[jmacusa]

You don't cure a rabid dog with a Milk Bone either. It could be said that the Allied bombing campaign ‘’indiscriminately slaughtered civilians’’ but then that was the intent. You wouldn't have found any Englishman who opposed ''Giving the Germans it back!''. Those civilians were the enemy. Those civilians worked in the factories that made the weapons of war that killed Allied soldiers. The Germans made the rules. They introduced ‘’terror bombing’’ by bombing Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry killing thousands of innocent civilians . They conducted unrestricted submarine warfare and any and all ships they sighted. With their V-1 bombs they indiscriminately killed Dutch and British civilians and the V-2 did the same. The V-2 was particularly terrifying since it traveled at three times the speed of sound and exploded without warning. And of course there was the horror of the Holocaust. You have the reek of the moral equivocator about you and I find that repugnant. In two days time marks the eighty-fourth anniversary of Kristhallnacht. Dwell on that.

[Wyrd bið ful aræd]

"You have the reek of the moral equivocator about you and I find that repugnant."

To the contrary, you have the reek of the worst kind of moral equivocator about you -- that it is acceptable to answer evil with equal or worse evil, even against those uninvolved with the evil you are facing.

[Mrs. Don-o]

" You wouldn't have found any Englishman who opposed ''Giving the Germans it back!''. Those civilians were the enemy."

This is not true. There was actually British opposition to what was then called "area bombing." Howard Cowan, an AP war correspondent, filed a story about the Dresden raid (mid-Feb, 1945)in which he called it "deliberate terror bombing of great German population centres" and Richard Stokes, MP, addressed British Parliament opposing indiscriminate area bombing on both moral and strategic grounds.

The controversy reached the highest levels. By the end of March, Churchill sent a telegram to General Ismay for the Chiefs of Staff in which he stated, "The moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed...."

When some objected to his use of the term "terror," Churchill simply reiterated his point (April 1945) with the usual British euphemism for attacks on cities: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so called 'area-bombing' of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests....". (I got these quotes from Frederick Taylor's book on Dresden.)

Prior to WWII, doubts about the strategic use of area bombing emerged during the Spanish Civil War. Large scale bombing of the civilian population, thought to be demoralizing to the enemy, often had the opposite effect. The book "Air Power" quotes strategist E. B. Strauss as saying, “Observers state that one of the most remarkable effects of the bombing of open towns in Government ("Loyalist") Spain had been the welding together into a formidable fighting force of groups of political factions who were previously at each other's throats…”

In other words, it unified and hardened the resolve of the opposition.

These experiences influenced the RAF and the USAAF, at the beginning of WII, to at first adopt a policy of daylight precision bombing against military assets, rather than indiscriminate terror bombing.

I question whether you would have found the British leadership disputing, at least in principle, that aerial operations must comply with these principles of law: military necessity, distinction, and proportionality. In other words, an attack or action must be reasonably anticipated to be effective step in destroying the enemy's war-making capacities; it must be an attack on a military objective; and the harm caused to civilians or civilian property must be proportional and not excessive in relation to the direct military objective.

These principles may have ALL been abandoned in practice by the end of the war, but the fact that the terror-bombing was continually obscured by secrecy and euphemism shows that those who did it knew they were open to condemnation as terrorists.

From a moral point of view, I know that Elizabeth Anscombe, a young Catholic philosopher, and the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, protested while the carpet bombing was in progress, on the grounds that either the directly targeted or the deliberately indiscriminate killing of innocent persons is murder.

There were others, as well, who knew the difference between legitimate use of lethal force, and murder. Sometimes we forget.