Aerial warfare introduced a moral and physical detachment that broadened the scale of killing. Early uses in the 1930s targeted hospitals and civilian centers, and the bombing of Guernica became emblematic of such slaughter. World War II normalized deliberate attacks on population centers, producing large civilian death tolls and firestorms across Europe and Japan. Strategic bombing culminated in radioactive devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Documentation records that between 300,000–600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians died from Allied bombing, with many deaths resulting from raids intentionally aimed at civilian populations.
Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can't match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, "Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done."
Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy's air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.
As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. "Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves," according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy.
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