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the ‘excesses’ of Bomber Command. Since he normally would not have cared a hoot for the views of the Swiss press, the subject must have been weighing on him. On 30 November 1944 – incidentally his seventieth birthday – Churchill interrupted Portal’s report to criticize the bombing of Holland: ‘800-900 German [casualties] against 20,000 Dutch – awful thing to do that.’55 Back on 27 June 1943, watching a film of Germany being bombed with Richard Casey, the Australian representative in the War Cabinet, Churchill had ‘sat bolt upright and said to [Casey] “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” ’ It was probably meant rhetorically at that stage of the war, but he soon got the answer when Casey replied that ‘We hadn’t started it, and that it was us or them.’56

After D-Day further efforts were made by the Americans – with large numbers of B-24 bombers now joining the B-17s – to shift concentration towards attacking German synthetic-oil supplies. Harris opposed this too, yet by then the Luftwaffe was somehow surviving on 10,000 tons of high-octane fuel a month, when 160,000 had once been required.57 Harris won, and between October 1944 and the end of the war more than 40 per cent of the 344,000 tons of bombs dropped by the RAF on Germany hit cities rather than purely military targets, even though the Allies had complete aerial superiority and the RAF could bomb their targets in daylight once again. This led to a row between Portal and Harris, with Harris spiritedly protecting his policy. Portal now wanted Bomber Command to concentrate on oil and transportation targets, which Harris still considered mere ‘panacea targets’. Yet the debate was only ever about the efficacy of the bombing offensive, not its morality, over which neither man had any doubts. Nor did Portal feel strong enough simply to order Harris to alter his targets, in the face of his immensely popular lieutenant’s opposition. In the last years of the war, Bomber Command continued to be hugely enlarged. Despite losses, the thirty-three squadrons with which it had begun the war had expanded to ninety-five by its end. As usual Canada made a disproportionate contribution to the war effort: RCAF squadrons made up the entirety of No. 6 Bomber Group, for example, which comprised fourteen squadrons and in 1944 flew 25,353 operational sorties, dropping 86,503 tons of bombs and mines with the lowest loss percentages of four-engined aircraft in the whole of Bomber Command. In all, one in four members of Bomber Command came from the overseas dominions, of whom no fewer than 15,661 did not live to see their native Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa again.

From February 1945, German west-to-east troop movements were being disrupted at the Russians’ urgent request by the Western Allies bombing the nodal points of Germany’s transportation system, including Berlin, Chemnitz, Leipzig and Dresden. But it was to be the raid on Dresden ten nights later that was to cause the most furious controversy of the entire CBO, which lasts to this day. During the Yalta Conference of 4 to 11 February 1945, the Chiefs of Staff meetings were held at Stalin’s headquarters, the Yusupov Villa at Koreiz, 6 miles from the Livadia Palace at Yalta where FDR stayed and where the plenary sessions took place. The British delegation stayed in ‘the slightly odd Moorish–Scottish baronial style’ Vorontsov Villa Palace overlooking the Black Sea at Alupka, 12 miles from the Livadia Palace.58 Alan Brooke was chairing the Chiefs of Staff meeting at the Yusupov Villa the day after the opening session when the Russian Deputy Chief of Staff Alexei Antonov and the Soviet air marshal Sergei Khudyakov ‘pressed the subject of [bombing German] lines of communication and entrainment, specifically via Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden’. In the view of one of those present at Yalta, Hugh Lunghi, who translated for the British Chiefs of Staff during these meetings with the Russians, it was this urgent request ‘to stop Hitler transferring divisions from the west to reinforce his troops in Silesia, blocking the Russian