If history has taught us anything, it's that the atrocities of war never go down as civilization goes up. Advancements in industrialization and technology have enhanced our lives of leisure at home, and exponentially expanded our barbarism in battle waged on foreign soil.

For most of humanity's time on Earth, warfare casualties directly correlated with numbers of soldiers. When swords were the main weapons, victims all had to be within arm's reach. A battle that killed tens of thousands had to be fought hand-to-hand by tens of thousands.

Even though spears and arrows added range, they still maintained mainly a one-to-one lethality. One arrow rarely felled two opponents.

The early history of firearms further extended the range from which one soldier could inflict death upon another, but single-shot muskets still kept the casualty ratio low. As artillery became more effective, it solidified the trend of cannon fire augmenting infantry maneuvers.

For example, in the U.S. Civil War's deadliest one-day battle at Sharpsburg/Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862, it took more than 100,000 soldiers in combat to leave nearly 4,000 dead.

Repeating rifles improved aim and firing frequency, but casualties and deaths on a mass scale didn't become a horrific reality until the mechanization of weaponry in the 20th century.

World War I produced a number of battlefield engagements in which the death toll exceeded 10,000 in a single day. Some 27,000 French Army soldiers died on Aug. 22, 1914, during the Battle of the Frontiers. About 19,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the Battle of Somme on July 1, 1916. The German Army suffered nearly 11,000 deaths on March 21, 1918, during the Spring Offensive.

World War II took mass killings off the battlefield and set unsettling records for single-day loss of lives. Aerial bombardment was in its infancy in WWI, but by the final years of the Second World War, it reached full maturity.

This is best understood by contrasting the deadliest days on battlefields against the deadliest days from bombing cities.

D-Day (June 6, 1944) was the deadliest day for U.S. forces with approximately 2,500 killed. Other Allied fatalities combined with German deaths raised the total death toll to likely more than 10,000.

The bloody month-long Battle of the Bulge from December 1944 to January 1945 resulted in more than 19,000 American soldier deaths and a higher number of Axis deaths.

The ferocious three-month Battle of Okinawa, lasting from the initial invasion on April 1, 1945, to June 22, left 12,500 American soldiers dead and nearly 10 times that many Japanese killed-in-action, many by Kamikaze.

Several calendar dates stand as somber reminders of modern warfare's brutal inhumanity to man.

Feb. 13, 1945, marks the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, which killed 25,000 civilians, mostly women and children and evacuees from the Eastern Front. The Allied attack included a lethal combination of high explosive and incendiary bombs to create a literal firestorm.

March 10, 1945, was the date of Operation Meetinghouse, in which 279 American B-29 bombers made a midnight raid over the densely populated residential areas of Tokyo that incinerated a quarter-million structures. More than 100,000 residents, almost all women and children, were killed, and a million more were left homeless.

Even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9 didn't match Tokyo's death toll, but were horrific in their own right, estimated to be 70,000 civilians, including tens of thousands of children, killed by each nuclear blast.

Governments on all sides have lied about the atrocities of war, for good reason. Those awful truths are demoralizing, not inspiring. Surviving witnesses from Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost always use the same words to describe what they saw: unbelievable and unforgettable.

Our hearts sink when we hear of a school shooting that kills a half-dozen kids. We ache at the innocent loss when hearing the news that a missile killed 170 children at a school in Iran.

That's why WWII statistics don't seem real; they're too big, too much, too many to comprehend.

As little as Americans really know about our own national 250-year history, we know almost nothing at all about countries like Iran, which boasts a continual history (mostly as Persia) spanning more than 4,000 years.

And just as we have trouble contemplating 20,000 children killed by a single U.S. bomb detonation, it's also hard to wrap our minds around four millennia of Eastern civilization customs, traditions and culture.

It is not a personal virtue to know nothing but form firm beliefs anyway, and yet that's par for the American course on the Middle East. And it is not a national virtue to militarily breach sovereignty for regime change in another country by counting on American citizens' collective ignorance, rather than making a case for their informed consent.

No candidate running on a "boots in Iran" platform would have been elected in 2024. Presidents who betray voter trust on core issues like "America first" often pay consequences. And they should.

Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.

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