War should always be looked upon as the last best choice to resolve conflict as the intended and unintended consequences of virtually any war includes not only the destruction of all sorts of infrastructure within countries, the attendant massive usage of resources for destructive purposes, but also the wholesale destruction of human life, be it male, female, child, or soldier. No matter how focused a given war is on targeting just military personnel on the opposing side, all wars bleed over to civilians, and to make matters worse, modern-day wars are incredibly inhumane.
While World War II was a war that was desperately fought to stop the wanton rampage, rape, and evil intents of the Axis nations, the Allied nations, didn't conduct their nature of war in response by taking into account at all times, that civilians should not be deliberately targeted. The upshot of this incredibly bloody and violent war is that according to historylearningsite.co.uk the overall civilian deaths from this war were estimated to be 30,497,000 peoples v. an estimated 24,517,000 soldiers of the war dead. However, if we also consider the amount of civilians killed by virtue of war related famine or disease, the new count for civilian deaths rises to a total of another 30,000,000 peoples as estimated by Wikipedia.org signifying that the overall amount of civilian deaths which can be attributed to the war as being at a more than 2:1 ratio than those that died in battle.
While death is indeed an integral part of the art of war, for soldiers that partake in it, it should not be that those that are civilians should suffer at rates of death far exceeding soldiers. While some of those civilian deaths are the unintended consequences of war, it is an absolute fact that many of the civilian deaths in World War II were deliberately targeted by virtue of their creed, by virtue of deliberate bombing, as punishment, as terror tactics, and so forth, which proved the same point again and again, that munitions as well as man's inhumanity to man are extremely lethal.
The judgment of any nation should be based upon how they treat the poor and defenseless, especially in the most tying of times, and the upshot of World War II is that virtually all countries failed this test in either the highest degree or in various degrees. It is a damnable shame that the Allied parties in so many ways lived by their actions that the way of justice was "an eye for an eye", a fallacy of the highest order.
Today, as never before in the history of mankind, the ability to kill people, civilian or not, to destroy nations, and to self-destruct is in the hands of the few and powerful, who literally at the stroke of a pen, can unleash this terrible destruction upon all corners of the earth. The problem with such power is that those that unloose such are so far removed from the field of action, that they subsequently feel none of its horror or comprehend correctly its unnecessary wanton destruction. This type of thinking is desperately wrong, sick, patently pathetic, and a disgrace, especially for those that claim that God blesses their country.