Heroes?

Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, tells the tale of an American soldier who, like the author, was a witness to the Dresden air raid and its horrors. He is now determined to write a book about it due to the fact that many do not know just how bad it was. I have to admit that I would fit the category nicely. Dresden was a familiar city, and I could link it to a World War II tragedy but the details I did not know. For example, in page 10 of the first chapter the narrator tells us the following:

"It [Dresden] wasn´t a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn´t know that, either. There hadn´t been much publicity."

Reading this made me react in two different ways. The first forced me to research further on the subject, and this is what I found: The Dresden attack lasted three days, from February 13 to 15, 1945. At the time this was the seventh largest German city and a very beautiful one at that. These three days saw hundreds of war planes launch thousands of tons in bombs. The thousands of fires around the city turned into one, destroyed practically everything. Although it is a hard number to calculate, it is said that between 25,000 to 35,000 died and many, many more suffered from lesions and burns. The missing reports of persons reached 35,000, of which around 10,000 were found alive later. The Dresden attacked, hurt, killed, and destroyed others. I still do not know for a fact if it was worse than Hiroshima, but it was definitely was a tragedy.

My second reaction is closely linked to the research I did. The Ally army won the war. They ended the reign of terror inflicted by Nazis. They were heroes according to many. What they did was admirable, but to what extent were their options honorable? Because the Nazi concentration were just the tip of the iceberg. Many more horrifying things occurred, but the bad guys do not take the blame for everything. In a war cruel things must be done to achieve bigger things, closely following Niccolo Machiavelli´s line of thought "the ende justifies the mean" or the popular saying "All´s fair in love and war". But is this truly correct? Is war an excuse for cruelty? And what if it doesn´t stop there, but the end begins to justify the mean? Would morality still matter?