[TheDaddy]

Originally Posted by frogstamper

the likes of Arthur "Bomber" Harris was convinced he could win the war by bombing the German civilian population into submission.
I fail to see how he could have believed this would have ever worked, especially after seeing the effect of the Blitz on Londoners, all this type of terror bombing achieves is to galvanize the local populace against a common enemy.
Of course after three years of war the public, politicians and the military were far more desensitized to the horrors of war and were more prepared to accept missions that would have been considered unconscionable prior to the war, both Churchill and Hitler both said they would never bomb civilians in cities before 39.
There are some things we done during the war that with hindsight probably wasn't our finest hour, like the wholesale devastation we brought about on Hamburg, Dresden, Mannheim and other German cities in the last year of the war.
As mentioned earlier the US 8th Air Force under General Jimmy Doolittle were very much against our strategy of area bombing, so its doubly ironic that it was the USAF who carried out the first two atomic raids wiping out two cities completely.

Churchill actually wrote to Harris asking him to try and limit civillian casualties and Montgomery was scathing about him after Hamburg.

Stronger words today

The respected Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten newspaper branded the raids war crimes and asked: “Why was the RAF’s Bomber Command chief Arthur Harris never once invited to a post-war victory parade in Berlin? Why did animals who served in the Second World War get a memorial but not bomber crews?

“The answer lies in a single word – Dresden. The air strikes from February 13, 1945 lie on the conscience of the English. By February 1945 this fight against civilians began to have the taste of a war crime.

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/198170