It was immoral. Bombing civilian targets is always immoral. Dresden was immoral. London bombing was immoral. Do not kid yourself.
You do not know what you are talking about, and your ignorance makes you dead wrong.
But what do you do if you are fighting an enemy who has no morals? What if an enemy bombs your civilians? What if an enemy commits atrocities against your prisoners of war? What of morality then?
Oh do tell?
So you consider it a higher moral calling to fight them conventionally and see 1 million more Americans perish to take their little island nation?
Gee, nice of you to assign more lives as a mere commodity to e traded for a more noble and pious point of view.
The fact that the Japanese had decentralized their munitions industry throughout the city did not make it any less legitimate a target. And for what its worth, Hiroshima was leafleted by American bombers for days prior to the drop, advising the "civilians" that their city was about to be destroyed and urging them to evacuate. Their Japanese masters forbade them to leave their posts in the factories.
Dresden was the center of the Zeiss-Ikon factories, which made the eyes of the Nazi war machine. Even residents could not understand how they made it so long without being bombed. I don't know the answer to that either. It should have been hit earlier.
It makes a difference to know the facts.
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. The crueler it is, the shorter it is”.
William Tecumseh Sherman Atlanta, Ga. July 1864.
CC
Sorry about that, but I’ll stick with the perspective of the Greatest Generation and their parents who sacrificed while living through this history as related in last two paragraphs below from my essay.
By the way those two cities would be considered military targets within the meaning of the Third Geneva Convention based on the then ability to precision bomb, but that is another essay. I’ll agree about Dresden though, because the map I saw shows the military targets and worker housing were I think towards the north, northwest, and west of the central area the British chose for their night raid. I think the city should have been on the U.S. list for a daylight attack. London was as much stupid as immoral, because Hitler abandoned the target plans that would have degraded the British ability to wage war and feed themselves.
“The moral failure of a negotiated peace requiring anything less than total submission was unacceptable. Allowing a blockade to operate interminably, while deferring to the War Faction any decision about whether Japanese and allied prisoner deaths met their 20 million standards was intolerable. Allowing months of diplomatic dithering to accompany additional hundreds of thousands of civilian and military deaths throughout Asia was intolerable. An imperial, militarist Japan could not be allowed to intimidate future generations when they were on the cusp of producing nuclear weapons.
Allowing the premeditated ignorance of revisionists center stage as the institutional knowledge of the Greatest Generation and their parents and grandparents dies away must remain intolerable.”