Here's where you're wrong. Terror bombing was almost entirely a myth - not a single bomb was dropped by an Allied bomber (and few if any from an Axis one) with the intention of causing victory through panic. Every single one was aimed at a factory, a military target, or a transportation network. Dresden was not only one of the key remaining industrial centers, it was THE supply and transit nexus for the forces defending the Soviet invasion route, and it was obliterated in an attempt to "plow the road" for the Soviets. The reason Japan's cities were firebombed (instead of the precision-for-the-era raids the US tried so hard to pull off in Europe) was because every Japanese home contained some sort of machine tool, and such decentralized production made up the majority of the Japanese industry. Similarly, Britain resorted to area firebombing not out of any attempt to break the enemy morale (nobody who lived through the Blitz would be stupid enough to think that would work) but because hitting a city block at night was pushing the accuracy of the time, and RAF Bomber Command just couldn't take the losses that unescorted (until the later models of American fighters got into service, fighters simply couldn't fly far enough) bombers would suffer by daylight. The ONLY goal was still to break the back of the industry, in this case by destroying or driving away the workforce.
EDIT: Nagasaki was one of Japan's biggest industrial centers, and Hiroshima was a major military base. Both were vital military targets.
I'm really surprised you'd make that claim, since everything I've ever read on the subject contradicts it. The idea of damaging civilian morale to the point of capitulation was central to nearly every air power advocate's vision for the war, and was believed by most of the senior officials in both the RAF and USAAF (read some of what Arthur Harris has said in memos and official directives, it's rather chilling). The USAAF clung to the notion for longer than the RAF that "precision" raids were possible and that it should only be military and industrial sites that are targeted, but that was the result of gross overconfidence in the capability of bombers at that time to accurately hit their target, or even consistently navigate to a target smaller than a city while under fire (and indeed, in some missions the bomber wings would end up dropping ordinance on the wrong city entirely). Beyond that, you can read memo after memo, directive after directive, and even many of the official press releases, and see that destroying civilian morale was at least a secondary objective for most of the campaign in Germany. With the strategic bombing campaign in Japan there wasn't even a question of avoiding civilian casualties, after the initial failings to be able do anything besides indiscriminately firebomb urban areas.
If you're arguing that civilians and civilian structures were targeted exclusively to reduce industrial capacity, that's one interpretation, but we are at least in agreement that they
were targeted, right? If a mission targeting the "industrial and military targets" is accomplished by leveling the entire city, does the objective matter? Are the two atomic bombs included in that 'not a single bomb' argument, as though the military significance of the cities was the reason for dropping the bombs?
Also thanks, I was wrong about Nagasaki and Hiroshima not having military importance; I was remembering a list of the largest cities destroyed in Japan, sorted by their target priority. The bombing of Dresden on the other hand, that is the quintessential example of a militarily unimportant target being needlessly annihilated, and rightly so. Leveling a city behind an already collapsed front a month before the war's end served no strategic purpose whatsoever, tactical or otherwise. Whatever minor industrial value the city had, it had no military importance (fortifications, bases, defenses of any kind), and it was only bombed to impress the soviets and improve RAF standing. The Red Army could've walked into the city and taken it
weeks later with no significant resistance.
Also, sorry, I know this is a tank thread.
Author
Topic: Defend ze glory of ze German Wunderwaffen! (Read 17051 times)