The crimes of war
Sir: As a member of the post-war generation, it may be impertinent of me to ques tion the reaction of your readers to Geoffrey Wheatcroft's review of Max Hastings's book Bomber Command. (Letters, 6 October). Nevertheless, I am not sure if Mr Jones's and Mr Deverill's arguments are entirely correct, whatever their personal or emotional justification.
To say, tout court, as Mr Jones does, that the German people and the Nazi war machine were one and the same, is far from the truth. In 1933 the Germans could not know that they had got a regime that would lead them to war. By 1936 it was too late, as the Gestapo effectively had the means to terrorise at will. Certainly, the army could have tried harder for a putsch in 1938 or 1939. But by this time the German people could no more decide their country's policies than can the Russian people those of the Soviet Union today. The English, who have been lucky enough never to have a totalitarian state, do not understand how near-impossible it is to protest against this kind of tyranny once it has established itself. Max Hastings's book is not the first on the subject. In fact, 30 years ago F. J. P. Veale's Advance to Barbarism presented the same cogent arguments against area bombing. The men who were responsible for the destruction of Dresden — and the deaths of probably as many as 135,000 people in a single night — may well have honestly believed that this was an effective method of hastening the end of the war. They may even have been blinded enough to think that it was an act in defence of 'civilisation'. As Mr Jones says, the rightness of this decision is a different question.
But it is complete doublethink to say that it is not for us to reflect on the morality of it.
Why not? Didn't the Nazis say the same — that the historical situation justified any course of action, however brutal?
I realise that, unlike many of your readers, I did not personally experience Nazi aggression. But when I visited Dresden, I felt, like Alistair Home, (Spectator, 18 August) regret, and dare I say it, shame. Malcolm Spencer 35 Brunswick Place, Hove, Sussex Sir: I must comment on Mr Grist's letter (13 October). The bombing of German cities was not an act of vengeance but was regarded as the only feasible method of striking at Germany. As one who saw many of the larger cities in devastated Germany, including Berlin, and also had the opportun ity of discussing the war with many Germans, I have no doubt that the bombing offensive shortened the war. Indeed I won dered at the time how the Germans could possibly have produced any armaments at all in such a scene of chaos. In addition, as Albert Speer has pointed out, a large part of the German fighter force had to be deployed in the West as well as massive anti-aircraft artillery, when it was urgently needed in Russia.
It is alleged that the bombing was brutal. In fact it has been called a crime. We must be clear on this. All war is terrible but once a war has been embarked upon actions become a choice of evils. The greatest crime of all would have been not to have fought Germany with all our might. It was thought at the time that the shortening of the war through the bombing of German cities was justified to save the lives of fighting men everywhere and the lives of civilians in the occupied countries. In the event 20 million Russians died in the war, half of them civilians, as well as six million Jews and well over three million Poles. We must ask how many more would have been added to this melancholy total if we had not bombed Germany. People writing about the last war, and their number ever increases, often appear to regard the men who planned and fought the war almost as gods who should never have made any errors of judgment. PI course mistakes were made by the particip ants in the greatest drama in human history. It is important, however, that the criticisms should be well founded.
P. Hog garth 10 Falrholme Road Sutton, Surrey Sir: I am sure that you will be inundated with letters protesting against Geoffrey Wheatcroft's treatment of Harris and Bomber Command in his review of Max Hastings's book (29 September). May I present the views of someone who has long been a resident of the recipient country of Bomber Command's area bombing. Wheatcroft takes exception on moral grounds to the indiscriminate bombing .0I civilian targets in Germany; this does him credit. But his main contention is that area bombing was not effective in that it did not break the spirit of the enemy and enforce an early surrender. The effect of German bombs on Britain is often quoted: the stiffening of the resolve to fight. And this is where the difference lies. Until the bombing raids on Germany, the war had led to very little hardship for the German civilian population. On the whole, Germans compared conditions favourably with those of pre-war unemployment and economic misery. Above all, the popular view was that the world at large was in no position to inflict punishment for the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. Many Germans have related that their disillusionment began with wartime difficulties, shortages and hardships, caused by the bombing of their cities. Many German towns and cities surrendered to the Western allies rather than fight because the popula tion was not willing to accept their senseless destruction; there was nothing left to fight for.
The situation for the population of Britain had been entirely different; the terror of being bombed only showed the necessity to fight on, as the only alternative to experiencing occupation by Nazi Germany.
Thus, Dresden had the opposite effect to Coventry; Allied bombing did shorten the war and save Allied lives, for which we should be grateful. P. E. Villiers Nassauische Strasse 5, Berlin Sir: As an eye-witness and intended victim of the air raids so vividly described by Mr Geoffrey Wheatcroft (29 September), may I be permitted to say a word in his support. MY own position is one of ambivalence. Having survived the Allied air offensive as a schoolgirl in Hamburg, I became a British subject by marriage in 1947, and subsequently qualified as a solicitor in this coun try. Having been fortunate enough to visit mediaeval Lubeck on its last day, I lived through the devastation of Hamburg, including the fire storm mentioned by Mr Wheatcroft. Later, cycling alone through the countryside, I had to abandon my bicy cle to take cover from machine-gunning by an Allied plane which considered me worth a special diversion. Civilian bombing naturally led to a strengthening of morale and of determination to resist an apparently bar barous enemy. I recall my amazement on learning that a British pilot, whose plane had been shot down, was found to have been wearing a crucifix. Your correspondent Mr Nigel Jones would say that 1, and others like me, were fair game because 'the German people and the Nazi war and death machine were, to all intents and purposes, one and the same.' Sooner or later the moral implications of the bomber offensive should be faced, and! believe that Mr Wheatcroft has taken an important step towards this. The best traditions of English life are ill-served by evasions based upon metaphysical notions of the enemy's collective guilt. Sigrid TosswIll 260 Brixton Hill, London SW2 Sir: I wonder at Nigel Jones's conclusion that the butchery of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the levelling of beautiful mediaeval cities by Bomber Command was morally just'. Does he extend the principle of eye-for-an-eye justice to the commission of war crimes against any enemy who can be found guilty of similar atrocities? Would he have condoned the elimination of the entire Nazi party membership in the gas chambers?
Furthermore, I object to Mr. Jones's suggestion that the Allies were so severely 'throttled' in the latter years of the war that they were justified in using any weapon that became available. In fact, as the bombs fell on Dresden and Wiirzburg, though not once on Auschwitz or Belsen, the Allied armies were advancing victoriously across Europe. The evil German regime lay in ruins, but the spirit of Yalta demanded that the whole of Germany go the same way.
Stephen McDadd Lincoln College, Oxford Sir: Geoffrey Wheatcroft manages to discuss Max Hastings:s Bomber Command without mentioning Adolf Hitler or even the Nazi Party. His arguments about the merits and morality of area-bombing are consequently quite mechanistic: they say nothing about German morale. But Hitler was Europe's greatest-ever ayatollah, a religious figure for the German mass. He led it to unheard-of feats of will. Against Hitler stood Churchill, the British Tory Democrat, 'on whose reputation', so Mr Wheatcroft tells us, 'area-bombing is the terrible stain.'
Winston Churchill, `a mixture of humanity and ruthlessness, above all of impetuosity and aggression', felt he had delivered bombs as home-truths to the German homeland. So a free rein to Sir Arthur Harris and goodbye to Lubeck as a start on 28 March 1942. For the reviewer most of the subsequent history of Bomber Command was the senseless extermination of 600,000 Germans and the loss of many tbousand British aircrew: also the gratuitous destruction of good buildings. He has no comprehension, it seems, of the bombing's effect on the Hitler-myth; let alone the `terrible stain' it imprinted on the reputation of Goering who had said: 'If a single bomber reaches Berlin you can call me Meyer.'
As a prisoner in Germany I read the Nazi Party organ, the Voelkischer Beobachter, from 1940 to 1945. Reading between the lines one could sense, after the check outside Moscow (December 1944 an evergrowing sense of nemesis. Area bombing, I suggest, did far more to de-mythologise Hitler with the German mass than Mr Wheatcroft allows: for one thing it made it impossible for Hitler to appear in public after 1943 amid the rubble of German cities (only Goebbels inspected). It is quite invalid to counter that, nevertheless, German troops fought on to the end. The point is that they did so stoically; for the most part in a military and not an ideological spirit. Mr Wheatcroft forgets, I think, that there was no chance whatever of either a Nazi government or a Nazified German mass being persuaded to `change its mind' in the Klausewitz-Fuller sense. This was no normal nationalism; nemesis had to come. After all in German eyes it was exactly total war: all or nothing.
Charles Janson House of Tongue, Sutherland
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