Was not a war crime... (This is about Dresden specifically, but the same rules hold)
The case against the bombing as a war crime
For details on the treaty obligations of the Allies see aerial area bombardment and international law in 1945
"In examining these events in the light of international humanitarian law, it should be borne in mind that during the Second World War there was no agreement, treaty, convention or any other instrument governing the protection of the civilian population or civilian property, as the Conventions then in force dealt only with the protection of the wounded and the sick on the battlefield and in naval warfare, hospital ships, the laws and customs of war and the protection of prisoners of war"[61].
The United States military made the case that bombing of Dresden did not constitute a war crime, based on the following points:[62]
The raid had legitimate military ends, brought about by exigent military circumstances.
Military units and anti-aircraft defenses were sufficiently close that it was valid not to consider the city "undefended".
The raid did not use extraordinary means, but was comparable to other raids used against comparable targets.
The raid was carried out through the normal chain of command, pursuant to directives and agreements then in force.
The raid achieved the military objective, without "excessive" loss of civilian life.
Legitimacy of the military ends (the first point) depends on two claims, first, that the railyards subjected to American precision bombing were an important logistical target, beyond their ordinary value as a communication centre and, second, that the city was an important industrial centre.
In reference to the first claim, an inquiry conducted at the behest of the US Secretary of War, General George C. Marshall, concluded that the raid was justified by the available intelligence. The inquiry found that elimination of German ability to reinforce a counter-attack against Marshall Konev's extended line or, alternatively, to retreat and regroup using Dresden as a base of operations, was an important military objective. As Dresden had been largely untouched during the war, it was one of the few remaining functional rail and communications centres. A secondary objective was to disrupt the industrial use of Dresden for munitions manufacture, which American intelligence believed to be the case. The fear of a Nazi breakout, such as had so nearly succeeded during the Battle of the Bulge, which ran from December 16, 1944 to January 25, 1945, less than three weeks before the bombing of Dresden, weighed on the minds of Allied planners.
The second claim was that Dresden was a militarily significant industrial centre. An official 1942 guide described the German city as "one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich" and in 1944, the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops which supplied the army with materiel[63].
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey listed at least 110 factories and industries in Dresden[64], albeit mainly in the outskirts, which were far less affected by the February 1945 raid. The city contained the Zeiss-Ikon optical factory and the Siemens glass factory, both of which, according to the Allies, were entirely devoted to manufacturing military gunsights. The immediate suburbs contained factories building radar and electronics components, and fuses for anti-aircraft shells. Other factories produced gas masks, engines for Junkers aircraft and cockpit parts for Messerschmitt fighters[65].
Because of the concentration of undamaged industry, unusual in Germany at the time of the raids, the allied planners had reason to believe that Dresden was a crucial to the effort to supply materiel for the defense of Germany itself.
The second of the five points addresses the prohibition, in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, of "attack or bombardment" of "undefended" towns. The Hague Conventions were adopted before the rise of air power and whether their prohibitions applied to air attacks had not yet been clarified in any ratified convention (in part, because of German opposition to the draft Amsterdam convention of 1938). However, the inquiry found that the presence of active German military units in the area, and the presence of fighters and anti-aircraft near Dresden, were sufficient to qualify Dresden as "defended" under the second Hague Convention. By this stage in the war both the British and the Germans had integrated air defences at the national level. Both countries stationed air-defences as far forward as possible to intercept hostile aircraft before they reached their targets. For example, the British countermeasures for the V-1 flying bomb involved moving anti-aircraft guns from London to the North Downs and the coast. Consequently there were fewer anti-aircraft guns in the capital, but the guns still defended London. Similarly the Germans integrated their air defences in a national air-defence system known as the Kammhuber Line, so an absence of local air-defence assets did not mean that a German city was undefended.
The third point is that the size of the Dresden raid, in terms of numbers and types of bombs and the means of delivery were commensurate with the military objective. On February 3, 1945, the Allies bombed Berlin and caused an estimated 25,000 civil fatalities; other raids in Japan caused civilian casualties over 100,000. The tonnage and types of bombs listed in the service records of the Dresden raid were comparable to (or less) than throw weights of bombs dropped in other air attacks carried out in early 1945. The combination of clear skies over Dresden (whilst most of the surrounding region was overcast) and the lack of local preparedness for the attacks (in contrast to other major production centres) resulted in unprecedented effectiveness of the bombing.
The fourth point is that no extraordinary decision was made to single out Dresden, or to take advantage of the large number of refugees for the purpose of "terrorizing" the German populace. The intent of area bombing was to disrupt industrial production, not to kill dislocated civilians. The American inquiry established that the Soviets, pursuant to allied agreements for the United States and the United Kingdom to provide air support for the Soviet offensive toward Berlin, had requested area bombing of Dresden in order to prevent a counter attack through Dresden, or the use of Dresden as a regrouping point after a strategic retreat.
The fifth point is that the firebombing achieved the intended effect of disabling a substantial fraction of industry in what was one of Germany's last centres of industrial production. It was estimated that over 25% of industrial capacity was disabled or destroyed, eliminating potential use of Dresden by the Germany military to launch counterstrikes to check the Soviet advance.
Insofar as Europe has enjoyed relative peace since 1945, and Germany has actively played a part in fostering that peace, it might be argued that the policy of carrying the war into Germany in 1945 contributed to this result. It is notable that Dresden, the great city of culture, has more obviously kept alive the memory of the war than has, for example, Dortmund. However, Nazi Germany would have been defeated without the aerial bombardment of historic inner cities, and this destruction may have complicated the ultimately necessary reconciliation with the people of the Federal Republic of Germany established in 1949. The repentance that has generally typified postwar (or at least post-1968) German discourse about World War II is not a reaction to the destruction of German cities but is based on a frank popular assessment that, for twelve years, Germany disastrously lost its way.
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