What is Lawful and Unlawful in War ?

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Surely we can all agree that war was terrible and we'd all prefer peace than war. I always thought it was lawful in war to shoot at your enemy who is shooting at you whether its on land firing a gun, a tank, a plane, a ship or submarine and drop bombs on military targets or even cities even though civilians would get caught in the bombing and I always thought it is unlawful to shoot prisoners-of-war after they surrendered and round up and shoot innocent civilian men, women and children. I seem to know now that certain types of bombing is wrong and are now classed a war crime such as Dresden or even Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of course, thousands of civilians lost their lives.

For some time there have been various international conventions that set the parameters of what can and cant be done.

A kind of 'rules of the game' between countries.

However accounts of most conflicts seem to indicate that they are frequently broken, at a local level due to human behaviour in the 'heat of battle' or in a more systemised way my senior officers / politicians for various reasons.

Some countries have internal 'rule of engagement' for the military dictating under what circumstances other people can be fired upon and possibly killed.

The application of rules and conventions to ritualised primative and barbaric behaviour seems quite illogical to me.

To simplify what is and what is not a war crime, consider Jesus' reply to the Roman soldier who was himself concerned about his job and what was right or wrong for him to do as a soldier, as in his position he was facing the same question.

Jesus replied and said that he is not sinning by following his orders. (As the responsibility is with the one who ga ve the orders and not with the soldier whos job it was to carry them out).
But Jesus also said not to add any extra to the orders and not to do any less either. In other words, if he was ordered to kill one man and he killed two, he had sinned before God because he went beyond his orders, but likewize, if he was ordered to kill the man but he did not, he sinned because he had signed up to the Roman army and it was his duty to carry out the orders to the best of his ability of the tasks he had been given.

Now consider what happened after world war two, when many German people were brought to trial to determine if any were guilty of war crimes, and logically looking at this, how can someone be found guilty if he or she was following orders given from above them? They can't unless they acted above these orders (If they did not carry the orders out it would be between them and the one who gave the orders and not the Allies who were bringing them up for trial). The trial was to determine if any being trialled acted above the orders that they had been given, and secondly, if they were a commanding officer, what were their general commands, and what was deemed reasonable for them under the circumstances that they were in (Bearing in mind that the allies knew that in a war a commanding officers duty is to order commands to kill enemy soldiers (Which would be the allies) which was a reasonable command.
Also, don't forget that both sides were facing very difficult decisions where they had taken thousands of prisoners from the other side, and often if they were in the front line, they had no extra food or anyone to guard them and yet they had orders to advance. Often on both sides that had no real choice but to kill their prisoners. They did not want to but if they did not, under those circumstances they could be killed by their prisoners because they simply did not have any facilities to take on so many prisoners... During the latter years of the war both sides had to make these decisions, and both sides had to make terrible choices.
So the courts had to hear the whole picture of the situations in which they were in and only hold them accountable for actions where they did have a choice in the matter, and they killed people that they should not have killed.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are classic examples of war crimes and why do I say this? Because the Japanese government had already surrendered, and news of this surrender was purposly delayed by certain individuals which resulted in thousands of people being killed and injured in those two cities. The ones in the pkanes were not to blame. It was the ones who purposly delayed the vitally important message.
(Now if they had gone to send the message and they were not in time, it was another issue, but this delay was done on purpose, so the one or ones who delayed were guilty of committing mass murder through delaying the information and they did not have any athority to do so. They were guilty alright!

Question. A countries leader. It is possible that a leader could be in a war with another country and in a war, order ones soldiers into battle, and yet not be guilty of any war crimes because the leader only did what was reasonably expected of such a leader in a war, so it does all need careful consideration of the facts and circumstances before a court casts judgement on a person.

ok so he did heal a gentile roman officer's servant.

Has no one ever heard of the Geneva Conventions?

Valorium mentioned "various international agreements", and gave a good general overview.

I think everyone was following orders without question but the only thing is with some people and not all the civilian population in Nazi Germany were following the orders of a racist and immoral regime that believed that genocide was ''necessary'' and ''acceptable'' because they wanted to created a ''New Order'' free of Jews and so carried out orders for mass murder knowing in some way it was wrong and that the outside world would find out and punish them if they didn't hide or destroy the evidence. Yes we the Allies did terrible things but we didn't carry out state-sponsored industrialised mass murder as the Nazis did.