“Did he become a “squishy Leftist” before or after his experiences in the Second World War? It’s not a rhetorical question; Army NCOs as a rule aren’t known for being “squishy Leftists”, and it’s fair to think his experiences in February 1945 had something to do with this.” [Captain Walker, post 200]
I’m not 100 percent familiar with Kurt Vonnegut’s personal journey through morality, ethics, nor ideology. A prototype college slacker: at Cornell, he opposed American involvement in WW2, in writing, though he was in ROTC. Couldn’t keep up his grades and left one step ahead of the boot. Enlisting before he could be drafted, he was in training programs at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and University of Tennessee before being sent to an infantry unit. A few months after arriving in the European theater, he was captured.
After the war he enrolled in a hybrid undergrad/grad program at the University of Chicago, but failed to complete it. Shortly later, he lied about his educational status to get hired by General Electric.
So it’s a safe guess that Vonnegut’s harrowing experiences in Dresden didn’t change his basic philosophical outlook all that much.
You seem anxious to claim him as a validator of your moralistic take on things.
After meeting thousands of military personnel, working closely with hundreds, and knowing a few dozen fairly well, I can say you lend greater significance to Vonnegut’s experiences and his worldview (especially any changes to it) than it deserves.
“As a rule” has no meaning; members of the military are not nearly so one-dimensional as you have assumed. They change their minds all the time, for a million and one reasons. They sign up for uniquely personal reasons, and leave the service for yet other personal reasons. Despite a presumed uniformity of training and indoctrination, it’s common to find two members enduring exactly the same experience, who react quite differently in the moment, and draw markedly differing conclusions later.
You know more about the man than I do, assuming you didn't just pull this from an internet site. (I knew he was in an ROTC program but it was my understanding that the military desperately needed men and began reaching for people previously considered off-limits such as ROTC students and individuals in defense-related jobs; he had ended up as an NCO because of his education. I may be wrong on this; "Slaughterhouse Five" was the only novel of his I've read and I can't say that I have ever been a fan of his.)
In any event, the argument against the targeting of a population center isn't based on the opinion of a survivor of the raid, it's based on the belief that non-combatants cannot be targeted. Vonnegut deserves a mention because (first and foremost, perhaps) he was Jewish and might be expected to have feelings of ill-will towards the Germans; after that, he had fought for his country and had seen combat against the Germans who then took him prisoner. (Among the Keyboard Warrior Class, of course, his military service and his Jewish background mean nothing. The man said something negative about that sacrosanct subject known as the Second World War and dared to suggest that the Allies and even (gasp) the Americans committed large scale acts of brutality; he must be torn down, his military service in defense of his country be damned.)
There has been a repeated effort here on this thread to describe the non-combatant deaths in Dresden as "collateral damage", which simply isn't true. "Collateral damage" is unintended damage; these people were the targets. (And they were the targets, by the way.)
The Allies (predominantly, the Brits) took it upon themselves to super-heat a German city in the waning months of the war knowing full well that they would get away with it; the Americans had just started the practice on the other side of the world, as Curtis LeMay's B-29 crews (operating from the recently-seized Marianas Islands) began dropping napalm on Japanese cities up and down the Japanese islands. (That the two bombs in August of 1945 should be the cause of consternation it became would must have been a shock to LeMay, who simply did what he had been doing for the six months prior, only on these two occasions with a much smaller carbon footprint.)
As I have alluded to earlier in the thread, a lot of the opinions on this subject are "generational"; anyone who learned about how evil the Germans and Japanese were and how good the Americans were on his veteran father's knee isn't going to change his mind on these subjects (certainly not at this point in their lives).
But for the rest of us "unstuck in time" ;), the "John Ford" version of these events doesn't hold any special significance.