Well, wideawake, let us see.
The Battle of the Bulge was essentially over by January 1st, 1945 (ie all German offensive operations had failed and were over)
The bombing of Dresden was essentially over by the end of February, 1945.
That is about 9 weeks.
In those 9 weeks:
The Soviets capture Warsaw.
The Soviets capture most of Eastern Europe (up to the Danube River)
Over 1 million Soviet troops approach the Polish/German border
The US Army (with Allies) captures all of the low countries and enters Germany.
Yep - it sure makes sense to fire-bomb a military insignificant German city packed with refugees...like those crazy Germans were on a fricken roll.
2banana, with due respect, in your estimation I suppose Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also unnecessary. I disagree. The outcome of WWII, both theaters, was a lot closer thing then most of us know, esp. in the early years.
When faced with occupation and slavery our grandfathers waged total war, like the Nazis and Japanese, and they won.
Sorry to post and run, but the whistle just blew. Something to chew over: the victors write the history books. We incinerated a lot of civilians and broke a lot of ceramics in Dresden. You screw with the bull, you get the horns. That’s war.*
[If more Nazis are gathering, now’s the time to bomb them, before they reproduce.]
Dresden was the most significant military target in Germany in February 1945.
The Nazis had already stalled the Soviets at the Polish border and Dresden was the transfer point for 500,000 reinforcements evacuated from France and the Low Countries to hold off the Soviets who had strung their forces over a 600 mile salient.
The Nazi strategy was to continue to hold the Soviets at bay while using the Siegfried line to minimize US/British capitalization on the Battle of the Bulge.
When Dresden went, the Nazis were unable to quickly move reinforcements from West to East and Nazi forces on both Western and Eastern fronts were forced to make rushed and inefficient movements to try and shore up their now-liquid lines.
Eisenhower believed that the key to avoiding several more battles as bitter as the Bulge was to stop the Nazis from reinforcing their Eastern lines.
Destroying Dresden was the key to that strategy - once Dresden was gone, the two wings of Nazi resistance were effectively severed and the Nazis were rolled up.
By so doing, we avoided a costly military invasion and saved many American lives, and even a lot more Japanese lives.
Simply put, we not only defeated them and their will to fight...we CRUSHED that will to fight in the hopes that it would not rise again. And it has been successful.
At the time, the same ratlional held for the Germans. The Nazis were fanatics, and they were smart and ruthless. We had to absolutely crush them and the people who supportedthem. Dresden was a part of that at the end, but, as I said, it punctuted our will in the matter and the fighting, when it did end, (apart from a few more or less minor incidents as compared to the whole) ended with finality.
That finality and then our own compasison to the peoples in those countries after the fighting ended in that manner, saved many, many lives.
In addition to my study of the history of it, I speak as one who lost his only uncle on my mother's side, over Grmany in a bombing raid in late 1944.