Strategic bombings of cities overall was unnecessary and just a waste of resources. It is pure terror tactics. It’s all clear when you remember the reaction on a bombing of Guernica in 1937 - except fash lackeys pretty much everyone condemned it, and the same was about nazi bombings of UK, but when strategic bombings became the callsign of UK and especially USA, almost all criticism immediately vanished from the west.
One thing to keep in mind here though is (at the time) for various reasons, casualty reports relating to bombing civilian targets were massively overstated. Obviously, the victim wants to portray their opponent as monstrous, but particularly in the early phases of World War 2 (especially in Poland) you had major news media carrying reports of aerial bombardment killing tens of thousands of people a day. Ultimately, many military planners came to really believe that such things were occurring/possible. A good example in the WW2 context is Oslo surrendering after being threatened with aerial bombardment. Our hindsight lets us know that bombing civilian targets isn’t that useful militarily (and is generally counterproductive), but at the time plenty of people thought it was super effective, not least the voting public.
Yes, it’s not only a crime against humanity but a waste of resources too. This still did not stopped US from perpetrating literal aerial genocide campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Laos etc.
Strategic bombings of cities overall was unnecessary and just a waste of resources. It is pure terror tactics. It’s all clear when you remember the reaction on a bombing of Guernica in 1937 - except fash lackeys pretty much everyone condemned it, and the same was about nazi bombings of UK, but when strategic bombings became the callsign of UK and especially USA, almost all criticism immediately vanished from the west.
One thing to keep in mind here though is (at the time) for various reasons, casualty reports relating to bombing civilian targets were massively overstated. Obviously, the victim wants to portray their opponent as monstrous, but particularly in the early phases of World War 2 (especially in Poland) you had major news media carrying reports of aerial bombardment killing tens of thousands of people a day. Ultimately, many military planners came to really believe that such things were occurring/possible. A good example in the WW2 context is Oslo surrendering after being threatened with aerial bombardment. Our hindsight lets us know that bombing civilian targets isn’t that useful militarily (and is generally counterproductive), but at the time plenty of people thought it was super effective, not least the voting public.
Yes, it’s not only a crime against humanity but a waste of resources too. This still did not stopped US from perpetrating literal aerial genocide campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Laos etc.