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?
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.
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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.)
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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.
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