Ethics and Airpower in World War II

Reviewed by: Ethics and Air Power in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities* Daniel T. Kuehl (bio) Ethics and Air Power in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities. By Stephen A. Garrett. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Pp. xvi+256; notes, bibliography, index. $18.95. There would probably be little disagreement among historians that the most controversial and debated aspect of World War II was strategic bombing: whether it “worked,” whether it was worth the effort, and whether it was morally justified. This last question is the focus of Stephen A. Garrett’s book Ethics and Airpower in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities. Garrett is a policy analyst at the Monterey Institute of International Studies whose background is more focused on international relations than military history. He has chosen to examine only one-half of the great experiment in strategic bombardment carried out by the British and Americans against Germany, although the half he examines—the Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command’s effort fatally to weaken Germany’s ability to wage war by breaking the will of the German industrial workforce—is unquestionably the one that has come in for the greatest moral scrutiny. Garrett’s position on the morality of this campaign is quite clear, and his thesis is that after the Normandy invasion, RAF Bomber Command’s area bombing campaign “was quite without ethical justification” (p. 183). The photo on the book’s cover, looking down over destroyed Dresden, provides a nonverbal hint of Garrett’s viewpoint. Garrett’s approach to this study is an interesting and useful one. After providing some background and context on the overall topic of the American [End Page 448] and British strategic bombing campaigns against Germany, the major part of the book is divided into two main sections. The first examines the general and collective responses of three important British groups toward the RAF’s area bombing campaign: the political leadership, the RAF and operational military, and the British public—in turn the “masters,” “servants,” and “subjects” of the realm. In the second major section he provides an evaluation of the area bombing campaign’s effectiveness and ethics, concluding that it failed in both. The first of these sections is more innovative than the second, although there is useful information in both. There is relatively widespread agreement among airpower historians that the area bombing campaign was not effective, but no such consensus exists regarding its morality. Opinions range from one extreme to the other, and Garrett’s position, while certainly more moderate than some, does argue that the RAF’s effort to crush German morale by its systematic “dehousing” of German workers not only violated British prewar political policy and airpower doctrine but also violated basic ethical standards of warmaking. Explaining British air strategy involves both the specific details of World War II and the general nature of modern industrial-age warfare. By the time Bomber Command’s aerial offensive was well underway, the war was more than three years old. Not only did the British need a means to strike at Germany, the Germans’ own bomber offensive in 1940–41 had already opened the floodgates to widespread attacks on British urban areas, providing, for many, sufficient moral justification for meting out all the punishment and retribution possible. Although Garrett explicitly asserts that the area campaign was unjustified after D day, that was precisely the moment when the British fear of heavy and unsustainable casualties was peaking. Once the British army was directly engaged with the German army in Western Europe, it was imperative to win the war as quickly as possible, or risk the loss of another generation of British manhood, as in World War I. If the cost of that victory was the destruction of German cities and the deaths of German civilians, so be it: they started it, after all. Equally important, in this reviewer’s opinion, was the very nature of state-versus-state warfare at the peak of the industrial age and waged between adversaries whose ideologies and war aims necessitated a fight to the death. Garrett and the other moralists who single out

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