Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is an authority on Nazi Germany and the origins and course of World War II. He is the author, most recently, of Hitler's Foreign Policy, 1933-1939: The Road to World War II.

The first people killed in World War Two were civilians. The Polish town of Wieluń is bombed completely undefended, in peacetime, early in the morning of September 1st, 1939.

When they attack in the West in 1940, there is the more deliberate bombing of cities. They also begin to machine-gun civilians who are fleeing. This practice of bombing cities is then extended to England, as well as Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg and France.

In several significant incidents, German soldiers massacre prisoners of war. Thousands of French-African soldiers are slaughtered deliberately by German soldiers, who are so directed in a number of instances by their officers.

In [the invasion of the Soviet Union], not only are millions of civilians killed, there is also a quite deliberate slaughter of prisoners of war. And when they are not slaughtered, they are simply surrounded by barbed wire and left to die. In the spring of 1942, the Germans reckon that, in the first seven months of the campaign in the east 2,100,000 Soviet prisoners of war were killed or died in German army captivity. This means ten thousand dead prisoners of war per day, seven days a week, for seven months, There is no precedent in world history for such a horror.

The British and French are, to begin with, very, very careful in their bombing. They drop leaflets on cities, but are very carefully restricted to the bombing, or trying to bomb, industrial facilities, warships and other military targets. Given the hopeless inaccuracy of bombing in World War Two, some German civilians are killed in this process, but that is collateral damage. Thereafter, you have quite deliberate area bombing of cities by the Royal Air Force, in addition to a certain amount of tactical support and targeted support. The United States, when it gets into the war in Europe, sticks to its intended targeted bombing and does not deviate from targeted bombing on industrial transportation and other military targets, given the inaccuracy of most bombing. That doesn't mean there aren't lots of civilians killed in the process.

The ground fighting by the Russians is, at least in general, according to rules. Lots of German prisoners are killed, and many died because they are weak when they are captured, and the rations in the camps are low, but more than two-thirds of German prisoners captured by the Russians returned to Germany alive, in many instances after quite a few years of slave labor in the Soviet Union. The overwhelming majority -- more than two-thirds -- of Red Army prisoners captured by the Germans are either killed or die in captivity.

The Japanese paid attention to no rules except their preference for horror from day one. In Malaya, they use British prisoners of war for bayonet practice. When they take Singapore in February of '42, the troops are allowed to run wild for days on end; they slaughter thousands of civilians, and go to the hospitals and slaughter patients, etc. In the Philippines, there is the notorious death march, in which Japanese are slaughtering and torturing prisoners of war who are either Americans from the US or Filipinos serving in the Philippines army, and there are massive killings of civilians. The Japanese, in other words, are killing prisoners of war from day one, and mistreating both civilians and prisoners horrendously. [They] kidnapped thousands of civilian women in the Philippines, in Malaya, in Burma, in Korea, and used them as sex slaves for their soldiers -- the so-called comfort women. Furthermore, in the last part of the war, the Japanese issue orders that all prisoners of war -- Chinese, British, American, Dutch, whatever -- are all to be killed before they can be liberated.

On the Allied side, there are very, very few Japanese soldiers who surrender. There are undoubtedly incidents where some of the Japanese POWs are killed, but basically, most of them survive, and ironically a very high proportion of them are captured because they are wounded and cannot kill themselves. Of the Allied POWs captured by the Japanese, somewhere between 28% and 30% die in Japanese custody. Of the Japanese captured by the Allies, somewhere around 3 or 4 or 5 percent die, mostly because they're so badly wounded. When it comes to the air, the US adhered to its targeting policy until February of 1945. In the latter part of the war in the Pacific, the American air force is deliberately setting fire to cities. The biggest of those air raids is in early march of 1945, on Tokyo.