[0xBDB]

> Why even have laws of war then

They didn't by our standards. A lot of what we think of as the laws of war today were clarified after WWII. Bombing civilians was illegal, but not in retaliation; so the US could bomb Hiroshima because the Axis had bombed Coventry. The fact that that was the Germans and probably an accident didn't matter.

If this seems extremely sketchy that's because it was, but so was Nuremberg. The Holocaust wasn't illegal for the Nazis to do to their own population - the prosecutors at the trials had to make up a standard of "behavior that shocks the conscience" that previously didn't exist in international law.

None of this reflects on morality, only legality, of course. But the legalities then were pretty primitive.

[FrojoS]

What makes you say, that the bombing of Coventry was "probably an accident"? There was repeated, and clearly well planned out bombing of the city between 1940-1942 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz

[0xBDB]

It was not a remark intended to excuse the Germans. There is some evidence, which I am admittedly struggling to find a citation for at the moment, that the early 1940 raids were generally intended to hit military targets and the Germans just weren't good enough at bombing to be that discriminate.

Later on of course both sides were hitting civilian targets deliberately, and using incendiaries and high explosives. But it's possible the British were the first to do it deliberately, in retaliation for the Germans doing it accidentally (which they naturally did not believe).