To the Editor:

In “Fire from the Sky” [July-August], Algis Valiunas offers a moral defense of the Allied air campaign in World War II—a presumptuous task, given the annihilation of civilian populations that was wrought by mass-destruction bombing. And in presenting the arguments of the opposing side, including the case I make in my book, Among the Dead Cities, he leaves out all nuance and qualification.

Thus, from Mr. Valiunas’s remarks about my book one would not gather that I say that the Allied effort in World War II was a just one, that the greatest crime the Allies could have committed was to lose the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and that the difficult and poignant question, therefore, is whether in the prosecution of that war Allied actions were universally blameless.

The weight of the evidence about what was planned and done—namely, indiscriminate saturation-bombing of civilian populations—suggests that the Allies were indeed far from blameless. (The commanders knew it, too, as we can see from the long and anxious debate about bombing that waxed for decades before the war began.) The fact that the Nazis and the Japanese did far worse things does not make a bad thing done by the Allies good. It reflects a kind of moral immaturity not to accept this.

Contrary to what Mr. Valiunas implies, I do not argue that Allied air crews should have disobeyed orders. (And yet he and I would doubtless praise an SS trooper who disobeyed orders to gun down civilians at the edge of a mass grave.) What I say is that in an ideal world, which the war situation was anything but, airmen might have been offered the choice of bombing civilians or bombing industrial and military targets of real strategic importance, and that in such a case they should have chosen the latter.

Indeed, had the money and technological resources that went into the Royal Air Force’s area-bombing campaign been focused on the Nazis’ long-range submarine patrols or energy supplies, the war would have ended sooner than it did. This is now uncontroversial. Many victims of the Nazis might have been spared, and the stain of the Allies’ slaughter of civilians might have been avoided.

We rightly denigrate the Nazi and Japanese regimes for murdering civilians en masse, but some wish to hide under the cloak of supposed “necessity” and the license of “just cause” for the same thing done by the Allies. Even more pusillanimously, some play the numbers game, trotting out the fact that the Allies’ victims were far fewer.

Mr. Valiunas takes me to task for suggesting that “the war aims of the Allies then were morally congruent with those of al Qaeda now,” but I was very careful to say that in one respect and one only—namely, the effort to weaken a nation’s will by killing as many of its people as possible—is there a similarity between the September 11 attacks and area-bombing (whoever carries it out).

What is the difference, in the end, between putting a pistol to the heads of a woman and her child and dropping a bomb on them? Mere distance.

A.C. Grayling
University of London
London England

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To the Editor:

Algis Valiunas makes many valuable observations as he surveys recent books, including my own Choices Under Fire, on the Allies’ aerial-bombing campaign in World War II. But I would like to take issue with one of his points, which is summed up near his conclusion: “The Allies went as far as they had to with the means at their disposal.”

I wish Mr. Valiunas had responded more substantively to my own detailed arguments to the contrary. Presumably he would agree that, even in advancing so clearly a righteous cause as the Allied military effort in World War II, some deeds would be morally questionable or downright wrong. Would it be acceptable to kill 10,000 enemy civilians in order to save the life of one Allied soldier? A million? Clearly, there comes a point at which the cost in human lives vastly exceeds the military benefit gained by a specific operation.

It would be a mistake to issue a blanket condemnation of Allied bombing tactics, just as it would be a mistake to condone them indiscriminately. Historians like Richard Overy have shown that the bombing campaign played a crucial role in securing ultimate victory; equally accomplished historians like John Keegan have given us reason to question some bombing practices, both on moral and practical grounds. It seems possible, for example, that a more restrained campaign, focused primarily on transportation infrastructure, fuel production, and strictly military targets like air bases, might have secured an Allied victory sooner than did the plastering of enemy cities with firebombs.

Some cities did harbor major military assets, and therefore constituted legitimate targets for sustained attack. The ball-bearing plants in Schweinfurt, Germany, for example, constituted crucial nodal points in German military production, a fact that justified the 600 civilian deaths brought about by American raids there. But with respect to the majority of the bombed cities, calculating the balance between the value of military targets and the value of civilian lives was a much more dicey affair. In the cases of Dresden and Tokyo, the balance was overwhelming: both cities constituted targets of mediocre military value. Allied planners knew that bombarding them would kill an astronomically high number of civilians while offering little hope of forcing the enemy to surrender. These kinds of attacks were atrocities, terrible mistakes made by nations fighting a noble cause.

The decisive argument, for me, has to do with timing. In the war’s early years, Allied bombers were going in against long odds, using technologies that rendered precision-bombing almost impossible. But as the war went on, the Allies steadily moved toward ever greater technological mastery and air superiority in the skies over Europe and Japan. Under such circumstances, the Anglo-Americans could have chosen a policy of restrained, carefully focused attacks that aimed primarily at fuel, transport, and military targets. But the record shows the exact opposite. The airborne slaughter of enemy civilians by the Allies reached its climax in the last twelve months of the war.

Mr. Valiunas concludes his article by drawing lessons from World War II for today’s conflict with Muslim extremists. The lesson I draw is the following: it is a terrible mistake to stoop to the level of your enemies, if there is any way you can possibly avoid it. The vicious disregard for human life exhibited by al Qaeda does not oblige us to adopt a symmetrical policy of brutality and immorality. Today, as in World War II, an intelligent policy of effective self-defense need not be divorced from a humane values and basic decency. Otherwise, in the effort to save our necks, we run the risk of losing our souls.

Michael Bess
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee

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To the Editor:

As a son of Würzburg, one of the German cities destroyed by Allied bombers during World War II, I have long been preoccupied with the questions Algis Valiunas takes up in his article. Although, born in 1972, I have only second-hand knowledge of old Würzburg, the appearance of the new city is a permanent reminder of what happened in 1945. In any case, I hope the unease I felt about some of Mr. Valiunas’s arguments is more than just a gut feeling.

I am convinced, in the first place, that the Allies’ own rationale for the bombings, the lowering of German morale, was not borne out in practice. Many historians hold that the bombings braced the sturdiness of the Germans in “defending” their country. This seems to be confirmed by the way the Nazis exploited “Allied atrocities” for propaganda purposes. The brutality of the attacks certainly made it harder for dissenters to resist the Nazi line. Mr. Valiunas disregards this crucial issue.

The moral equivalence that Mr. Valiunas detects in the comparison drawn by Jörg Friedrich (in his The Fire) between the Allied bombardment and the Holocaust is indeed troubling. I have witnessed similar perversions myself. At last year’s official commemoration of the destruction of my hometown, Paul Celan’s Holocaust poem “Die Todes-fuge” (“Death Fugue”) was read. Even though the desire to be united in mourning with the victims of the Holocaust may be understandable, Germans must acknowledge that the destruction of Germany was, in the final analysis, a consequence of German aggression. I should note here that the German edition of Friedrich’s book was criticized in the German press on precisely such grounds.

Still, moral clarity demands that evil on both sides be called by its name. The bombing of my hometown, which had neither military infrastructure nor heavy industry and was (apart from wounded soldiers) almost devoid of grown-up men in the spring of 1945, remains unjustifiable. Contrary to Mr. Valiunas, no necessities “compelled” the Allies to destroy it. By clouding the issue with talk of “tragic dilemmas,” “righteous fury,” and men “caught in a tragic vise,” he betrays a touch of moral haziness and relativism of his own.

Pascal Fischer
University of Würzburg
Würzburg, Germany

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To the Editor:

Algis Valiunas’s extended review of four new books on the air war against Germany in World War II passes over Frederick Taylor’s 2004 book Dresden. That book contains a crucial piece of evidence disputing Mr. Valiunas’s view that the Allied bombing of Dresden was justified.

Although, by 1945, Winston Churchill had belatedly denounced terror bombing and “wanton destruction,” British Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris insisted that Dresden should be bombed on account of its munitions works and “key transportation points.” Three great railway routes met there, it was correctly pointed out.

But Taylor reproduces Bomber Command’s map of the “13th/14th February 1945 Dresden Primary Target,” and it shows that the raid was to be concentrated on Dresden’s population center, the historic Altstadt and its outskirts. In the event, not a single stray bomb fell on the nearby railroad freight yard to which Harris had referred. Similarly, when the Royal Air Force bombed the wine city of Heilbronn, it sent 282 Lancaster bombers, but only 27 of them targeted the railroad freight yard of that town. Ninety percent of the force was (successfully) directed at the population center, killing 7,000 civilians.

As an aside, Mr. Valiunas neglects to note that Harris’s remark about German cities not being “worth the bones of one British grenadier” was no doubt an allusion of sorts to Otto von Bismarck’s remark that the Balkans were not “worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier.”

Gunther Greulich
Lynnfield, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

I read with great interest Algis Valiunas’s extremely fair-minded article on recent books in the long procession of studies about aerial bombing during World War II. It seems to me that only one—Marshall De Bruhl’s Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden—amounts to a proper piece of military history. Not that I agree with all of his arguments (though I have to agree with most of the facts he presents, since a great many of them were presented several years ago in my own book, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945). But his conclusions are grounded in the military and technological realities of the war, and are more interesting and sound than those of the other writers.

I have debated A.C. Grayling, author of Among the Dead Cities, in public forums. He is a profoundly decent (and extraordinarily intelligent) philosopher who, though he tries to deal fairly with the historical material, cannot help being guided by essentially ahistorical criteria, chief among them an underlying conviction that killing human beings, even in war, is mostly wrong and even criminal. His arguments are answerable, and Mr. Valiunas does a fine job answering them.

Jörg Friedrich, author of The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945, is another matter. (I have debated him, too.) His method is to annihilate perceived opponents, present or historical, by all means available. Thus the bizarre and rather creepy linguistic excesses documented by Mr. Valiunas—comparing Allied bomber crews to SS Einsatzgruppen, air-raid shelters to gas chambers, and so on. Friedrich is all black and white, with no shades of gray. If the Allies killed many German civilians, this can only be because that was their wicked intent all along. The same goes for the destruction of German art treasures, landmarks, and libraries—a clear case of premeditated cultural genocide. And the Allied air campaign was in any case a complete waste of time and resources. Such distortions mar what would otherwise be a stimulating and original account of the war.

As for Dresden, of course it could and arguably should have been spared. Who would not wish for the ability to travel back in time to the meetings of Allied commanders in 1945 to argue on behalf of the city, its people, and its unique and irreplaceable wonders? All fine and good, but that is not history. History means trying to understand what happened, when it happened. What is required is a detached analysis of the times, the forces involved, the feelings and calculations of those responsible for decisions and their execution, and the larger imperatives that conditioned the military means used. With the Allied air campaign as with most subjects, one will not always arrive at conclusions that please the moralists or the self-satisfied patriots.

Frederick Taylor
Cornwall, England

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To the Editor:

There is one factor about the Allied air campaign that Algis Valiunas does not consider. Especially in the early years of the war, when invading the continent was not yet feasible, bombing represented the most effective means of attacking Germany. And in response to the Allies’ growing mastery of the skies, Germany, for its part, had to devote much treasure and resources toward building defensive aircraft and anti-aircraft munitions. This became a huge drain on the German war economy.

Lawrence Briskin
Centerville, Ohio

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To the Editor:

Having been in Europe during World War II and witnessed the Nazis’ malevolence firsthand, I have little patience for the fastidious moralism exhibited by the critics of the Allies’ conduct of the war whose work Algis Valiunas surveys. If these critics had begun their studies with the Nazis’ deliberate and unprovoked devastation of Rotterdam, Belgrade, Warsaw, London, and Coventry, I wonder if they could as easily censure those who fought to stop the force responsible.

Eugene Feldman
Lewistown, Pennsylvania

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To the Editor:

Algis Valiunas’s fine article is a grim reminder of the locations under Nazi control that were not bombed but should have been. Why was there no “fire from the sky” rained on Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the other slaughterhouses, and the railroad hubs and poison-gas factories that served them? Not a new question, but one for which a satisfactory answer has yet to be found.

Harry I. Greenfield
Wheaton, Maryland

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Algis Valiunas writes:

A.C. Grayling accuses me of plowing heedlessly through the careful nuance and scruple of his argument; but if there are nuance and scruple, they are concealed behind bluster. There is no nuance to Mr. Grayling’s statement in his book: “To say that the principle underlying 9/11, Hamburg, and Hiroshima is the same is to say that the same moral judgment applies to all three.” Moral judgments have to do with ends and means. If the same moral judgment applies to 9/11 and Hamburg, then either the ends must be congruent, or the means must be so foul that distinctions between the ends are insignificant—which amounts to a judgment of moral equivalence between the Allies in World War II and al Qaeda today.

Mr. Grayling does indeed say precisely and forcefully in his book that Allied aircrews should have disobeyed orders. Thus, after declaring that area bombing was unnecessary, disproportionate, inhumane, immoral, and very wrong, he writes: “And now there come some very hard questions for us to ask ourselves about our airmen—our own kinsmen. Should airmen have refused to carry out area-bombing raids? Yes.” Only after making this categorical judgment that appears to deal with the world as it is does Mr. Grayling retreat into the fantasy of “the hypothetical ideal world which does not exist and certainly not in wartime.”

What possible significance, then, does this hypothetical ideal have in the discussion of actual moral choice in time of war? Mr. Grayling is either a very astute writer who wants the full rhetorical benefit of having it both ways—the thrill of the bold and sweeping denunciation of Allied wickedness, and the shrewd hedging that the hypothetical ideal provides—or a very poor writer who muddles his argument thoroughly. I am not sure which is worse.

Mr. Grayling also declares that I fecklessly attempt to “make a bad thing done by the Allies good.” I never say that the bombing was good. I say it was a tragic eventuality of war. War is an ineradicable feature of the human condition and of the human propensity for evil, and it is sometimes a moral necessity for decent nations to resort to it. Whether moral philosophers protest or not, the peacetime rules do not apply in time of war: the “long and anxious debate” about the decency of bombing civilians was abruptly ended when war actually broke out and the Nazis devastated Warsaw from the air.

Vengeance is only too natural a response to profound injury, and even ordinarily good men will return evil for evil under sufficient provocation. As Arthur Harris remarked while watching the East End of London burn during the worst night of the Blitz, “They are sowing the wind.” And as Thomas Mann, generally considered a more civilized type than Bomber Harris, remarked, entreating his German countrymen to consider the fate of his bombed-out hometown of Lübeck: “I think of Coventry, and have no objection to the lesson that everything must be paid for. Did Germany believe that she would never have to pay for the atrocities that her leap into barbarism seemed to allow?”

Michael Bess subjects the case for area-bombing to a reductio ad absurdum. One admits that no statesman or general would be willing to kill a million enemy civilians to spare the life of a single Allied soldier. But such an absurd moral calculation has nothing to do with the genuine and painful reckonings of prudence that marked Allied conduct during the war, of which one can only say: these means for these ends may be terrible but are acceptable.

What does World War II teach us about our current circumstances? Mr. Bess and I evidently come to different conclusions. In his history of that war, Winston Churchill refers again and again to the Allies’ failed hope—first of preserving the peace by looking the other way while Germany rearmed, then of stopping Germany in the war’s early going—until the golden word “hope” clinks like tin. Machiavelli had taught that hope may be a Christian virtue but it is not a political one, and the Allies learned this lesson in the most painful fashion.

To hope that militant Islam, demonstrably vicious and mad, will not use the atomic bomb once it possesses it is an offense against prudence with potentially world-shattering consequences. The “humane values and basic decency” professed by Mr. Bess demand that the Iranian regime never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. President Ahmadinejad’s fevered call for the destruction of Israel is his Mein Kampf, and must be taken seriously, as Hitler’s insane animadversions were not until it was too late. If Iran or one of its terrorist proxies launches a nuclear strike against Israel or the United States, it will inevitably be answered in kind, and likely with desolating overkill.

That is the chain of evil—truly a risk to our necks and our souls—that is to be avoided by measures that would seem drastic in ordinary circumstances. There was a time when Hitler could have been stopped, and the Holocaust, and Hamburg, and Dresden, been avoided. This is the time for stopping Iran before its atomic dreams become the world’s nightmare.

In my own small way, I share Pascal Fischer’s sorrow for the fate of Würzburg. My father, his mother, and his two brothers, refugees from the Red Army and the Stalinist terror that had overrun their native Lithuania, were living in Würzburg when the firestorm ravaged the city. My father used to say that they were hiding in the cracks in the war, and the British bombed even the cracks. My uncle Vytas nearly died in the bombing; of the 200 people in his air-raid shelter, he was one of seven who survived the night.

My uncle is a brave man —he did time in a Nazi prison for resistance activities during the German occupation of Lithuania, and in the 1950’s he was a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency spy in Berlin—but the night of the firestorm turned a patch of his hair permanently white. He hates the British, whom he considers barbarians, to this day. I do not know how Mr. Fischer overlooked the lament in my essay for the destruction of Würzburg, and of other cities “that could not by any stretch be construed as of military importance.” There were strategic reasons for bombing Hamburg and Dresden; there was none for Würzburg. War, to repeat, makes even decent men and nations complicit to one degree or another in evil. As for righteous fury and the tragic vise, I refer Mr. Fischer to the Thomas Mann quotation above.

I do not know where Gunther Greulich gets his information about an undamaged railroad freight yard, to which Bomber Harris never actually referred in the first place. Here is what Frederick Taylor writes about the damage to the Dresden railway operation on February 15, 1945:

That same day, [General Erich] Hampe’s repair gangs—mainly Allied prisoners of war, augmented with some forced laborers—began working ’round the clock on replacing track. The general had to bring in his own equipment and communications, since the administrative apparatus of the railways in Dresden was almost completely destroyed. The vital north-south line connecting the Neustadt station and Hauptbanhof via the railway bridge was completely wrecked. The Neustadt goods yards were all but destroyed, and the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards were very badly hit. Eight hundred coaches and wagons had burned out as a result of the RAF raids alone. The American air raid on February 14 knocked out the Friedrichstadt passenger station completely, and demolished another forty-five tracks in the Friedrichstadt marshaling yard. To an inexpert eye, the damage must have seemed irreparable.

I am grateful to Frederick Taylor for his generous words about my essay, and even more grateful for his excellent book on Dresden, which I have just finished reading. It is the best book I know about the air war in Europe, and I am sorry I was not aware of it when writing my piece.

I agree with Lawrence Briskin, and thank him for his suggestion. I also agree with Eugene Feldman, and so would Thomas Mann. With Harry I. Greenfield I can only grieve.