Monthly Archives: Aug 2025

Unbelievable? Sadly No

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I was going through FaceBook this morning and encountered this item from ABC7 a news outlet in Los Angeles and Southern California. You will see an all too familiar type of headline.

It was not the headline which took hold of my attention. It was the reaction emjois. Now Facebook being Facebook you can expect a few twisted and ignorant souls to put up laughing ones when there is a human tragedy and also thumbs up when Trump’s administration does something. After all it’s FaceBook where the ignorant, ill-informed and prejudiced of any political stripe be it Right or Left congregate.

The aspect which disturbed me was that there were approximately 200 thumbs up (maybe more now and worse 150+ whose reaction was to put the laughing face. A quick glance at the comments revealing one GIF ICE – themed support.
These twinned actions say much about a corrosion of the common sense of Humanity. That folk can support or mock the misery of children, vulnerable and frightened small individuals does speak harshly about those folk.

Now down Humanity’s long jagged, ragged road there is nothing new in this. One of the most frightening creations we have to offer is mentality of The Mob, be it a howling scream missile throwing horde or a host of folk with access to social media. Of any political or social stripe by the way. Against these waves of irrational hate and screaming War can at times look positively sanitised ‘It’s nothing personal. It’s just business,’. It is also fearfully easy to be swept up in the emotions of a crowd whose passions have been ignited.

The most dangerous aspect of this mindless action comes from the Opportunist. The Opportunist comes in many forms. We think of them as simply charlatans looking out for no more than personal gain from ‘the rubes’. But there are those who harbour extreme beliefs who will sense the discomfort and anger, to harness it and thus have a fertile ground to promote those ideas. There are those who are possessed of a narcissism and thus will use any means to promote themselves. There are the professionals who are there at the behest of an organisation or nation to stir up the Mob, who will be quite unaware they are fodder. And there are those who just want their moment of Glory, not really sure where it leads. All of these types will work upon the crowd, turning it into a mob, mindless.
Now aside from the expert professionals and the more astute of the charlatans both of whom know when to fade into the background or ‘jump ship’ at the right time there can grow  amongst the rest an unholy alliance between Opportunist and Mob. This being that the Opportunist delivers what The Mob want to hear, but The Mob will want more, howling for it, so the Opportunist begins to do at the behest of The Mob and thus the cycle picks up a giddy pace both parties locked into a whirlwind of emotion where all perspective is lost. The end leads to some type of destruction, either materially or of the Soul, sometimes both. For within this there will always be the danger of the element of retribution, and that comes in many forms.

To return to those foolish folk who applauded at that news item. They would do well to consider an incident where some of their own; close friends or relatives are attending a gathering, a rally. There is an accident, a fire in the building maybe, loss of life much injury. How will they feel in the aftermath of that horror and tragedy to see thumbs up and laughing emjois along with cruel comments?

The door swings both ways. 

And since there appear to be those who say they espouse Christianity, then they should meditate on the words of Christ as recorded in Matthew 25 verses 31-46  

The War Posts Part IV – A VJ Reflection – Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why the Resonances?

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Foreword:

The original post was written on 9th August. It was longer with more detail. WP wiped it out and I foolishly had not created two back-ups. This is a short version which ends a series on War. And expands upon points I raised in the previous post .

15th August 2025. 80th Anniversary of Japan’s surrender and marked the official end of WWII. There will be commemorations in the UK. That’s the official term we will not celebrate the event that would not be proper. Particularly when the events leading up the surrender were overshadowed by the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everything else which took place from the 7th July 1937 when Chinese and Japanese forces clashed until the 6th August 1945 has taken second place in the Western World public consciousness; the provinces of folk with interests in the entire era.

The question remains. Why the particular abhorrence in public mind of the nations involved in the victory over Japan. There is only one event of that era which supersedes the revulsion and that would be the Nazi Concentration Camps and attendant genocidal actions in the field.
The casualty lists make grim reading both in the explosion and aftermath.
Hiroshima: 80,000 – 166,000 killed, injured not accurately recorded
Nagasaki : 80,000.
Higher than the following:
The controversial firebombing of Dresden Feb 1945 :Estimates  25,000 dead
The Firebombing of Tokyo March 1945: Estimates 100,000 dead.
French civilian casualties by allied air action during 1944: Estimates 15-20,000 dead

Those three examples are in the provinces of military history. The public in general can be forgiven for not knowing about them and many other events which were part of the 75- 80 million deaths associated with WWII.
London, Leningrad, Warsaw, Stalingrad, Philippines, Okinawa, Berlin, Konigsberg all have their own bloody tallies of dead and injured civilians , some do figure in some sections of the public consciousness, but none weigh as heavily as the fates of those two Japanese cities. Why is that?

This is my statement. It is my considered opinion that the objections and the revulsions to the use of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki result from shock and at the bottom of our Human being- Fear of what took place. The idea that approximately 20% of the Japanese civilian casualties of WWII were caused in two locations in mere minutes is horrific information that vibrates deep into the Human consciousness. So quick, so efficient. So possible, everywhere? For it is an acceptable fact by most people that if one nation has a weapon then sooner or later another will have the same weapon, and that it could be used ‘here’.
And we don’t want that. We want it to be uninvented. If there’s a war and some foe flies over with conventional bombs and drop them on our city, that is frightening but we reckon the damage is local(ish) and can be repaired and we can all work together to help out, because even if our location is in chaos there’s one down the road to lend a hand. We can cope with conventional wars. We have our own ideas of what to do.
Not so with Nuclear Weapons. We have been brought up to understand that those bring destruction on an ultimate scale. They lay waste on a massive scale. Everything collapses. No emergency services, no health support, no supplies. Better off at ground zero than miles away and surviving. And naturally, understandably, we do not want to live with that knowledge. The idea that there is a means so powerful, so effective, so dreadful that all we have known, accepted, learnt to live with can be gone. And worse, we are some of the survivors?

Now harsh words will follow.
A First World perspective?. There have been at least 300 what we might call wars since WWII ended. There are whole swathes of the world whose miseries and terrors might not be nuclear ones but are or have been as dreadful in their own, small ways, small because in most cases the rest of the world doesn’t even know they are going on; much less care. Unless of course it suits some purpose to notice. If you protest or are angry about one, then what about the ten that went before, or elsewhere in the world? Sorry if I am getting cross – but I try not to do ‘Selective’.

Anyway, back to….. analysis?
Meanwhile we are angry and scared that our lives or way of lives can be wiped out. I suggest therefore that the Atom Bombs became our own worse, personal nightmares. In our fear or rage we blame individuals for unleashing them. We are so frightened we want to blame someone. And we want to give our fear a justification, so understandably we channel it into an outrage. We call this one particular act of war a crime. We will of course call other acts crimes as well, and each of us no doubt as a list of those depending on our own trigger points. But no acts of war, to date has been so monumentally, individually, terrifying as those two bombs.
Yes they brought horrible suffering. War does that. Look back at the casualty lists above, and those are just some air raids. I have not included the urban battles, not the sieges, not the post battle eras of pillage, rape and random killings, not the unfortunate killings of folk who just got in the way, not the reprisals, not the massacres….not the….not the…
By all means beware of  The Logic of War. It leads to paths such as the dropping of nuclear weapons. A straight line from the splinting of the atom by Professor Rutherford in a laboratory in Manchester UK 1917.

By even more effort embrace Compassion, Respect and Tolerance, because around the corner, waiting in the Shadows waits Violence and Hate and they have their own version of those Horrors I have been writing about.

And dear reader, there is no other way to end this series.

Take care. Walk wide of violent solutions.

The War Posts – Part I .An Introduction to War

The War Posts Part II – The Logic of War

The War Posts Part III – When Industry Replaced Cavalry and its Arm Grew Long

The War Posts Part IV- An Explanation and Remorse.

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I had completed a post to conclude a series when suddenly the whole lot was wiped by WP.
I should have been more careful and kept at least two layers of back-ups.
Needless to say my response was not fit for an all-Age audience.

There will therefore be a delay before the last of this series is up on WP, maybe a few days while I distil out all the fury at what took place. Subjects like this need a focused mind.

The War Posts – Part I .An Introduction to War

The War Posts Part II – The Logic of War

The War Posts Part III – When Industry Replaced Cavalry and its Arm Grew Long

 

The War Posts Part III – When Industry Replaced Cavalry and its Arm Grew Long

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Precursor
The warnings had been there. To name but two: The American Civil War and The Franco-Prussian War. The message being the machines of Industry and the advances of Science were being fully harnessed to the carriages of war. Be the conflict on land, sea and now air advances were made, and each one provoked another. The term Arms Race had come of age. Meanwhile in the relative background research was advancing in Atomic Physics and in turn the new field of Nuclear Physics, nothing to really interest the Military and International Political Minds. Meanwhile the delicate system of checks and balances in essentially European and Russian politics contained such events as Germanic expansion and union, Italian unity and Independence and Russia’s messianic mission to free and unite all the Slavs. Empires prevailed, nations prevailed and wars were mostly colonial in nature; events which happened outside of the European sphere were left to the diplomatic core to summon up governmental and some military assistance where and when.

The Seismic Event (WWI)
By the second decade of the 20th Century, the political system was being pressured by variables. National identities as we know them, a product of the 19th Century had by now been given strident voice, having been urged on in preceding years by polemic writers working in the fields of Identity, Race and the more aggressive Philosophies. The web of alliances all based upon deterrents through Military Defence or Defence through aggression gave way and World War I commenced, in which the full potential of the previous decades were released. From now on The Logic of War became mainstay. In this case the Logic had lain out the issues in simple terms. Break the enemy’s armies and break the enemy’s Will. It didn’t really matter in which order.
Although much military thought had gone into what to do with armies and weaponry, amongst the principal powers, of late there had been no practical experience against a similarly weaponised foe. No one truly appreciated the full potential of the Industrial Army when unleashed either in attack or defence. That going to have to be learnt; the hard way. But the Logic of War would continue, because the foe had to be defeated, this was not just a struggle over some portions of land, some king’s ambitions, some passing fervour; the concept of National Survival was there. Thus all means were justifiable. There was no place or times for ethics; there never had been before, why should there now?
Meanwhile in 1917 in Manchester UK, Ernest Rutherford experiments with the first artificial  nuclear reactions. No doubt some would have huffed that these ‘boffins’ should be putting their talents to better uses helping The War Effort.
The war would come to an end, there were a series of military victories by the Allies, but basically the German led Central powers collapsed, the brutal truth being they had collectively lost the will to continue, bled by casualties and of resources, from within they fell. The Logic of War had favoured one side, by a thin margin its Will had prevailed.

Old Lessons Applied With New Tools
There is a line of thought that runs when later centuries’ historians view the first half of the 20th Century, they will place the two wars together. The same issues and with two major changes of sides effectively the same war.
In the interim the nationalistic feelings were fired by ethnic and racial divides, one minority or another being blamed for failures. And losers or those who had minor gains resolved they would do things differently next time. Then there was the dangerous innocence which pretended that if you ignored War it would simply go away, like when dealing with other Human flaws there was much misplaced faith invested in Wishful Thinking.

Meanwhile 1932 Cambridge UK under guidance from Rutherford and others’ discoveries James Chadwick discovers the Neutron. Following on these advances in December 1938 Berlin Germany chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in conjunction with physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch enact the process now known as Nuclear Fission. The resultant energy is noted and considered a subject for later research into a cheap form of heating.

Elsewhere the inevitability of a stumbling to conflict continues. The steps, the errors, the hopes, the lies and the confusions need not to be repeated. September 1939 add December 1941 and the world is embraced in a war in which the full efforts of Industry and Science are marshalled into the Logic of War. Axis vs Allies. One aspect is not truly embraced by one Axis side which will have great fatal consequences for one of its allies.
In the USA during October 1939 Hungarian refugee physicists Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard, while in the UK Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls German refugee physicists in March 1940 contact the respective governments alerting them to the potential destructive power of Nuclear Fission and concerns that the German Nazi government could also research this potential. Both governments take this matter seriously. Following the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 and the US entry into WWII the USA uses its industrial capacity to expand the research into a viable weapon. The logic of War has now embraced the nuclear field. No area of weaponry is ever left unexplored.
This is not the only development conducted by the Allies; the side which the Axis  considered decadent and weak, forgetting that Democracies can be as ruthless as any aggressive totalitarian regime. Amongst the many advances the Allies make is to construct vast strategic bomber fleets to take the war to the Axis’ homelands, while in their rush to quick victories the Axis only invested in air forces to support their armies on the ground, they made the mistake of not matching plane for plane the four engined heavy bombers. Germany will make advances in flying bomb and rocket missiles but too little too late for a war in which resources cannot be matched. The allies meanwhile direct resources to that age old target, the population and the foes’ resource’s, crippling Axis efforts to respond. And yet two Axis powers Germany and Japan calculate that the Will to Resist will prevail, as more ground is lost, the tighter is the grip to this belief held by those who have the final authority over their people.
Somewhere within the proliferation of the ideas that the Logic War calls upon, is that lessons are always being learnt and histories recalled. The Allies bear in mind Germany was not occupied or fought over at the end of WWI, and its later regimes made capital of this, Germany was not beaten, just tricked. The current coalition of Allies will not give this regime that wriggle room. Total War until the capacity to fight back is destroyed and surrender is the only option. On the other side of the World the Japanese regime holding to a warped version of a martial code demands and indoctrinates its armies and civilian populations into a fight to the death. And by now the Allies have the capacity to deliver just that.
Thus, there is the unavoidable fact that under the calculations of The Logic of War, if the foe will not surrender and you have the ability to prevail, you will prevail by ensuring the foe cannot continue to defy you. You will not turn your back on a foe which will not bow down in surrender. This is one Logic of War, for at its depths War reasons that death and destruction are the final arbiters.

The Last Military Acts
By the spring of 1945 Germany had surrendered, beaten down by what we refer to as conventional means, and at a high price in both blood and treasure. Across the oceans WWII continued. The USA being the principal allied proponent. In the light of the casualty rate on Okinawa, of 49,000, the next stage being the landing on the main islands of Japan suggested another high casualty surge, particularly as the military government holding sway showed no sign of unconditional surrender.
We now move into an area which in terms of that long history of warfare is not new, and was mentioned earlier. How to force an enemy surrender. The USA had by other motivation now come into possession of a fearfully efficient weapon. The Atomic bomb. This allowed the possibility of one aircraft with one bomb to level an entire city. There was some debate on how to deploy this. Drop it as a demonstration on some isolated place? Suppose the regime did not give way? Half the arsenal would have been used, and only one shot left? Since there had been no testing of the weapons suppose they didn’t work as expected? The regime would be encouraged to continue resistance and the allied casualty rates continue to climb. Meanwhile as the war ran down the alliance naturally was fracturing, The USSR was taking up larger portion of Europe than expected. Had this war best  be finished quickly and as is the case in many a war, face up to the next foe – your previous ally? And above all, a conventional invasion of Japan suggested casualties into of possible 500,000 allied and at least 1,000,000 Japanese.
Finish the war as quickly and conveniently as possible – that was the decision taken. The die was cast. Hiroshima and Nagasaki would take their place in the history books of the 1930s to 1945 wars. Along with Nanking, Warsaw, Leningrad, Stalingrad, London, Tokyo, Hamburg, Berlin; to name but a few. Only in the case of those two cities the results came swiftly, dramatically, and with a new force that scared everyone with its potential. Two cities obliterated, swiftly but leaving an aftermath that unlike the others whose long drawn out suffering were by conventional means, this heralded a new era. Same result though. Same as it ever was,

Four photos named in alphabetical order but not placed so Hamburg (firebombed) Hiroshima (atom bomb), Stalingrad (sustained military action) Tokyo  (firebombed). When I saved these images to my laptop and blog I did not identify them by name, only by the title War, followed by a number to satisfy the computer record. To be honest I am not sure which is which, I think the fourth might be Stalingrad – I could be wrong, it might be the third one.
War- the great equaliser. It kills and destroys because that is what it is there for.
In the aftermath there would be much debate over the use of the atom bombs, military, ethically, politically, socially, eighty years on the debates still continue with intensity. Hamburg and Tokyo do not get the same attention as examples of the horror of war. There’s only one location that seems to generate the same kind (but not volume by any means) of debate that revolves around Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that is the German City of Dresden February 1945
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden

But this was by conventional means and has passed into the annals of the many other acts of WWII.

Nothing frightens or horrifies us so much as Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s bombings. Maybe because of that swiftness and efficiency. Maybe because  it showed no one was safe anymore, War could not just happen ‘somewhere else’. Maybe because we can see exactly where the Logic of War can lead.
Not that the lesson has been truly learnt, ask the millions who were and are in the wrong place and the time since 1945.

The subject of the last post. War Continues,

The War Posts – Part I .An Introduction to War

The War Posts Part II – The Logic of War

The War Posts Part II – The Logic of War

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Foreword: This post is going to start off with what might be seen as in an unfair way. Bear with me.

Opening
I am going to ask you a few uncomfortable questions:

Have you ever felt there was a group of folk you disliked intensely for their views?
Have you ever felt some folk were so opposed to your outlook there was no arguing with them?
Have you ever felt personally threatened by some group for a perceived potentially invasive potential?
Have you ever felt that a group is such a threat to you and your way of life that  force as a last resort is justifiable?
Have you ever felt that a group or community holds views which you consider so repellent and inexcusable that they should not be allowed to continue?
Have you ever coveted anything?

You may feel justified in thinking these are a bit unfair and leading questions. Understandable. Yet I ask them, because in my opinion these are at the very basic, fundamental urges to resort to conflict. In short at this current stage in the development of Humanity, Humanity is wired for conflict. At the least in the verbal; at the worst in warfare. Now you may feel you, personally, can and have managed with much effort to circumvent these urges, and that is laudable. Can however you say the same for the majority of people around you, or to take it one step further, in the world?
Or does the evidence suggest that despite all the hard, harsh tragic lessons of History Humanity still defaults to conflict and thus War? I would contend on that current evidence this is the case. War is a facet of the current Human Condition and thus has its own Logic, one which exists in the extreme versions of those opening questions.

The Environment of the Logic of War
Being this extreme activity which involves the seizure or destruction of people, resources and property either because one side feels a need to or the other side feels the need to stop them, the thought processes, the perceptions and the decision making are ones outside of the usual civil procedures. After all willing acceptance to inflict Death and wilful Destruction are involved and those are very much Absolutes. It can be argued that some wars are conducted with some restraints at some times, but overall the application of violence to achieve or foil achievement are there at the basics. Thus those who are involved in warfare either by profession, political decision or simply in there by no choice at all will shift their perspectives from the civil and civic ways, eventually accepting in within such an environment indeed The Means Justifies The End. By Need or by Duty.

Practices Within The Logic of War 
As stated in the previous post the destruction of on side’s resources and will to resist in addition to their armies was always there in the campaign. This would take various forms.

Outright slaughter upon any who resisted – The Mongol Invasions of the 13th and 14th century took this to such extreme forms that some historians have cited the environment changed such was the loss of Human Life.

Subjugation of The Population – Either by terror or by enslavement. Common in the classical eras for a population of a fallen city to be put into slavery. Even in the 18th century prisons of war taken by the Hapsburg Empire could find themselves sold off to the Ottomans. And of course the continued fear of the armed enemy now living in your neighbourhood, quite at their whim. William the Conqueror to name but one dealt with an Anglo-Saxon uprising in the north of England by what was called ‘The Harrying of the North’. There a many, many more examples – the 20th & 21st centuries were and are carrying on an old response.

Treating People As Resources or Vermin – As briefly covered in the previous post and also during extreme examples of the above questions an action which is ingrained into war. Destroy the people and you destroy the foe’s abilities or will to continue. Jonathan Sumpton’s five volume history of the Hundred Years’ War is a masterful work in scope and in detail, although as you read through the fifth volume you are starting to wonder how there were any folk alive left in France by 1460 after the depravations of The English, The French Civil Wars and the ravaging by mercenary armies. The Thirty Years War is synonymous with slaughter, pillage and rapine throughout central Europe. To spare you any more details I would just summarise by saying in Eastern Europe through to Russia, down to the Ottoman and Persian Empires brutality was the order of the day. When you look through the history of China a similar picture arises. And you can go in any direction and find the same processes. The ultimately depressing or shocking facet being a people can be victims and later instigators, or the other way around and not unusually  both at once.

The Arrival of Industrial Efficiency – There would be some debate as to when this approach impacted on the processes of war. Arguably the overwhelming replacement of steel by the missile as the principal deliverer of action, so maybe the early years of the 18th Century.  Now over the next two centuries would develop a stronger intention to destroy armies by essentially blasting them apart and if the place of conflict happened to include villages or small towns, this was how things were. During this era the French Revolutionary armies developed the principal of mobility through not relying on long supply columns, but living off of the land; in the long history of warfare this was nothing new- grab what you want and if the civilians know what good for them they accept it. (Only this did not work out so well for the French in Spain or Russia, and in 1814 there was retribution visited by a revised Prussia) .  As armies grew larger and supply became a constant problem appropriation of civilians and civilian resources  was not reduced by enlightened thinking or the growth of request for ‘Rights’ and ‘Independence’  Far from it. Fired up by a new concept of Nationalism The Means Justifies The End edict was allowed to run riot, literally in many cases, and woe betide a minority living in an area where a majority had just gained independence, for minorities are always treated with suspicion (see those worrisome questions) 

Being Truly Professional and Social About it – There have always been professionals but the demands and developments of the 19th Century required far more study and contemplation of war, and many more books than simply instruction manuals were coming into print. Probably the one which springs to the military inclined mind would be the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz’s ‘On War’ being treatises on political-military analysis and strategy, which although published in 1832, still hold some sway in these times. I would suggest this was when Modern War as we know it was distilled from its embryonic form of the Napoleon Era. The Means Justifies The End  now had a truly modern feel. The soldier had to be educated to some degree to handle sophisticated weapons; officer classes trained to handle the various demands of the modern armies and those armies motivated to embrace a nationalistic feel. Science ever in the background was also fully entering the mix and something to be given some study and respect, for it was an exciting new world and every advance had the possibility of finding a place in warfare. With all this taking place a nation looking for or to keep its place on the World Stage or simply stay independent had to be more than ever aware of all these factors. What had once been conducted at the behest of Princes, Kings and Emperors was now overseen by secular Governments and their professional armies. Public support on a national basis had been growing since the 18th Century but now became a strong demand. Thus a change was taking place in the industrialised world. War was not something which happened to the civilian population, the civilian population through the evolution of mass communication could now enter the dynamic, no longer involved in just local squabbles over land or defence or religion, but now through Nationhood. 

By the beginning of the 20th Century the capacity for destruction of not just a foe’s armies but it’s resources and people had developed by enveloping and refining the usage of all possible advances, scientific, political and social. The era we now call Modern needs its own post for there The Logic of War shows its true colours and potential   

The War Posts – Part I .An Introduction to War

The War Posts – Part I .An Introduction to War

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Foreword: The dates of the 6th and 8th of August hold particularly vivid images in the historical narrative. Most readers will be aware of their relevance. The days Nuclear Weaponry was added to the catalogue of weaponry. Thus, arguably these events became the starkest, most fearful indication to a number of people as to the horrors of War. Those who lived in times and places in which they did not personally experience the events and consequences of War. And to everyone how very efficient and finalistic War was now becoming.

Overview
As long as there has been Humanity there has been conflict, as it is with other species. Although as Humanity developed and started its path to civilisation War became more than just one group throwing things at another group. As did everything else War developed too, the logic being weapons had to improve to keep up with everything else; you could hardly conquer in walled city with a host of men armed with sharp pointed stick charging at it and valiantly poking away. Missiles, sieges, mining, poisoning of water courses, throwing in of dead diseased bodies and of course laying waste the land around depriving the foes of resources. Pitched battles could be quite rare at times. There was also the arts of marching and countermarching like chess, and maybe the foe would see no advantage to combat, give up and go home or seek terms. The latter practice carried on into the early 18th century; then with industrialisation war became more focused about destroying armies.

Throughout all this one thing was a constant. That being the suffering of the civilians and the ruination of their livelihoods. The idea of an army marching in good disciplined order with stony faces set of the horizon and their tryst with Fate might make good image on film. Only in the old style propaganda films or political slanted works will you see soldiers treating enemy civilians in sanitised bad ways, you will have to read about the true pillage, multiple gang rapes, random killing, casual cruelty and destruction. You would have to bypass the recent wars quasi-colonial style wars of the latter part of the 20th and thus far in the 21st Century to face the fact that the liberating armies of the Allies moving west through France and into Germany in WWII were not comprised entirely of firm but fair, tough fighting decent lads.

Armies are at best hard, brutal machines trained to expect danger; at worse they are ill-disciplined armed gangs with a smidge of training. And there are the majority, the in-between. Ill-clothed, ill-ed, ill-paid only there because there was no other option.
Civilians are the fodder, either swept up to be part of the violence or to be treated with no more concern than their houses. Either a resource to be used, or one to be destroyed thus depriving the enemy and sapping the general will, another resource.

Reasoning
I can understand that having digested this, the reader would conclude ‘I can see where he is going with this. He is trying to dilute the effects on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a sweeping generalisation, that they were nothing special’
It would be a reasonable assumption.
From the perspective of repulsion and the sudden, swift, frightening devastation. A fearful power unleashed, a vision as to how War could now be.
Yes they were special. None of us were now safe. Anywhere. Anyhow. We were all subject to the Dread Logic of War.

War?
Suffering. Terrible, Raw, Suffering. Dealt out with a Logic more terrible than the weapons themselves.

The next part covers The Logic of War