War crimes

Astrid Essed (Letters, 12 August) should recognise that today the only reason she is living in a free country is that the USA and the UK won the Second World War by bombing Germany into submission, and the easiest means of doing that was to bomb cities and frighten the population. Dresden was an easy target.

If we had not done that the war would have been extended by two or three years, at the cost of thousands of lives, or we may have lost the war entirely.

When the Americans dropped the first A bomb on Hiroshima the Japanese Emperor refused to surrender and only did so when the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The A bombs were estimated to have saved one million American lives.

Astrid also refuses to recognise the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler and his SS cohorts, as well as the Japanese – thousands of British prisoners of war died building the infamous railway.

As she says we may have committed war crimes, but every crime was fully justified in order to free the world from the tyrannies of the Third Reich.

JAMES MACINTYRE

Clarendon Road, Linlithgow