The bombing of downtown Rotterdam was a mistake from confused orders, as was the initial bombing of civilian portions of London. Churchill, OTOH, ordered a deliberate attack on the citizenry of Berlin and then many other cities, with eager help from Bomber Harris. And the Allied attacks were not simply dropping bombs here and there, but the purposeful use of incindiary devices to create fire storms to destroy the city being attacked.
Its difficult to see the moral or historical difference between such bombing campaigns against civilians and the gas chambers, except that one side won and the other lost.
1) The Nazis were right to start the war in Europe. They were the Good Guys. It's a shame they lost.
2) The Japanese were right to start the war in the Pacific. They were the Good Guys. It's a shame they lost.
3) The Allies responded when attacked. They were the Good Guys. I'm glad we won.
4) Despite all my reading on WWII, I have not yet figured out who the Good Guys were. Could have been the Nazis. Could have been us. Who's to say?
I choose Option #3.
I take it you choose option #4?
That's moronic. The Germans had war industry in those cities. The Jews weren't exactly making B-24's in the ghettos.
Do you actually expect any fair-minded person to believe that tripe? Stop deluding yourself with Nazi apologist propaganda. It's true that the allies killed more German civilians in bombing raids than the other way around, but it's proposterous to claim that the Luftwaffe's unprecidented mass bombing of allied civilians was purely the result of "confused orders". Hitler used massive bombing compaigns with the express intent of terrorizing the allied nations, Britain in particular. That doesn't mean he only attacked civilian areas, but breaking Britain's national spirit with heavy civilian casualties was a tactic of psychological warfare that Hitler made no attempt to hide.
Much of the allied bombing of Dresden and even of Berlin can be seen today in our comfortable position looking back on history as outrageous overkill. However, in the throes of battle it is not always so easy to determine the exact amount of military action needs to be taken, especially when the uncertainty of a horrific war looms over your psyche. Did a desire for vengeance have anything to do with the decision to bomb Dresden? It's likely, but what can you expect from a nation that had itself first been bombed continually by the Luftwaffe? Nobody knows the true number of civilians killed in the Dresden firebombing, and as such many people (including Nazi apologists and anti-American leftists) have inflated the number to astronomical highs and have gotten away with it. I agree that looking in hindsight it may not have been justified, but I don't know that I could have said the same were I in charge of making strategic decisions at that point in the war. Either way, your casting Churchill as a demon-teutophobe seeking only bloody revenge, and Britain's and America's roles in WW2 as morally equivalent to Germany's genocide is intellectually dishonest.
Puh-leeze. By your own admission, the Nazis threatened to destroy the city unless the Dutch surrendered. The "mistake" is that they destroyed it anyway after they got their surrender, which is hardly exculpatory.