Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [296]
In war as in peace, there is unlikely to be much cause for pride in a policy about which it is deemed necessary to deceive one’s own people. The reputations of Churchill and Bomber Command alike were damaged by the exchanges of March–April 1945. The prime minister, who of all men should know, had put his signature to a document, albeit subsequently withdrawn, declaring Britain’s strategic air offensive to have been terroristic. He had then been privy to an administrative sleight of hand designed to suppress this admission of the truth.
Churchill’s writings, dating back to World War I, make plain that he thought air bombardment of civilians barbaric. In the early part of World War II, when Germany had already ravaged half the cities of Europe and Britain had no other plausible means of attacking Hitler’s Reich, he suppressed his instincts and endorsed the bomber offensive. That decision seems both inevitable and justifiable. It is a gross abuse of language to identify area bombing as a “war crime,” as do some modern critics. The policy was designed to hasten the defeat of Germany by destroying its industrial base, not wantonly to slaughter innocents. Yet it remains a blot on the Allied conduct of the war that city attacks were allowed to continue into 1945, when huge forces of aircraft employed sophisticated technology against negligible defences, and German industrial output could no longer much influence outcomes. Both the operational necessity to attack cities—because the RAF was capable of nothing else—and the strategic purpose of such operations were gone. Yet the assault was maintained because, until Churchill’s belated intervention, nobody thought to tell the air forces to stop, or rather to restrict themselves to residual military targets.
Here was a classic example of technological determinism. The weapons existed, and thus they continued to be used. The pity of Churchill’s March 28 memorandum, not least from the viewpoint of some 150,000 German civilians who perished under air attack in 1945, was that it had not been written several months earlier. Yet it is hard not to sympathise with the exhausted old prime minister, bearing the troubles of the world upon his shoulders, for being slow to act. The record of his conduct towards Hitler’s people shows an overarching instinct towards mercy, remarkable in the leader of a nation which had suffered so much at German hands since 1939. Churchill’s 1945 papers contain many charitable reflections and directions about the treatment of Germans. These should be set in the balance against the undoubted excesses of the bomber offensive, and his own responsibility for them.
In the last weeks of the European war, Churchill undertook two more battlefield joyrides. Much to his own satisfaction, he relieved himself in the Siegfried Line on March 3, with an aside to photographers: “This is one of the operations connected with this great war which must not be reproduced graphically.” He performed the same ceremony in the Rhine three weeks later, on a visit to watch Montgomery’s great river crossing with Alan Brooke. As he gazed down upon the vast panorama from a chair set out for him on a Xanten hilltop, he said: “I should have liked to have deployed my men in red coats on the plain down there and ordered them to charge.” Then he added, not without satisfaction: “But now my armies are too vast.” At the sound of aircraft, he sprang to his feet: “They’re coming! They’re coming!” He watched fascinated as the great armada passed overhead, thousands of multicoloured parachutes blossoming forth above the German riverbank. He was hurried unwillingly to the rear by