The Allied Bombings in the Second World War Were Not Terrorism

     I have noted in earlier posts that the word terrorism has been diluted to such a point that the terrorists have been successful in establishing a moral superiority over the government they oppose by claiming that their actions are only in response to some worse “terrorism” or other alleged crimes of that government.

     In a post last week, for example, I noted that some are equating the United States response to terrorism (i.e. the War on Terrorism), particularly its use of missiles fired from aerial drones, with terrorism itself because innocent civilians are killed. I noted the distinction between targeting innocent civilians and accidentally killing them because of the targeting of a legitimate military target. Also, civilians are not necessarily innocent. They are legitimate targets if they harbor terrorists, for example. Such moral equivalency arguments are often made by militant Islamists and eagerly believed by leftists and isolationists in the West. 

     Another common example of such a moral equivalency argument is that the Allied bombings during the Second World War were acts of “terrorism.” This charge must be considered carefully.

     The conventional and nuclear bombings of Japan by the U.S. were not terrorism. The targets were cities that had strategic military significance. The civilian deaths were unintended, but were unavoidable at the time because the technology then did not permit more narrowly-targeted weaponry. There was no attempt to intimidate the populace of Japan because Japanese public opinion was irrelevant; in Imperial Japan, all Japanese subjects were committed to serving the Emperor, whom they adored as a god. If there were any intent to intimidate, it was to intimidate the Emperor into surrendering, not to terrorizing the Japanese people into demanding the Emperor surrender. It would have been unthinkable for the Japanese to make any demands of their Emperor or to surrender. 

     The bombings of Dresden, Germany are different from the Japanese bombings, but only in the sense that German public opinion, unlike Japanese public opinion, could have been influenced by the Allied air raids. But, at worst, the air raids on this militarily significant city were less an attempt to get the German people to rebel against their Nazi government than to give up the fight. The German people had elected the Nazis and kept them in power. The Nazis were still popular in Germany. The Germans would not have rebelled against them even if they wanted to because of fear of Nazi repression. Therefore, the most that the Allies could have achieved was to weaken the German will to fight, not to effect a change of government. The Nazis had started the war and continued it. A majority of the German people were thereby culpable for this war of aggression and the Nazi crimes against humanity. They had not only put the Nazis in power, but supported them politically. Regardless of their political responsibility, many Germans even voluntarily participated in activities on the home front in support of the war, such as being Nazi informants, serving in civil defense organizations, working in military industrial plants, et cetera. Thus, these German civilians, at least, were not innocent civilians. However, there were many German civilians who were truly innocent. The Allied bombs could not distinguish between the innocent and those who were not.

     I had noted in a previous post in March of 2010, Dresden Bombing Deaths Exaggerated, that recent scholarship has proven that the Nazi claims of civilian deaths was much higher than the true number. Nevertheless, the civilian loss of life was significant, although the estimated 25,000 deaths were amounted to less than one tenth of one percent of the total deaths in the Second World War. I submit that the Dresden bombings stand out for the German civilian losses because the Allied strategy was not to target innocent civilians. Otherwise, there would have been other such examples. In fact, the major strategy of American General Carl Spaatz, who was responsible for the Allied air campaign in the European Theater, was to target German fuel supplies, in addition to the usual necessary military targets.

     The Allies’ strategy in the Second World War was to win as quickly as possible by targeting strategic military targets in Japan and Germany, not to terrorize innocent civilians. Therefore, the bombings were not acts of terrorism. The first acts of terrorism were hijackings of commercial airliners committed by militant Muslims, the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the 1960s.