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Originally Posted by goldorak
No no no. Hindsight has nothing to do with it. In the pacific theater for instance , General LeMay knew perfectly well what he was doing when he ordered the strategic bombing raids against japanese cities. And when high altitude bombing raids didn't bring enough devastation he ordered low level flights during the night. The tokyo raid make 100 000 dead. Civilian dead. This is not war, this is massacre. He was so aware of this that he publicly stated that should the US lose the war he would have been convicted of war crimes.
The whole strategic bombing doctrine was born and developed in England and the US. Other countries used it with more or less success but the art of SB was taken to its extreme with the british and americans. Germany didn't even have a long range bomber force when it entered the war. All medium and light bombers. So yes Germany has it reponsabilities, but so do the Allies.
And winning the war is no excuse to put under the rug many "questionable" actions. Its as if after 60 years we still have this image of Germany as the empire of evil, and the Allies were the knights in shining armor fighting the dragon for truth and justice. Go beyond the propaganda and you see that the allies were every bit as ruthless and oportunistic as the germans.
And what about the japanese ? Eh they lost the war also, and yet even in 2010 they still don't aknowledge their responsabilities in the war. They negate everything, and lets not even go into the japanese occupation of china.
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Now you're just swinging wildly hoping to connect with something. We're talking about Dresden, not Tokyo.
But yeah Curtis LeMay would certainly have been convicted of war crimes had we lost. So would have FDR, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Harris, Montgomery, Nimitz, Halsey and every other leader on the allied side and it wouldn't have stopped there either. The Germans and Japanese designated all kinds of people as war criminals including Privates and Corporals. I'm sure the show trials in the event of an Axis victory would have gone on for years. Does that fact make them actual war criminals? No it wouldn't.