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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
The Bombs of World War II
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