"So, we destroyed the German forces (twelve hundred Flying Fortresses bombing several thousand German soldiers!)--and also the French population of Royan. After the war, I read a dispatch by the New York Times correspondent in the area: "About 350 civilians, dazed or bruised ... crawled from the ruins and said the air attacks had been 'such hell as we never believed possible.' " At our bombing altitudes--twenty-five or thirty thousand feet--we saw no people, heard no screams, saw no blood, no torn limbs. I remember only seeing the canisters light up like matches flaring one by one on the ground below. Up there in the sky, I was just "doing my job"--the explanation throughout history of warriors committing atrocities."