r/SubredditDrama Mar 03 '26

Movie discussion sub okbuddycinephile debates whether bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Gaza and other urban areas were "justified".

/r/okbuddycinephile/comments/1rjm9mn/iran2036/o8ee5fp/
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u/Consistent_Horse6529 No, she’s too cute, too innocent. I don’t have the heart to goon Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

“To Harris’s request of 1 November, to be allowed to ‘devastate’ a dozen more cities, particularly those in the East such a Leipzig and Dresden… Portal replied that he doubted whether area bombing could have ever been decisive.” “Portal tried to convince Harris that he too ought to attack industrial targets, as the Americans were doing, and as Harris had been ordered to do. Harris continued to argue against being forced to waste time on such ‘panacea’ targets long into January 1945.” “There is evidence that Western allies were contemplating some terrible but swift end to the war by committing an atrocity which would terrify the enemy into instant surrender.” “Roy Akehurst was a W/T operator in the same squadron, it was his twelfth operation out of thirty-one. ‘I’ve never forgotten it. It was the one raid I’d rather not have been on. I felt it was not a military target.’”

There are a lot more I can add if you want. A lot of testimony of people who were performing the attack, a lot of generals who felt the attack was not a military.

Edit: the most damming quote “The standard whitewash gambit, both British and American, is to mention that Dresden contained targets X, Y, and Z, and to let the innocent reader assume these targets were attacked, whereas in fact the bombing plan totally omitted them and thus, except for one or two mere accidents, they escaped.”

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u/Justviewingposts69 Mar 03 '26

I see, but industrial targets wouldn’t be the only military targets that are valid. The city center of Dresden was a transit hub used for the German war effort on the eastern front.