructive and murderous than anything that has happened in Ukraine, yet American and European commentators are breathlessly calling for war crimes trials against the Russians.
McNamara is actually quoting Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay when he says that:
When asked about U.S. actions in Japan during World War II, McNamara responded, “LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. . . . LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?”
Absolutely!
I mean to iterate that what I think is most interesting about this quote is McNamara is criticizing a butcher like LeMay with his own words.
Yes. Dresden and Tokyo were absolutely horrific. For Dresden, my understanding is that it would not be hyperbolic to compare it to Hiroshima, historically speaking.
The civilian casualties were astronomical, as was the destruction and terror. The attack was also carried out completely indiscriminately, and in that way also resembles a nuclear bomb.
It's actually interesting. I just looked it up because I was curious, and it sounds like between when I graduated high school (and learned about Dresden) and now, the death total was revised from ~100k (which would be comparable to Hiroshima) to ~25k (which is still horrendous). Casualty numbers are obviously even higher (as that includes injuries.)
yeah. it looks like it wasn't really challenged until after 2010, which was a little after I finished high school (and read Slaughterhouse Five as well, which I really liked).
There's also something to be said for the fact that 25,000 dead and 100k injured or whatever is still pretty damn bad. The tragedy and horror of Dresden is still more or less accurately captured by history, I think, even as we are now doing a better job of weeding out Nazi lies (as well we should!!)
From what I know about Dresden: it was horrific, there was an intentional plan by the allies to target working class neighborhoods. They were near industry, giving plausible deniability, they were densely populated, increasing casualties and the morale hit, and the theory as usual was that there would be civil unrest. What's also true is that the damage was exaggerated by Nazi propaganda at the time, which has actually made it difficult to estimate the casualties caused by the bombings.
I'm assuming this isn't going to be particularly controversial, I'm cribbing from a WWII dad-doc I saw on Netflix, so I assume it's pretty standard and accepted stuff.
I'm gonna say; I think comparing the numbers of dead and maimed, and saying this bombing or that bombing is worse, I think looking at war that way destroys our humanness. Because if the bombing of Tokyo was worse than the bombing of Dresden, if murdering 100,000 civilians is worse than murdering only 25,000, it means were accepting that there are degrees of mass murder, and if we're not careful we might decide that there is an acceptable degree of mass murder.
Bombing civilians is wrong. It doesn't matter if it's one person or a million. It's wrong. It's a crime.
Operation Meetinghouse, which was conducted on the night of 9–10 March 1945, is the single most destructive bombing raid in human history.Of central Tokyo 16 square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) were destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.
Jesus Christ yeah, that does sound like a war crime...
Yeah the American attitude towards Japanese life was literally "Kill them all". There was no notion of Japanese civilians as people with a right to life. Absolute dehumanization.
i will point out that many allied countries were bombed to shit by the nazis, my hometown was not in any way a military or industrial target after the first year of the war, but was pretty much flattened
americans tend to forget that, what with them being safe across the ocean
this is of course in reference to dresden, the nuclear bombs have no fucking justification at all
The difference is that bombing Japan and Germany was targeting a fascist war machine.
No other instance of US military force have ever been justified. I would also argue that nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima, while horrible and definitely war crimes have their justification in a roundabout way because of what Japan was doing to China at the time. I don't think it was done with the Chinese people in mind but if it ended that genocide even one day earlier then it can be seen as justified. Of course the true reason was to have Japan surrender wholly to the US undermining any such justification.
Of course this could have done without nuclear weapons as well. And obviously the point there was to demonstrate that we were willing to use this new weapon.
Edit: Yes I realize I just justified the use of nuclear weapons but I stand by the distinction.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't even necessary to end the war, they were definitely not important to ending the genocide in China. Japan's war in China, and the war in general, was fully lost in 1945; their genocidal rampage through the country had basically withered and fallen apart through the year before. The US seeking an unconditional (except the Emperor condition, eventually) surrender from Japan has nothing to do the atrocities they committed in China, it was pure realpolitik, as any war of that scale is. Nuking hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in militarily insignificant cities, in a war already nearly over, perpetuating the strategy of terror bombing which only made the war deadlier to civilians instead of hastening its end, is not any kind of just retribution for Japanese war crimes. It's not even effective punishment; it murders all the wrong targets. Fascist dictatorships don't care about civilian deaths, there were many in the Japanese leadership who wanted to keep fighting, including in China, even after the nukes dropped. None of the military leadership, none of the war criminals who brutalized China, Korea, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and Indochina died from nukes, only civilians subject to fascism and a decade of total war.
I thought Japan's war in China was going fine. It was the war in the Pacific that was going badly.
Japan was in no danger of losing in China. They were hip deep, of course, because China is virtually unconquer-able, but they weren't actually losing.
From what I remember there were several million Soviet soldiers ripping through Manchuria when the nukes were dropped, and American command was worried that if they didn't stop the Soviets then the Soviets would invade and occupy at least China, and maybe Japan too.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria destroyed their logistics chain, caused a majority of their force in the North to rout, and basically made field operations in China impossible. They'd have lasted 3 months tops with 1.5 million Soviet Guards pressing from the north.
I think on the surface it would be justified to kill in order to stop those genocides.
But there is apparently evidence that the whole allied bombing campaign over Nazi Germany targeting civilians was actually just prolonging the war.
Because Germany was not at all democratic, there was not any real pressure applied by bombing civilians. Additionally, the main victims were city dwellers, who were more likely to be opposed to Hitler, however quiet that opposition was. So we kinda just killed his German enemies for him, which he wouldn't have been able to do without some real work to justify it
I'm not sure how it applied to the bombing of Japan but it could be a similar dynamic.
But there is apparently evidence that the whole allied bombing campaign over Nazi Germany targeting civilians was actually just prolonging the war.
Turns out that murdering entire cities of defenseless civilians really motivates people to fight harder, especially if they're convinced that you'll exterminate them if they stop fighting. British command didn't care though, they had power over people and they had the moral and emotional intelligence of a kid lighting off fire crackers in an ant hill because one of them stung his toe.
I would also argue that nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima, while horrible and definitely war crimes have their justification in a roundabout way because of what Japan was doing to China at the time.
Yeah this is absolutely not it.
1.) Killing group A because group B is killing group C doesn't make any sense.
2.) That's not what happened, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no real military significance and didn't change the course of the war in any meaningful way
3.) Collective punishment is morally wrong. Killing a bunch of civilians because a soldier from the same country killed a bunch of civilians is just, you know... Nazi shit. Like literally how the Nazis (and Americans, and French, and British, and many others) behaved when they were attacked by Partisans. Bad look, don't do it.
4.) The fate and wellbeing of Chinese civilians was never considered by the US at any time so far as I am aware.
5.) Japan was ready to surrender and everyone who mattered knew it before the bombs were dropped. America wanted to kill as many Japanese as possible because the Americans who mattered hated Japanese people, and because they spent a lot of money on the bombs and wanted to see what they would do, and because they wanted to show the rest of the world that America could now destroy entire cities with a single bomber, and because they wanted to cow the Soviets who were invading Manchuria at the same time, and for a few other reasons.
I still don't understand this though- why not just set off a bomb near the island first to demonstrate its power? The U.S. had another one it could use if Japan didn't surrender.
America wanted to kill as many Japanese as possible. Like killing them was an active goal and viewed as a positive. America had completely, totally dehumanized all Japanese people. It differed from genocide only in that America never made any effort to kill all Japanese people.
The people who were drawing up the bombing plans didn't think "Well, we want to maximize our effect while minimizing civilian casualties." They literally said "This city hasn't been bombed much, let's kill all the people here". They picked the targets they did because they knew it would maximize the death and suffering of Japanese people.
It's even worse than that. They left the cities unbombed so that they could gauge the destructive power of the weapon on a clean slate. They were literally called tests 2 and 3. Monstrous given the fascists were already on the ropes.
I would also argue that nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima, while horrible and definitely war crimes have their justification in a roundabout way
:what-the-hell:
I was just saying that it's been retroactively justified this way by people I've actually spoken to, I don't agree with it but :shrug-outta-hecks:
I guess I should have said "made a case for" idk I was just remembering a huge struggle session in the discord about it where someone made this case to me.
Really weird to see people defending the bombing of Dresden in this thread, especially in the same breath as recommending Shaun’s Hiroshima video. In that video, Shaun discusses how the strategy of strategic bombing was pretty useless and that the bombing of Dresden was unjustified. Winston Churchill even ended up calling strategic bombing a pretty useless strategy that didn’t contribute much to the war effort, and there was that dude (I think someone quoted him in this thread) who said if the allies hadn’t won the war these things would absolutely be war crimes. This is also what they will tell you if you ever visit Dresden. I met some guy who gave me a tour of some of the ww2 sites in Dresden, was very nostalgic for East Germany, but he also said yeah the allies shouldn’t bombed Dresden in the way they did.
Even worse is people defending Hiroshima. Both were absolutely unjustified. People are defending these things bc the countries were fascist, which like, yeah, but the actual levers of power of fascism are not being bombed, just a bunch of civilians. Meanwhile these things did very little to actually end the war, so not much damage is actually being done to these fascist countries.
Idk too much about Cambodia and Laos to compare, but the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden both were absolutely unjustified, contributed very little to the war effort, and were absolutely war crimes. No one here should be defending them
I’m like half asleep and lieing in bed so might try to flesh this answer out once I get up
To add some additional information, the firebombings carried out by the US on Japan killed more people than a nuke and are often forgotten about in the face of the two nuclear detonations. The Japanese were looking for an out for any reason possible before the nukes were dropped and the US was decently aware of this fact which makes the dropping of the nukes all that more unjustifiable. I would argue that both are equally evil but that come Laos and Cambodia the technology advanced enough for this campaign to be more brutal just like how technology has advanced enough now for us to remotely drop bombs on poor people in the mountains of Afghanistan.
(I think someone quoted him in this thread)
They cite it as McNamara, but McNamara is actually quoting notorious lizardman Curtis LeMay
and here's another of LeMay's quotes:
“There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders.” -- Curtis LeMay
They were war crimes, at least when saturation bombing, the question is did they help beat the fascists...the answer is "sometimes, but usually no and usually as a secondary objective to terror bombing". Dresden no, the Rhineland and Tokyo (more controversial since they knew the firestorm would murder most of the civilians and thought it was a good thing" probably yes since those really fucked the industrial and political capacity.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki....they probably speed the already forthcoming surrender up a week or two (and helped screw over the Soviets in negotiations), but that's hardly worth nuking an entire city.
So Bomber Harris might not be as "bad" as those who bombed innocent civilians fighting for their own liberation, but he certainly should have been up at the Hague.
Ultimately, the question when at war is not "does this piece of paper say it's bad?" But "does this destroy any concept of basic human dignity even more than war does?" And "does this bring this war to an end as swiftly as possible and with as few lives on either side lost as possible?
As a note of morbid interest, Bomber Harris did bomb innocent civilians fighting for their own liberation - in Iraq in the 1920s. He pioneered the concept of 'Strategic Bombing' by conducting was what then coined 'Aerial Policing' against Iraqi civilians - an attempt to conduct colonial policing (suppressing of independence movements) cheaper than convention methods.
Just a wonderful person I want to play Minecraft creative mode with.
I don't think there's a meaningful moral difference between Harris and any Nazi official. Harris just happened to win.
Agreed. The moral difference was at the social level where liberals are at least nominally better than genocidal fascists on a world conquest.
...even if sometimes it's hard to spot the difference.
Here's how Dresdens most popular church looked after the war. The :GDR-emblem: left it like that on purpose - not as an indictment of the allied bombings, but as a reminder what fascism leads to. It leads to getting your shit kicked in when you become too much of a threat for humanity as a whole.
As a German whose grandparents became refugees after the war, i still have to say that the Germans back then ... well, they had it coming. They really did, even most of the civilians. While Hitler never had an absolute majority as long as there still were halfway fair and open elections, there was a strong majority for a coalition of reactionary, ultra-nationalist parties who directly enabled and cheered on his rise to power and his popular support only solidified in the years leading up to the war. You cannot seperate the crimes of the nazi regime from the masses, eager and fervent popular support was the backbone of the nazi reign of terror. If you're fine with chuds getting the wall, i don't see why you'd morally object to OG nazis getting merced (strategically objecting is another issue, see below). The majority of the people killed in the raids were reactionaries who had fully supported the revanchist, expansionist course of Germany and the deadly persecution of Jews, communists and many, many other groups that had no place in the fascist order. Oh, but they were women and children, you say - yes, women and children who snitched on their neighbors. Women who saw it as their duty to the Fatherland to birth and raise little nazi soldiers and children who learned maths by calculating how much money can be saved by exterminating people with disabilities. And then they went off to the Hitlerjugend to learn how to shoot and how to hate Jews and how to serve the Führer. As harsh as it sounds, Germany's people largely deserved what they got, the scale of the crimes they enabled was just too massive to say otherwise and all casualties of WW2 are ultimately the fault of the nazis anyway, after all they kicked the whole thing off when they were actively trying to set the world on fire for their imperialism speedrun. It's a clear case of fuck around, find out, even though ofc there are always innocent people getting lost in indiscriminate carpet bombing and even though WW2 proved once and for all that such a doctrine is strategically pointless. The plan to destroy enemy morale through these bombings was a total failure, their only military worth was in destroying infrastructure important to the war effort. So while i don't feel any pity for Dresden burning down, it would be inexcusable to repeat what happened there in following wars.
Which brings us to Vietnam and Laos. Unlike in WW2, there was ample experience with the pointlesness of strategic bombing. Unlike with Germany, there was a clear focus on an exterminationist maximization of Vietnamese casualties, as the US believed they could win the war by genociding their way to a better KDR (that's literally what they planned, google McNamara fallacy). The bombings also happened on a scale that is not even remotely comparable to WW2. America had seen that indiscriminate mass bombing campaigns don't win wars and still doubled down, after they had already seen again that this does not work in Korea. It's just not the fucking same. Not to mention that in WW2, the US tried to stop a bunch of literal nazis who wanted to subjugate and ethnically cleanse all of Europe, whereas Vietnam was a bunch iof communists who only wanted the right to govern their country themselves, free of imperialist meddling. And the people of Laos did even less than that.
So no, Dresden doesn't even come remotely close to the crimes of the War of Imperialist Aggression against the people of Vietnam and Laos.
I'm not saying anything about Japan here, i know too little about the Pacific theatre during WW2 to pitch in on that. Shaun has a pretty thorough video on Hiroshima, though, i can highly recommend that one.
Just one last thing, neonazis are holding protest vigils in Dresden every year were they cry about the "allied bombing holocaust". Mythologizing, exaggerating and misrepresenting the bombing of Dresden is a core part of their victim blaming narratives. It should not be repeated in leftist circles, the US did enough undoubtedly bad things against communists to be criticized for. We do not have to show sympathy for dead fascists to do that.
I'm not sure how accurate it is, but I remember hearing that military high-ups who planned and executed the sorties in japan referred to them as "terror bombing raids" in their own words, in written correspondence.
I think maybe this was in the show "untold history of the us" but I could be wrong. I have been meaning to find the show for a while to rewatch, but netflix stopped hosting it and I never decided on a vpn so no torrents yet
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