Another crucial – and highly relevant – lesson from this time involves how the fire bombings and atomic attacks came to be justified by those who ordered them.
Historian Richard Overy argues in his new book, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, that political and military leaders in 1945 understood full well that the indiscriminate bombing of Japanese cities was morally unjustifiable and politically unsustainable, so developed a work-around through a determined and consistent public relations campaign.
The nuclear blast over Nagasaki in Japan in 1945.Credit: Getty
Redefining civilian targets as military ones, it was emphasised to the public that every targeted Japanese city had an army, air force or naval base nearby, and that backstreets were full of small-scale industrial workshops. By this sloppy and dishonest process, streets densely packed with non-combatant civilians were transformed into legitimate aiming points whose destruction was crucial for winning the war.
Almost unbelievably, the use of the atomic bombs was justified by telling the public atomic weapons could be more precisely targeted than the firestorms unleashed by incendiary weapons.
While it was true that little was initially understood about the immediate and long-term effects of blast radiation, rebranding atomic bombs as precision weapons demonstrates the utter self-delusion of which humans are capable. It is this final point that we are seeing play out again; now with the daily destruction of Ukraine, Palestine, and the recent bombardments of Israel.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin makes little pretence that his nightly attacks on Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities are anything other than terror bombing, and therefore war crimes. But what about the flattening of Gaza, which today uncannily resembles the ghostly bombed cities of 1945?
One can despise Hamas, be a supporter of Israel and still see the attacks on Gaza’s densely populated urban areas as having the same moral and intellectual dubiousness as the area bombing of European and Japanese cities in the Second World War.
The justifications offered by the Israeli government and Israeli Defence Force – that the presence of Hamas fighters makes Gaza’s schools, hospitals and streets legitimate military targets – has a logic that sounds all too familiar. Despite their lesser lethality, the same arguments apply to the Hamas and Iranian rockets fired at Israel.
Just as the suburbs, streets and homes of London, Warsaw, Berlin, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cynically redefined as military targets in the 1940s, so are the cities of Ukraine and the Middle East today.
In built-up areas, there is no such thing as a precision bomb or missile. And even where revenge can sometimes seem justified to victims of the most vicious surprise attacks, the concept of proportionality must apply. As always, we learn from history or repeat it.
Dennis Glover is a speechwriter, novelist and author of Repeat: A Warning from History.
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