The firebombing of the Japanese cities in World War II was eclipsed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, but in many ways it was worse. In the 2003 Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War, Robert Strange McNamara— yes, that was his middle name— arguably the engineer of the U.S. war in Vietnam, describes how his talent for efficiency, discovered early, brought him to help Gen. LeMay direct the bombing raids on Japan.

“Since Japanese houses were built of wood, they burned so easily. I was on the island of Guam in (Gen. LeMay’s) command in March of 1945. In that single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children.”

McNamara, staring at Morris and the camera, continues his monologue. “And (LeMay) went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 41% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional.”

We don’t know what it’s like to be in a wooden city being firebombed. American novelist James Dickey’s greatest work, To the White Sea, gave a fictional rendering of an American soldier alone in Tokyo waiting for the raids he knew were coming.

Humans instinctively ran from fire into water, as the Germans did in Dresden.

There they mashed each other in their flight or drowned or crisped up on the way there. It is hellish to be both wet and still burning.

The Fog of War is terrifying because it’s so deadpan. McNamara has always been my “ultimate” American war criminal—he’s a complicated man, less reptilian than Kissinger, braver than Cheney—just as people think of Albert Speer as the most semi-civilized of the senior Nazis, but we’re all wrong.

What is attractive, though, is McNamara’s candour.

He tells Morris, “LeMay said ‘If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’

And I think he's right. "LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?’”

Firebombers, ponder that.