[Serious] What was the dirtiest trick ever pulled in the history of war?

Bit of history on that, some of which isn't well known.

We apparently started firebombing because anti-aircraft fire got pretty good, which meant we had to send our bombers in higher to avoid it. Problem is it's hard to hit much of anything from that high, so we switched to targeting whole neighborhoods, even thought it's an evil thing to do. But workers make weapons so they're targets now.

We figured out quickly that most of the real damage gets done because bombing causes fires, so our attention quickly turned to making things burn. This was mostly worked out at a base in Utah called Dugway Proving Grounds. In order to make it realistic, we built exact replicas of Japanese and German worker housing out in the desert, then bombed them and rebuilt, over and over. The lengths we went to to make the housing authentic was staggering - we imported lumber from Russia in a time of war just to get the wood right, made authentic furniture and even exactly replicated German roofing from the Ruhr valley.

Turns out getting Japanese housing to burn was super easy, any incendiary device worked and it was hard to put out the ensuing fires. Tokyo burned 'like autumn leaves' according to a period account in Life magazine. German housing was more stout, but turns out the secret is to make a bomb that crashed through the roof, blew the inside to kindling, then lit it on fire. That took some figuring but it too worked well.

How I know this. The model for the German housing still exists at Dugway - I nominated it for inclusion on the National Register years ago. They rebuilt it one last time and didn't destroy it, so there it sits out alone in the desert. Japantown is still there too but it's just a bunch of concrete slabs, all that remains from the bombing. Not sure it ever got included as it's a dark bit of our history. I do recall that the army sent back my first draft because I said that this was where we 'worked out how to fire-bomb civilians'. That sounded too harsh. I said I'd soften the language, then didn't.

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