WANT TO STOP OUR BOMBS? STOP YOUR WAR:

Operation Overload: The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945 by Jorg Friedrich, translated by Allison Brown and Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden by Marshall De Bruhl (Paul Johnson, 12/12/2006, American Spectator)

After the war, when Churchill was replaced by Clem Attlee and his Labour government, uneasiness about the bombing grew, and was expressed in a characteristically English way. Attlee and Labour had been in the wartime coalition and endorsed the bombing policy, so they could not repudiate it openly. But Harris was left out of the victory honors list. Leaders of comparable seniority in all three services received peerages but Harris was denied one. He, and the survivors of Bomber Command, bitterly resented this cowardly snub.

Jorg Friedrich tells the story from the viewpoint of the bombed with, it seems to me, great skill and objectivity, and with many gruesome details. Some of the photos are horrifying, particularly one of the massed corpses of the Dresden raid piled on iron gratings for incineration. Yet the numbers killed were, bearing in mind the huge bomb weights and the firestorms raised, surprisingly few. German morale held up well, despite the failure of Hitler's rockets offensive, which Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry hailed as "retribution." There were some incidents in which angry mobs of civilians attacked Allied prisoners of war believed to be bomber-crews. Friedrich says over a hundred Allied pilots were lynched in the last years of the war, sometimes with the connivance of the Nazi authorities. Only a tiny number of top Nazis were killed by bombing. One exception was Roland Friesler, the vicious and hysterical judge who presided over the trials of those involved in the July 1944 anti-Hitler plot. He was buried in the rubble of his own courtroom. Our wartime experience suggests bombing is not a successful way of eliminating individual enemy leaders.

It has also been frequently cited as proof that bombing is not a war-winning strategy in general. But the evidence of both these books is more nuancee. And certainly Harris himself to his dying day believed he and his men had made a decisive contribution to victory. He was a curious and rasping figure about whom many tales were told. He drove to his headquarters at High Wycombe every day in a huge Packard (then a very uncommon car in the UK), often at high speed. On one occasion he was stopped by a country policeman, who gave him a rustic lecture on the risks of speeding. "Why, Sir, one day if you're not careful, you might even kill someone." "Young man," said the "Bomber," "every night I kill thousands."

We're democrats, we target the people, not the "leaders."

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 11, 2006 11:54 PM