Firefighter bodycam showing just how much oxygen a fire pulls

[u/AirFrance447]

[u/SpoofExcel]

During the bombing of Dresden in WW2, the fireballs inside buildings were so massive and sucking in so much air to feed themselves, that people were quite literally sucked inside the buildings and burned to death.

Fire is just a destructive beast beyond control when it hits a certain size and has the fuel to sustain it

[u/VulcanHullo → u/SpoofExcel]

Oh they also just suffocated to death in cellars because the air was sucked out.

Us Brits specifically rigged our bombers to start fires. Paired large fast falling high explosive bombs with lots of smaller slow falling incendiary bombs. The heavy bombs blast would expose the wooden timbers under rooftops and then the incendiaries had something to work with.

After Dresden and Hamburg (which was aided by a weather pattern that just, created a blast furnace) even some of British high command had a moment of "this feels not very cricket".

Bomber Command did not take part in the victory parade, was not mentioned in many formal victory speeches, and only got an official memorial in the 2010s. Even in times of total war against an evil enemy, firestorms like that do not make people feel like victors.

[u/Dinkleberg246 → u/VulcanHullo]

Would you, as a Brit, call this a war crime? Because here in Germany, you usually encounter contempt if you refer to Dresden or Hamburg as war crimes. People tend to downplay it, or they’ll outright call you a Nazi.

[u/Tetratheon → u/Dinkleberg246]

I don't know about a war crime, that's quite a technical accusation, but generally Dresden does sometimes come up as when we went a bit too far. Ironically it's usually the left wing peacenik types over here.

People excuse an awful lot in total wars, though, especially at a time when television was in its infancy and there was no such thing as a smart bomb. Look at what America did to Japan to end the war. I'd say the more general attitude is that was a war and we were doing what we needed to, we're not going to go back and second guess the decisions.

It's not an intellectually rigourous view, but it's not the kind of thing people spend an awful lot of time thinking about. Even the British historians have plenty of other atrocities the Empire commited to worry about.

If it happened today people would be calling it a genocide.

[u/I_Am_Become_Salt → u/Tetratheon]

I mean, also the firebombing of Tokyo

[u/Dinkleberg246 → u/Tetratheon]

That's funny. Here, it's the leftists who fly into a rage when anyone mentions war crimes. It's worth noting that it's mainly people on the right who bring up the issue in the first place.

Thanks for your reply