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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

Of course not; at that time few or none among the Allies knew the camps existed, so they could not possibly have been the reason. But many lives were saved from those camps, nonetheless, in direct consequence of actions such as Dresden which made it eventually impossible for Germany to continue to prosecute the war.

So the question still merits asking - and answering.

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The answer is no, absolutely fucking not, and the fact is that you are with one post defending the moral rectitude and high ground of American soldiers who refer to their victims as "bug splats" when adults and "fun-size terrorists" when children, and with the other post justifying their wholesale firebombing of civilian population centers because of the unsubstantiated potential for a separate effect that you admit was totally unforeseen and unintentional.

Meanwhile, you show no evident scruple in trading away the lives of the Nazi regime's victims, in the cause of preserving those of its subjects:

> The answer is no, absolutely fucking not

To be clear, I don't make this point in order to argue some special lack of moral rectitude on your part, but rather for its value as an example of the fact that, in warfare, there exist no options that offer perfect moral uprightness - that the choices available there are not between virtue and iniquity, but rather between greater iniquity and lesser. There's nothing lovely about this fact, but it is a fact nonetheless, and I fail to see how refusing to acknowledge it improves the ability, of one who does so, to correctly understand the world we so imperfectly share.

I'm not sure that Dresden is a great example - it was late in the war and strategically probably achieved very little.

The attach on Hamburg earlier in the war (July 1943) probably had more impact but even then the Allied air raids on Germany actually achieved disproportionally little given the huge resource allocated to them.

They didn't decide the war, to be sure. But I think there's a compelling argument to be made that they considerably shortened it.

The German industrial war machine in fact remained surprisingly effective in the face of allied bombing until early 1945 [1] when the scale of the bombing finally became overwhelming. But by this time the Germans were going to lose anyway because they couldn’t continue to handle devastating tactical attrition on two fronts. Prior to 1945, German manufacturing was more constrained by the (non) availability of critical resources (coal and steel) than affected by allied bombing [2]. The bombing also failed to decisively impact German civilian morale until very late in the war [3].

However, bombing did force the Germans to prioritise air defence of their heartlands over tactical air operations against allied ground forces, so that German ground forces and their logistics chains operated under punishingly hostile skies from D-Day onwards.

[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/53742/the-bombing-war/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction

[3] https://www.amazon.co.uk/German-War-Nation-Under-1939-45-x/d...

[EDIT - reworded for clarity and additional detail]

The bombing operations forced Germany not only to use its planes defensively instead of tactically against the Soviet Union (and build high altitude fighters to begin with), but also forced them to spend an enormous amount of resources on anti-air guns, bunkers for civilians, military assets and manufacturing, radar systems, and what not, all of which could have being spend.

As especially the USA's industrial output was much larger than Germany's, bombers might still have been a good investment, even if it didn't actually reduce Germany's industrial capacity, because it did reduce its capacity to wage ground war.

EDIT: Also, even if Germany's industrial output did grow during WWII, it still tied up an enormous amount of resources: "The Allied bombing campaign also tied up valuable manpower, with Albert Speer (Germany's Minister of Armaments) estimating that in the summer of 1944 between 200,000 and 300,000 men were permanently employed in repairing oil installations and placing oil production underground. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany#Wartim...

-I don't think that argument stands up to scrutiny; Dresden (to take but the latest and most infamous example of WWII fire bombing) basically happened after Germany's ability to put up a fight had been crushed.

Most notably, in the 2nd half of 1944 they effectively lost the oil imports from Romania; at the same time, they were fighting on three fronts - with the Allies coming up through Italy and crossing the Channel, the Soviets from the east. They had to do an awful lot more with an awful lot less.

Granted, it could be argued that obliterating an important railroad junction like Dresden made logistics (even) harder for the Germans - but again, at that late point in the war it probably didn't matter much.

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