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[muriel_volestrangler]

57. Yes, I think they would

It is, after all, often called a war crime these days:

This was by no means an unprecedented act by the Allies. In July 1943, long before Dresden, the Allies unleashed Operation Gomorrah, a protracted assault on Hamburg which literally melted the streets and incinerated people in searing, hurricane-strength winds. More than 20,000 died in just one night of the Hamburg campaign alone, and historians have compared it to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then there was the RAF bombing of Pforzheim, a German town, shortly after the Dresden onslaught, which killed almost a third of the population.

Questions have long been raised about the strategic legitimacy of attacks like these, and the later, apocalyptic attack on Tokyo in March 1945, which flattened the city and left around 100,000 dead. It’s Dresden which has attracted most attention by critics, as it was regarded as a capital of culture first and foremost, not a military target. As Victor Gregg, a British POW caught up in the firestorm later said, ‘The people of Dresden believed that as long as the Luftwaffe kept away from Oxford, Dresden would be spared.’

Dr Gregory Stanton, a scholar specialising in genocide, has classified the Dresden bombing as a war crime. Many other experts have agreed, and even suggested that Churchill himself could have been put on trial. German historian Jörg Friedrich, author of a book about the Allied bombings of German cities, went as far as saying ‘Churchill was the greatest child-slaughterer of all time.’
...
But the potentially damning counterpoint to all of these technical justifications is that Bomber Harris was explicitly interested in terror as an objective in itself. He and other Allied strategists were frustrated by the relative failures of precision bombing raids and advocated massive area bombardments to kill civilians and shatter the enemy’s will. Harris was completely open and unashamed about this, and was actually impatient about other military bigwigs mincing their words about the ferocity of their attacks.

https://www.history.co.uk/article/was-the-destruction-of-dresden-an-allied-war-crime