Reflections

...Officers who would never think of beating their wives calmly rehearse the annihilation of entire cities...

...Terror destruction of working-class neighborhoods did not reduce military output...

...Nuclear strategists should note that obliteration bombing in World War II was born of accident and miscalculation...

...Examination shows that the Allies were wrong about the military necessity of obliteration bombing...

...That we would lose our moral bearings in response to the immorality of the Third Reich is characteristic of warfare...

...and London when thinking of that terrible lime...

...only one-third of all bombs dropped were falling within five miles of their targets, and the wrong cities were even being hit...

...The legacy for the United States is tragic: a permanently militarized conception of national security...

...Walzer condemns this continuation of terror bombing, once victory was assured, without recognizing its inevitability...

...Similarly, the first bombing of London was a tactical error...

...did not free us from militarism...

...We had to kill innocents to stop the killing of innocents...

...Our use of terror bombing, rather than being suspended once the emergency passed, actually increased...

...When Churchill opted for area bombing in 1940, he was not making a one-time decision...

...Once full-scale war has broken out it can never be humanized or civilized, and if one side attempted to do so it would most likely be defeated...

...In what sense did fascism, crushed in Germany, manifest itself, Phoenix-like, in the soul of the victors because we fought "fire with fire...

...Michael Walzer of Harvard, in his book...

...The Allies commenced to destroy systematically Germany's forty-three major cities Just-war convention held that noncom-batants should be spared whenever possible—never intentionally killed...

...He did misjudge the danger of his own immoral response...

...No weapon, once introduced, ever has been withdrawn for moral reasons...

...Precision bombing was impossible in the early years of the war...

...did not bring decency into the realm of international relationships...

...Warsaw...

...World War II remains in the public mind as an unparalleled example of a just war...

...a huge, inefficient bureaucracy...

...militarization of foreign policy...

...Fundamental values cannot be violated without losing them...

...There is no good evidence that destruction of Germany's cities significantly shortened the war...

...By 1942...

...Nonviolent resisters, like soldiers, would have suffered greatly and often would have failed, but their failure in the end would have been less than that of the war itself...

...did not achieve world peace...

...Yet practically no attention h.i> been given to the moral and spiritual costs of fighting Hitler as we did...

...he misjudged the nature of his own immoral response Pacifists believe that Hitler had to be opposed, but in ways which preserve the fundamentals of human dignity...

...Instead, it bequeathed to the victors all too much of the spirit of the vanquished: a fascist exaltation of the nation-state "uber alles" where morality is eclipsed by politics...

...If we fight the nuclear war for which we increasingly prepare, we shall join them' as mass murderers...

...RAFcrews were actually forbidden to open their bays over factories or military installations...

...Some 85 per cent of all Allied bomb tonnage was dropped after January 1, 1944, when German defeat was obvious...

...Even Hitler recognized that "any attempt to combat a philosophy with methods of violence will fail in the end, unless the fight takes the form of attack for a new spiritual attitude" (Mein Kampf...

...agencies of covert action and undemocratic secrecy, prone to violations of individual rights and police-state tactics incompatible with democracy...

...So long as we resort to war to settle differences between nations, so long will we have to endure the horrors, barbarities and excesses that war brings with it...

...The battle that needed to be fought against Hitler was far less a political or military battle than a moral one directed fron-tally against his disregard for the sanctity of persons...

...the Dutch had already surrendered, and German pilots, hampered by primitive communications systems, missed frantic signals lo scrub the mission...

...Communism became the objectified evil that justified any means necessary to assure its defeat: "Better dead than red...

...Had not the conscience of the West remained silent, Hitler's inhumanity to the Jews and others could have been publicized, protested, and hampered by concerted efforts far less costly than the war which finally destroyed him...

...Hitler defeated, Stalin immediately replaced him as the personification of a threat which perpetuated the "supreme emergency" mentality...

...Hiroshima, and Nagasaki...

...The terror bombing of non-combatant civilians, in violation of the conventions of warfare, set in motion a process that culminated in the incinerations of Dresden, Tokyo...

...The excesses of war are neither spiritually nor physically bearable...

...Today, missiles fired from a single Poseidon submarine, of which we have thirty, can make a Hiroshima of every major population center in the Soviet Union...

...It did not destroy the political will of the people...

...The exceptionbecome-policy culminated in the unjustifiable destruction of Dresden, a refugee center, during a children's carnival: and of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at a time when a defeated aggressor was already petitioning for surrender...

...Churchill said in l°40, "provide the means of victory...

...Just end Unjust Wars, takes this view...

...That, to me, is the lesson of Dresden...

...Churchill didn't misjudge the nature of Nazism...

...Further, willingness to bomb innocent populations, born as an emergency tactic in World War II, has become our basic strategy for "defense...

...The evil of Nazism had to be defeated by any means necessary...

...Even in a supreme emergency, we must not threaten the innocent in the name of protecting them...

...Human survival hangs by threads, threatened by accident or malfunction, never more than twenty minutes from obliteration...

...one in which regrettable but necessary means were taken to bring an immeasurable evil to an end...

...and the Luftwaffe, aiming at military installations in greater London, accidentally hit the city itself on August 24...

...What is immoral is war itself...

...The attack on Rotterdam was a mistake...

...Not only do the circumstances later prove not to have been emergencies—Hitler could not have brought off an invasion of England in 1940—but once an exception is made to decency, the indecency becomes habitual...

...Churchill justified terror bombing, nevertheless, as a "supreme emergency" measure because Western Civilization itself was at stake...

...Despots such as Hitler and Stalin have killed millions...

...Precision bombing was out of the question, however...

...The bombers alone...

...The Royal Air Force could not hope to hit military targets with anything like accuracy, so it readily accepted the argumentsof strategists who thought that Britain could defeat Germany by destroying the morale of the people...

...and the creation of a large, permanent standing army, staffed, if necessary, through involuntary servitude...

...1940...

...Rather, he set into motion a process which now returns to haunt its instigators...

...of London by ordering reprisal raids on Berlin the following week...

...We must abolish war before war abolishes us...

...Accordingly, we aimed a nuclear arsenal at millions of innocent civilians...

...Chur-, chill responded to the accidental bombings Ken Brown is director of the peace studies program at Manchester College in North Manchester, Indiana, and a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation's national council...

...Scholars have debated the Allied decision deliberately to bomb civilian rather than military targets, The British, having been driven from the Continent, had no other offensive weapons with which to carry the attack to the Germans...

...The Allied bombing offensive began a practice that culminated in Hiroshima and, perhaps, in yet unnamed calamities of a future holocaust...

...For all its costs—its sixty million casualties—the war did not bring liberty to Eastern Europe, over which the conflict began...

...The importance of shutting down the death camps of Hitler's "Final Solution" cannot be overestimated, although it should be pointed out that the war was not fought to save the Jews and other political victims but to halt German expansionism...

...Churchill did not misjudge the danger that Nazism represented to human decency...

...These Luftwaffe air raids, however, were either tactical suppon or strategic bombings...

...redirection of resources away from humanitarian ends...

...This article is adapted from Fellowship magazine, where it first appeared...

...These words of Air Marshall Sir Robert Saundby, reflecting on the terror bombing of Dresden, are quoted in D. Irv-ing's book, Destruction of Dresden: "It is not so much this or the other means of making war that is immoral or inhumane...

...Conventry...

...Britain survived...

...Miller, outraged, ordered reprisals to the reprisals, although he still hoped for a negotiated peace with the British...

...Simple decency and respect of life remain imperiled...

...The immorality of exception has become the accepted policy of otherwise decent people...

...Walzer believes that Nazi victory was so much a possibility in the first years of the war that violation of fundamental human rights was I usti tie J Temporarily, it was necessary to kill innocent people to defeat Nazism, "evil objectified . . . in a form so potent and apparent that there could never have been anything to do but fight against it " Volumes have been written to describe the incomprehensible horrors of the Third Reich...

...The lesson of Dresden, and of Hiroshima, is that morality and practicality coincide...

...Philosophers enjoy finding exceptions, but in life we cannot ascertain exceptions...

...Herein lies the great difficulty in excepting ourselves from moral behavior "when the chips are down...

...we should regard each act as an end in itself...

...Terror bombing did kill more than 600,000 people in Germany and establish the principle of mass murder which may lead the world to doomsday...