USAAF

On June 15, 1944, the first B-29 raid flew from China to strike at a factory in Japan. This was the precision target bombing that the United State Army Air Forces (USAAF) had practiced for years. This policy would be abandoned shortly for area bombing of civilian targets.

With the fall of Poland, thousands of POWs were taken by the German Army, and millions more before the war was over. The question of what to do with those POWs would lead to some of the worst atrocities of the war.

World War I had seen some air raids over England and Germany, but the technology was not yet available to wreak total havoc on the civilian population. The very idea of targeting a civilian population in a time of war was anathema to most of the world’s leaders.