Read this article to learn about the allied air raids and the use of atom bombs during the second world war!
About 1,500,000 civilians were killed in air raids during the Second World War.
Although air raids on the civilian population were started by Germany, the Allied countries also resorted to raids on the civilian population on a massive scale.
The British dropped over 650,000 incendiaries on the German city of Dresden on 13-14 February 1945, killing about 135,000 people. The two atom bombs used by the US, as stated earlier, killed about 320,000 Japanese men, women and children.
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The use of atom bombs by the US is considered by many people an abominable act, not only because of the number of people that the two bombs killed but also because of the very use of the new weapons of mass destruction.
The argument that without the use of the atom bombs, the war with Japan would have been a protracted war with many more casualties on both sides than those caused by the atom bombs is not accepted by many scholars.
They point out that after the collapse of Germany; Japan was in no position to conduct a protracted war. Around this time, the Soviet Union was also about to enter the war against Japan.
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The atomic weapons were developed in the US during the war by pooling the scientific skills and resources of many countries. Many scientists, of the US and other countries, had worked on the project to develop atomic weapons because of the fear in the scientific community that Nazi Germany might develop these weapons first and use them to terrorist the world into submission.
However, at the end of the war in Europe, it had become clear that no other country had made much progress in developing them. Some scholars hold the view that the US, the only country then possessing these weapons, used them to demonstrate her military supremacy in the post-war world.
The Soviet Union, which suffered the heaviest casualties, both civilian and military, is held guilty of murdering 10,000 Polish soldiers and burying them in mass graves in the Katyn forest in 1940.