Armageddon - Max Hastings [227]
It is a tribute to the maintenance of democracy in Britain that such a statement could be made, and publicly debated, in the midst of a world war, even if after years of suffering at the hands of the Luftwaffe few among the bishop’s British audience were in a mood to heed him.
Most people believed that the German people deserved their fate. Yet it seems debatable whether Allied aircraft were appropriately employed in belatedly administering punishment to the German people, as distinct from inflicting strategic damage upon their capacity to continue the war. The bomber offensive may be perceived in four phases. From 1940 through 1942, it inflicted negligible damage upon the Germans, but represented a heroic earnest of British defiance. In 1943, the impact of intensified bombing was assuaged by increased industrial output, but air attack obliged the Nazis seriously to address the defence of the Reich. From the spring of 1944 onwards, the bomber offensive achieved a terrible maturity. It made mounting inroads on Germany’s industrial capacity, and brought the Luftwaffe to its knees. Richard Overy, among others, has justly highlighted the importance of bombing in forcing Hitler to devote huge resources—above all some 10,000 of his excellent 88mm guns—to the home defence of the Reich when these deadly weapons would otherwise have been deployed on the fighting fronts, to the detriment of the Allied armies. This drain on battlefield armaments would have been even greater had not Hitler professed an unconcern, even satisfaction, about the destruction inflicted by bombing: “[it] actually works in our favour, because it is creating a body of people with nothing to lose—people who will therefore fight on with utter fanaticism.”
Up to 1945, there seems little difficulty in justifying the bomber offensive militarily and morally, as a matter of both desirability and necessity. In all wars, combatants must pay a moral price for military actions, and painful choices must be accepted. Churchill agonized before D-Day about the inevitable deaths of thousands of French civilians if France’s rail links were bombed. He reluctantly concluded that the greater good—the success of the invasion—must be held paramount, and he was surely right. Few British or American people worried much about the fate of the people of Germany during the war years. Why indeed should they have done so? The Germans had brought unspeakable misery upon the world.
Yet in the early months of 1945 Bishop Bell’s remarks a year earlier attained a new relevance. By this last phase, the moral cost of killing German civilians in unprecedented numbers outweighed any possible strategic advantage. The wholesale destruction of some great cities, Dresden foremost among them, could have been averted, even if attacks on urban rail centres had continued. Ironically, and although the leaders of the USAAF never admitted this, Spaatz’s aircraft joined in many area attacks in the last weeks, because they ran out of identifiable precision targets. The performance of the strategic air forces at this period was a murderous, largely futile muddle. “I felt that again our efforts were rather disconnnected,” wrote Tedder, as Eisenhower’s deputy. “We were attacking more or less simultanously oil, cities, depots, marshalling yards, canals and factories. In this I could discern no comprehensive or economical use of our overwhelming air forces.” Churchill or Portal should have stopped Harris’s manic assault on Germany’s surviving cities. Neither did so, Churchill because he was preoccupied elsewhere, Portal