Inferno - Max Hastings [313]
Critics concluded that the Allies had paid an unacceptable moral price for a marginal strategic achievement. Sir Arthur Harris said: “It all boils down to the fact that everybody dislikes bombers because they drop things on them, and everybody loves the fighter because it shoots down the bomber.” He once wrote bitterly: “I have no intention … of going down to History as the author, or sole executant, of the Strategical plans to destroy the cities of Germany.” He himself, he asserted, “never had strategical control of the Bomber Offensive … only tactical control with which to implement the strategical directives … received.”
He quoted the remark of Gen. 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 aircrews. 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY
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