"It is conveniently forgotten that the Allies, by their overwhelming and relentless day and night bombing of the Ruhr Valley and Cologne and Hamburg and the gods know what other great cities besides, murdered more Germans than were Japanese by means of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki," the actor Richard Burton opined in "To Play Churchill Is to Hate Him," an essay which appeared in 1974, just under three decades after WW2 ended and five before Trump's War started (www.nytimes.com).

Churchill and his misadvisers firmly believed that Intensive bombardment from the air would cow the Germans into abject surrender. They had forgotten that the Germans had tried to do the same to us and had failed. We bled and burned, too, and we laughed, after. the first shock, at the at tempts of the Luftwaffe and the rest of "Hitler's grisly gang" to make us suppliant and beg for mercy. The fiercer the holocaust, the stronger We became.

I add tangentially that there came a point during the Vietnam War when I was briefly in a position to make inquiries of representatives from "the other side" as to whether the status of some of the pilots who went down over North Vietnam could be shifted from "MIA," and the families' torture be somehow alleviated. To no avail. However, Peter Kalischer, the CBS man in Paris, took me aside and in a low voice explained that it was his understanding that once they landed on solid ground more than a few of those pilots were killed by the folks they'd been bombing. For some reason, it really pissed them off.