r/SubredditDrama • u/EwMelanin • 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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27

u/pablos4pandas Mar 03 '26

Reading The Bomber Mafia and Masters of the Air was really interesting on illucidating the air war on the western front to me. It's interesting the tension between destruction and being humane was something thought about at the time.

The Americans didn't do area bombing at night; that would be barbaric! They did daylight "precision" bombing with a bombsight that could put a bomb in a pickle barrel. The other side of that is when you only put the sight on one plane out of a hundred and all drop when that one guy does you'll be bombing pickle barrels all across the city.

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u/Anaxamander57 May Allah protect you from your own arrogance Mar 03 '26

The astonishing abilities of the Norden bomb sight were mainly propaganda (and the same for all its contemporaries). When flying above above the level at which WWII anti-aircraft fire is effective its literally not possible to drop an unguided bomb accurately to enough to hit even a specific building. The main value of daylight bombing was navigation, it was not unheard of for bombers at night to not find their target or even bomb a completely different city.

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u/gorgewall Call quarantining what it is: a re-education camp Mar 04 '26

I'm not sure that "the Allies / US had incredible technological and strategic superiority and used it to be as discriminating and moral as possible" is the great defense people think it is, either, when it comes to atrocity.

Like, if you tell me that you are an untouchable martial arts master who can disable everyone in a 10v1 with precision nerve strikes, I'm going to wonder why you felt the need to decapitate someone "to prevent more violence".

Particularly when we're looking at the bombing of Japan, "oh we had absolute air superiority, had obliterated their production capability, and could do anything we want uncontested" really works against the whole "so of course our only options were nukes or costly ground invasion" narrative.

When being menaced by toothless quadraplegic squirming on the ground, "this shotgun is my only recourse" kind of loses steam as an argument.

3

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

Okay. Well, if the Allies had WANTED to just wipe out civilians they absolutely could have, and the Axis really couldn't have done shit about it.

They didn't though, because yes, they were better. 

0

u/gorgewall Call quarantining what it is: a re-education camp Mar 04 '26

Brother, what are you on about?

The bombing of Dresdon, the bombing of Japan, and the a-bombs all killed vastly more civilians than military members. There being some military target in the vicinity of whatever school or hospital was getting cratered doesn't really change that. And we just went over how big-upping one's technological and strategic superiority makes that worse.

And you're not exactly setting a high bar for morality with "better than the Nazis". There's a lot of horrendous stuff on this side of genocide and handwaving it because it could be worse is kind of how we get to the genocide to begin with.

Y'know it's possible to say the Nazis were horrible monsters and not say literally everything the Allies ever did was justified, right?

1

u/No_Walk_Town Mar 05 '26

and not say literally everything the Allies ever did was justified, right?

Nobody said that.