Comment by lostlogin
3 days ago
Dresden is a darkly funny choice for comparison. Area bombing definitely wasn't a war crime and Arthur Harris was not a war criminal.
3 days ago
Dresden is a darkly funny choice for comparison. Area bombing definitely wasn't a war crime and Arthur Harris was not a war criminal.
Regardless of the circumstances of the bombing, if the question is - did there exist any cities in europe that were more damaged in WW2 than gaza was in the current conflict, isn't it natural to compare gaza with the most famously damaged european city in WW2? Like what comparison would you expect to be made in relation to that question?
Dresden was levelled and does make your point.
I’d have picked Warsaw. Completely destroyed while clearing out the ghetto after the uprising which was brutally suppressed. It has some grim parallels too.
Dresden: 23% of industrial buildings, 50% of homes, 25,000 dead: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51448486
Warsaw was closer, but only 85-90% of its buildings were destroyed by the Nazis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Warsaw
The statistic I heard was “more than any city in wwii”. I figured that Hiroshima (67%) years or Nagasaki (37%) were worse.
Gaza crossed 90% of all buildings in May, so I shouldn’t have qualified my statement with the word “European”.
Edit: I found one partial counterexample: The firebombing of Tokyo killed about 10x more people than Israel did during this conflict, but didn’t do nearly as much damage (as a percentage) to buildings: https://www.britannica.com/event/Bombing-of-Tokyo