Killing from the sky created a detached form of modern warfare that distances combatants from victims. Aerial forces first targeted civilians and infrastructure in the 1930s, as Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia struck hospitals and German-Italian bombers destroyed Guernica. Initially taboo, deliberate bombing of population centers became normalized during World War Two. The German blitz killed over 43,500 British civilians; Allied raids produced firestorms in Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden and atomic devastation in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Combined Allied bombing killed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians, with estimates ranging from roughly 300,000–600,000 Germans and over 200,000 Japanese.
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.
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