re: #179 Decatur Deb

The first major city raid in WWII was Warsaw, followed by Rotterdam, an accidental raid on London, a revenge raid on Berlin, and open terror raids starting with Coventry. WWI already had seen indiscriminate Zepplin raids on London.

There were massive-scale daylight raids on London in late 1940 as part of the Battle of Britain after the (single) revenge raid on Berlin. Because the RAF Fighter Command won the Battle of Britain, inflicting unsustainable losses on the Luftwaffe, the Germans switched to night-time raids in October, including the infamous raid on Coventry (which certainly wasn’t the first).

RAF Bomber Command responded with night-time raids over Germany. Arthur Harris took over Bomber Command in early 1942 and eventually got authorisation from Churchill to go to “area bombing” later in the year.

By 1944, they were conducting large-scale raids on any city that hadn’t been pounded into dust. The reason Dresden is regarded as particularly objectionable is that it was chosen as a target largely because most other cities were seriously bomb-damaged already, and Dresden had not been bombed earlier because it was rather lacking in military significance.

Whether it’s actually a war crime (the line between bombing cities that contain military targets and not caring how many civilians you kill and bombing civilians on purpose is pretty narrow) or not, it was strategically pointless and did kill a lot of civilians. There’s a reason that Dresden and Coventry were the first two cities to twin with each other.