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wrote on 9 March 1945: “The planes are over Berlin every day, sometimes twice a day. The poor, poor people. How do they stand such suffering? Everyone is totally worn out.” A Berliner, Karl Deutmann, wrote of one USAAF attack: “We heard, behind the metre-thick walls of our bunker and for more than an hour, nothing but the awful rumbling and thunder of the carpet of falling bombs, with the lights flickering and sometimes almost going out … When we left the bunker the sun had disappeared, the sky darkened with clouds. Fed by numberless small and big fires, a vast sea of smoke hung over the whole of the inner city … In the Neuburgerstrasse … the girls’ trades school had been hit; hundreds of girls had been sheltering in the cellar. Later the parents were standing in front of the shattered bodies, mangled and stripped naked by blast, no longer able to recognise their own daughters.” In Hagen a diarist wrote on 15 March 1945: “Fear and panic rule among the public. There is no public building left in the town, no business, and hardly any street. Only mountains of rubble and debris. I am churned up to the depths of my being and cannot describe all the horror. The air is filled with an eerie hissing and roaring. I stand around with others, baffled and not knowing what to do.”

Only a limited number of British and American people gave much thought to the fate of Germany beneath air bombardment, partly because their governments persistently deceived them about the nature of the campaign: the reality of area bombing, the targeting of cities, was concealed beneath verbiage about industrial installations. The USAAF, doctrinally and morally committed to precision attack, never publicly admitted that its operations, and especially radar-guided blind bombing, inflicted almost as much injury upon civilian life and property as did the area attacks of the RAF. Moreover, it was asking much to invite the Allied peoples, who had themselves suffered so much from German aggression, to be overly troubled about German civilian casualties.

Some informed British people were more dismayed by the cost to architecture than to human beings: the aesthete and National Labour MP Harold Nicolson expressed shock at public indifference to the destruction of Europe’s cultural heritage. “It is a reproach to democratic education,” he wrote in the Spectator in February 1944, just a year before Dresden was bombed, “that the peoples of Britain and America should be either indifferent or actually hostile to these supreme expressions of human intelligence. It is a reflection upon our leaders that they have shown but a perfunctory awareness of their responsibilities. And it will be a source of distress to our grandchildren that we, who might have stood firm as the trustees of Europe’s heritage, should have turned our faces aside.”

Nicolson was correct in anticipating that future generations would recoil in dismay from the strategic bomber offensive, but he misjudged the nature of their revulsion: in the twenty-first century, it is the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians, more than the devastation of baroque palaces, that rouses strong emotions. More than a few Germans, and even some Anglo-American critics, see a moral equivalence between Nazi wickedness in massacring innocents, especially Jews, and Allied wickedness in burning cities. This seems mistaken. The bomber offensive was designed to achieve the defeat of the Axis and the liberation of Europe. The Nazis’ mass murders not only killed far more people, but lacked the justification of pursuing a strategic purpose. Instead, they were conducted solely to fulfil Nazi Germany’s ideological and racial objectives. Technological determinism was the decisive factor in the worst excesses of bombing, which took place in 1945 when the war was obviously approaching its conclusion: vast air forces existed, and thus they were employed. Years of conflict against a barbaric enemy had coarsened Allied sensibilities, shrunk humanitarian instincts. This is unremarkable.

When it was all over, the American and British airmen who