This one has long baffled me, George W. Bush is claimed to be war criminal because he had three, count em, terrorists interrogated. Winston Churchill was supposed to be a war criminal because he ordered the fire bombing of Dresden [1]. Harry S. Truman was a war criminal for the atomic raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki [2].
Yet the most destructive air raid of all time, both in terms of area destroyed and peoples killed was the LeMay treatment, to wit the fire bombing of Toyko [3].,
335 B-29s took off[1] [4] to raid on the night of 9-10 March, with 279 of them[1] [4] dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Fourteen B-29s were lost.[1] [4] Approximately 16 square miles (41 km²) of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting firestorm [5], more than the immediate deaths of either the Hiroshima [6] or Nagasaki [7] atomic bombs.[2] [8][3] [9] The US Strategic Bombing Survey [10] later estimated that nearly 88,000 people died in this one raid, 41,000 were injured, and over a million residents lost their homes. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated a higher toll: 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department [11] established a figure of 124,711 casualties including both killed and wounded and 286,358 buildings and homes destroyed. Richard Rhodes [12], historian, put deaths at over 100,000, injuries at a million and homeless residents at a million. These casualty and damage figures could be low
The United State president at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt [13], Should we disinter Roosevelt have him hung as a war criminal? Or do remember the words of William T. Sherman [14]: “:War is Hell?” I say the latter. What say you?