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At the dawn of the Second World War in September 1939, a fragile and almost surreal consensus held among the belligerent powers. Spurred by an appeal from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, leaders on all sides, from Britain’s Neville Chamberlain to a duplicitous Adolf Hitler, publicly pledged to refrain from the aerial bombing of civilians. This was to be a war fought between armies, not against populations. There was a genuine, if deeply naive, belief that the looming conflict could be contained by the conventions of “civilised” conduct, that the bomber could be leashed and restricted to purely military objectives. Yet,…