Was the American Bombing Campaign in World War II a War Crime?

American Heritage Magazine ^ | April 6, 2006 | Fredric Smoler

[tbird5]

Deliberately targeting civilians is widely considered terrorism nowadays, but during World War II both the Britain’s Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Force deliberately targeted civilians.

The British philosopher A. C. Grayling, in his new book Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (Walker, $25.95), points out that the two air forces combined killed perhaps 600,000 German civilians and another 200,000 Japanese. He makes the case that at least by our current standards we were terrorists, and it logically follows that the attacks were war crimes. In an age of political terror, when it is urgent to come up with a persuasive distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence, it is hard to overstate the importance of the questions Grayling raises.

[RBroadfoot]

"Can there really be civilians in all out war?

It is the "civilians" that manufacture the goods that empower the war machine to continue on."

That's Osama's argument as well.

[rlmorel]

Heck, our fighter pilots were strafing anything that moved. And to demoralize the German and Japanese public was just why they were doing it.

Like Sherman said..."War is Hell".

[Zhang Fei]

Actually, I got much of my World War II history on the lap of an old relative who served in the South Pacific.

If the US had not dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, and an invasion of mainland Japan had occurred, you might have gotten your WWII history from somebody else's lap.

[wolficatZ]

"On 10 March 1945, one of the last paper balloons had descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project's production site at Hanford, Washington. The balloon landed on a power line that fed electricity to the building containing the reactor producing plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb, and shut the reactor down!"

 

The Fire Balloons

[Reagan Man]

>>>>The British philosopher A. C. Grayling, in his new book... "Political Correctness Gone Mainstream".

[Madison Moose]

If I remember what I read about this correctly, Japan actually canceled the bio weapon attacks on the west coast because a high ranking official in their army got nervous about what the US would do in return.

[frankiep]

Apparently actual facts like that aren't enough for some people.

[Berlin_Freeper]

"I've often said that if my great-grandfather came back today and spent 48 hours getting familiar with what the United States has become, he'd swear that the Nazis had actually won World War II -- or that we'd been invaded by the Soviets soon after the war ended."


US+UK+Australia-canada=Brothers in Arms

Most likely you would be making him sick in his stomach at how impotent and useless Canada had become. It can hardly be said that Canada even has a military. That was the main reason Canada failed to join their Brothers in Arms against the fully documented mass murderer and torturer Saddam Hussein...

National Post
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Canada's army, navy and air force are facing a funding shortfall of up to half a billion dollars, defence sources told the National Post, and the military is recommending drastic measures to make up the difference, including closing some of the largest bases in the country.

"We will not be able to meet our domestic defence obligations," one naval officer said. Colonel Howard Marsh: "This is a look forward ... at what they need in order to keep the army going," he said. "Nobody has ever seen a bankrupt military in a developed country.... This year I predict we will see that in Canada."

Col. Marsh said the military is saddled with ageing bases and increasingly dilapidated buildings that are fast reaching the point of collapse. "What they've been doing, year in and year out ... is not replace or repair those buildings, or buy new equipment," he said.

"The average age of the equipment in the Canadian Forces is over 20 years and it hasn't been well-maintained."

[txroadkill]

Heck, our fighter pilots were strafing anything that moved. And to demoralize the German and Japanese public was just why they were doing it.

I have read ever book I can get my hands on about WWII in both the ETO and the Pacific and I have never seen anything that would indicate that any US service men ever intentinaly targeted civilians. I don't believe that any US fighter pilots ever even saw main land Japan unless they were POW's. And in the ETO the fighter pilots had too many military targets, too little fuel, and too little time to ever harass anything that wasn't military. Keep in mind that every time a fighter pilot pulled his trigger, an camera started running. If you know of something different I would sure like to read it.

[MarkL]

The reason that wars seem to go on forever nowadays is because we are too civilized. We no longer completely destroy the ability of the enemy to make war. The last war that was ended and resulted in peace was WWII. Everywhere else in the world where those results were prohibited, the wars just go on and on forever. The best example being Israel, and the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Although Israel nearly lost the war in the first 48 hours, with help from the US, they were able to counterattack and drive the Egyptian army back across the Sinai and the Suez Canal, surrounding it, and were about 50 miles from Damascus, Syria. Unfortunately, the UN and Soviet Union stepped in, causing Israel to cease hostilities. Had they been allowed to "finish the job," the middle east would be a far better, and safer place today.

Mark

[Enchante]

No one can even begin to discuss this issue intelligently without first taking account of the following facts: all the cities (Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Conventry and so many others) that Germany and Japan bombed first, the fact that every day the war went on the Axis powers were slaughtering vast numbers of people, the facts of the Holocaust (which was killing thousands of Jews and other targeted peoples every day the war went on), the total "scorched earth" of the Eastern Front in which the Germans annihilated countless cities, towns, and villages, etc. etc.

The Allied Powers were trying to bring the earliest possible end to an aggressive war launched by the Axis powers which was killing TENS OF MILLIONS (final tally was probably 40+ million). Sure, one can argue that bombing of cities is never justified, but if it's EVER justified it certainly was in WWII as the best attempt to defeat the Axis.

btw, there's no certainty at all that the USSR would have stayed in the war without the US and UK attacking Germany all-out from the air, since before June 1944 that was the ONLY serious way they had to reduce the German military power on the Eastern Front. If Stalin had judged that the US and UK were unwilling to do all in their power to defeat Germany then he might well have made a negotiated peace and Nazi rule would have continued all over Europe, the Holocaust would have been carried out to its "final solution" etc.

[rlmorel]

You are giving Osama Bin Laden legitimacy he does not have.

He does NOT officially operate under the auspices of a country.

His scumbag islamofacist thugs do not wear uniforms.

He attacked the USA on its own soil using terrorists in civilian garb.

As I said before, he uses his twisted rationale to justify murder. It is not war. It is murder.

[Spktyr]

Only in revisionist history.

In reality, total war is when you wipe out *everything* associated with your enemy. That includes women, children, the elderly, whoever is in the way or offers resistance to your troops.

The idea is to inflict such horrors on the enemy that they give up rather than watch the things they hold dear be destroyed.

It's not a new idea either. There's examples throughout recorded history. The interesting thing is that it usually *works*, if you inflict the proper amount of devastation.

[Psycho_Bunny]

The British "philosopher" A. C. Grayling should maybe look up the phrase "tipping point".

[Zhang Fei]

It is the "civilians" that manufacture the goods that empower the war machine to continue on." That's Osama's argument as well.

Osama no doubt has three meals a day. So do we. He also puts on his pants one leg at a time. As do we. Just because Osama says something doesn't mean it's wrong.

In my book, civilians are legitimate targets if the other side breaks the rules by targeting our civilians. At the same time, it pays to exercise some prudence. Some cost benefit analysis is justified here.

We are fighting, at best tens of thousands of men in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the populations of both countries are friendly, and of the hostiles, only a few tens of thousands are motivated to fight us. There is no point in stirring up a hornet's nest by going after their civilians. This is not an enemy that is killing 300 and crippling hundreds of our men on a daily basis, as occurred during WWII.

[txroadkill]

Good post. You should read "The Conquerors" by Michael Beschloss. Great inside infomation on how Roosevelt and Truman were thinking all through WWII.

[Spktyr]

Actually, that wasn't the case (except in some revisionist minds). It was the specific target of at least four raids that I know of, but they all missed.

[TheCrusader]

"Was the American Bombing Campaign in World War II a War Crime?"

Nothing in this book about the German Blitzkrieg or the Russian bombardment of Polish cities? Nothing at all about the German bombing of the Vatican and Castle Gandolfo, the Pope's personal residence where 500 Jews being hidden there were killed by Nazi bombs? The fact is that this "author" forgets that the U.S. bombing of Dresden was in response to the Nazi WAR CRIMES and atrocities. This is just another trashy book seeking to defile history by taking facts out of historical context and by judging the events of a particular time period against modern thought.

Now that the Crusades have finally been vindicated as necessary defensive wars, after decades of anti-Christian and anti-Catholic "historians" calling them "Brutal papist wars fought for the purpose of subjugating and converting muslims to Christianity", they have to continue on with their quest of revising history to make evil appear good, and good appear evil. These twisted times we now live in will no doubt be judged by honest historians as the era that sought to murder all truth and that attempted to elevate evil to God's throne. File this book in the maneur heap of dispicable lies and twisted insinuations along with the Davinci Code hogwash.

[gondramB]

>>The argument that in World War II enemy cities -- at least German ones -- represented legitimate targets because of their industrial capacity falls on its face when you realize the lengths to which the U.S. and Britain went to protect key industrial targets in many of these German cities.

The major plant in Cologne that had been owned by the Ford Motor Company (actually Ford Werke, the German subsidiary of the company), for example, had gone unscathed through so many Allied bombing raids during the war that it became a place of refuge for the city's residents whenever the air raid sirens sounded.<<

I recently saw a history channel show that said that both sides initially refrained from bombing cities but an accidental bombing led to retaliation and more retaliation.

[rlmorel]

I really did not make that up. You can see references to it in books written by pilots in the 357th Fighter Group, and 56th Fighter group.

We had carrier pilots strafing and pounding the crap out of Japan near the end of the war, flying fighters.

It wasn't considered a war crime at that point. How could they?