“... 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?
You're sadly mistaken on this point, FRiend; the Jews were smashing down the doors to flee Germany as the persecutions increased. While the most finite details of Endlösung ("Final Solution") would not be known until after the war, everyone knew of the threat they faced. (What would be the point of the efforts to get them out of harm's way (in some cases, by Germans themselves), if there really was, in fact, no awareness of the danger they were in?)
And I don't cite Vonnegut as an authority on this or any other moral matter; I only refer to him as a credible witness. (The moral act of targeting a city doesn't pass or fail judgment in light of his or any other POW's opinion.) Whether or not others knew of his Jewish background is irrelevant; he knew exactly what his background was. And if he, a secular American Jew, could recognize the immorality of targeting a population center, even in a country that had deported his "kind" to death camps en masse, then his opinion on the subject bears far more evidence than that of his fellow American who simply shouts, "'Murica!" but who has never seen anything as graphic as a bad car accident.
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?
I prefer the moral to the immoral; the "real", of course, is simply the one we choose.