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.
“... 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... these people were the targets. (And they were the targets, by the way.)...a lot of the opinions on this subject are “generational”...But for the rest of us “unstuck in time” ;), the “John Ford” version of these events doesn’t hold any special significance.” [Captain Walker, post 203]
It’s less than honest to cite Kurt Vonnegut Jr as some sort of moral authority. In 1945 he just one of millions in uniform, and he escaped alive by inches. Americans of the day knew nothing of his Jewishness, nor did most of them have any notion of what the Nazis had been doing to the Jews (or the Romany, the gays, those judged mentally deficient or physically deformed, the political prisoners - all those other groups who made up the other half of the Third Reich’s victims).
Of course Vonnegut was affected by his experiences in Dresden. Who would not have been? Experiences endured by millions of others caught in the war. Some POWs held by the Axis nations did not survive Allied air attacks. Other POWs were killed by US submarines sinking Japanese transport ships that were taking them to the Home Islands for slave labor. The subs sometimes surfaced after an attack; unaware of their presence and unable to distinguish them from Japanese personnel in the water, the crew of at least one sub killed POWs who’d escaped their sinking ship with small arms fire.
Your absolute condemnation of British and American air bombardment strategies on moralistic grounds leads one to ask:
Do you prefer the moral to the real?