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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what Mr.Vonnegut would have to say about the historians that try to minimize the causalities that occurred during the firebombing of Dresden.

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"You weren't there".

What historians try to do that? Are they respected in their field? And are you sure about their intentions? Are they trying to minimize casualties, or just trying to find an accurate number(which may be smaller than reported casualties).

http://www.unz.com/article/how-many-germans-died-under-raf-b...

What minimization? The recent (2010) study commissioned by the Dresden council came to the same ~25k that is the popular opinion.

To be fair I could easily see it being much higher but that figure is the best we have.

The consensus during and after WW2 was that the Germans deserved it. If you start a war expect to get burned.

Sadly history tends to fade and now the Germans were just a tragically misunderstood people doing nothing wrong.

How amazingly reductive. Citizens are not governments.

I wonder how you'd feel if you or a family member endured a horrible death by firestorm due to the machinations of a government which happens to rule the nation in which you currently reside?

On whose perfect soil do you presently live?

If only the writers of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II shared your gift for stating things so concisely and unambiguously!

If the Nazis did not want to be bombed, they should not have picked a fight with the 2 superpowers (UK, US) who had heavy bombers when they had none.

I know someone who survived Dresden, and what those people went through was terrible. However, it was an inevitable consequence of stopping an ideological movement that did not value humanity in the least. When you hear people touting their ideology and how they can't respect people's rights because they're trying to achieve a greater good - watch out.

I think it is generally agreed that the Dresden bombing had little strategic impact, so I would do a little more reading on the subject before you go claim that it was a necessity to stop the Nazis. Unless you think vindictively bombing a civilian population as revenge is justifiable.

Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was arguably an opportunity to test methods. And to create terror, of course. Maybe also payback for the Blitz.

I understand that it was always going to be immoral to fire bomb Dresden but the wind on that day whipped up the fires considerably and the extremity of the outcome was due to chance rather than vindictiveness. Of course I think if they’d have known the outcome of course they would have done it anyway.

Or maybe some of them considered the wind fortuitous. I wouldn't be surprised. But then, I'm not a huge fan of war. In fiction, sure. The bloodier, the better. But not in reality, where so many die to make points.

Given the brutal efficiency of the Nazis in their conquest, occupation and genocide, I have little problem justifying means of inflicting damage on any significant source of support until the threat is completely neutralized. They were desperate times, and destroying the enemy's will to continue fighting is an integral part of warfare.

The Battle for Britain had just shown that "destroying the enemy's will" was not an effective strategy, something that has been verified several more times since. The acts were absolutely abhorrent, and the nicest way to describe them is "not quite as bad as the Nazis."

Or the Germans' failure showed they were incapable of carrying out the strategy. I find it easy to criticize the acts as abhorrent without the threat of Nazi rule over your head.

There was quite a bit if data showing that the strategy was not effective, the decision to attack the "will of the people" over military targets was made for callous reasons like revenge. There are no circumstances that make the act less abhorrent, we should have realized it then and not committed similar acts.

The Russians would disagree.

Please now explain why exploding nuclear bombs to mass murder civilians were really necessary and also why it was necessary as a demonstration of power instead of doing something like exploding Mount Fuji.

A fanciful idea indeed. It's exactly this kind of thinking that got us into war by convincing Yamamoto that we'd be a push over because we did not have the stomach for war. War is terrible. We didn't want it. We were staying out of it despite the mass atrocities of Japan and Germany. But when it was forced on us we fought it and used the weapons at our disposal. No regrets here.

Sure - it was necessary to insure the unconditional surrender of Japan, as opposed to the conditional surrender they were trying to negotiate. Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the...

https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/debate-over-japanese-...

https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth

The very first time I read his book, over a decade ago, I really sympathized with his cries for Dresden. But it didn't last for me:

http://www.fallen.io/ww2/

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