"LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
- Robert McNamara in the excellent documentary "The fog of war"
He was talking about this in the context of the US incendiary campaign against Japan in WW2. The US had worked out that the wooden structures most Japanese civilians lived in would be prone to an incendiary bombing campaign. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were killed.
"Over several hours, U.S. Army Air Forces warplanes destroyed the shitamachi, or the low-lying section of Tokyo, and killed an estimated 100,000 Japanese citizens in a firestorm. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey later wrote that probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man."
That was the first raid targeting civilian populations. Much more devastating numerically than the later atomic blasts and not much discussed.
"Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."
- Robert McNamara
"The original idea of the Geneva Convention is that civilian targets were out, and it was military targets that should be used. In Europe, you had the Russians and the Germans especially the Nazis bombing civilians. When we did the firebombings, we were killing civilians."
- Ed Lawson, Technical Sergeant, 882nd Bomb Squadron, 500th Bomb Group.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/m...ing-japan.html
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I see what you are saying and these things are subjective no doubt. Major world events are complex and best not armchair quaterback'd many years later imho. It is tough to document all of feelings and fears of the moment.
