Whether you care about a few hundred thousand more dead civilians than necessary is a matter of what kind of person you are. You are absolutely entitled to your way of thinking.
Pity? For whom? For me? God, no, I was born after the whole thing ended, no reason at all to pity me. Thank god, for depending on your pity seems to be a very unenviable fate.
Pity for the kid of this lady?
http://virus.aksios.de/feb99/dresden2.jpg
Well, in fact I do have some pity, even though you'll surely think of me as a tree hugger because of that. And you'll surely see both the mom and the child as genocidal murderers, after all they were German, so the woman surely deserved to burn alive and the child surely deserved to see his/her mom like that. Nobody requires you to have any pity, and actually I wasn't asking for any. If a few tens of thousands of cases like that happened all over the country because a US air force general decided to teach moral lessons to civilian population by destroying a few extra cities left in an already mostly destroyed country, and you couldn't care less, you're absolutely entitled to that. We're all different people with different ways of relating to the suffering of others.
The Allies slaughtered German civilians by the hundreds of thousands, not by the millions, they didn't round them up but firebombed their residential areas for the purpose of killing the civilians, and they did not commit a racially motivated genocide. As I said, there were differences.
That is the part that I couldn't care less about. A vertical massacre by bombing is as much a massacre as a horizontal one by machine gunning. Whether it was technically a war crime or "just" an atrocity because it was bombing and not shooting, I don't know and don't care.
True. But again, we are discussing the
deliberate bombing of civilians in WW2, not collateral damage. We're discussing the execution of what Harris said about civilians being the intended aim of the bombing strategy. But more to the point, you have gotten to the core of the secret of why Germany is often very reluctant to go bombing with the friends from NATO.