My first post - please be gentle!
In his previous post Doddsy2978 said: "It is important to realise that the bombing of conurbations in WWII came from a mis-understanding." He cited the "accidental" bombing of London - which led the RAF to retaliate against Berlin - and then which led on to the "Blitz".
With respect, I don't think that this is truly the origin of area bombing and the inclusion of civilians onto target lists for both sides in WWII. The Germans had already targetted Rotterdam and Warsaw as deliberate terror bombing, designed primarily to strike at enemy morale - though with incidental strategic "military necessity" benefits, of the type already quoted in support of the bombing of Dresden.
It was the Germans too who in WWI (as early as December 1914) had shelled UK East Coast ports such as Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dogger_Bank - with laughable military significance. Zeppelins later bombed London and Paris, and British bombers joined in with attacks against urban "industrial targets" (see
http://www.firstworldwar.com/airwar/bombers_britain.htm).
The point of mentioning all this is to illustrate (not exhaustively) that the drawing in of civilians into war was well under way - and had been for centuries. Even in more recent civilized times, a great city like Paris could come under bombardment and siege (1870).
The Hague Conventions and the like were an attempt to regularise what was permissible. Many of their strictures fell in the face of true battlefield experience and military necessity - submarines required to surface to attack, and give a chance to crews to abandon their ships before sinking. But they were well-meaning and undoubtedly helped to reduce some (not all) of the brutalities incidental to war. Donitz at Nuremberg called that bluff when his defence lawyer threatened to call in US Pacific Fleet officers to testify as to the US unrestricted submarine warfare policies and tactics.
The war crimes issue is really not about things like area bombing or "targeting" civilians, I suspect. It is much messier and not so easily reducible to simple checklists of what is and is not permissible. After all, if you espouse (or have thrust upon you) "total war", then philosophically all is permissible.
If we are left with the (admittedly unsatisfactory) traditional tests of the "laws and usages of war", rooted in a much more general Western Christian-Humanist ethic and civilization, then we are down to applying much more pragmatic standards - though still with recognisable boundaries. Now, you have to leave the Soviets (and, I suppose, the Japanese) out of this. Like the Nazis, they played by their own rules; though (an IMPORTANT distinction) the Nazi control over the Services was nowhere near as total, and the German forces retained autonomy and a perception of historical military tradition and ethics. Focussing on the "Western front" European War - because that's where much of the debate relevant to the UK/US contextual comparison leads us - it seems clear that the parameters and rules for Allied societies, armies and personnel were vastly more faithful to these "laws and usages of war" than their opponents. (Can you imagine Tommies or GI Joes standing idle by, smoking, taking snaps, and so on while the police auxiliaries rounded up men, women and children, made them dig their graves, and then shot them en masse?)
The niggling and problematic questions for those viewing it from the Allied "Western" viewpoint lies with the more anonymous forms of waging war: area bombing, the use of atomics, even blockade..? Overall, I conclude that the Allies fought an honourable and just war; and that the "crimes" now being laid at their door were morally equivalent to the righteous use of force that our civil laws permit in cases of self-defence.
Hmmm...doesn't help much, does it? Sorry about that, and the length.
