Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Curtis LeMay

(Should I say: Warning, plot spoilers for GOT ahead, or is this enough time?)

Last Sunday, waiting for Game of Thrones to start, I started thinking about how Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen trashing King’s Landing with her dragon, Dragon, had set up the final episode. We watched from ground level as she spread terror, killing helpless women and children from a distance, by airpower. Her biggest backers, Tyrion Lannister, and Aegon Targaryen – previously known as John Snow, when he was still happy being her lover – were shown as dismayed at the pointless carnage. The episode was designed to make it hard to keep rooting for Daney, as she turned into her father, The Mad King. Going into the last episode, I assumed, and we are set up to assume, that, in the end, Daney would not be the winner of the game. For seven season, I’ve rooted for Daney and now I was hoping she abdicated or committed suicide.

I read somewhere that David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were thinking of the Allied bombing of Dresden when they did Game of Thrones 8.5. It made me wonder how our bombing of Dresden was not considered a war crime and how we came to do it in the first place. It seems that, in the 1930s, as the major Western powers plus Japan were making decisions about updating their military equipment, especially their respective air forces, Britain and the United States bet that strategic bombing could win a war (or, at least, substantially help to win it). Germany and the USSR bet that the best use of airpower was tactical and did not invest in heavy bombers. When Germany started the actual war, their use of tactical air support was a major factor in their early, lightning quick, victories, but, as the war went on, it became the only way the US and Britan could strike back and both Britain’s and the United States’ past decisions colored their thinking on how to win the war. They continued to believe that bombing German production facilities would weaken the German war machine (and, later, the Japanese war machine). Eventually, they were bombing German production facilities around the clock even though it didn’t really work as advertised. Out of frustration as much as anything, we sorted of drifted into strategic bombing to terrorize the civilian population, just like Daenerys Stormborn. That terror bombing campaign peaked in the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, killing somewhere between 130,000 to 225,000 Japanese civilians (depending on who is counting).

But dropping the atomic bombs, as destructive as it was, killed fewer people than our March 9, 1945 attack on Tokyo when we killed more people at one time than ever before, or after (so far). In one 24 hour period, we used 334 B29 bombers to drop 1,665 tons of bombs, first using high explosive bombs to turn large areas of Tokyo into kindling and then using incendiary bombs to set the city afire, killing over one hundred thousand people, mostly women and children, and making over one million people homeless.

The third, or so, scene of Game of Thrones has Ned Stark beheading a deserter himself because the person who gives a death sentence should have to bear the burden of carrying it out. He is the moral pole in this world and we are on his side. But in our world, the real world, the Mad Kings of Al-Qaeda behead people up close and personal and the good guys, us, kill from the air, passionless. That does not make me comfortable.