Precisely, World War II urban warfare is over romanticized in retrospect. It was apparently gruesome. High attrition, inhuman conditions, really nothing for the people on the ground fighting or defending or just living neutrally.
Any "gains" fall to the brass, the people who would likely never see real fighting, but readily order battalions of men to "take" a town or city to play the probabilities game of death with the objective of "winning" the objective.
There's no need to go as far back as WW2, where the aerial bombardment, targeting, and radar/counter-radar technology was instrumental to the war, but is still thought of as rather primitive. Even with incredibly advanced technology and adaptations to tactics, the Western approach's effect on urban centers today is still arguably the worst of all, comparatively. US allies in the middle east commonly inflict high civilian casualties, but also, from the article itself:
> In 2004 fighting between American forces and insurgents in Fallujah, in Iraq, damaged or destroyed 70% of the city’s buildings. When a coalition including Iraq, America and others liberated Mosul, another Iraqi city, from the Islamic State group in 2016-17, over 10,000 civilians were killed—around 3,200 of them by the coalition—and two-fifths of the civilian population had to flee. It was also lethal for those on the ground: Iraq’s army suffered 10,000 casualties.
I think it's indisputable that the Ukraine war and the 2003 Iraq war are/were completely unjust, and our feelings about the Ukraine war should guide our future policy about other supposedly "just" wars.
That was a strategic bombing campaign, and an anemic one by the standards of the later war. Also bad, but not properly urban warfare, and I think a case could be plausibly made that urban warfare is meaningfully worse.
Really? I won’t claim to have exhaustively surveyed it but it sure felt like it was widely recognized as a brutal ordeal with random sudden death never far away. Most of the “greatest generation” imagery was grounded in the idea of slogging through it anyways.
> World War II urban warfare is over romanticized in retrospect
At least for me WW II urban warfare is all but synonymous with the Battle for Stalingrad, which is arguably the nastiest battle in human history. Who is romanticising that?
I am not the OP but I had my view on this kind of changed by watching YouTube essay "Lies of Heroism – Redefining the Anti-War Film" [1]. Whey you think about movies like for example Enemy at the Gates, they show the gruesome reality of the battlefield, but it is usually interpreted in a way that makes the suffering feel meaningful, heroic. Contrast that with Come and See, where there is no heroism, no ultimate meaning of the suffering, just meaningless hellish nightmare.
Someone who is unlikely to die in the next hour needs to be making those strategic decisions though. What is the alternative? (besides simply not having wars anymore)
Any "gains" fall to the brass, the people who would likely never see real fighting, but readily order battalions of men to "take" a town or city to play the probabilities game of death with the objective of "winning" the objective.