The Ethics of Bombing
The Archbishop of Canterbury, addressing the Convocation the Southern Province on Tuesday, referred in wise and consider language to the bombing of German cities like Lubeck and Rost A phrase which one of his predecessors made notorious, "a regr table necessity," springs spontaneously to the lips in this connemo Dr. Temple put it in his own way. "When the R.A.F.," he sat "lately did signal service to the Allied cause by the destruction great measure of the Baltic ports of Lubeck and Rostock .
was part of the price, the bitter price, paid for conspicuous aid Russia." That thesis is developed at greater length, and camri perhaps in some respects beyond the point where it would comma general assent, in an article on another page on the ethics of born ing. Nothing is more difficult to dogmatise about, for the simp reason that where so barbaric an institution as war is in quests there can be no clear line of division between what is moral legitimate and what is not. But where Dr. Temple was unquestn ably right was in condemning the satisfaction openly expressed the desolation created. The B.B.C. and the Air Ministry Ne Service are both at fault in this respect, the latter for the langua in which it frames its accounts of such raids, the former for apparently deliberate gratification implied by the tones of t announcers as they read out the catalogue of destruction.
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