Terror bombing, like torture, not only was immoral but it didn’t work. Dresden certainly had nothing to do with victory, and was mere vindictiveness. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only useful if you cared about unconditional surrender, which we shouldn’t have. But even if we did all we needed to do was sit on Japan, which was helpless. Neither invasion nor mass slaughter were required.
What did victory get us, whether or not murdering civilians was necessary? Our Gallant Ally Russia in charge of nearly as much as the big, bad Nazis and Japs conquered, and 50 or so years of Cold War and a never-ending commitment to being World Police. All the evils that come with empire.
Soviet Union declared war on them before they surrendered. I doubt we wanted to take any chance of splitting up who got what out of Japan.
“Terror bombing, like torture, not only was immoral but it didn’t work. Dresden certainly had nothing to do with victory, and was mere vindictiveness. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only useful if you cared about unconditional surrender, which we shouldn’t have. But even if we did all we needed to do was sit on Japan, which was helpless. Neither invasion nor mass slaughter were required.
What did victory get us, whether or not murdering civilians was necessary? Our Gallant Ally Russia in charge of nearly as much as the big, bad Nazis and Japs conquered, and 50 or so years of Cold War and a never-ending commitment to being World Police. All the evils that come with empire.”
tubalcane pines for the pre-1860 Agrarian Republic. Which - yearnings of libertarians and paleocon nostalgia addicts nothwithstanding - never existed. Imperialism, then, is unavoidable; the only question left is, how do we deal with the empire we’re stuck with? Americans are not entirely without flaws, but I prefer an empire run by Americans, to an empire run by anyone else.
tubalcane writes just like many revisionists: we won the Second World War, therefore the issue was never in doubt, therefore there was no need for US forces to do ugly deeds. Deeds that an overly pampered, overly prissy coterie of latter-day moralizers are pleased to condemn, three generations after.
Especially that mean, unfair strategic bombardment stuff.
30 to 90 seconds with a map ought to dispel any doubts about Dresden; it was a transport nexus. Therefore, it was a key target. The only way to deny Germans the use of it was to strike it exactly as the RAF and USAAF raids did. To say otherwise is to play the Nazi propaganda game - not a pleasant prospect, even at this late date. Did the residents suffer? Undeniably. Why should any of us care?
The Home Islands of Dai Nihon were becoming ever more completely cut off by mid 1945. But a very large fraction of the Imperial Japanese Army stood firm on occupied territory in northeastern China. Blockade had worked in the past and was working then, but it was a slow process. All what-ifs are irreducibly speculative, but it’s a safe bet many more millions would have starved, contending with the winter of 1945-1946, and even greater numbers would have perished throughout the following year. Many, many more times than the actual number who met their end in Allied air strikes.
The only puzzle here is why tubalcane and like-minded forum members believe they are morally superior to the rest of us, when they poormouth decisions of wartime leaders, taken 70 years in the past or earlier yet.
tubalcane seems to be telling us it’s better to be moral than to be effective. A pretty sentiment, perhaps, but it falls short of workable policy even in peacetime. And in wartime, it invites ruin and defeat. After which, all talk of morality stops.