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He quoted the remark of General John Burgoyne after accepting defeat in the American War of Independence: ‘I expect ministerial ingratitude will be displayed, as in all countries and at all times has been usual, to remove the blame from the order to its execution.’ Harris added, ‘In my experience, I doubt he ever spoke a truer word.’ He had a point. Harris was a formidable commander, if an unlovable human being, who developed a personal obsession with destroying Germany’s cities, and displayed the spirit of an ancient Roman in fulfilling this end: Delenda est Carthago. But if his superiors dissented from his conduct of Britain’s bomber forces, it was their duty to sack him. As it was, Churchill and the chiefs of staff permitted Harris to pursue to the blazing end the policy they themselves had mandated back in 1942; he was the enforcer of area bombing, not its architect.

It is unjust that fighter pilots of all nations today retain a popular adulation often denied to bomber aircrew. Moral strictures upon strategic air attack should properly be deployed against those who instigated it. The killing of civilians must always be deplored, but Nazi Germany represented a historic evil. Until the last day of the war, Hitler’s people inflicted appalling sufferings upon the innocent. The destruction of their cities and the deaths of significant numbers of their inhabitants seems a price they had to pay for the horrors they unleashed upon Western civilisation, and represents a far lighter toll than Germany imposed upon the rest of Europe.

Victims

1 MASTERS AND SLAVES

Almost every citizen of the nations that participated in the war suffered consequences, but in widely varying degree. Historians describe events chiefly in terms of clashes of arms, which of course determined outcomes. But the conflict should also be understood as a human experience which changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people, many of whom never saw a battlefield. Fear of injury or death created the most obvious apprehension, especially in the new age of air bombardment. But beyond this, there were many other causes of distress: about food and health; the absence of loved ones; the dissolution of communities. There were simple sorrows, such as being unable to give presents to loved ones. ‘Eva’s birthday,’ Victor Klemperer, a Jew rendered destitute by Nazi confiscation of all that he owned, wrote of his wife in Dresden on 12 July 1944. ‘My hands quite empty again, not even a flower.’ Nor was it necessary to be subject to Axis hegemony to suffer grievously: Stalin deported eastwards vast numbers of Soviet citizens from minorities whose loyalties he deemed suspect, notably Chechens and Crimean Tatars, some 3.5 million in all. An unquantified but large proportion of these people died in consequence, some from typhus which broke out during their transportation. Their sufferings, unlike those of Hitler’s victims, are scarcely recorded, but it is known that four Heroes of the Soviet Union were among the deportees; Beria’s purges spurned discrimination.

Among other victims of the Soviets were 1.5 million Poles deported to Siberian exile or the gulag in 1940–41, in furtherance of Stalinist ethnic cleansing policies; at least 350,000 perished of starvation or disease, and a further 30,000 were executed. Edward Matyka, a twenty-one-year-old soldier, naïvely supposed that the Russians would not impede his escape to Romania from the German-occupied region of Poland. But he was arrested by a Soviet patrol in January 1940, imprisoned, and awarded a sentence of five years’ hard labour for ‘illegal crossing of the border and attempts to carry out spying on behalf of the enemies of the Soviet Union’. In October, after weeks of travelling on prison barges, he and his comrades were required to march forty miles in bitter cold to reach their labour camp: ‘Four hundred shadows of men moved after one another slowly, with difficulty, making their