[jmacusa]

It ended a war Germany deliberately started. A war it hoped would have it dominating the world under the swastika flag and ridding the world of the Jewish people. After surviving the Luftwaffe's attempts to bomb it into submission and the horrifying V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks the British people didn't give a G-damn how many Nazi bastards and Huns died or how as long as they(the Brits) were ''giving it to them back''. War sucks. There's no way around it. It sucks even more when you start wars and end up losing them.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

[Carpet bombing] ended a war Germany deliberately started. A war it hoped would have it dominating the world under the swastika flag and ridding the world of the Jewish people. After surviving the Luftwaffe's attempts to bomb it into submission and the horrifying V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks the British people didn't give a G-damn how many Nazi bastards and Huns died or how as long as they(the Brits) were ''giving it to them back''. War sucks. There's no way around it. It sucks even more when you start wars and end up losing them.

Except that carpet bombing didn’t end the war. The war ended after Hitler was trapped by the Soviet army and committed suicide.

Strategic bombing didn’t end the war in Japan, either - until the “shock and awe” produced by the two (count them, two) atomic bombs. And that was after Curtis LeMay had killed scores of thousands of Japanese in individual nighttime carpet bombing raids on Japanese cities. He had reached the stage where he was inviting the Japanese civilians of a city to evacuate, then devastating that city with firebombs. It seems clear that interdiction of enemy fuel supplies was the productive use of heavy bombers. It wouldn’t end a war by itself - but it would substantially hobble the opponent’s military capability so that opposing armies could victoriously end the war.

[muawiyah]

That's a little broad doncha' think. Germany, for the most part had lost by the time somebody thought to bomb Dresden ~ and with the Red Army pausing from the Vistula–Oder Offensive for necessary reinforcement and resupply ~ whatever military utility Dresden had had was of little note except or one thing ~ the possibility that German military units might flee through there to the West to surrender to American or British forces.

This particular bombing begins to look much more like the opening shot in the Cold War, at least in Joe Stalin's playbook.