Why was Coventry 'coventriert'?

[tcolvin]

Bruce.

I don't follow you.
It was illegal then, and is so today, to target civilians.
But factories making war material, and ports importing war material, just as ships carrying war material, were all, AFAIK, legitimate targets within the rules of law (the Geneva Convention).
The mediaeval centres of Coventry and Lübeck were not legitimate targets per se, as defined by the Geneva Convention.
So I do not follow your logic that "Lübeck was a legitimate target".

Germany and the UK were not legitimate targets, but both contained legitimate targets. The problem was that neither the GAF, nor Bomber Command, nor the VIII USAAF could hit these legitimate targets, so they went after the only thing they could hit - city centres, and rationalised that civilian morale was being degraded so the war would be ended without the need to fight battles on the ground.

Don correctly argued that the armament works in Coventry were legitimate targets (and as we have seen they were actually targetted) and he suggested that the destruction of the inner city of Coventry was collateral damage. I think in a court of law the GAF would probably be absolved from the charge of targetting civilians in Coventry.

Flender Werke and the iron ore unloading facilities in the port of Lübeck, and the factory making oxygen breathing apparatus for U-boat crews, were legitimate targets. But these were not targetted. Harris in fact targetted the flammable inner city, and the tactics were chosen in order to induce a firestorm.

Harris and Churchill were exultant with their success in producing a firestorm in Lübeck. Ditto Goering and Hitler after coventrieren Coventry, which raises a doubt about their real motives, but these were relatively early days when fire-raising techniques were still in their infancy.

I don't see how anyone can argue that the destruction of Lübeck was not clearly a war crime.

Tony