WLD, I remember meeting some old folk in Bethnal Green who admitted they had cheered when Bomber Command reduced Dresden to a fireball, against which 9/11 would barely have registered on the catastrophe scale. It took them several years to see it differently.

I remember the former US attorney general Ramsay Clark recalling some Americans who had reacted similarly to the nuking of Hiroshima. It was only after publication of John Hersey's famous account, run across a whole issue of the New Yorker in August 1946, that they could see the carnage from a victim perspective. (Even so someone responded to the New Yorker with a letter saying "Great, now let's drop 20 more on Moscow.")

Incidentally, those here who think a public wringing of hands in anguish is a prerequisite for saying anything in this thread should read Hersey's account. He reports the experiences of six survivors in clinical detail without once displaying the slightest hint of his own emotions. It was not necessary. And maybe that is why what he did stands as just about the most effective piece of journalism published in the states in a hundred years.