Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
From that Wikipedia page:
We weren't just bombing factories.
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No, we were bombing an entire city that was part of an entire war effort in a total war. A city that was "an industrial city of first-class importance," that provided "shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike," and that "house[d] the administrative services displaced from other areas." All of that -- even the sheltering of refugees, to an extent -- was part of the German war effort. We were trying to disrupt and destroy that. We were also trying to bomb Germany into submission, not only to win that war but to demonstrate that Germany could not survive another war.
In the context of that war at that time, this doesn't trouble me. Nor does the notion that we were treating German lives as worth less than American lives (and British, French, and Russian lives). They were worth less, because the nation of which they were part had devalued them. There's an interesting discussion about this entire topic in The Storm of War (a book that is worth reading overall). It won't change your view but perhaps would soften it a little.
None of this has much to do with fighting against stateless actors, except in the most attenuated sense.
