[quote]orion wrote:
While I do think that to drop the bomb was a quick way to end the war and therefore the general suffering, the carpet bombings in Europe and Japan were taken from the British colonial playbook where they would simply destroy a village from the air to let it be a warning to others.
This policy specifically targeted civilians in order to break their spirit, shock and awe if you will.
Or in other words terrorism and yes, a war crime.
Attacking places like Tokyo with millions of people and wood and paper houses with fire bombs did little to soften their resolve, it did create a flaming inferno though that let hundred of thousands of people die an unimaginably painful death.
To be fair though it was Churchill who introduced that little gem into WWII.
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Verpiss Dich! You Germans led the way on bombarding civilians. During the Great War when my Grandmother was a child my Great Grandmother had to rush her into a London underground station to escape the bombs that were being dropped around them by Luftwaffe Zeppelins.
Then there was the “Paris Gun” which was designed to lob shells 75 miles over the battle lines and into Paris.
As a military weapon, the Paris Gun wasn’t a great success: the payload was minuscule, the barrel required frequent replacement and its accuracy was only good enough for city-sized targets. However, the German objective was to build a psychological weapon to attack the morale of the Parisians, not to destroy the city itself.
I would also like to point out that the Luftwaffe bombed civilians during the Spanish civil war.
April 26, 1937
Nazis test Luftwaffe on Guernica
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=4950
During the Spanish Civil War, the German military tests its powerful new air force–the Luftwaffe–on the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain.
Although the independence-minded Basque region opposed General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, Guernica itself was a small rural city of only 5,000 inhabitants that declared nonbelligerence in the conflict. With Franco’s approval, the cutting-edge German aircraft began their unprovoked attack at 4:30 p.m., the busiest hour of the market day in Guernica. For three hours, the German planes poured down a continuous and unopposed rain of bombs and gunfire on the town and surrounding countryside. One-third of Guernica’s 5,000 inhabitants were killed or wounded, and fires engulfed the city and burned for days.
The indiscriminate killing of civilians at Guernica aroused world opinion and became a symbol of fascist brutality.
The area of Tokyo that was firebombed was involved in armaments manufacture which makes the people there participants in the war.
Why no mention of the “Rape of Nanking”?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4920138942953644691
The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs tells the story in words and more than 400 photographs of the Japanese invasion of China and the sacking of its capital city, Nanking, in 1937-38.
Between December 1937 and March 1938 at least 369,366 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered by the invading troops. An estimated 80,000 women and girls were raped; many of them were then mutilated or murdered.
THE SAVAGERY OF THE KILLING WAS AS APPALLING AS ITS SCALE.
Thousands of victims were beheaded, burned, bayoneted, buried alive, or disemboweled.
To this day the Japanese government has refused to apologize for these and other World War II atrocities, and a significant sector of Japanese society denies that they took place at all.