Peter Hitchens: One last raid on the bombing issue

I've been disappointed by the persistent failure of the pro-Arthur Harris contributors (and by the way, I was pleased to see the mention of his real nickname, 'Butch', or 'Butcher', and the reasons for it, namely his willingness to squander the lives of brave young men. He was the Douglas Haig of the Second War) to acknowledge or effectively to counter my central points. The first is that, quite simply, the deliberate mass-slaughter of non-combatants is self-evidently wrong and a severe blot on our national record. Before 1939, no British person would have imagined supporting such a policy, which would have been regarded as barbaric and un-Christian by politicians, military leaders and ordinary voters alike. This is easily demonstrated by reading the public statements of British national leaders in the early months of the war, before we had been militarily defeated and pushed to the fringes of the conflict. Art that stage, the idea of deliberately bombing civilians was still properly regarded with horror.

His previous posts on this subject: Some reasonably accurate daylight bombing and Among the Dead Cities.