The Mongol devastations - signandsight: "When soldier Jack Couffer walked among the houses of the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah in 1943, which, according to the Air Force 'correspond to the type of housing in which 80 percent of the German industrial population lives', he started imagining things. 'I looked in the empty windows and imagined with terrible clarity that the houses were inhabited, bursting with life, with people walking through the narrow alleys on their way to and from the factories, street traders, shoppers, children playing. It is easier to set a sterile place like that on fire if you whisk such fantasies away'. The coming air war was no longer to be won with scruples. "