The Lady from 29 Palms

I was ten when the Greatest Generation dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That was 74 years ago today. What with radiation sickness and so on, more than 300,000 Japanese men, women and children lost their lives. 

My memory of the event is that Californians were astonished by the A-bomb, at first classifying it as a modern wonder like penicillin and dried milk. The Andrews sisters had a hit song on the radio about "a dynamite dreamboat, a load of atom bombs, the lady from 29 Palms." 

Later a controversy developed about whether the use of the bomb had been necessary. I'll skip that part, because I consider it beside the point. The point is that bombers deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime. 

As  best I can tell, deliberating bombing civilians in order to kill some families and frighten the others into demanding a surrender was a tactic first used by the British in the 1920s in Iraq. Brits under Churchill's command bombed Kurds riding horses. Led by Churchill and Bomber Harris, the Brits returned to this official civilian bombing policy in World War II, followed by the retaliating Nazis and later by the Americans. It was a lot safer for 
Americans  to bomb Berlin at night without aiming. 

Gen. James Doolittle, in charge of our air war in Europe, was relieved of  his command and sent home when he refused to bomb random strangers. After that our nation committed a long series of war crimes, including the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo (that one burned to death over a hundred thousand civilians).

Lesson One: War crimes should be admitted, but we (and Japan, for that matter) can't do it.