Communication

Communication To the editor: Stephen A. Garrett’s Ethics and Air Power in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities (reviewed in Technology and Culture 40 [1999]: 448–50) addresses legal and ethical issues that have been sharpened by twentieth-century technology. The aerial bombardment of population centers has come in for criticism, ranging from Garrett’s moderate animadversions to accusations of war crimes, on the grounds that it often violates the principle of the international laws of war that obligates combatants to make an effort not to injure noncombatants. The “strategic” bombing of German cities by Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command in World War II has kindled sharp differences of opinion over the legality and morality of attacking the residential districts of German cities with the object of undermining the German people’s support of the war. If that was in fact an object of the attacks it was a clear violation of the laws of war, and the animosity it provoked among some critics after the war is reflected in the sobriquet they bestowed on Arthur Harris, chief of Bomber Command: “Butcher Harris.” Defenders of the strategic bombing policy have argued that the aiming points were generally military targets and, in any event, the campaign was retaliation for the bombing of British cities. Daniel T. Kuehl, in his review of Garrett’s book, takes him to task for his criticism of the strategic bombing program and characterizes him as a “moralist.” Kuehl states that after D day “it was imperative to win the war as quickly as possible,” and that “if the cost of that victory was the destruction of German cities and the deaths of German civilians, so be it.” That may be the argument of a “realist” in the heat of battle, but it cannot properly be the judgment of a historian weighing the complex issues raised by the introduction of military aviation on a large scale. If the imperative to win the war quickly in order to save “a generation of British manhood” justifies the deliberate slaughter of civilians, the fundamental principle of international law that draws a distinction between soldiers and civilians would be nullified. Given the nature of the Nazi menace it might be possible to rationalize the “strategic” bombing of cities, but that would require a reasoned argument weighing practical, legal, and ethical issues. Kuehl offers only the unapologetic opinion that the war against Nazi Germany justified [End Page 187] a suspension of the rules—“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.” This is disturbingly reminiscent of Hitler’s notorious order to his officers before the attack on the Soviet Union: “The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies” (quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich [New York, 1960], 830). Such arguments are merely pragmatic, and they have no legal or ethical value. Kuehl then employs a variation of the tu quoque principle (“others did it too”), which is generally disallowed by courts and tribunals and which some Nazi defendants in their war crimes trials attempted (unsuccessfully) to use. On the grounds that many civilians were also killed in other wartime actions Kuehl rejects the criticism of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—“who mourns the equal number of civilians ground to a pulp between the attacking and defending forces on Okinawa just a few months earlier?” This argument fails not only because it rests on tu quoque but also because it neglects to account for intention. Civilian deaths in wartime are often the unintended consequences of legitimate combat (as they presumably were on Okinawa). But with regard to British and American strategic bombing in World War II there is ongoing debate whether in some attacks (including specifically Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki) the civilian populations were deliberately targeted. The question

Criticism · German · Object (grammar) · Political science · Power (physics) · Principle of legality · Sociology · Strategic bombing · World War II · History · Law · Military and Defense Studies · Philosophy · War, Ethics, and Justification