THE IMMORALITY LAY IN NOT CONTINUING ON TO MOSCOW:

The architect of the mission was 38-year-old Brigadier General Curtis LeMay, who said of the raid, "If we lose the war, we'll be tried as war criminals." The overnight attack killed more than 100,000 people in a firestorm that reached 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Author James M. Scott spares none of the gory details in Black Snow, his engrossing, carefully constructed account of the mission and its aftermath. The book is gut wrenching and -- without explicitly saying so -- challenges the notion of American exceptionalism. [...]

Ultimately, Black Snow is more than the story of a horrific episode from a horrific war. It is a cautionary tale. On one side was a severely weakened Japan, whose hubris -- fueled by its emperor, Hirohito -- and misguided sense of invincibility caused it to believe it could defeat the Allies. On the other was the United States, which chose to engage in the large-scale slaughter of civilians -- and eventually drop the atomic bomb -- in the name of ending World War II. While Scott makes clear his belief that Japan had only itself to blame for what befell it, he forces all of us to ponder what is moral and what is not.

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