The problem with this argument is that there is no clear place to draw the line. Can we also justify the killing of actors and musicians, since they contribute so much to the country’s morale? And what about doctors and nurses, who heal soldiers’ wounds so that they can go back to the battlefield? As I mentioned in chapter 7 some theorists even go so far as to say that women and children are a legitimate target. German soldiers believed they were fighting for their families, so by killing their wives and children one took away their incentive to fight. Under this kind of logic the Second World War was no longer a just and honourable struggle against an evil regime, but a war of annihilation.

The only thing that saves this policy from the charge of total immorality is that it was born from the best of intentions. Those who advocated bombing civilians sincerely believed they were trying to save lives rather than take them. Men like Harris, who had witnessed the terrible bloodbath of the First World War, saw bombing as the only way to spare British soldiers from total carnage. Fifty-five thousand RAF men and 26,000 USAAF men died during the course of the bombing war – a huge total, but only a tiny fraction of the number who suffered in the First World War trenches. ⁶While the Russian Army was paying the butcher’s bill on the Eastern Front, the Allied air forces were able to keep them on side by paying a far smaller share until the Allied armies were strong enough to launch a successful cross-Channel invasion.

Also, the theory went, it was not only Allied lives that would be spared. The British Air Ministry was convinced that bombing would save German lives, too, because it would shorten the war – in fact, after the destruction of Hamburg many in the government believed the war would be over before the end of 1943. Had the RAF achieved that, millions of people on both sides would have been saved.

This line of thinking must have seemed incredibly seductive at the time. But it is its very seductiveness that makes it so disturbing. The British were so caught up in the bomber dream that nobody seems to have considered what would happen if the policy did not work. In the search for the elusive knock-out blow the Allies launched attacks on civilian targets for several years. Before Hamburg they had bombed Lübeck, Rostock and Cologne. After Hamburg they bombed Mannheim, Kassel, Hanover, Munich, Berlin – the list of destroyed cities goes on and on. By May 1945 they had killed somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 German civilians, most of whom had only tenuous links to the war. ⁷The knock-out blow – the final strike that would end the war and so save lives – was never achieved.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this policy is that it removed all the traditional distinctions between combatants and civilians. There has to be some line over which military men will not cross, even if it is an arbitrary one. The problem with the Allied air strategy during the Second World War was that it removed the line without even attempting to draw a new one. The failure to do so opens the door to the nightmare of unlimited warfare, where anything is allowed provided it gets the job done – war without rules, without principles, without conscience. I hesitate to make the comparison with the amorality that led to the Holocaust, as several historians before me have done, because that would be going too far. But, ethically speaking at least, we are only a few steps away.

* * *

It would be reassuring to report that the British people of the time at least considered these issues before they lent their support to the bomber war, but this was by no means the case. Few people ever spoke out against the bombing of German cities like Hamburg. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, was one, as was the Labour politician Richard Stokes – but their speeches in Parliament were largely dismissed by the British press as unpatriotic. Basil Liddell Hart was another who objected: after writing enthusiastically about the theory of bombing he was much less enamoured with bombing in practice. As early as 1942 he claimed that it would be ironic if the so-called defenders of civilization could only defeat Hitler by depending on ‘the most barbaric, and unskilled, way of winning a war that the modern world has seen’. ⁸

Beyond those lone voices, however, the atmosphere was less one of regretful determination than of pure triumph, with ever-increasing superlatives emblazoned across the front pages of all the newspapers. The men who flew the bombers were regarded as heroes: several British and American airmen have told me that they would often spend a night in a pub without ever having to buy a drink for themselves. Those who were recruited for morale-raising tours round British factories were treated like celebrities, and their descriptions of the huge fires created by Allied bombs were always greeted with enthusiastic cheers. ⁹

By the end of the war, however, things had begun to change. Britain was already turning its back on the deeds of Bomber Command. After six long years of conflict the appetite for German blood was no longer what it had been in 1943, and nobody wanted to be associated with a policy that had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. One by one, politicians, planners and even the Prime Minister distanced themselves from the decisions that had led to the ‘blanket bombing’ of German cities. The only senior figure who openly accepted responsibility for the policy was Sir Arthur Harris, who had always been its outspoken champion. At the end of the war he became something of a pariah, and there are numerous examples of how the political establishment tried to distance themselves from him. ¹⁰Rightly or wrongly, his reputation remains severely tarnished to this day – as the defacing of his statue makes clear.

In the USA the tide was also turning. The American people had always opposed the wholesale bombing of cities, so their reaction to the supposedly indiscriminate bombing of Dresden in February 1945 was of outrage. Across the country front-page reports appeared claiming that American airmen were engaged in the ‘deliberate terror bombing of great German population centres as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom’. ¹¹The people, and the media, were not pacified until General Arnold stepped forward to insist that the USAAF had not departed from its strict policy of bombing only military targets. Unlike in Britain, this assertion was generally accepted, and the idea that American involvement in bombing Germany had been anything less than exemplary did not really resurface until the 1960s. ¹²Even today, Americans tend to reserve their distaste either for the way the British conducted the air war, or for how they themselves acted in the subjugation of Japan.

As popular revulsion for bombing has grown, the men who flew the planes and dropped the bombs have gradually become the scapegoats for our communal sense of shame. And since it was the British whose bombing was apparently more indiscriminate, it is the RAF who have received most of the blame. Almost every British veteran I interviewed for this book expressed indignation over the way the world has come to judge their actions since 1945. Indeed, I have often found it difficult to secure interviews with them in the first place, because many were worried by my intentions. They assumed that my wish to show the German side of the story meant that I was likely to do what countless people have done: that is, to blame them personallyfor the suffering that British bombs caused ordinary Germans. In short, they were worried that I would treat them in the same way as the protesters treated them at the unveiling of Harris’s statue.

This is one of the saddest legacies of the bomber war. While I admit that I have a small measure of sympathy for someof the beliefs held by those protesters, I deplore their abuse of Bomber Command veterans. If it is wrong to punish German civilians for the sins of their political leaders, then it is equally wrong to attack British airmen for the planning decisions of their superiors. British bomber crews were almost always told at briefing that they were attacking military or industrial targets. They were motivated by a sincere desire to help their country, and to rid the world of a profoundly evil regime. Whatever we think of the way the bomber war was conducted, those men, who faced death daily, and witnessed the deaths of countless friends and comrades, deserve our utmost respect.