The Day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. In last week's "Church Times" Paul Oestreicher expressed the now conventional view that this was a war crime (200,000 died in an instant and thousands more later) – and calls in support two wartime military leaders Eisenhower and Montgomery. But in "The Guardian" on Hiroshima Day, Oliver Kamm demurred. "The bomb was a deliverance for American troops for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself "(where 20 million might have died had the war continued). Was the bomb necessary for the "peace party" in Japan's cabinet to prevail? Who can tell, but I remember the day and the accounts of the horrific fighting island by island that preceded it. My boyhood memory is of relief that the war had ended.
Recent anniversaries have brought together consideration of the Nazi Concentration Camp at Auschwitz, liberated in 1945, and the RAF bombing of Dresden in 1945. Some have put then in the same status as war crimes. But are they not very different? Auschwitz was part of the long-term Nazi plan to eliminate certain peoples, chiefly but not only Jews, simply because conflicted with Nazi ideology of racial purity. A crime against humanity if ever there was one. By contrast, the bombing of Dresden was an act of Total Warfare, which the city had so far escaped, despite its importance in manufacture of war products and as transport hub. And most people did not have proper air-raid shelters. The best estimate is that 35 thousand were killed that night of 13/14th February (not the much higher figure claimed by holocaust deniers). A tragedy, but not an Auschwitz-style War Crime.