[Catfish]

Well.. cities as legitimate military targets?
IMHO bombing any civilian target or threaten to do so, is taking civilians as hostages.
There is almost no city which would not be a legitimate military target nowadays, from chocolate bars to ball bearings, all help to support the evil enemy, right?

So London was also a legitimate target, for all those ammunition factories, headquarters a.s.o. in WWI, and II ?
Ironically, the bombing of civilians in WW2 began with a tragic error, inviting Churchill to do what he and the military wanted to do all along. The order or parole sent to the armed forces was "Total Germany", which meant the declaration of a total war, right from the beginning.

On the other hand as things developed, such bombings of civilians would have happened sooner or later anyway, after the declaration of war. They had already taken place in WW1.. (started with the french i think though i may be wrong, to bombing cities in the Ruhr area, Friedrichshafen, and then, of course, England), and especially the german bombing raids in Poland at the begining of WWII.
You cannot see the bombing between England and Germany, without looking at Poland.

They did it first, so we are just doing what they did. Justification, not much better morally, but a reason.


As i said before, there were political reasons to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki and maybe rightly so, to prevent more dying, but imho the military really wanted to try out their new toys (as Einstein wrote) and see the real effect. And we should not forget that japanese people were effectively dehumanized, in propaganda. Not too much people protesting, if the population knew about it at all.
Real military reasons to bomb a city's population? I doubt it.