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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Dresden...

The Germans did terrible things, but the allies definitely did not have the moral high ground on all fronts. This is for me the horror of war: that because of one side losing its humanity the other side will too.

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Dresden was as legitimate a target as any other city. Its factories made, among other things, precision optics for bomb sights.

Dresden being a purely civilian target is a myth.

Yes, and precisely the large industrial areas of Dresden were not targeted but the inner city with lots of civilians was.

Note that I have no love for Nazi Germany, my family suffered tremendously at their hands and the results of that are still felt today. At the same time: I am categorically against indiscriminate firebombing of cities leading to 20K+ civilian deaths and if you feel that those civilians were a legitimate target because they happened to be in the city then you and I are probably not going to have a very productive discussion.

There were military factories in the city center also.

What I'm saying Jacques, is that the issue is nuanced. I encourage you to read Frederick Taylor's excellent book on the subject.

I've read that already (note: history is written by the victors) as well as a whole pile of other books on war (WWI, WWII) and ethics, rules of engagement and so on. My takeaway is that if you want to be able to take the moral high ground as a nation state you play by the rules even if that gives you a disadvantage on the off chance that you win the war. Because if you do you will end up with a more broken world than the one that you had before and now you have no tools to fix it without being labeled a hypocrite. This is all pretty complex stuff and not worthy of treatment by comment (books would be more appropriate) but that's how I feel about it and I don't think that it is going to be a trivial affair to move me from that position.

It also informed my stance on how I perceive war and my own possible role in it: I would definitely find myself mobilized (financially, personally) to help defend countries that are overrun by obvious aggressors, including my own but I would under no circumstance allow myself to be roped into a war of aggression up to the point where I would be happy to go to prison or worse if it came to it. This is not trivial stuff and I have so far been fortunate enough not to have seen this put to the test in a practical sense.

I know Dresden was not a purely civilian target, but civilians were fairly explicitly targeted, either that or you'd have to chalk that all up to extreme sloppiness, which is not a case that anybody credible has ever made.

>I know Dresden was not a purely civilian target

I feel like we're pretty much on the same page, then.

I really don't know why all the people defending strategic bombing of civilians, targeted at civilians at that, ignore all the contemporary documents from the people doing it, Harris, the RAF, USAAF and so on, clearly showing they knew already back then that a) it was a war crime and b) didn't even have remotely the effect they used to sell it in public (namely destroying enemy moral to the point the enemy surrenders).

How many would be civilians who were drafted to be soldiers are you willing to sacrifice so that you don't kill 'civilians'? If you are talking professional armies it is one argument, but when you are talking civilians that have been dragged into a conflict their nation did not start are they 100% not-civilian simply because of circumstance? Being a drafted non-aggressor army should also be part of the consideration in my mind.

We're talking about people that were at zero risk to be drafted as soldiers. You can put civilians in quotes but these were actual civilians. Boys too young to be drafted, women, girls, babies... Targeting them was a huge mistake, especially because that ordnance could have been put to far better use a few kilometers away, 30 seconds flying time.

Are there any "pure" civilian targets then, or is absolutely anything a legitimate military target? Was that pizzeria in Kramatorsk a legitimate military target because, as Russia claimed, soldiers were among those eating there?

>Are there any "pure" civilian targets then, or is absolutely anything a legitimate military target?

Welcome to the fundamental ethical dilemma underlying the debate around the Total War concept.

I don't claim to have all the answers.

I think the debate as such is around insurgent warfare, where you're not fighting organized, unformed armies so much as bands of militias and guerillas, and the line between combatant and civilian is entirely transactional.

Total war stopped being a thing once it became certain the next one would lead to global nuclear annihilation.

At least in terms of international law this debate has been over for about a century when you are fighting a uniformed military.

There's a difference between bombing factories and doing firebombing intended to raze the city as a whole.

As Mcnamara himself says in the documentary interview Fog of War, proportionality is a concept in warfare.

If what Russia is doing to Kyiv is impermissible in war, then what the allies did in Dresden was certainly not permissible

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