Quote:
Originally Posted by August
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.
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Actually Dresden is but a case of Strategic Bombing. We can express regret for the bombing of Dresden, as that for any other city that was leveled between 1918 and 1945. I don't remeber who it was in this thread that correctly framed the issue. Its not about Dresden, or Tokyo or Guernica.
Its about the doctrine of strategic bombing and wether its use was justified or not. Doesn't matter if used in the pacific theater, the european theater or the spanish civil war. The act in itself has to be condemed, wether it was carried out by Allies or the Axis. The people in command, knew perfectly well the atrocities they were commiting. All justified in the name of war, and atrocities nonetheless. And the difference between a war criminal and a hero ? One belongs to the losing side, the other to the winning side.