The Luftwaffe bombing campaign over England claimed more than 40,000 lives, yet the Allied campaign over Germany and occupied Europe is believed to have killed at least ten times that number. Can we really say the Luftwaffe campaign was evil and a war crime, while quietly forgetting about the Allied action?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the most visible, most memorable, and therefore most culturally significant of the bomb attacks on civilian targets that characterised the Second World War.
Both Axis and Allied powers took part in these almost unprecedented assaults on civilian targets. Both sides in that conflict defied the ethics and customs of warfare: that any use of force must distinguish between enemy combatants and the civilian/non-combatant population.
It is a weakness of human nature that we forgive in our friends what we despise in our enemies. How else could anyone offer in-principle support for the indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants?
We remain conveniently ignorant of the destructive scale of conventional bombing over Europe and Japan, even though the terror of the London Blitz is ingrained in our cultural memory. But if the Blitz was wrong, then surely the bombing of German and Japanese cities was wrong too? If the suffering of English civilians was a travesty of justice, what of the tenfold suffering of German civilians?
If not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we could excuse the crimes committed by the Allied powers as 'necessary'. But the atomic bombs can not be hidden, and we are forced into strenuous moral contortions in order to deny the undeniable. If Germany or Japan had achieved a nuclear weapon and launched it on an Allied city, our condemnation would be unrelenting.
An alternative can be found in the trenches of the Western Front during the First World War. They provided scenes of unmitigated slaughter, as military strategy dissolved into a war of attrition. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides were slaughtered without significant advances made.
But rather than blame Germany for the Allied deaths, or Britain and France for the German deaths, we now blame military commanders for their failure to adapt to the challenges of new defensive military technology. To knowingly commit one's soldiers to such pointless and deadly engagements is a serious breach of the ethics of warfare, and a betrayal of the duties of command.
This nuanced view of the First World War allows us to sympathise with the plight of the ordinary