Thursday, September 24, 2015

The deterioration of family values R6 - YJ Draiman


The deterioration of family 
values R6
Since World War 2 when women were encouraged to join the work force en mass, to replace the men who went to war and keep the economy and the war effort going.
There has been a deterioration of family values and a breakdown of the family unit, a trend where a mother was not at home to take care of her children, monitor their behavior, help with the homework and discipline when and where necessary.
The advancement in technology has harmed family values. The Media and Television has totally destroyed any comprehension of values in our society. We have become a materialistic society – No holds barred.
The lack of discipline and total disregard for authority and respect is clear to anyone who has watched the past 50 years and seen our society’s values deteriorate.
One example alone is that 50 years ago a teacher was happy to go to school to teach, a teacher was respected and looked up-to, a teacher could discipline. Today teachers fear for their lives they are petrified by their students, discipline is restricted both to teachers and parents alike.
This scenario caries on to other social interactions of society today, and the situation is getting worse and worse every year.
You will notice that many families who come from other countries have a very strong family values, tradition, good education, respect and the children excel in their studies. That is because they have not had the chance to be influenced by our overly liberal society.
The education of our children begins at home and continues in school – the parents and the school must take a proactive approach to teach our children values and respect.
In today’s society a teacher is not permitted to discipline a student, the teachers will be sued, not to mention that teachers fears for their safety.
Parents in today’s society are also restricted as to how to discipline their children; in many cases parents are getting sued. In many cases children would never dream of treating their parents with such disrespect 50 years ago. Today some parents are afraid of their own children.
Abuse has been and will be with society to eternity that does not give society the right to prohibit discipline; a few acts of abuse should not cause society to prohibit proper discipline.
When an individual or individuals utilize a vehicle to commit a crime cause the death of others, does society prohibit vehicles altogether, no, a vehicle is very important for our everyday life.
Well, the discipline of our children by parents and teachers is extremely important for our society and the preservation of humanity.
It seems that our society is so busy chasing the dollar, fame and glory, that anything goes all values goes out the window. We should be an example of honesty, integrity and respect to our children.
Are Americans patriotic and proud enough to defend, protect and bring family values back to America? Is America ready to fight for honesty integrity and justice in our society, eliminate corruption and fraud, waste and self serving programs?
Re-invigorate our economy, rebuild our industrial base and decrease our dependence on foreign economies and resources.
YJ Draiman, Northridge, CA.
PS
Tell me and I will forget
Show me and I may remember
Involve me and I will understand.
– Chinese Proverb.

We all want health, happiness, prosperity and life
PS

We, the people, are losing our values. Drunk with decades of material indulgence unbalanced by authentic spiritual endeavor, we’re fast becoming corrupt. We look to objects for happiness and fulfillment. We go shopping when we feel empty and depressed. We elevate billionaires and Hollywood entertainers to positions of public acclaim they have not earned.
AMERICA IS not experiencing a crisis of leadership so much as a crisis of values. Politicians cannot provide them; they are mere caretakers of public business, and are as much in need of values guidance as the rest of us.

The Bible and Israel aka Palestine - Draiman


The Bible and Israel aka Palestine




 Joel 3:1-4 For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land. And they have cast lots for my people; and have given a boy for an harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink. Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Israel aka Palestine? will ye render me a recompense? and if ye recompense me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompense upon your own head;

In Earliest History, It Was Cannan’s Tribal Land

   The name of Palestine aka Israel and or Palestina aka the land of Israel is mentioned on only four occasions in the Bible. With the subject of Palestine aka Israel in the news so much these days, it is therefore practical that we should research into history and see where the name Palestine came from?
   The commonly used name of Palestine today refers to that region of the eastern Mediterranean coast from the sea to the Jordan valley and from the southern Negev desert to the Galilee Lake region in the north. The word itself is derived from "Plesheth", a name that appears frequently in the Bible and has come into the English language as the name of "Philistine". Plesheth, (root palash) was a general term meaning rolling or migratory. The ancient Philistines were not Arabs, nor even Semites, but were most closely related to the ancient Greeks originating from Asia Minor. The word Palestine (or Palestina) originally identified the region as "the land of the Philistines," a war-like tribe that inhabited much of the region alongside the Hebrew people in the coastal plains only. But the older name from antiquity for this region was not Israel aka Palestine since roman times, but Canaan, and it is the term most used in the Old Testament regarding this particular parcel of land.
   The Amarna Letters (an advanced art of ancient Canaanite writing) of the 14th century BC referred to "the land of Canaan," applying the term to the coastal region inhabited by the Phoenicians. The Canaanites had many tiny city-states, each one at times independent and at times a vassal of an Egyptian or Hittite king. The Canaanites never united into a state.
    The history of Israel aka Palestine is complicated by the many different cultures and civilizations that have flourished in the region. The first historical reference to the inhabitants of Canaan occurs in Genesis 10, where the table of nations is recorded. Canaan, the son of Ham and the grandson of Noah is said to have fathered most of the inhabitants of the land. These include Sidon (the Phoenicians), Heth (the Hittites), and the Jebusites (who lived near Jerusalem), the Amorites (in the hill country), the Girgashites, the Hivites (peasants from the northern hills), the Arkites (from Arka in Phoenicia), the Sinites (from the northern coast of Lebanon), the Arvadites, the Zemarites (from Sumra), and the Hamathites. (from Hamath) (Genesis 10:15-18) The history of Palestine gains its significance for the Christian with the beginning of the Biblical period. But the region was inhabited by other cultures long before Abraham and his family arrived.
   As the human eventually became scattered over the earth, a number of cultures emerged. Small city-states began to be organized in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Almost at the same time Egypt and the fertile region of the Nile River Valley emerged as a unified nation west of Mesopotamia. In the 29th century BC the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt were united, and the world power of the ancient Pharoah’s was born. The area of Canaan witnessed the same urban development and population increases during this period. The cities of JerichoMegiddo, Beth Shan, Ai, Ashdod, Ashkelon, ShechemGezerLachish, and many others were all in existence during this time.



Canaan’s Land Became the Promised Land

   After the Exodus from Egypt, probably in the Thirteenth Century BC but perhaps earlier, the Children of Israel settled in the land of Canaan. There they formed first a tribal confederation, and then the Biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the post-Biblical Kingdom of Judea. Israel aka Palestine was not the name used for this region in Biblical times, and that is the reason that the Old Testament refers to the land as Eretz Yisrael, or the Land of Israel. A precise boundary description of it is given in Numbers, Chapter 34:
   And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Command the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land of Canaan; (this is the land that shall fall unto you for an inheritance, even the land of Canaan with the coasts thereof:)
  Thus, prior to its conquest by the Israelite Hebrews under Joshua, the area referred to today as Israel aka Palestine was known as the "Land of Canaan," but afterwards it received the name Eretz Yisrael or "land of Israel" (I Samuel 13:19). As recorded in Ezekiel (26:20), Israel aka Palestine was also referred to as Eretz Chayim in Hebrew, or the land of the living. The land of the living was a symbol-spiritualized term for those living away from the influence of Babylon. Ironically, the land east of the Jordan River was named separately as Ever ha'Yardan, or, "the other side of Jordan." The Eastern Part of the Jordan River inhabited by two Jewish tribes.
   From the beginning of history to this day, Israel-Judah-Judea has had the only united, independent, sovereign nation-state that ever existed in Israel aka "Palestine" since Roman times, west of the Jordan River. (In Biblical times, AmmonMoab and Edom as well as Israel had land east of the Jordan, but they disappeared in antiquity and no other nation took their place until the British invented Trans-Jordan in the 1920s.) After the Israelites took the land from the Canaanites, the entire country became known as the "Land of Israel," (I Samuel 13:19; Matthew 2:20) and the "land of the promise" (Hebrews 11:9).
   Around 2000 BC the patriarch Abraham arrived in Canaan from Ur of the Chaldees in lower Mesopotamia, and found the land controlled by Amorites and Canaanites. Abraham lived for a while in Egypt, where he was exposed to this great culture of the ancient world. For 400 years the descendants of Abraham were in Egyptian bondage, but God raised them up a champion in the person of Moses to lead them back to the Land of Promise. After Moses, God strengthened the new leader of Israel, Joshua, and he led the Israelites in successful campaigns to win control of Canaan, just as God had promised.
   With the rise of the United Jewish Monarchy under David and Solomon, the Hebrew people extended their influence over more of Canaan Land (later known as Israel aka Palestine) than ever before. But around 920 BC Israel was divided into two segments, the northern kingdom of Israel, and the southern kingdom of Judah. These were turbulent times in the history of the Jewish people, and eventually resulted in the uprooting of Israel from the land.
   In 606-605 BC Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, annihilated the Egyptian army, and effectively came into control of all of the land of Israel(Canaan Land) to the Egyptian border. In 597 BC, Jerusalem, as foretold by the prophets, (Ezekiel) fell to the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. Later, when Cyrus, the King of Persia, conquered Babylon, he allowed the Jews to begin to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the waste city. As a Persian province, the region was governed by regional rulers under Persian authority. Later the Greeks under Alexander the Great established rule over the former land of Israel, eventually giving sway to localized Jewish revolts that ended with Rome gaining control over the region just prior to the time of Christ’s birth.



 Rome Moves to Eradicate Israel’s Land Heritage

   In 63 BC Pompey conquered Eretz Israel (Israel aka Palestine) for Rome. From 37 BC until 4 BC Herod the Great ruled the land as the Roman appointed king under the Caesars. During the reign of King Herod, Jesus was born in BethlehemIn AD 70
Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman general Titus as he crushed a revolt by the Jewish people, and Rome was moved to rename the Promised Land “Palestina.” The name "Palestine" was officially introduced in the period after 138 AD, three years after Rome’s suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt. It was originally used as an adjective, Palaistinei derived from the Hebrew word, Pelashet, or "land of the Pelashtim" (the Philistines). It was first mentioned by the Greek historian, Herodotus as the "Philistine Syria", referring originally only to the southwestern coast south of Phoenecia held by the Philistines, but was gradually extended to cover the entire region. In time, the name was shortened and the adjective Palaistinei became a proper noun. Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, identified Palaistinei with the biblical Canaan.
   The word “Palestine” or Pelesheth thus became known as the land of southern Syria. This is a name Rome gave the region to conjoin it with the administrative district of its Empire located in Damascus. The boundaries of Palestine were not clearly defined in ancient times, a problem which plagues the entire Middle East even today. It fell to the British and French Mandates after WWI to establish the modern boundaries that separate the nations of the region today.
   Generally, the ancient Israelites had occupied the land bordered on the south by the Wadi el' Arish and Kadesh Barnea, and on the north by the foothills of Mount Hermon. The Mediterranean Sea formed the natural western boundary and the Jordan River a natural eastern boundary, albeit several Israelite tribes did occupy the region on the eastern side of the river as part of the land of Israel, which today is known as Transjordan, or the land east of the Jordan River.
   After the fall of Rome, Israel aka Palestine fell into the possession and occupation of several Middle Eastern and Arab powers. They included the Byzantines (330-634), the Persians (607-29), the Arabs (634-1099), the Crusaders (1099-1263), the Mamelukes (1263-1516) and the Ottoman Turks (1517-1917). The most important historical events during this period were Saladin's consolidation of his control of EgyptSyria, Mesopotamia, and most of Israel aka Palestine in AD 1187 by his victory over the Roman Papal Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the establishment of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in AD 1517.    

Since the destruction of the Second Jewish Commonwealth (1) by the Romans, the land referred to as Israel aka "Palestine"(2) had been ruled by a series of foreign occupiers. Each successive ruler subdivided his conquest as he saw fit, though none, since the Romans, considered Israel aka "Palestine" as having a separate administrative or geographic entity. The Ottoman Turks, who ruled this area from the year 1516 to 1917, regarded it as part of Southern Syria. The land later referred to as Israel aka "Palestine" was divided into three separate districts.


·         The Kingdom of Jerusalem was a French kingdom established in the French Levant in 1099 by the First Crusade. (Holy Roman EmpireCurrently, the title of “King of Jerusalem” is claimed by King Juan Carlos I of Spain as the successor to the royal family of Aragon, as heir of Ferdinand II of Aragon.
  • In 1917 the Balfour Declaration incorporated into international law and treaties in 1920, liberated Israel aka Palestine from Turkish rule and placed the land under the control of Great Britain as trustee to reconstitute the ancestral historical Jewish National Home in Palestine aka Israel. On May 14, 1948, the modern State of Israel was declared sovereign and formally established, as per the terms of the 1920 International treaty which reconstituted Israel in Palestine in 1920, and the British who violated their promise and duty as trustee withdrew. Almost immediately the Arabs who refused the reconstituted Jewish State in Palestine under any conditions, attacked the fledgeling Jewish State with 6 well armed Arab armies and began their struggle for control of the land of Palestine aka Israel!
  • The Arab states do not recognize the Balfour Declaration, which was born out of the Christian Zionist movement of the late 1800’s, and appropriated with the political Zionism movement of the Jews. Great Britain eventually violated international law and treaties which set-up 21 Arab countries consisting of over 5 million square miles of territory and 75,000 square miles for the Jewish state of Israel, and conceded to the complex dilemma, and turned the conflict over to the United Nations in 1947. The UN had no right to modify international law and treaties, The UN can only recommend and its recommendation must be accepted by the parties to be valid. Since the Arabs unilaterally refused to accept the UN recommendation for partition, the resolution is null and void and have no meaning whatsoever.



Rome Created The Mythology of Palestine

   As the world treks down the so-called "Road Map to Peace," there are some issues Christians need to deal with. One of the most prominent of those issues is the question regarding the peoples referred to today as the Arab-Palestinians. Christians that support the State of Israel (because of Biblical prophecy and historical records) as the national, ancestral, indigenous, covenantal homeland of the Jewish people are often charged with being calloused and totally insensitive to the needs and aspirations of the Arab-Palestinians. Fair minded Christians need to know if that is a questionable charge, and know how to evaluate history to understand the complex subject in this perplexing ‘land controversy created by the Arabs.”
   First, let us clarify who the "Palestinians" really are, according to history it is the Jews. The notion of a modern distinct "Palestinian people" with a language, culture and nationality of its own, is a deceptive creation of Yasser Arafat and his notorious PLO, in unison with the Arab League, who terrorized and expelled a million Jewish families from the Arab lands, and nurtured the false claim by the surrounding Arab nations and world media, after the ignominious Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. The modern so-called "Arab-Palestinian people" are, in reality, a mixture of Arabs whose mother tongue is Arabic, whose religion is Islam, and whose culture is shared by most of the 22 surrounding Arab countries. There simply is not nor has there ever been a distinct Palestinian national entity. The term “Palestinian” has historically applied to Jews living in area, by the Romans.
   Second, as I have alluded to before, the name "Palestine" is the Romanized version of "Philistine," which was assigned, by the Romans to the region in the first century AD. It was a derogatory and humiliating term imposed by the Romans on the Jews, who constituted the vast majority of the people who lived thereRome forced on the Jews and their land, not the name of Israel that God had ordained, but the name of an arch enemy of the Jews, the Philistines. Rome even went so far as to rename Jerusalem, Aelia Capitolina. Thus, the name Palestine came into prominence and remained attached to the region until the end of the British Mandate period in 1947. However, Jews have always lived on the land and considered the land their homeland and Jerusalem its capital. In addition, the land was never without as many Jews as the governing power would allow.
    But what should be a Christian's attitude toward the Arab-Palestinians? Some Christians note what God says about the "ger," that is, the "alien" and the "stranger," and say that should apply to the Arab-Palestinians today. One of the most comprehensive passages regarding the "ger," i.e. the "alien," is found in Ezekiel 47:21-23. "'You are to distribute this land among yourselves according to the tribes of Israel. You are to allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who have settled among you and who have children. You are to consider them as native-born Israelites; along with you they are to be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel. In whatever tribe the alien settles, there you are to give him his inheritance,' declares the Sovereign LORD." The question is, are these, and similar passages, relevant to Israel's treatment of the "arab-Palestinians" today? The answer is clearly, No!
    This passage assumes God's everlasting covenant promise to the Jewish people of the land of Israel as an everlasting possession (cf. Genesis 17:7-8). The passage referred to above is speaking of those non-Jews who desire to have a protected citizenship under Israel's sovereignty. They are not seeking a sovereignty of their own that replaces Israel. They are willing subjects to the laws and governance of Israel. As a matter of fact, the scriptures require that they also worship and follow the decrees of the God of Israel. (Jehovah) Modern Israel has made a provision for such people. There are Arab Israelis who have the full rights and privileges, including voting, of Israeli citizenship. There are duly elected Arab Israelis in the Israeli Parliament and the Supreme Court that represent their Arab constituencies. In a word, the Arab-Palestinians do not qualify for the protections to be given to those under Israel's God-ordained governance. The so-called "Arab-Palestinians" under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, are loath to have Israel as their sovereign authority. The Arab-Palestinian Hamas, as well as the Arab goal of peace envisions the total elimination of Israel as a nation and aa a people. The Arab-Palestinian flag portrays the current boundaries of Israel as being the boundaries of a future Arab-Palestine State without any mention of Israel. As Christians consider the "Road Map to Peace," we do well to keep in mind that God's sovereign decrees and covenants will not be thwarted. If an Arab-Palestinian state emerges within the boundaries given by God to Israel, it will be short-lived and interim. But even more sobering is the fact that those Christians who promote an Arab-Palestinian State have placed themselves in alliance against God’s providential designs for Israel. (Psalm 83:5).



Why Did Rome Use The Name Palestine to Rename Eretz Israel?
    Again, the name Palestine itself is derived from "Plesheth", a name that appears frequently in the Bible and has come into our modern English as "Philistine". The Philistines were not Arabs, nor even Semites, but were most closely related to the Greeks originating from Asia Minor and other Greek localities. The Philistines reached the southern coast of Israel in several waves. One group arrived in the pre-patriarchal period and settled south of Beersheba in Gerar where they came into conflict with Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael. Another group, coming from Crete after being repulsed from an attempted invasion of Egypt by Rameses III in 1194 BC, seized the southern coastal area, where they founded five settlements (Gaza, Ascalon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gat). In the Persian and Greek periods, foreign settlers, chiefly from the Mediterranean islands, overran the Philistine districts.
   After the Roman conquest of Judea, "Palastina" became an occupied province of the pagan Roman Empire and then occupied by the Christian Byzantine Empire, and very briefly of the Zoroastrian Persian Empire.
    From the fifth century BC, following the historian Herodotus, Greeks called the eastern coast of the Mediterranean "Philistine Syria" using the Greek language form of the name. In AD 135, after putting down the Bar Kochba revolt, the second major Jewish revolt against Rome, Emperor Hadrian wanted to blot out the name of the Roman "Provincia Judaea" and so he renamed it "Provincia Syria Palaestina", the Latin version of the Greek name and the first use of the name as an administrative unit. The name "Provincia Syria Palaestina" was later shortened to Palaestina, from which the modern, anglicized "Palestine aka Israel" is derived.
     In 638 AD, an Arab-Muslim Caliph took Palastina away from the Byzantine Empire and occupied it as part of an Arab-Muslim Empire. The Arabs, who had no name of their own for this region, adopted the Greco-Roman name Palastina, that they pronounced "Falastin". In that period, much of the mixed population of Palastina converted to Islam and adopted the Arabic language. They were subjects of a distant Caliph who ruled them from his capital, that was first in Damascus and later in Baghdad. They did not become a nation or an independent state, or develop a distinct society or culture, they were just residents of occupied territory.

    Rome’s dispersion of the Jews from Eretz Israel was an instrument of the Satanic cosmic conspiracy to dissect Israel from the providence and omniscience of God to fulfill his covenant with Jacob.
    Thus, Rome’s renaming of Eretz Israel was the Roman Emperor’s method of eradicating the memory of Israel from anything to do with the Biblically Promised Land, and to show the world that Rome had forever annulled the covenant of Abraham. This same concept is still alive today in religious Rome, and throughout the religious world in the guise of Replacement Theology.
   The eradication of Israel in geography and the insertion of Palestine aka Israel to the label for the land remained the situation until the end of the fourth century, when in the wake of a general imperial reorganization Palestine aka Israel became three Palestines: First, Second, and Third. This configuration is believed to have persisted into the seventh century, to the time of the Persian and the Muslim conquests of the land.
    Later, the Roman Papal Crusaders employed the word Palestine aka Israel to refer to the whole general region of the "three Palestines." After the fall of the crusader kingdom, Palestine aka Israel was no longer an official designation, but was continued to be used informally for the lands on both sides of the Jordan River, since this represented the official and historical land of Israel.

   The Ottoman Turks, who were non-Arabs but religious Muslims, ruled the area as occupiers for 400 years (1517-1917). Under Ottoman rule, the Palestine aka Israel region was attached administratively to the province of Damascus and ruled from Istanbul. The name Palestine aka Israel was revived after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and applied to the territory in this region that was placed under the British Mandate for Palestine to reconstitute the Jewish nation of Israel under 1920 international law and treaties. The name "Falastin" that Arabs today use for "Palestine ska Israel" is not an Arabic name. It is the Arab pronunciation of the Roman "Palaestina."
·         Thus, this is the fundamental reason that talking and writing about Israel and the Middle East Conflict today features the nouns "Palestine" and Arab-Palestinian", and the phrases "Arab-Palestinian territory" and even "Israeli-liberated and occupied Arab-Palestinian territory". All too often, these terms are used with regard to their historical or geographical meaning, so that the usage creates false illusions rather than clarifying Biblical and historical truth about the Promised Land.
 


The Jews Come Home & Palestine-Israel Becomes a Problem

    At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and among its subject provinces, the region known as "Palestine" aka Israel was assigned to the British, according to 1920 international law and treaties, to govern temporarily as trustee for the Jewish people to reconstitute the National home for the Jewish people, as a mandate from the League of Nations. The restoration of the "desolate" land began in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century with the first Jewish pioneers. Their labors created newer and better conditions and opportunities, which turned the barren and desolate land into a flourishing green productive land, which in turn attracted migrant workers from many parts of the Middle East, including Arabs.
   The Balfour Declaration of 1917, incorporated by international law and treaties in 1920 and adopted and confirmed by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, committed the British Government to the principle that "His Majesty's government viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish National Home, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object." It was specified both that this area be open to "close Jewish settlement" and that the rights of all inhabitants already in the country be preserved and protected. Mandate Palestine originally included all of what is now Jordan, as well as all of what is now Israeland the territories between them. However, under personal interests the British violated international law and treaties to gain control of Arab oil, when Great Britain's protégé Emir Abdullah was forced to leave the ancestral Hashemite domain in Arabia, the British violated the treaty and created a realm for him that included all of the Mandate Palestine east of the Jordan River, which is over 75% of the territory allocated to the Jewish people under international law and treaties. There was no traditional or historic Arab name for this land, so it was called after the river: first Trans-Jordan and later Jordan. It has since become known as the first Arab-Palestinian State, its citizens are over 70% Arab-Palestinians.
    By this political act, that violated the conditions of the Balfour Declaration, international law and treaties and the Mandate for Palestine, the British cut more than 75 percent out of the Jewish National Home. No Jew has ever been permitted to purchase property or reside in Trans-Jordan/Jordan, all Jewish property, which was substantial in TrasJordan was confiscated. Less than 25 percent then remained of the Mandate for Palestine, and even in this remnant, the British violated international law and treaties and the Balfour and Mandate requirements for a "Jewish National Home." Britain progressively restricted where Jews could buy land, where they could live, build, farm or work, until WWII.

   

During the period of the British Mandate for Palestine, it was the Jewish population that was known as "Palestinians". British policy was to curtail their numbers and progressively limit Jewish immigration. By 1939, the White Paper virtually put an end to admission of Jews to Palestine. This policy was imposed the most stringently at the very time this Home was most desperately needed, after the rise of Nazi power in Europe; this caused the deaths of millions of Jews. At the same time that the British slammed the gates on Jews, they permitted or ignored massive illegal immigration into Western Palestine from Arab countries Jordan, Syria, Egypt, North Africa.
   By 1948, the Arabs had still not yet discovered the mythical ancient nation of Falastin. When they were offered half of Palestine aka Israel west of the Jordan River for a state, the offer was violently rejected. Six Arab states launched a war of annihilation against the nascent State of Israel. Their purpose was not to establish an independent Falastin. Their aim was to partition western Palestine amongst themselves. They did not succeed in killing Israel, but Trans-Jordan succeeded in taking Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem, killing or driving out all the Jews who had lived in those places, destroying Synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, taking over all Jewish properties and banning Jews of all nations from Jewish holy places. Egypt succeeded in taking the Gaza Strip. These two Arab states held these lands until 1967. Then they launched another war of annihilation against Israel, and in consequence lost the lands they had taken by war in 1948. During those 19 years, 1948-1967, Jordan and Egypt never offered to surrender those lands to make up an independent state of Falastin. The "Palestinians" never sought it. Nobody in the world ever suggested it, much less demanded it.
   It was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 that Israel was finally able to settle some small part of those internationally “mandated” lands from which the Jews had been debarred by the British. Successive British governments and now world governments regularly condemn Israeli settlements as "illegal". In truth, denying Israel a right to settle the so-called liberated “occupied territory” is tantamount to giving away the Allied victory in WWI, and denying the Christian Zionist movement that led Great Britain and America to oversee the birth of the Jewish Homeland in the first place!
    But it was actually three years earlier, in 1964, that the Palestine Liberation Movement was founded. PLO co-founder Ahmed Shukairy, who less than 10 years earlier had denied the existence of Palestine aka Israel, was its first chairman. Its charter proclaimed its sole purpose to be the destruction of Israel. To that end it helped to precipitate the Arab attack on Israel in 1967. Yasser Arafat emerged as the bloody terrorist leader of this movement to destroy Israel, and yet the delusional West invited him to participate in a new scheme to again partition the Promised Land in 1991.
    As Arafat and his terror thugs learned how to manipulate the media and use it for deceptive propaganda purposes, they discovered it sounded better for Western consumption to speak about the liberation of Falastin than of the destruction of Israel, which they had screamed so much about prior to 1967. Much of the world, governments, media and public opinion, accept virtually without question of serious false analysis the new-sprung deceptive myth of an Arab nation of Falastin, whose territory is unlawfully occupied by the Jews. Even though since the end of World War I, the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa have been given 22 independent states in 99.5 percent of the land they claimed (over 5 million square miles), the Islamic-Arab world remains intent on destroying Israel. Lord Balfour once expressed his hope that when the Arabs had been given so much, (that would later be discovered to hold vast reserves of oil) they would "not begrudge" the Jews the "little notch" (75,000 square miles) promised and allocated to them. But alas, the voice of demonic hatred of Israel that resides in the Arab psyche resonated recently in the words of the President of Iran, who vociferously announced what the whole Muslim world aspires to, “the end of Zionism and the annihilation of Israel from existence.” Just like the terrorizing and expulsion of a million Jewish families from Arab States and confiscating all their assets including over 120,000 square km. of land. Most of those expelled Jewish families were settled in Israel and now comprise over half the population.



The Deceptive Propaganda of Arab-Palestine

   One of the most misunderstood issues today is the question of "Who are the Arab-Palestinians"? There is a propaganda war going on now with regard to the term "Arab-Palestine."  At one time it might have been argued that Palestine aka Israel was an innocuous designation of the Middle Eastern area that is generally thought of as the Jewish Holy Land.  During the last few decades, however, the term Arab-Palestine has been deceptively adopted by Arabs living in Israel in the area west of the Jordan River aka Judea and Samaria. It is specifically employed to avoid the use of the name Israel, (just as Rome designed) and must be considered an anti-Israel term.  In all Arab maps published in Jordan, Egypt, etc., the area west of the Jordan River is deceptively called Arab-Palestine, without any reference to Israel.  Palestine aka Israel is the term now used by those who want to deny the legitimate existence of Israel as a genuine nation among the family of nations. The term has even been adopted by the former terrorist-turned political entity (PLO) within Israel that is gradually obtaining more and more pockets of territory through their, the Arab deceptive "peace process," and formally known as the PA (Palestinian Authority).  Arab-Palestine has successfully become a deceptive political propaganda term with massive anti-Israel implications. The world press uses the term consistently as a means to question the legitimacy of the modern state of Israel. Christians also have used the term Arab-Palestine for centuries, and have become deceptively seduced into using the term in a manner which gives credence to those who wish to destroy God’s Chosen People. In earlier times this might have been excused because of its common usage, but since the rebirth of Israel in 1920 and its sovereignty declared in 1948 and in light of the perpetual hatred of Esau in seeking Israel’s destruction, with the empowering aid of Western political power brokers, every Christian should recognize that God is moving to bring history to its climax around Jerusalem!
  Therefore, in light of the current deceptive propaganda war against Israel, Christians must now re-evaluate the term Arab-Palestine and consider whether it is biblically, theologically and prophetically accurate to participate in the persecution an political partitioning of God’s Land.



The Biblical Usage Of Palestine
 
   The term Palestine, although rarely used in the Old Testament, refers specifically to the southwestern coastal area of Israel occupied by the Philistines.  As stated above, it is a translation of the Hebrew word "Pelesheth."  The term is never used to refer to the whole land occupied by Israel.  Before Israel occupied the land, it would be generally accurate to say that the southwestern coastal area (Gaza Strip vicinity) was called Philistia (the way of the Philistines, or Palestine), while the central highlands were called Canaan.  Both the Canaanites and the Philistines had disappeared as distinct peoples and the Jewish people are the surviving indigenous people at least by the time of the Babylonian Captivity of Judea (586 BC), and the Canaanites no longer exist. In the New Testament, the term Palestine is never used.  The term Israel is primarily used to refer to the people of Israel, rather than the Land.  However, in at least two passages, Israel is used to refer to the Land:

"
Saying, Arise, and take this young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel:  for they are dead who sought the young child's live. And he arose, and took the young child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel" (Mathew. 2:20-21).

"But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another:  for verily I say to you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man shall have come" (Matthew 10:23)

   
The first passage is when Joseph, Mary and Jesus returned from Egypt to Israel, and the second has reference to the proclamation of the Gospel throughout the Land of Israel.  Jesus, Matthew and the angel speaking to Joseph use the term Israel with reference to the Land, even though the term was not then recognized by the Roman authorities.

   It is clear, then, that the Bible never uses the term Palestine to refer to the Holy Land as a whole, and Bible maps that refer to Palestine in the Old or New Testament are, at best, inaccurate, and, at worst, are a conscious intentional denial of the Biblical name of Israel.

 


The Deception About Arab-Palestine

   
  How did the world and the church get into the habit of calling the Land of Israel "Palestine?" When Titus destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Roman government struck a coin with the phrase "Judea Capta," meaning Judea has been captured. The term Palestine was never used in the early Roman designations. It was not until the Romans crushed the second Jewish revolt against Rome in 135 AD under Bar Kochba that Emperor Hadrian applied the term “Palestine to the Land of Israel.” Hadrian, like many dictators since his time realized the propaganda power of terms and symbols. He replaced the shrines of the Jewish Temple and the Sepulchre of Christ in Jerusalem with temples to pagan deities. He changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina; and changed the name of Israel and Judea to Palestine.  Hadrian's selection of Palestine was purposeful, not accidental. He took the name of the ancient enemies of Israel, the Philistines, Latinized it to Palestine, and applied it to the Land of Israel. He hoped in doing this to erase the name Israel from all memory. Thus, the term Palestine as applied to the Land of Israel was invented by the inveterate enemy of the Bible and the Jewish people, ROME.
  Thus, the anti-Israel, anti-Christian name of Palestine aka Israel was assimilated into the Universal Church's vocabulary as the Byzantine Empire was being established. The Church has, since that time, broadly used the term Palestine in literature and in maps to refer to the Land of Israel. It should be noted, however, that the Crusaders called their land the Kingdom of Jerusalem. When the British received the Mandate for Palestine aka Israel after World War I, though, they called the land on both sides of the Jordan River, Palestine aka Israel. This became the accepted geo-political term for several decades, and those who lived in the land were called Palestinians, whether they were Jews, Arabs or Europeans.


   Even evangelical Christians who believe in the future of Israel casually use the term Palestine aka Israel.  It appears that Bible-believing Christians have either knowingly or unwittingly followed the world pagans and haters of Israel in calling Israel by the anti-Israel term Palestine.
   The use of the term Palestine for deceptive propaganda and political purposes is devastating in the ongoing events of our time. The term, liberated “Occupied Palestine” has incorrectly been assumed to lie at the heart of the Israeli-Arab Conflict. In truth, the term Palestine aka Israel lies at the cornerstone of the propaganda war against Israel and the Jewish people. Should Christians utilize terms used by the enemies of Israel who desire to accomplish nothing less than the completed destruction of the Jewish people?  I would think not. Christians should use the terminology of the Bible wherever possible. Why should we use any other term when referring to the Land, especially now that the Jews are back in the Land and have re-established the nation of Israel in its historical territory among the family of nations?

The only term we should use for the Land is Israel, or its subdivisons of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, and not be sucked in to the propaganda word war developed to eradicate the name of Israel from its Land.
   The Jewish people base their claim to the Land of Israel (Palestine aka Israel) on at least four premises: 1) God promised the land to the patriarch Abraham; 2) the Jewish people settled and developed the land; 3) the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine under international law and treaties to the Jewish people and 4) the territory was captured in defensive wars.
    By the early 19th century-years before the birth of the modern Zionist movement-more than 30,000 Jews lived throughout what is today Israel. When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 200,000 Arabs and others lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. No independent Arab or Palestinian state has ever existed in Palestine aka Israel. Palestinian Arab nationalism is largely a post-World War I phenomenon that did not become a significant political movement until after the 1967 Six- Day War and Israel's liberation and recapture of the West Bank aka Judea and Samaria. Israel's international "birth certificate" is validated by the promise of the Bible, and it specifies that its land is what the world now calls PALESTINE aka ISRAEL!
   Joshua conquered the Land God promised the Jews over three thousand years ago. King David established Jerusalem as the capital of Israel around 1000 BC and King Solomon built the Jewish Temple about 96O BC. This was almost 1000 years before the beginning of Christianity and 1600 years before the rise of Islam. When Jesus came to Jerusalem to celebrate the feasts, he didn't come to a church or a mosque, he came to the Jewish Temple. It was not the Church Mount or the Mosque Mount, but the Temple Mount of Israel.    
   Before the birth of the State of Israel, Arab leaders themselves denied the existence of an Arab country called Palestine. In 1937, Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi said, "There is no such country as Palestine! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. 'Palestine" is alien to us; it is the Zionists who introduced it." Yet today the whole world is heeding the demands of the Arab terrorists who insist upon having a new Arab-Palestinian State inside the land of Israel.
    Recently (May 2006) an Islamic Arab-Palestinian cleric remarked that Christians who support Israel are distorting the true faith of Christianity, and have adopted Satan as god and comprise the greatest danger to world peace. The cleric, Hamed Al-Tamimi, the PA’S official cleric accused Zionist Christians of persecuting Arab-Palestinians and directing the war in Iraq. He further called for pro-Israeli Christian denominations to be expelled from the "World Church." As usual, the demonic inspired clerics of fundamentalist Islam have been led by Satan to turn things around 180 degrees. It is obvious that it is a top priority of Satan’s Last Days strategy to isolate Christian Zionism, (which did indeed help create an environment for Jehovah to bring a remnant of Jews back to the Promised Land) and to encourage the World’s False Church to eliminate Biblical teaching that is supportive of God’s providence with his chosen nation, Israel. Unfortunately, there are many so-called Christian denominations and Churches that are blindly following the demonic-rhetoric out of Satan’s anti-Zion theological camps.



The Prophetic Paradigm of Palestine

   This article began by highlighting the prophetic scripture from Joel chapter three that deals with the world’s obsession with partitioning the land of Israel. Joel’s prophecy mentioned the ancient conspiracy among the Phoenician Empire in complicity with the people of Mt. Seir. (Esau’s descendants and the ancient Palestinians aka Philastins)
  Joel 3:1-4 For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land. And they have cast lots for my people; and have given a boy for an harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink. Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine aka Israel? will ye render me a recompense? and if ye recompense me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompense upon your own head;
   God’s word through his prophet Joel reveals that the ancient conspiracy of ‘parting god’s land” will be dealt with in a recompense fashion by God almighty in the days when He has returned a remnant of Israel from the four corners of the world. Jehovah God says, “I will bring again the captivity” (undo the Dispersion) and plant his people back in their own land, and There, He will plead with the nations for his people, which they have scattered, and parted MY land.
   Joel continues to recount the duplicitous conspiracy and prophetic pattern that the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon were engaged in with other perpetual enemies of Israel. The conspiracy involved the ancient descendants of Esau (Mt. Seir) that were enabling and aiding the Phoenicians in capturing and enslaving the Jews for work in the Phoenician world trade and commerce industry, while in return, the people of Mt. Seir sought to steal the Land of Israel. To this conspiracy, God pronounced a judgment against Tyre and Sidon, and all the coasts of Palestine.
    History records that the Phoenicians were famous for their trade and commerce and their skill as a seafaring people. Phoenicia had two major sea-ports, Tyre and Sidon, which were semi-independent city-states. Phoenicia grew in world influence as its merchant fleets brought wealth into the country from all over the known world. The nation increasingly became independent of foreign domination and by its "golden age" (about 1050-850 BC) the Phoenicians achieved their height of prosperity and influence. Phoenicia went on to found many colonies along its shipping routes, so that many Phoenicians lived in Crete, Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily, Italy, North Africa (Carthage), and even Spain. Tyre and Sidon began to realize their colonial and expansionist dreams. Under Hiram I, the ruler of Tyre (980-947 BC), Phoenicia began a colony at Tarshish in Spain. (Ezekiel 38 also mentions Tarshish as being instrumental in global trade with Sheba and Dedan in the Last Days when Russia invades the land of Israel) Tyrian ships began to dominate Mediterranean commerce, and helped lay the groundwork for the formation of later European powers. Phoenicia’s merchants became princes, and the honorable ruling elite of the earth says Isaiah 23:8. (Isaiah 23:8 Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth?)
   Several prophets of the Old Testament prophesied against Tyre and Sidon. They condemned the Tyrians for delivering the ancient Israelites to the Edomites (Amos 1:9) and selling them as slaves to the Greeks (Joel 3:5-6). Jeremiah prophesied Tyre and Sidon's defeat (Jeremiah 27:1-11). But the classic prophecy against Tyre and Sidon, and all the coasts of Palestine was given by Ezekiel. This prophecy was partially fulfilled when the Assyrians came and ended the Phoenicians hold on the Eastern Mediterranean Coast of Palestine. (Canaan) (Sidon, or Zidon was a son of Canaan)
   Ezekiel prophesied of the Lord against Mt. Seir. (Palestine) Ezekiel’s prophecy forecast that the Arab-Palestinian conspiracy to steal the land of Israel, and the perpetual hatred and bloodletting practiced against Israel by the descendants of Esau would cause God to recompense their evil upon their own heads!
    In the days of King Jehoshaphat of Judah, the people of Mount Seir (the Edomites) joined the Ammonites and the Moabites in an invasion against Judah. For this reason, the prophet Ezekiel staunchly predicted God's destruction of "Mount Seir" because of their strong hatred of Israel and their desire to possess the lands of Israel and Judah. Tyre and Sidon, and all the coasts of Palestine appeased the Seirians in this conspiracy.
   This same conspiracy is being revisited today in the Middle East Conflict. The Western world is involved in a world scheme of placating the Arab hatred of Israel (oil resources and cartels) and enforcing the ages old conspiracy to ‘partition” the land of Israel, and give it to the Palestinians.
    But the Lord has spoken, and He will speedily recompense evil upon the heads of the nations of this world and the conspiratorial designs of the inhabitants of the Coast of Palestine!


Tuesday, September 22, 2015

The RAF Bombing Campaign in Germany: Ethical and Strategic Considerations - Intentional civilian targets


The RAF Bombing Campaign in Germany: Ethical and Strategic Considerations

Karl F. Rahder
Master's Thesis, Committee on International Relations, University of Chicago

November, 1988                             
2

Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe.
our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.

Richard II
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Contents

Part I:  The  Utilitarian  Nature  of  Bomber  Command's  Morale Campaign (p 5)

Part II: Misgivings, Public and Private (p 31)

Part III: The Anglo-American Offensive (p 46)

Conclusions (p 69)
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In the aftermath of the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany, some 300,000 to 600,000 German civilians - mostly working-class people residing in the Reich's large, urban centers - had been killed by Allied air forces.   Some five to seven and one-half million non-combatants had lost their homes in an assault on sometimes undefended German cities which began on a small scale but   gained intensity and fury until, in the Winter of 1945, devastating raids took place in the cities of Berlin and Dresden, killing more than sixty thousand residents and refugees fleeing the Red Army in the east.   In Germany's largest cities, some 40% of the dwellings were destroyed or heavily damaged. In this four and a half year program of attacking the morale of Germany's people, Britain's RAF had contributed by far the largest share and paid a heavy price: some 55,000 aircrew were killed over Germany or German-occupied territory.1

This paper will examine the evolution of the British morale bombing campaign
through an ethical perspective, including reference to the just war tradition.   Ethical
arguments have been posited both for and against Bomber Command's decision to bomb noncombatants, and no policy which results in even unintended collateral deaths can be made without reference to the long just war tradition which has in part come to define the warring state and its place in the moral world. Can the morale campaign be ethically justified?    If the RAF and the Air Staff, which had nominal control over Bomber Command, developed a relationship between mass bombing of civilians and the surrender of the German war machine and monitored the validity of this relationship, then there may have been a legitimate rationale for breaking the long-standing ethical injunctions against killing innocents.  How did the British formulate the relationship between mass bombing of urban workers, shopkeepers and other noncombatants, and  surrender of the German state?
This is of vital importance, for the bombing of "innocents" has long been considered a most
 1United States Strategic Bombing Survey (hereafter USSBS) Summary Report (European War), p 15; Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: 1982), p 122; Max Hastings, Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bomber Offensive 1939-1945 (London: Michael Joseph 1980), pp 1, 352
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unmilitary endeavor, and the way in which Bomber Command articulated its morale bombing policy will reveal the extent to which strategic, doctrinal and ethical issues were explored before the campaign commenced and during its execution. We will examine the analyses which drove - or sometimes challenged - morale bombing in the RAF.   

If the bombing of cities such as Hamburg represented the "murderous lust of a sadistic enemy...transcending all human experience" to some German residents, we will want to understand how such a deliberate campaign was justified and sought.

Indeed, were the ethical issues actually addressed inside HM Government or was the utilitarian argument window dressing for a policy without an ethical or even a rational strategic basis?    In order to answer this question, we will want to determine the extent of misgivings over the morale campaign within the military and in HM Government as well as the strategic and ethical underpinnings of the campaign.   

The article will explore how the few opponents of area bombing framed their arguments and compare those arguments with the Bomber Command's justification of its method and strategy.
Finally, we will examine briefly the   nature of American differences with their British partners at Bomber Command as well as whether ethical considerations played a role, internally or in the debate over bombing strategy.

Chapter I: The Utilitarian Nature of Bomber Command's Morale Campaign

Through the just war concept or tradition, we have a foundation for our sense of
moral right in war and hence of the nature of moral outrage committed by states in war,
especially "just war."   For it is not enough (and patently wrong) to argue that either all
war is morally proscribed or that states by definition are incapable of moral choice in
war.   Historical example very quickly renders both notions untenable.   The simple and
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evident fact that we can still be shocked by actions of states at war implies that there is a deeply rooted (if for most people unarticulated) notion of what states may do in war as well as implicit permission that sovereign states may engage in war at all.
Just war criteria are usually divided into two broad and often complementary categories: the criteria under which states may engage in war and also the limitations states must abide by when engaged in a just war (that is, after the first set of criteria has been met).   The former, when taken together, are called the jus ad bellum and the latter limitations jus in bello.  The jus ad bellum consists of several ideas, most of which need not concern us in this article.2 In the modern world, the just cause (defense of one's borders) has become the paramount jus ad bellum criterion.3
The jus in bello criteria are two: that states must use means approximating those
used against them (proportionality) and that non-combatant immunity shall be maintained (discrimination).   Ironically, while the means of warfare have become more destructive and indiscriminate, the jus in bello criteria have lost none of their relevance in modern thought.4 The RAF throughout the war maintained a somewhat utilitarian argument 5 in defense of the violation of noncombatant immunity while denying in public that noncombatants were being killed indiscriminately.  Privately, Bomber Command and its  supporters inside the Government tended to admit in varying degrees to targeting noncombatants.   The jus in
bello criterion of discrimination is the key to the ethical examination of Bomber Command's strategy.  While British intentions vis a vis Germany before the war are outside the scope of this paper, we will assume (with the weight of historical evidence on our side) that Britain was engaged in a just war.   For Britain, the 2See Johnson, Can Modern War Be Just, pp 18-29.  Johnson adds a seventh criterion in his unpublished essay, viz, that there be a reasonable hope of success.
Can Modern War Be Just?, p 21
4 Johnson points out in his essay that the jus in bello "have...risen in importance relative to the jus ad bellum over time."  Hardin adds that "in contemporary concern, the doctrine of just war is almost exclusively a matter of jus in bello after an unjust attack." See Hardin, p 185
5 On utilitarianism and the action-based objections to consequentialist means, see Hardin and Ramsey, passim
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jus ad bellum has been satisfied.   A purely just war argument in favor of Bomber
Command’s methods cannot succeed, for we are left with the ethical problem of a state
which  has  otherwise  satisfied  the  just  cause  killing  indiscriminately  hundreds  of
thousands of civilians, most of whom had nothing to do with the munitions factories
which the Government repeatedly claimed to be aiming for.  The analysis and history are complex, for Bomber Command and the Air Staff posed several arguments, one for
public consumption (see Section II) and several internally.   The latter were a jumbled
assortment of wishful thinking in the guise of strategic analysis and a xenophobic set of untestable assumptions.   In simple terms, Bomber Command's argument, as well as that of many of its critics, was utilitarian: 'Our justification for the bombing of residential areas is that this regrettable action will save Allied lives and shorten the war.'   
This argument (which justified nominally unjust means in the pursuit of a good end) may be challenged on its own terms, as General Carl Spaatz did, or it may run against objections along the lines that breaking the jus in bello criterion of noncombatant immunity is immoral in its own right and cannot be justified by any good end.
To restate the problem, we will use a just war frarm-work to examine the ethics of British strategic bombing campaign.  The just war tradition is always with us, forcing us to look at issues such as large-scale bombardment of civilians not simply from a strategic perspective, but an ethical one as well.   I would argue that the following hard-headed questions guide any command decision-making body when the question of killing large numbers of civilians in wartime is posed:
1) Has the nation in questioned examined the moral issue of killing civilians before embarking on a campaign to do so?
2) Is it a matter of last resort?
3)  Has the state articulated a relationship between mass bombing and surrender of its adversary?
4)   Is the validity of this relationship being monitored?     (If killing non-combatants
is working - that     is, compelling the adversary to surrender - then the state would
nominally be permitted to continue.     If the strategy is not working, then the state 8
would be compelled to seek victory or survival without   resort   to breaking       this injunction.)

Let us now turn to Britain’s situation between the wars...
Bomber Command's mission evolved from a muddled pre-war set of doctrines
which were hastily formulated and often mutually exclusive.  The RAF could not seem to make up its mind before the war what the role of Bomber Command was.  Up until 1933, the RAF was the stepchild of British forces.  With rearmament beginning in 1933, based in part on an exaggerated picture of German strategic forces,
Britain still had only a vague deterrence role for Bomber Command with no concomitant strategy.  

By 1937, the RAF's bomber force was rated so weak that its bases could probably not draw German bombers away from raiding British cities.   In June of 1938, more out of fear of the Luftwaffe than any ethical constraints, the PM told parliament that in the event of war, the RAF would bomb only those German targets located away from cities.   In the final days before war, Ludlow Hewitt (Bomber Command C-in-C) warned the Air Staff that in the event of all-out attacks on Germany, Bomber Command would be wiped out in less than eight weeks.6

Britain sought in the early months of the war to maintain a strictly precision-
oriented  bombing  policy.    This  was  largely  due  to  fears  based  on  the  pre-war
exaggerations of German strategic air power and what the Luftwaffe could do to
London

The  "knockout  blow"  literature  of  the  interwar  period  reflected  the  widespread
expectation in Europe that aerial warfare would be directed against cities in which the
residents would be bombed and even gassed.   Many of the apocalyptic pictures of a
knockout blow on
London (launched from Germany or France) seem remarkably current, finding a place in modern thought on the effects of nuclear war.   Among the principal contributors to the knockout blow concept were Lord Trenchard, Italian General Guilio Douhet, James Spaight and Basil Liddell Hart.   Douhet died in 1930, and Lidell Hart
6See Messenger, p 25; SAO IV, p 89; Quester, pp 82-89; Hastings, p 42
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would eventually turn away from the concept of strategic bombardment of cities to articulate a tactical role for air power in concert with ground forces.   Trenchard would continue to exert a strong philosophical influence advocating the effectiveness of morale bombing in the RAF.7

In May of 1940 the "phoney war" had ended with the German assaults on the Low
Countries
and France.   The only significant "strategic" aerial bombardment so far was
carried out by the Luftwaffe on targets in countries which could not strike back, such as
Warsaw.   Hitler claimed that the situation in Warsaw (and later, Rotterdam) was purely tactical and the bombing had fallen within the parameters of the Hague Draft Rules.  This is plausible, since Hitler immediately acquiesced to Roosevelt's plea for all parties to pledge not to bomb cities indiscriminately.   Hitler further had given orders to his staff that France and Britain were not to be bombed.  If Britain had given up on the  deterrent power of the RAF, it was still uppermost in Hitler's mind.8 The most significant event in the early air war was the bombing of Rotterdam, which seemed to confirm the widespread fears of the knockout blow. The figure of 30,000 people killed was generally accepted, 9 and it seemed that the GAF had lost any inhibitions against killing civilians in large scale terror attacks designed to intimidate, create panic and bring a population to its knees.
Had Goering decided to resort to the strategies of Trenchard and Douhet?  In fact,
the
Rotterdam incident was an example of the breakdown in command and control.  

The commander on the ground, having encircled the city, called off the attack, but not before a large contingent of aircraft went aloft.   Signal flares lighted by the German ground 7For a survey of the knockout blow in interwar literature, see Kennett, chapter 3; Hastings, chapter 1;
Frankland, pp 16-40 and Uri Bialer, Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932-1939 (London, 1980)
8See George Quester, Deterrence Before Hiroshima (New York: John Wiley, 1966), pp 106, 108 and passim for Hitler's desire to retain a deterrence relationship with Britain.
9 Quester, p 110 and Kennett, p 107-8, 112
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forces to ward off the attack went unheeded, and the city center was bombed with 980 civilians dying.10
Bomber Command's first desultory experience with precision bombing was its attack on the German seaplane base on the island of Sylt.   Despite claims by pilots of success, photo reconnaissance undertaken later indicated that:
The operation does not confirm that...the average crews of our bombers can identify targets at night...nor does it prove that the average crew can bomb industrial targets at night...11

Training of Bomber Command crews was woeful during this period, and remained
inadequate during the first years of the war. (Harris would often decline to bomb
precision targets on the basis of his crews' inability to find them.)   In August of 1939,
40% of bomber crews could not find a target in a friendly city in daylight.12 Despite the poor accuracy of this first operation, HM Government still hoped to stick to precision attacks.   Its June memo to the Air Ministry reflected the unarticulated prewar emphasis on precision:

the attack must be made...to avoid undue loss of civilian life in the vicinity of the target13

These were the final days for the precision target set, although the Air Ministry and
the Government would continue to claim to be hitting military and other precision targets throughout the war (see Chapter 2).   Bomber Command crews still took pains to avoid hitting civilian targets such as hospitals in urban settings,14 but Churchill looked to 
 
10Quester, p 110
11Charles Messenger, 'Bomber' Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive (NY, 1984), p 34-5 and SAO 12Messenger 29
13In Hastings 89
14Ibid, p 90
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Britain's future strategy and found only "one way through." On July 8, 1940, the Prime Minister wrote a memo to the Minister of Aircraft production (Beaverbrook) advocating attacks upon the cities of Germany as the only way to "overwhelm" the Nazis, whom he saw turning "east" (read: the USSR) if British fighters were successful in fending off German bombers in the months ahead.   Churchill told Beaverbrook that he wanted Bomber Command to deliver an:

absolutely devastating exterminating attack by very heavy bombers upon the Nazi homeland.   We must be able to overwhelm him by this means, without which I do not see a way through.15

Here was the first enunciation of a means/ends based rationale for the killing of
large numbers of civilians in enemy territory.  The memo indicated a deliberate policy of mass bombing, not a strategy which included collateral deaths which were not directly intended.  At this juncture, Bomber Command still lacked the means by which this  mass bombing of
Germany's heart could be carried out.   A competent, four-engined bomber was still years away, and in the meantime Britain's only truly strategic military force would have to make do with two-engined bombers of limited range which Bomber Command would sometimes have to coax from other services.    Importantly, the memo also implied no military involvement on the Continent, if at all possible.   This was the major motivating influence in Churchill's strategic thinking prior to Overlord.   Only Bomber Command offered the possibility of at once making a major contribution to Germany's defeat and avoiding another Somme while doing so.  

We will have occasion to return to this aspect of Churchill's thinking later on.
On July 13, the Air Staff issued a directive which specified oil and the aircraft
industry as the twin target sets. Sir Charles Portal, at this time C-in-C of Bomber
Command and a Trenchard disciple, replied that the plan was too limited and that such

15R.V. Jones, Most Secret War (1978) p 183 in Messenger, p 39
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precision targets would likely not be hit.  When bombs missed their aiming points at oil plants which were far from urban areas, they would hit nothing else of importance and do no damage, and the minimum amount of dislocation and disturbance will be caused by the operation as a whole.16

Widely dispersed attacks would be more effective because of the collateral damage done to civil populations in an area campaign:

It largely increases the moral[e] effect of out operations by the alarm and disturbance created over the wider area.17

Thus Portal began backing into a morale strategy which would necessitate the killing of civilians as at least a desirable side-effect.  In July 1940, the German Air Force had begun attacks on coastal shipping (including ports adjacent to major cities) in preparation for Operation Sea Lion.   More than any other single event, the Battle of Britain proved to be the catalyst for the eventual anti-morale bombing campaign directed at the people of Germany.   Hitler's directive to the Luftwaffe was succinct: the aims of the bombing campaign in Britain were to 1) destroy the RAF and the aircraft industry, 2) destroy ports and food storage facilities and 3) attack residential areas as reprisals for possible British raids against German cities:
I reserve to myself the right to decide on terror tactics as measures of reprisal.18

16Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945 (hereafter SAO), Vol 1, p 150
17Hastings, p 101
18Quester p 114 fn 23

13
In mid August, the Luftwaffe was doing grievous damage to Fighter Command
aerodromes as well as attacking the aircraft industry.  Goering thought destruction of the RAF would "open decisive possibilities for victory without an invasion"19 (much as the Allied morale bombing advocates would claim four years later).   In late August, the Germans added industrial targets at night to their day attacks.  Navigational errors caused ten or twelve German airplanes to bomb residential London accidentally on the night of August 24.  British reaction was swift, with 81 aircraft making what was described as a precision attack on Berlin.  Five more Berlin raids were made in the next fortnight.
September 1940 was the most significant month for Bomber Command's future, a
month in which the RAF slipped   from its oft-announced position of precision targets
only to a stance which would give its later actions doctrinal precedence. After September 7, the GAF shifted its focus to London and away from Fighter Command aerodromes in what were widely considered to be indiscriminate area attacks.    Portal, on September 11, "proscribed" 20 German cities for revenge operations.     "In view of the indiscriminate nature of the German attacks," wrote Portal, "every effort should be made to bomb these."20

The Air Staff were "dismayed" and "determined to resist" Portal's desire to initiate
an area campaign which might bring havoc upon
Britain's population centers.21 Further, both the Air Staff and the Air Ministry still believed in the efficacy of precision targeting; 
the early German bombing during the Battle of Britain was considered by the Vice Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Richard Peirse, not to be deliberately terroristic, but "sporadic and mainly harassing."22 On September 21, the Air Ministry issued a directive to Bomber Command indicating the sanction for bombing cities.   This new target set reflected the clash between those in the Ministry who favored precision attacks against a variety of 19  For a useful chronological discussion of the Battle of Britain, see Quester, pp113-22 20SAO I, p 153
21Hastings, p 102
22SAO I, p 152
14
military and industrial targets and the Prime Minister and his allies, who favored punitive raids on Berlin.   Oil was the main priority, along with communications. The German aircraft industry and naval targets such as submarine pens and landing craft were the secondary target set.   In the final paragraph, occasional morale attacks on Berlin were sanctioned which would cause "the greatest possible disturbance and dislocation both to the industrial activities and to the civil population generally in the area," although the directive noted that "there are no objectives in the Berlin area of importance to our major plans."23
By October, Portal had moved from C-in-C of Bomber Command to Chief of the
Air Staff.  This represented the confluence of views between the new Chief and Churchill,
who was increasingly pressing for morale attacks against Germany.    Oil would remain the major target of Bomber Command from the autumn of 1940 until the following May, although after October 30, the twin target set was clearly oil and morale.  In poor weather, which was most of the time (especially in winter), Berlin and other cities on Portal's "proscribed list" were to be attacked. Portal ordered the new Bomber Command C-in C, Sir Richard Peirse, to attack the cities "with such regularity as you may find practicable."
Bomber Command was further directed to raise fire-storms in the more important German cities.  Unlike analyses in the near future which would link the psychological effects of the morale campaign to victory over the German state, the Air Staff were more modest in their goals.  The rationale for morale bombing was simply "to affect the morale of the German people when they can no longer expect an early victory and are faced with the near approach of winter and the certainty of a long war."   This was straightforward enough:
Bomber Command would "demonstrate to the enemy the power and severity of air
bombardment and the hardship and dislocation which will result from it."24 Britain had 
now committed itself (without acknowledging this in public) to a morale campaign aimed
23Ibid, p 153; SAO IV, p 127
24SAO IV, pp 128-29
15
at the minds of the German people.   While the goals of this campaign were still modest, this too would change.
Technological constraints also played a role in Bomber Command's reluctance to
continue bombing precision targets.  Losses to German fighters in the Ruhr campaign and the ineffectual attacks against hardened U-Boat pens in France made the shift to night and to area all the more palatable.   But in the directives from Portal and in the increasing pressure from Churchill, another - distinctly punitive - aspect of British policy was surfacing.   In the wake of the futile Bomber Command attacks on military targets in
France, Churchill added momentum towards large-scale morale bombing by urging the Air Minister (Sinclair) to devote greater resources to a build-up of bomber resources and a semi-area campaign in the Ruhr.

While the area campaign was gaining in the Air Staff at this time, there was still no
overall rationale or strategy delineating what
Britain hoped to achieve by bombing the
cities of
Germany.  The manner in which this was attempted was unscientific, subjective,
and largely unchallenged - both on ethical and purely military grounds.  The first internal attempt to rationalize morale bombing came from Sir Robert Vansittart, a Foreign Office official who had access to a letter written by a "former German staff officer" who strongly urged an "all-out attack on German morale."25 This was met with great interest 
in the Air Staff, and the following month the Chiefs of Staff examined the effects of bombing morale for the first time.   This brief and inadequate "analysis" repeated the urgings of Lord Trenchard, who advocated a widespread campaign aimed at German morale, which he considered breakable, based on his personal observations in WWI. Thus the CoS declared in its overview of Britain's strategic objectives that The evidence at our disposal goes to show that the morale of the average German civilian will weaken quicker than that of a population such as our 
own  as  a  consequence  of  direct  attack.    The  Germans  have  been
25SAO I, p 169
16
undernourished and subjected to a permanent strain equivalent to that of war conditions during almost the whole period of Hitler's regime and for this reason also will be liable to crack before a nation of greater stamina.26

This can be seen charitably as a vaguely utilitarian argument: the "all out attack on German morale" was justified by the good end achieved - the surrender of the German state.   However, the salient issue of killing innocents was not mentioned, nor did the moral dimension come into play at all.   Indeed, there seemed to be a phobia for discussing the ethical issues or putting forward a compelling utilitarian justification for bombing noncombatants.   The result, as we shall see, was an increasingly savage, punitive campaign, carried out in an ethical and strategic vacuum.

In early 1941, Bomber Command continued its attack on the twin target set of oil
and morale.   Up to this time the area campaign was having almost no effect.   In
December of 1940, the city of Mannheim experienced the RAF's first experiment with an area attack on a large city.  The purpose of the raid was to light fires throughout the city, but the results of the attack by 92 aircraft were disappointing.   Precision attacks were abandoned in late 1940 except for naval targets and oil.   The naval attacks were doing little good; Bomber Command resisted the pleas of the Admiralty to aid in the Battle of the Atlantic.   Both now and later, under Harris, Bomber Command would argue that it was far more efficient to attack manufacturing facilities inside Germany (and to kill German industrial workers) than to raid "panaceas" such as submarine pens in French ports.   The durability of the submarine pens at St. Nazaire and Lorient seemed to favor Bomber Command's approach.   The constant attacks upon the emplacements virtually razed these towns and killed many civilians.   The U-boat support facilities continued to
26SAO IV, p 190
17
operate, however.   Admiral Doenitz said of the devastating but militarily futile attacks,
"No dog or cat is left in these towns.  Nothing but the submarine shelters remain!"27
Bomber Command seemed almost incapable of bombing any target, regardless of
size.  Churchill criticized Bomber Command for its utter inability to sink German cruisers in Brest, and the escape of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau up the English Channel
underscored its impotence   during this period.   Indeed, until 1943, Bomber Command
was only a potential strategic weapon, one which might save Allied lives and bring
Germany to surrender without having to commit large British land armies to the
Continent.   But the RAF's ability to deliver knockout blows, in 1941, was still years
away.

By February 1941, Portal was becoming disenchanted with the oil campaign.   By March,  oil attacks had ceased completely with the Air Staff concluding in April that oil was invulnerable.  Portal now came to embrace "mass attacks on industrial areas" as the most efficient means of crippling Germany's war at sea.28
1941 saw two monographs on the precision/area bombing dilemma that together proved to be the death-knell of precision attacks for Bomber Command.  The first was a memo written by Lord Trenchard in May to the Chiefs of Staff.  In his report, Trenchard echoed the earlier pseudo-scientific analyses of the German character and mixed this with wild projections and assumptions of what a strategic bombing force was capable of.  His estimates began the British notions that eventually Bomber Command would have a force of somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 heavy bombers (perhaps as early as 1944) with which to defeat Germany from the air.
Trenchard articulated what for Bomber Command was "the great temptation, thanks
to the complete misjudgment of the German character and situation which reigned in all 
 
27C & C II, p 316
28SAO I, p 165
18
sections of the British consciousness..."29 This temptation was the all-out attack on what was perceived to be Germany's weakest link: the morale of her citizens, especially her urban work force.  Trenchard articulated finally (in a bureaucracy in which there seemed to be an inordinate fear of articulating what everyone wanted) the "rationale" behind terror-bombing.  The rationale depended exclusively upon the putative superiority of the British character to that of Germany's people.  This analysis repeated "intelligence" from the Air Staff, Bomber Command, and the Ministry of Information regarding what the German experience of strategic bombing was and what the ultimate result must be:
When we have surveyed the whole area of the struggle and the factors
involved, what is the outstanding fact?   It is the ingrained morale of the
British nation which is nowhere more strongly manifest than in its ability
to stand up to losses and its power to bear the whole strain of war and its
casualties.
History has proved that we have always been able to stand our Casualties better than other Nations Strategically it must be   sound to hammer the weak points of the enemy. 
When we talk of weak points we mean the spheres in which we are
relatively stronger than he is.   Where are those weak points to be found?
Certainly not in land fighting...Where then is Germany's weak point?  It is
to be found in precisely the sphere in which I began this paper by stating
that we had a great strength.   All the evidence of the last war and of this
shows  that  the  German  nation  is  peculiarly  susceptible  to  air
bombing...The ordinary people are...virtually imprisoned in their shelters
or within the bombed area, they remain passive and easy prey to hysteria
and panic without anything to mitigate the inevitable confusion and chaos.
There is no joking in the German shelters as in ours...

29John Terraine, The Right of the Line, The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939-1945 (London: Hodeder and Stoughton 1985), p 263
19
This, then is their weak point compared with ourselves, and it is at this weak point that we should strike and strike again.30

Trenchard went on in this extraordinary treatise to project that 70% losses could be incurred with a four hundred plane reserve (he anticipated aircraft inventories to be strengthened once America came into the war).    Even in such circumstances, the comparison between what the Royal Navy  and Bomber Command could do favored the latter.  When bombing ships at sea, 99% of bombs would miss the target, while in a city campaign, 99% would hit.  Morale, then, was the key.
Trenchard's views echoed those of the Air Staff, which in 1941 with a modest force
of obsolescent aircraft deluded itself that Germany was already suffering from the
incipient morale campaign.  An Air Staff report stated that the German people "cowered  under an incessant rain of HE, and plotted rebellion against the hated Nazi regime."31
Despite the lack of sufficient resources, the Air Staff backed further into morale bombing with a new target set announcement in July.   Transport and railways would form one leg of this new dyad (the Chiefs of Staff still felt that oil was the best precision target, but acknowledged Bomber Command's inability to interrupt Germany's oil supplies in any meaningful way).  The Air Staff estimated a CEP of 1,000 yards in good moonlight for these raids.   The other component of the new target set was morale, although the word "morale" was not used.   Since moonlight was required for any precision at all, for 3/4 of each month it is possible to obtain satisfactory results only by the 'Blitz' attack on large working class and industrial areas in the towns.32
This wording made the area bombing campaign seem to be one of default, although
the Air Staff and Bomber Command (along with a somewhat ambivalent PM) had
30SAO IV, App 10, pp 194-197
31In Terraine, p 266
32SAO I, p 172
20
concurred for some time that morale was the most effective target.   The Air Staff plan was for an eventual force of 4,000 heavy bombers, but Sinclair told Portal in June that this proposal was encountering "heavy weather" with the ministers, who hesitated to sink as much as a third of Britain's industry into a single arm of the military.33

Amidst  growing  disillusionment  over  Bomber  Command  accuracy,  the  first
objective, scientific analysis was commissioned in 1941.   In July, Lord Cherwell (the
Prime Minister's scientific adviser and a close friend of Churchill's), commissioned an
exhaustive study of bombing effectiveness.    Lord Cherwell appointed D.M. Butt, of the War Cabinet Secretariate, to analyze 630 photos representing a total of 6,105 individual sorties.  Of these missions, 2/3 of the crews claimed to have reached the target.  The Butt Report found that in fact, of the above crews, only 1/3 came within five miles of the aiming point.  When attacking French ports, 2/3 of the bombers had CEPs of five miles or better.   In the Ruhr, only 10% had a five mile CEP.   In a new moon, only 1/15th of all sorties came within five miles of their targets.   These figures applied only to aircraft claiming to have hit the target.34
Sir Richard Peirse and others in Bomber Command were dubious over Butt's findings and methodology.    Reluctantly, however, Portal agreed with the overall conclusions and was challenged by Churchill to come up with "proposals for action."35 The "action" proposed was Portal's reminder to the PM of the damage which would be wrought upon Germany once Bomber Command was armed with its 4,000 heavies. Germany would be "forced to her knees" in six months, once the bombers had been acquired.36 Bomber Command would destroy the foundations upon which the [German] war machine rests - the economy which feeds it, the morale which sustains it...and the hopes of  
33Ibid, p 177
34Ibid, pp 178-9; Kennett, p 129; Messenger, p 48; Hastings, p 117; Terraine, p 242 35SAO I, p 179; Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol IV (1951), p 250 36Messenger, p 50
21
victory which inspire it.   Then only shall we be able to return to the
continent and...impose our will upon the enemy...It is in bombing on a
scale undreamt of in the last war that we find the new weapon on which
we must principally depend for the destruction of German economic life
and morale.37
As in the Trenchard memo of a few months prior, the bomber is seen not only as the agent which will smash German morale, but also as the means by which Britain can avoid a massive, destructive land war on the continent.   What was missing in this and most analyses was the logical progression between demoralization of the populace (including whether it would in fact happen) and victory over the German war machine.  The vague hope was that a land army would be merely a police force (this was articulated later during formulation of Pointblank) or that the Allies could dictate terms to a weakened, demoralized Germany.   The second possibility withered after Roosevelt's declaration of the "unconditional surrender" policy at Casablanca.
In the wake of the Butt Report's dismal findings, and anticipating a large strategic
bombing force, the Chiefs of Staff now drew up a list of forty three German cities having populations of 100,000 or more.  Among them were Essen, Dusseldorf, Cologne and the Ruhr industrial area.   The methodology for Bomber Command was based on German damage to British cities during the Blitz.  The Air Staff made a study of bomb damage in both Britain and Germany, and determined that British cities had sustained more damage than German ones in attacks of similar force.  The higher level of incendiary use by the Luftwaffe was cited as causing the disproportionate level of damage to English cities.
The Air Staff then recommended to Bomber Command that incendiaries be used in a
greater proportion in attacks on German residential areas.38 Coventry was the standard
model for British calculations of damage to Germany.  The Air Ministry speculated that six Coventry-sized attacks would completely destroy a comparable German city, based in 
37CoS memo July 31, 1941 in SAO I, p 181
38Ibid, p 252-3
22
part on industry and social life in Coventry having taken thirty-five days to recover after the December 1940 raid.
Churchill was not so sure of Portal's optimism.   Despite his pronouncement to
Beaverbrook the previous July that the heavy bomber was "the one sure path" to victory, he now wrote his most perceptive observation on strategic bombing, a tome reminiscent of his 1917 views in which he had found it "improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack would compel the Government of a great nation to surrender."39 In what may have been a challenge to Portal, Churchill 
threw cold water on the notion that strategic bombing could "be a decisive factor" in the defeat of Germany:

On the contrary, all that we have learnt since the war shows that its effects, both physical and moral, are greatly exaggerated.   There is no doubt that the British people have been stimulated and strengthened by the attack made upon them so far...The most we can say is that it will be a heavy and I trust a seriously increasing annoyance.40
Portal was momentarily stunned by the PM's apparent disavowal of strategic
bombing, not to mention the support he had given to the 4,000 bomber plan.  In a
carefully  worded  minute  which  Sir  Archibald  Sinclair  praised  as  "masterly"  and
"audacious," Portal both reminded Churchill of his past support and countered his arguments.
This was not simply an argument designed to retain operational viability, but was
a reiteration of the morale bombing policy which Bomber Command had adopted over
the previous year.  Portal conceded that light, harassing attacks might unite national will, but this could:
scarcely be said of attacks on the Coventry model.  Judging from our own
experience, it is difficult to believe that any country could withstand
39Quoted in Hastings, pp 44-5
40Messenger, p 50
23
indefinitely the scale of attack contemplated in the Air Staff plan...the consensus of informed opinion is that German morale is much more vulnerable to bombing than our own.41
Churchill replied to Portal's memo in early October, 1941.   In the memo, he continued his highly ambivalent views, on the one hand promising to continue the expansion program for Bomber Command, but on the other, expressing further caution regarding strategic bombing as a whole:

I deprecate, however, placing unbounded confidence in this means of
attack, and still more expressing that confidence in terms of arithmetic.  It
is the most potent method of impairing the enemy's morale we can use at
the present time.
Churchill also challenged the loose, pseudo-psychological view that German morale was somehow weaker than its British counterpart and that the decimation of an enemy's morale would perforce lead to victory:

Even if all the towns of Germany were rendered largely uninhabitable, it
does not follow that the military control would be weakened or even that
war industry could not be carried on...One has to do the best one can, but
he is an unwise man who thinks there is any certain method of winning
this war, or indeed any other war between equals in strength.   The only
plan is to persevere.42

Portal was caught in a vicious circle.   In its present circumstances, with 506
bombers available on a given day (none of these were Lancasters) and a very poor record for accuracy and damage done to either German morale or the economy, Bomber Command was not likely to get its 4,000 bomber force. If quality and quantity did not
 
41SAO I, p 183
42Ibid, pp 184-85
24
improve quickly, however, Bomber Command would never be able to deliver the knockout blows on German cities it was promising.
Peirse decided to demonstrate Bomber Command's ability to make heavy morale
attacks by ordering a number of raids in early November.   Among the cities attacked
were Mannheim and Berlin.   The result was heavy losses sustained by the bombers and little damage to the German cities.   From   a 1940 loss rate of 3.2%, Bomber Command was now suffering an unacceptable rate of 4.1%.43 Churchill called a halt to offensive 
operations until the following Spring.
The end of 1941 saw the complete failure of not only precision bombing by the
RAF, but also of any convincing demonstration that Bomber Command could carry out
larger-scale morale attacks, which was the only mission left to it, the only mission it had chosen for itself.   This failure was not entirely Bomber Command's fault; it lacked the tools to do the job.  But the job itself was still ill-defined.  Bomber Command had come to area bombing not only out of operational necessity, but through a long, circuitous process of justification and tortuous rationalization.  The means of area bombing for the purpose of breaking civilian morale seemed obvious enough, even self-justifying.  Surely the end desired -- the defeat of Germany -- was also self-evident.  But not only was the ostensibly utilitarian relationship between morale bombing and surrender not examined,
but the exact nature of Germany's collapse had been all but blithely ignored.   The
momentous implications of seeking to attack noncombatants had not even entered into
the discussion so far, nor would they.   Britain had been bombing morale and would
continue to do so on a greater and more terrible scale while hoping for the best.  It would at least become "an increasing annoyance."
What was meant by "breaking civilian morale" was never clearly defined, except in
loose, self-deluded terms such as "final collapse," "general dislocation" or "internal
disruption."  By the end of 1941, in response to criticism from the US Special Observer 
43Messenger, p 51
25
Group, the British Joint Planning Staff (JPS) attempted to define morale as an objective.
It did so in curious terms, stressing transport, living and industrial facilities while
downplaying the terror-oriented aspects of area-bombing.44 Perhaps to appease the
Americans, the definition was now far from Trenchard's and James Spaight's emphasis on terror and the psychological effects of strategic bombing.  This divergence would not last long.
U.S. criticism of British strategic bombing plans as well as consultation had been
taking place almost since the beginning of the war.   In mid 1941, an American general
summed up a meeting with Air Ministry and RAF personnel.   The tone of the meeting
reflected future contentious debates between the Army Air Force (AAF) and Bomber
Command:
I told [the junior Air Minister] that I was no expert but so far as my
observations went, the British had no proof yet that their bombing had
been any more effective than the German bombing of England...I pointed
out that the Luftwaffe under the most favorable conditions had failed to
paralyze the British or reduce this country to impotence in over a year of
attack, at very short range, and when its energies were not engaged
elsewhere.   So why, I asked, should the RAF believe they could bring
down Germany at a greater range and with its targets very much more
dispersed than those in England and protected by very much better anti-
aircraft defenses now than the British had here last year?   I built on
absolutely sure ground here because I have had a little time to study the
statistics on the damage done to Britain in the seven months between 1
June and 31 December 1940, and it is really surprisingly small...45
By the end of 1941, morale amongst the highest echelons of Bomber Command and
in the ranks as well was low.   Peirse was being criticized for lack of leadership.   The
incipient morale campaign was getting nowhere and causing grievous losses for air crews.
44SAO I, P 298
45Hastings,  p 120
26
On December 7, the Air Vice-Marshal (Bottomley) wrote that there was no "concrete
evidence" that morale bombing was having any psychological effect and the "material
results obtained have been definitely disappointing."46 Something would have to be
done.
Incredibly, at this critical juncture no new analysis of strategy or rational utilitarian
study took place.   Instead of considering the ethical implications of what it was about to do or examine the implicit relationship between morale bombing and German surrender, Britain now came to sanction its slowly evolving terror campaign in de jure terms, if for internal consumption only.   In February Bomber Command received from Portal and the Air Staff the official approbation for a full-scale, deliberate terror campaign.  Even though urban dwellings had been the primary target set for more than a year, Directive 22 was significant for its stress on the morale campaign at the expense of other targets.   The restriction's of the last three months were lifted and Bomber Command was free to bomb several specific cities until their "destruction has been achieved":
the primary objective of your operations should now be focussed on the morale of the industrial workers.47

Most significant was this penciled notation from Portal to Bottomley:

Ref the new bombing directive: I suppose it is clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not,* for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories where these are mentioned in Appendix A.
This must be made quite clear if it is not already understood.48
46SAO I, 256-57
47SAO IV, Appendix 8, p 144
* Underlining in original
48Memo Portal to Bottomley Feb 15, 1942 in SAO I, p 324
27
Directive 22 made official what had been taking place since Oct 1940, a month
before
Coventry.   In a series of memos and gradual enunciation of policy, Bomber
Command and the Air Staff had finally come to adopt officially the bombing of German cities.   This official embrace still lacked any thoughtful analysis of how the end of surrender might come about, but Bomber Command was now irrevocably committed to the deliberate attack on civilian morale.    The morale campaign was the result of reluctance to articulate a comprehensive strategic policy for Bomber Command, which had seemingly come around 180  degrees from the early days of the war when 
Chamberlain promised no indiscriminate bombing, when the moral opprobrium for such acts lay with the Germans at Rotterdam. The British, further, sought in the early days to sustain the deterrence relationship with Hitler, avoiding the knockout blow on London
Only during the Battle of Britain, when the knockout blow failed to materialize, did the
British go over gradually to the morale campaign.  They would avoid the limitations suffered by the GAF by raining bombs down on German civilians on an unprecedented, even unimaginable, scale.   The result would surely be panic, revolt, and victory.   In the meantime, it was the only means to keep
Germany occupied and the Russians placated.
(The Soviets were never convinced that the bomber offensive represented
Britain's
proportionate share in the war effort. Stalin received copies of Harris's "Blue Book" of
bombed-out German cities, but he remained unimpressed beyond congratulations later in the war over the destruction of large sections of
Berlin.  The air offensive was a palliative until the British were finally compelled to open a second front.)49
Working class housing was the ideal target set for several complementary reasons.
It was densely packed, usually close to the city center.  In the older cities such as
Lubeck and  Dresden,  much  of  the  construction  was  wooden.    Harris,  improvising  from observations of the Blitz, dropped incendiaries in unprecedented numbers on German working class neighborhoods and followed up with HE, which would keep firefighters 
49See R.J. Overy, The Air War, 1939-1945 (Stein and Day, 1980), p 71 and Hastings, p 203
28
inside the shelters.   Middle-  and upper-class areas were not as suitable since these dwellings were more widely dispersed and often on the fringes of a city.  Emphasis was laid increasingly on the state of mind of the German worker.
In March 1942, Arthur Harris, Bomber Command's new C-in-C, opened a series of
area attacks which would continue for the duration of the war.   First
Essen, and then
Lubeck were raided.   The attack on the latter was particularly violent.   Harris could not attack German cities with impunity, at least not yet.  Navigational difficulties and a lack of heavy bombers (by the Autumn of 1942 he would have only 100 Lancasters) meant that lightly defended coastal towns in the west were most susceptible to raids. (Harris refused a request from the PM in 1942 to attack Berlin.   It was too far, too heavily defended, and Gee - the new navigational device - was hampered by geographic limitations.50) Harris felt Lubeck would make a showcase target and provide a relatively risk-free way for his crews to "be well 'blooded,' as they say in foxhunting..."51 The city was on the northern coast and offered no real navigational challenges.  It was considered militarily unimportant and had few AA batteries.   The most important criterion for Bomber Command was the construction of its central residential area.  An old Hanseatic capital  of  historical  and  artistic  importance,  Lubeck's  residential  dwellings  were constructed mostly of wood, giving the city a highly combustible nature.  Harris said that it was "built more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation."52 234 bombers released 300 tons of bombs (50% incendiaries).53 As Harris predicted, huge areas of the town burned to the ground. 1475 homes were destroyed with another 2,000 badly damaged.
312 people were killed.54   RAF losses were light, with only twelve aircraft failing to
return.   Lubeck's industrial and military value were limited, but Harris felt that it was
"preferable to destroy an industrial town of moderate importance than fail to destroy a
50Kennett, p 131
51Hastings, p 165
52Terraine, p 476
53Kennett, p 132
54Hastings, p 165 and SAO I, p 392
29

large, industrial city."55   As a result of the RAF attacks in March, 3,052 people left the city, but most of these returned soon after, as in other large area raids which "de-housed" large numbers of people.   Damage to Lubeck's industries was generally light, with all coming back to near full production within a week and many other destroyed factories switching to affiliates in other cities.   Later precision raids on Lubeck caused much heavier damage to factories and utilities.56
Rostock was bombed shortly thereafter.  Its circumstances were similar to those of
Lubeck's, and thousands of its residents fled the city in the wake of the raid.   The
situation, briefly, was close to mass panic, but this did not last long. The Heinkel factory - 
- hit by a simultaneous precision attack -- was back to full production in two days.57
Most affected were Goebbels and Hitler, who were shocked at the news of the devastation.  Goebbels wrote in his diary that "community life in Rostock is almost at an end."  Ironically, he adopted the same sort of nationalistic, pseudo-psychological analysis upon which the RAF morale campaign was based.  The result of the Lubeck attack could have been worse, Goebbels wrote, for northern Germans could take the devastation. Those in the south might succumb to mass panic or demoralization:
The  English  claim  they  dropped  one  thousand  pound  bombs  onto
Luebeck.  The damage done there is indeed enormous...It is horrible.  One
can well imagine how such an awful bombardment affects the population.
Thank God, it is a case of North German population, which, on the whole,
is much tougher than the South German or the Southeast German
population.58
The German press was now labelling the British raids Terrorangriffe, or "terror
attacks."59 Hitler was both angry at the GAF's AA forces and frightened for what the
55Terraine, p 477
56USSBS, A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Lubeck, pp 1-31 passim 57Terraine, p 480
58Louis Lochner, ed., The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 (Garden City: Doubleday 1948), p 160 59Kennett, p 144
30
future held.   Again, he sought a deterrence relationship with Britain through threatened reprisals.   Indeed, up to this time, it was still possible for both countries to turn away from urban bombing.   Certain members of Parliament proposed that a "gentlemen's agreement" could be put into effect which would preclude any further intentional bombing of cities.   Churchill and Eden, now seeing that Britain's cities had little to fear from the tactically-oriented Luftwaffe, squelched this effort.   In April, Hitler warned Churchill in a speech to the Reichstag that retribution would be soon in coming.  Attacks on munitions factories would be ineffectual and not have the symbolic value of raids on English cultural centers similar in importance to the German cities which had been torched.  Perusing his Baedecker's guide to English cities, Hitler decided to attack every town with a three-star rating.60 Thus the great cultural centers of Bath, Exeter,
Canterbury and York were bombed between April and June.      1637 civilians were killed and the British public were "incensed."61      In a mirror image of the RAF's attitude, Hitler told Goebbels that he would repeat these raids night after night until the English were sick and tired of terror attacks.   He shares my opinion absolutely that 
cultural centers, bathing resorts, and civilian cities must be attacked now;
there the psychological effect is much stronger, and at the present moment
psychological effect is the most important thing...there is no other way of
bringing the English to their senses.   They belong to a class of human
beings with whom you can talk only after you have first knocked out their
teeth.62

60This may have been apocryphal.  See Kennett, p 132.  Goebbels was furious over the label "Baedecker raids" in his diary; see Lochner, pp 200-01
61Terraine, p 423.
62Lochner, p 190
31

Chapter II: Misgivings, Public and Private
The irrationality of Bomber Command's morale campaign, which seemed more punitive than strictly utilitarian, was rarely questioned inside the RAF.   Beginning in 1942 and continuing for the duration, members of parliament, writers, churchmen and a few general officers (usually retired and none in Bomber Command) questioned in ethical terms what was obviously to them a terror campaign.  As we shall see, the criticism took various forms. The dissembling nature of Bomber Command's arguments - to the public and to the Air Staff - made it vulnerable to those in Parliament who attacked its veracity and others who questioned the means on ethical grounds.

The Spring of 1942 was significant not only for Bomber Command's official policy,
but for
Whitehall as well.   On the 24th of March the debate over Bomber Command's
proper mission became public.   At first, MP's questioned the investment of so many
resources into an arm of the military which was reaping so few results.  A.V. Bull echoed the criticism made in 1941 by the American general when he pointed out that
Britain's morale and production had withstood the Blitz.  He also questioned the logic of "bombing an enemy into submission."63 Bull spoke of a "disaster" which was not simply the futility of such a policy, but the waste of resources which could be spent on more productive projects.
This was not, of course, a moral argument.   Policy was being questioned on the
grounds of efficacy, not the ethics of killing non-combatants.   The debate took a more
ethically-oriented turn in May, when Richard Stokes asked about morale bombing in the House of Commons.   Despite frequent government assurances to the press that Bomber Command was raiding only military targets in precision attacks, a few members were becoming skeptical.  The objections were now moral as well as operational.  Stokes was becoming the most outspoken critic of Bomber Command's morale campaign.   A WWI
 
63Messenger, p 64
32
veteran, decorated with the Military Cross and Croix de Guerre, he was a "constant thorn in the Government's flesh" regarding the bombing of civilians.64
Sinclair, along with Clement Atlee, was the chief government spokesman in the
House of Commons.  Sinclair denied repeatedly -- from 1942 to the end of the war -- that the RAF had instructions to attack anything but military targets and vital factories, even though he knew that Bomber Command had been specifically ordered not to attack these very targets.

The few MP's who questioned bombing policy on moral or operational grounds were a tiny minority with little influence.   Stokes was often shouted down in Commons by members who cheered Sinclair's baldly dishonest claims.   Harris at least had the courage of his convictions (and any MP who bothered to read Harris's statements on area bombing can hardly have claimed ignorance).  He was exasperated with the government duplicity and repeatedly called for public declarations.
The Times repeated the government's duplicitous statements that the RAF were making only precision attacks.  When would Germany halt its propaganda regarding the alleged attacks on civilians and admit the devastation wrought to its communications, docks, and war matériel?  The Times correspondent assured his readers that at no time have the RAF deliberately attacked either civilians or non-
military objectives.  It would not be worth the while of Bomber Command
to send valuable aircraft and highly skilled and equally valuable trained
men such long distances merely to knock down a few inoffensive houses.
65

The press in general repeated Churchill's public argument which capitalized on the
somewhat skewed version of history in which
Germany had initiated the city campaign at 
64Hastings, p 192
65Quoted in Messenger, p 82
33
Coventry and London in 1940.   Churchill's rationale was one of just retribution for Germany's sins:
We ask no favor of the enemy.  We seek from them no compunction.  On
the contrary, if tonight the people of London were asked to cast their votes
whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of all
cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, 'No, we will mete out to the
Germans the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted
out to us.'66
In reality, Churchill's assertion had an ironic twist that says much about the people
of
London and the experience of noncombatants exposed to the horror of indiscriminate bombing.  In May of 1941, a Gallup poll was published which measured public sentiment for reprisal bombing in Britain.   Some agreed with Churchill's view that the Germans should receive the full measure of what they had supposedly dealt to Britain's cities.  But significantly, those who cried most for revenge lived in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmoreland -- areas in the countryside, out of range of the German Blitz.  Some 75% of the people in these rural areas favored "reprisal" raids on German cities.  By contrast, those living in the hardest-hit areas, such as central London, were far less eager to see German civilians suffer.   Only 45% of the citizens of central London favored such reprisal raids.67
If Stokes and his allies were supporters of the war but critical of the means
employed, the handful of pacifists in the House had even less influence.  One of these was Alfred Salter, a Labour MP from the working class district of Bermondsey, which had suffered heavily in the Blitz.   Ill and barely able to speak, he made a classically deontic speech to an uncaring House.   "All this is founded," he said, "on the great and terrible

66Quoted in Quester, p 141
67Angus Calder, The People's War (NY: Pantheon 1969), p 229; Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books 1977), p 256;  Irving L. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress (Rand Report:
1955), p 127
34
fallacy that ends justify means.   They never do -- never, never...Is there not pity in the whole world?  Are all our hearts hardened and coarsened by events?...Will not somebody, for the love of God, for the sake of Christ, demand sanity and peace?"68
Misgivings within the   RAF command hierarchy seem to have been virtually non-
existent.   Several factors may in part account for this.   One was certainly the overall
perception of German atrocities committed at Warsaw and Rotterdam.   Although the
damage to Rotterdam was actually light, figures at the time gave the impression that
Germany had "taken the gloves off."   The bombing of London (itself a reprisal for the
two-week bombing of Berlin) only added to the impression that Germany had deliberately broken down its deterrence relationship with the UK.   Britain's position was unique and for a time, desperate.  Until mid-1941, its strategic situation was bleak.  Fighter Command had just managed to persevere in the summer of '40. Britain stood isolated until June of 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR.   Even then, the outcome was unclear until the entry of the Americans.   In the early years, "the bombers alone provided the means of victory."69 It is, nevertheless, odd that the moral implications of killing civilians wholesale never entered the equation.    There is no evidence that general officers,
including the Air Marshals, had any ethical misgivings regarding BC's mission or even
considered the question worth examination.
Bomber Command saw its mission as "dehousing" as many German workers as
possible, although even this term begged a larger question.  Portal answered the question of the fine difference between dehousing and killing noncombatants when he estimated that with four to six thousand heavy bombers, Bomber Command could destroy six million homes, "de-house" 25 million Germans and kill 900,000 civilians by 1944.70 
(Cherwell, it should be noted, postulated that nothing demoralizes a person more than having his house destroyed.  Harris also clung to the curious argument that Bomber
68Angus Calder, p 494
69Ibid, p 229,
70Hastings, p 203
35
Command was not trying to kill people, but simply demoralize them to the point where
they would no longer report for work. The result would be the impotence of   German
industry.)
Bomber Command   never really examined its target set, either from a military or
ethical framework. Portal defeated plans for an "objective, scientific analysis" of the
strategic air offensive "without recourse to argument," citing only the delay it would cause and the inevitable scope of such a study.71 Such studies were in fact taking place  in the 
AAF throughout the war, but the RAF muddled through, using an unarticulated version of Trenchardian doctrine tied to operational limitations.
If there were no generals in Bomber Command who had moral objections, at least two figures with some former prominence objected heatedly and in unmistakably ethical terms to the morale campaign.   Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, together with Basil LidellHart, had in the twenties been amongst the most influential advocates of air power. Liddell Hart had warned of the coming of the aerial "knockout blow" but had since modified his views.  Both men had favored the use of tactical air  in concert with fast-moving ground forces, a concept applied with great efficiency by the Wermacht.
Fuller and Lidell-Hart now saw the morale-bombing campaign as not only an extravagant waste of resources and a military misstep, but an immoral, destructive act that would come to haunt Britain.  In August 1943, Fuller sent a letter to the London Evening Standard in which he deplored the morale bombing campaign.  "The worst devastations of the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Seljuks, and Mongols pale into insignificance when compared to the material and moral damage now wrought..." he wrote.   The Evening Standard's editor, Michael Foot (later the Labour Party leader) wrote back to Fuller that he "lacked the nerve" to publish the article.72

71Anthony Verrier, Bomber Offensive (London: Pan Books, 1974), p 96 72Hastings, p 198
36
Liddell Hart wrote a private "Reflection" in the summer of 1942, on the barbarism of city-bombing:
It will be ironical if the defenders of civilization depend for victory upon the most barbaric, and unskilled, way of winning a war that the modern world has seen...We are now counting for victory on success in the way of degrading it to a new low level - as represented by indiscriminate (night) bombing and indiscriminate starvation...73
Whatever influence Lidell-Hart and Fuller once had, they were now Cassandras,
like Stokes or Bishop Bell.  George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, was probably the most celebrated opponent of the morale campaign.   Bell was a long-time and ardent foe of Nazism whose conscience could not abide the destruction of German cities.    His credentials as a supporter of the war effort (and RAF crews) should never have been in question, although he was attacked unfairly in the press for his views.   As early as May 1941, he argued that morale bombing was "a degradation of the spirit..."74 Bell was not a pacifist.   Like Salter and Fuller, he questioned the means employed on their own terms.
Bombing military targets had a self-evident justification which did not trammel upon the Augustinian notions of what a state might do in war.   The wholesale destruction of
German cities was another matter.  Writing in a church publication, the Chichester Dioce-san Gazette, Bell argued that Britain could not take the moral high ground while the Government exulted over the killing of German non-combatants:
I see signs in some quarters of giving way to the spirit which caused the
war...When a Minister of the Government speaks in exulting terms of a
ruthless and destructive bombing of the German people...or contemplate
the subjection of fifty German cities to the same terror as Hamburg (or
Coventry) has suffered...then we have real cause to grieve for a lowering
of the moral tone, and also to fear greatly for the future.   It is our whole
73Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A Study of His Military Thought (London: Cassell & Co, 1977), p 145 74Calder, p 492
37
claim that we are fighting for a better world order, for freedom, for justice, for morality...75

Bell had some private support from his colleagues, such as Lord Lang, the former
Primate.   Another colleague, William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to come to Bell's aid in calling for a statement from the Government on the bombing
campaign in the House of Lords.  Neither would Temple support Bell's efforts to have the government make a declared distinction between Nazis and the German populace as a whole.  Such a distinction would have of course made public justification or continuation of the morale campaign very difficult.   Temple took a subtly utilitarian view which fixed culpability for the war on all its participants.  The best a Christian (who was also a Briton) could do was be "penitent" while participating in a necessary evil.76
Bell made his most significant and impassioned speech before the House of Lords on February 9, 1944, moving that the government make public its bombing policy.   The motion was actually a reasoned, informed indictment of morale bombing.
I would humbly claim to be one of the most convinced and consistent
Anti-Nazis in Great Britain.  But I desire to challenge the Government on
the policy which directs the bombing of enemy towns on the present scale,
especially with reference to civilians, non-combatants, and non-military
and non-industrial objectives...Few will deny that there is a distinction in
principle between attacks on military and industrial objectives and attacks
on objectives which do not posses that character...It is said that 74,000
persons have been killed [in Berlin] and that 3,000,000 are already
homeless.  The policy is obliteration, openly acknowledged.  That is not a justifiable act of war...[This will not stop] till, to use the language of the Chief of Bomber Command with regard to Berlin, the heart of Nazi Germany ceases to beat...
75Norman Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Offensive Against Germany 1939-1945 (London: 1983), p
374
76Calder, p 488 and see F. A. Iremonger, William Temple (Oxford University Press: 1948),  p 232
38

Bell then challenged one of the pillars of Bomber Command's strategy.   If terror bombing was designed to  send a message to German civilians, then why punish the very people Britain was trying to influence?
If we wish to shorten the war...then let the Government speak a word of
hope and encouragement both to the tortured millions of Europe and to
those enemies of Hitler to whom in 1939 Mr. Churchill referred as
'millions who stand aloof from the seething mass of criminality and
corruption constituted by the Nazi Party machine.'   Why is there this
blindness to the psychological side?  Why is there this inability to reckon
with the moral and spiritual facts?   Why is there this forgetfulness of the
ideals by which our cause is inspired?   How can the War Cabinet fail to
see that this progressive devastation of cities is threatening the roots of
civilization?

Viscount Cranbourne, speaking for the Government, repeated Sinclair's assertions in the House of Commons that the RAF has never indulged in pure terror raids, in what used to be known as Baedeker raids of the kind which the Luftwaffe indulged in at one time on this country.77

Press reaction to Bell's speech was mixed -- the large dailies such as the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail were harshly critical or satirical.  A few of the smaller or more progressive papers -- the Spectator and the New Statesman, for instance -- recognized Bell's sincerity and courage.78
The literature reflects no deep-seated resistance by aircrew members to morale
bombing.    Most shut out pangs of conscience early or justified area bombing by
77Hansard Lords (Feb 9, 1944), cols 737-755
78Longmate, p 377
39
comparing their actions to the German initiation of indiscriminate bombing at Warsaw and Rotterdam.    Personal ethics paled in importance with the realities of the air battle.  There apparently was, however, an undercurrent of ethical resistance within the ranks to morale bombing.  Sometimes this took the form of a sarcastic comment by an airman at briefing;
more often of private regret.79 Bell's speech in the House of Lords struck a chord of
sympathy with many families who had sons in Bomber Command, as well as aircrew
members who felt that the terror campaign was wrong.  Many of the latter felt constrained from speaking out; Bell became their champion.    In letters sent to the bishop, some RAF crew members thanked Bell for his speech.  Families and other clergymen sent supportive letters to Bell, telling him that there were "a not inconsiderable number [of RAF aircrew]
who are torn and disturbed, and it is these men who will be grateful to you."80
It is widely acknowledged that Bell's outspokenness cost him the Archbishopric of
Canterbury after the death of William Temple, much as Churchill's disavowal of the terror campaign cost Harris a peerage and Bomber Command mention in the Honours List after the war.
In October 1942 the Assistant Chief for Policy of the Air Staff issued a memo to commands throughout the RAF which sought to measure the intrinsic value of civilians in occupied and enemy territory.   The October directive made clear the rights civilians enjoyed (or forfeited) in the air war and drove a wedge between the rights of civilians in occupied Allied countries and the non-combatant residents of Germany:
1. The following rules govern out bombardment policy in British, Allied or Neutral territory occupied by the enemy:
Bombardment is to be confined to military objectives, and must be subject to the following general principles:
(1) The intentional bombardment of civilian populations, as such, is forbidden.

79Martin Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg: Allied Air Forces Against a German City in 1943, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981), p 349
80Personal correspondence with Stephen Lammers, Religion Department, Lafayette College
40
(2)  It must be possible to identify the objective.
(3)   The attack must be made with reasonable care to avoid undue
loss of civilian       life in the vicinity of the target.

2. German, Italian and Japanese territory:
Consequent upon the enemy's adoption of a campaign of unrestricted air
warfare, the Cabinet have authorized a bombing policy which includes the
attack of enemy morale.   The foregoing rules do not, therefore, apply to
our  conduct  of  air  warfare  against  German,  Italian  and  Japanese
territory.81
No rationale, ethical or military, was offered.   The directive simply codified the morale campaign while placing the responsibilities for its inception on the enemy.   If Germany had begun unrestricted strategic bombing, its people forfeited their rights normally protected under just war criteria and notions of the immunity of civilians in war. Hitler had done much the same thing when he attacked English cities during the Baedecker raids, although his arguments had no moral flavor at all.  His reluctance to kill English civilians rested on fears of reprisals against Germany, not on a sense of the intrinsic worth of the residents of London.
Some influential Britons went further in their advocacy of the terror-bombing cam-
paign.    Robert Vansittart, of the Foreign Office, made broadcasts during the war
characterizing Germany as a violent pariah, the "butcher-bird" of Europe. In his "Black
Record," Vansittart saw Germany as innately militaristic and thus all Germans as guilty.
His identification of all German citizens with the Nazis was reminiscent of Churchill's
refusal to differentiate "good" from "bad" Germans in Parliament.  Vansittart wrote that
81Hastings, p 191.  Italics added.
41
the battle still rages round the question:   are we fighting the Germans or the Nazis?   One day historians will rub their eyes, and wonder how such silly questions could be discussed at the end of 1941.82
Vansittart's extreme views were noted with irony in Germany, where excerpts from
the Black Record broadcasts were used on posters which lined the walls of the subway
stations.83
Another advocate of morale bombing was James Spaight, one of Britain's early
proponents of air power.   Along with Douhet and Trenchard, Spaight felt the most
efficient use of air power was strategic bombing directed against cities (although his
writings in the interwar period are sometimes highly ambivalent and indicate a good deal of ethical reflection).   Spaight wrote on the psychological effects of mass bombing.   His arguments and views were more sophisticated than Vansittart's; civilians were fair game not because they were Germans, but because in modern war, practically all   workers in urban centers contribute directly to the war effort.   They are part of the "pre-fabricated battle":
Now, those areas have become in the march of events battle-areas.   It is
idle to pretend that they are still the quiet, innocuous towns which they
were once.  They are not.  They are dangerous, lethal, menacing towns - to
an enemy.  Terrible things - in his eyes - are done in them.  Battle begins
in them.  One must think today of battle as being pre-fabricated...The clash
of arms is only the final stage of a process which has had its beginning
elsewhere and long before...The making of arms is war-making.  It cannot
be called anything else.  It is not non-combatant work.84
82Lord Sir Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941),
p ix
83Calder, p 490; see also Longmate, p 374
84J. M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944), p 78
42
Spaight held that industrial workers and those involved in transport were warriors and could be attacked as combatants:
The  old  clear  distinction  between  soldiers  and  civilians  has  been
obscured...The people who make and transport war material are, to the
opposing belligerent, active, dangerous enemies.  He is as fully entitled to
try to put them out of action as if they were commissioned or enlisted soldiers.
They are in fact warriors.   The fact that they wear no uniform is
immaterial.  They are in no proper sense of the word non-combatants.85

Spaight made an important point regarding the activities of industrial workers, and
his premise had always been a component of Bomber Command's strategy (although the state of mind of the workers from the point of view of sheer terror became more important to Bomber Command as the evidence mounted that the area attacks were not affecting Germany's economy in a significant way).   In an industrialized, modern state which aggresses against its neighbors, workers who run the machine tools and railways which manufacture and transport war matériel do contribute more directly to aggressive war than at any time in the past.  Modern strategic war is more inclusive and more consensual than ever before.  If factories and their employees are legitimate targets during precision raids directed solely at those factories, Spaight would hold that they are equally subject to attack in their homes.
But even Spaight deplored terror for its own sake -- or said he did:

That is not to say that the whole population of an enemy country is subject
to       attack.         Indiscriminate        bombing      is       certainly       not
justifiable...Unfortunately, there are other victims whose connection with
hostilities is too remote to justify their being brought into the same
category and whom in any event it is neither the desire nor the interest of
an enemy to kill or mutilate.   No chivalrous airman wants to slaughter
grandmothers or babies.  The tragedy is that he may do so in trying to put

85Ibid, p 112
43
the others out of action.  It is an unintended, horrible, pitiable incident of war, but to say that is not to condemn air bombardment.86

This last point was an appeal to the doctrine of double effect, which spares agents
involved in necessary but regrettable collateral deaths when their cause is just and other just war criteria are being met.   One's intention  in such a case is not simply to kill noncombatants wantonly, but rather to undertake allowable actions in war (e.g. attacking only military or industrial targets), recognizing that unintended civilian deaths are unavoidable.87 Even though Spaight had to be aware of the the psychological argument as well as Directive 22, he insisted that the Government was being truthful when it declared repeatedly in public that only factories and traditional military targets (not 
residential districts) were being bombed.
Bomber Command's methodology -- if not its strategy -- was articulated most
succinctly in March 1942 by Churchill's scientific advisor, Lord Cherwell.   In the now-famous "Cherwell minute," the former Professor Lindemann sought to articulate Bomber Command's means, even if the ends were given short shrift. (The assumed end --
Germany's collapse -- was by now an a priori part of the strategy of morale bombing.)
The Cherwell minute is reminiscent of Trenchard's essay ten months earlier, but with   a scientific gloss.  The memo purported to project British bomber production over the next year, expected tonnage of bombs carried and the effects on Germany's fifty-eight largest cities:
The following seems a simple method of estimating what we could do by bombing Germany:
Careful analysis of the effects of raids on Birmingham, Hull and
elsewhere have shown that, on the average, 1 ton of bombs dropped on a

86Ibid, p 115
87See Hardin, pp 180-4 on double effect
44
built-up area demolishes 20-40 dwellings and turns 100-200 people out of
house and home...In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in 58 towns of
over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment, should be easy
to find and hit.    Our forecast output of heavy bombers (including
Wellingtons) between now and the middle of 1943 is about 10,000.   If
even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on the built-up
areas of these 58 German towns the great majority of their inhabitants
(about one-third of the German population) would be turned out of house
and home.
Investigation seems to show that having one's house demolished is
most damaging to morale.  People seem to mind it more than having their
friends or even relatives killed.   At Hull signs of strain were evident,
though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished.   On the above
figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the 58
principal German towns.   There seems little doubt that this would break
the spirit of the people.
Our calculation assumes, of course, that we really get one-half of our bombs into built-up areas.   On the other hand, no account is taken of the large promised American production (6,000 heavy bombers in the period in question).   Nor has regard been paid to the inevitable damage to factories, communications etc. in these towns and the damage by fire, probably accentuated by breakdown of public services.88

Lindemann's paper was circulated not only amongst the War Cabinet, but to a circle
of scientists on the highest level as well.  It was here that the Cherwell minute came under close scrutiny and criticism.   Many of Cherwell's colleagues -- among them Sir Henry Tizard, P. M. S. Blackett, and Solly Zuckerman -- subjected the report's conclusions to their own individual statistical analyses and found the report to be seriously flawed.
Tizard found Cherwell's estimate of the number of houses destroyed five times too high.
Blackett concluded they were six times too high.89 Further, Tizard doubted that the
88Minute in SAO I, pp 331-32
89C.P. Snow, Science and Government (Harvard University Press: 1961), p 49.  Despite Snow's assertions,
Cherwell's figures may have been closer to the truth than those of the Tizard group.  The estimates of
45
navigational technology then available or projected could deliver massive blows even to targets as large as cities.
The debate between the Tizard-Blackett group and Cherwell is one of the enduring intellectual myths of the twentieth century.   The principals involved on the losing side have become wrapped in a cloak of virtue and the statistical debate has come to symbolize any struggle between parochial stupidity and moral rectitude.  C.P. Snow first brought the great debate into the open in his Godwin Lecture at Harvard in 1960.   His Science and Government recounts the struggle between Tizard and Lindemann, two scientists of great intellect who had known each other for decades and who possessed very different characters.   One is persuaded by the general tone of the book that the debate over Cherwell's memo was on moral grounds.  It was  not.
Not only is the rendering of Lindemann's personality "unsympathetic" (as Walzer
put it), but a close reading reveals both inaccuracies and the real nature of Tizard's
objections.   In the most revealing sentence of the book, Snow says that "...it was not
Lindemann's ruthlessness that worried us most, it was his calculations."90 Tizard's
differences with Lindemann were based on personality and the statistical database, not on an ethically-based rejection of terror-bombing.   Tizard communicated his misgivings to Cherwell, stressing the need for greater resources being devoted to the Battle of the Atlantic.  He felt also that Cherwell's projected figure of 10,000 heavy bombers  by mid1943 was unrealistic.   Seven thousand heavies seemed to Tizard to be a more accurate estimate.91 Tizard concluded that the short-term investment in heavy bombers was probably wasteful and that the morale campaign would be effective only if carried out "on a much bigger scale than [Cherwell envisaged]."92

houses destroyed vary.  See the figures for areas of cities destroyed according to the British Bombing Survey Unit and German authorities in Messenger, p 232
90Snow, p 49
91Longmate, p 132.  This figure was also, of course, utterly fantastic. 92Hastings, pp 143-44
46
The evidence indicates that Tizard did not object to Cherwell's "de-housing" strategy on ethical grounds.  The Tizard group's figures suggested simply that operational and production limitations would, for the foreseeable future, impede the terror campaign. Tizard told Cherwell that assuming Bomber Command could find the fifty- eight largest cities was "much too optimistic."  In  a note penned to Sinclair, Tizard assured him that he did not "disagree fundamentally with bombing policy."93

Chapter III: The Anglo-American Offensive

The  Anglo-American  aerial  partnership  has  often  been  described  as  both
complementary and beset by rancour, usually in the form of ethical differences over the killing of non-combatants.   In some versions of the latter historical myth, the RAF
triumphs in the political, internecine struggle, resulting in a reluctant American Eighth Air Force   participating in counter-population bombardment on a wide scale.94 What were 
the actual issues and how did US generals articulate their differences with Bomber Command?  Were the ethically-framed arguments sincere?  How deeply did they go?  We will now explore the nature of the competition between these two great strategic air forces and the events which led to their cooperation in the wholesale destruction which took place in the final few months of the war.
At the Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting in June 1942, the British conferred with
their new allies to frame bombing policy and other matters.  The British by now realized that they would receive almost none of the bombers they had hoped for from the Americans; the plan now was to formulate a strategy for employing the USAAF in the

93SAO I, pp 333-35
94Johnson repeats this myth in Can Modern War Be Just?  It has been told in many sources, usually American.
47
area campaign.   This proved to be an impossible task.   The Americans were "fanatic" in their faith in precision, daylight bombing, an attitude which deeply concerned Harris and Churchill.   The Americans seemed to have no alternative in case day bombing failed. Portal was extremely pessimistic; the Americans would not be able to penetrate beyond the Ruhr without suffering staggering losses.   If daylight bombing failed after such a drawn-out experiment, the switch to night would probably consume two critical years. The Americans "have hung their hats on the day bomber policy," Air Vice-Marshal Slessor wrote, "and are convinced they can do it."   Attempting to make them see reason would only make them "obstinate."95
Despite the RAF's low opinion of the B-17 (the British argued that the Lancaster
should be produced in large numbers in the US while Britain would manufacture a
corresponding number of Mustangs), the AAF made its first bombing run against the
enemy over France in August 1942.   This and other early operations were against naval and military targets in occupied territory, usually within range of friendly fighter escort.
Bomber crews exaggerated their fighter kills and for a time even the British were
impressed.
Meanwhile, Portal still harbored hopes that the Americans would join Bomber
Command in a massive area campaign.   Such a force could destroy six million German homes, leave 25 million homeless and kill 500,000 civilians, with one million seriously injured.96 At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, the British had several strategic goals, primary among them being postponement of a cross-channel invasion until 1944.   This they achieved, agreeing to participate instead in the North African invasion and operations in Italy and Sicily.   Strategic bombing would remain the centerpiece of Britain's war effort, and Harris had already decided to back his American friends' wishes to engage in daylight bombing, even though  Churchill thought it was "doomed."  
Harris
95SAO I, pp 355-59
96Hastings, p 203
48
told Churchill that Arnold was "despondent" at the prospect of resources being taken from the American strategic bombing campaign and diverted to the Far East and other areas. Prudence called for supporting the AAF's autonomy, even though its mission differed from the RAF's.   The Americans would, the Air Staff felt,   learn from their tactical mistakes and eventually embrace morale bombing as the only viable strategy.
Casablanca seemed to place a low priority on morale as an objective for bombing,
and was something of a victory for the American precision advocates.   The directive
included five target sets which    suggested the possibility of attacking morale in a
somewhat secondary sense.   The primary target set listed the following in order of priority:

a) German submarine construction yards.
b) The German aircraft industry.
c) Transportation.
d) Oil plants.
e) Other targets in enemy war industry.
The most important passage, addressed to the strategic bombing forces of Britain
and the US,   stated that "Your primary object will be the progressive destruction and
dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened."  Harris received this on February 4, 1943.  His plan was now to exploit Bomber Command's autonomy and continue the morale campaign unfettered, even though Bottomley had told him that Directive 22 was now superseded.97 Through sheer deceit, 
Harris managed to keep intact the spirit of Directive 22, which called for mass bombing of residential districts.   In a letter to the Air Ministry apprising it of the content of the Casablanca Directive and its effect on Bomber Command operations, Harris altered the crucial paragraph.   The "dislocation" of the German industrial-military network and the

97Messenger, p 107
49
"undermining of the morale of the German people" was changed by Harris to "the
progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system aimed at undermining the morale of the German people..."   Harris also changed "your primary object" to "the primary object of Bomber Command" which seemed to place an official sanction for a morale campaign solely within Harris's purview.98 Harris 
was now free to "attack pretty well any German industrial city of 100,000 or more."99
From  Casablanca  came  the  Eaker  Plan  which  advocated  a  combined,
complementary assault against six key German target sets and 76 specific targets.  Eaker felt that it was "better to cause a high degree of destruction in a few really essential industries than to cause a small degree of destruction in many industries."100 The Eaker 
Plan got underway in mid-1943 as Operation Pointblank.  This was the Combined Bomber Offensive at last.
Pointblank purported to guide the bombing operations of the two strategic air
forces.   American targets included aircraft production, ball bearings, and petroleum.
Bomber Command would attack cities associated with the Pointblank industries and
would devote operations against the specific targets only "as far as practicable."101
Harris thus had a free hand to continue the RAF assault on German morale almost
unhindered.   The "Combined Offensive" was a public relations fiction as the two great
bombing forces went their separate ways.    Despite the intention of Pointblank to
concentrate attacks on the German heavy industry and aircraft production, the British terror campaign was now fully underway.   Harris had the
Lancasters he needed in growing numbers, and Bomber Command had the navigational tools and "spoofing" devices to embark on raids of awesome dimensions, though still far short of the most conservative estimates of Tizard, Cherwell or Trenchard.
98SAO II, pp 12-15. Italics added.
99Harris, p 144
100Messenger, p 115
101Kennett, p 145
50
Hamburg was the first city selected for bombing by the RAF under the auspices of
Pointblank.  Famous as Europe's principal seaport, Hamburg was also a regional center of maritime and military production.  Harris did not seek to attack particular factories or shipping yards (such as the yard which produced the Bismarck).   His object as stated in the official order was to "destroy Hamburg."102 The operation, known as "Gomorrah,"
would take several nights to accomplish - Harris did not think the city could be devastated in a single attack.   The first raid came on the night of July 24. 791 planes - Lancasters,
Halifaxes, Stirlings and Wellingtons - attacked the city with 1541 tons of explosives.103
1500 people were killed and only twelve aircraft were lost, due largely to Window, the
foil-chaff the British were using for the first time.   In the first "cooperative" effort of
Pointblank, 68 B-17s bombed precision targets the following day and on the 26th as well.
On the 27th, the RAF attacked again with slightly less tonnage, but more than 3 million individual incendiaries.   The result was a classic firestorm of stupendous dimensions,
killing some 42,600 people.104 Bomber Command staged two more large incendiary
raids on the city, but by now they were bombing rubble and the follow-up raids did little additional damage.     The report of the Hamburg Police President was not only a scientific account of the effects of the attack, but an emotive, graphic description of the experience of a firestorm for the inhabitants a large city:
Women, especially, hesitated to risk flight from the apparently safe shelter
through the flames into the unknown...people waited in the shelters until
the heat and the obvious danger compelled some immediate action...In
many  cases...they  were  already  unconscious  or  dead  from  carbon
monoxide poisoning...The scenes of terror which took place in the
firestorm area are indescribable.   Children were torn away from their
parents' hands by the force of the hurricane and whirled into the fire.
102Messenger, pp 128-29
103USSBS, p 7 I
104Kennett, pp 147-8; Messenger, pp 129-31
51
People who thought they had escaped fell down, overcome by the devouring force of the heat and died in an instant...105

For the rest of 1943 and into the Spring of '44, the RAF continued its city campaign, sowing great destruction on the residential sectors of Germany's cities.  German warrelated industry continued to thrive (for those workers who lost their homes, returning to work was often therapeutic) while the shops, service-sector and non-essential industries suffered most.106 An agent's report from inside Berlin told of the wholesale ruin, but also of the people's astonishment that the factories were untouched.107
Early in October, the US 8th Air Force made its most ambitious raids yet, attacking
Schweinfurt again in a series of four raids.  This was the infamous "Black Week" and in its aftermath the 8AF was brought to a standstill. For the next six months the future of precision bombing was in doubt.   In the final raid, 291 B-17s left from Britain.  At
Aachen, their fighter escort turned back, at which point the Luftwaffe launched a
defensive attack of unprecedented ferocity.  Losses were grievous, with 60 aircraft shot
down on the final raid, and 148 destroyed in toto during Black Week.   Having lost air
superiority to the Luftwaffe, the 8th would make no more deep penetrations into Germany for the rest of 1943.
Inevitably, the appalling American losses at Schweinfurt fueled Harris's contention
that the AAF was involved in a pointless "panacea-mongering" strategy.  The Americans' lack of flexibility had meant there were never any other options to pursue, and Harris now urged the 8th to join him in attacking Berlin on a huge scale.   The allure of Berlin was irresistible to Harris and Churchill and its psychological importance was far greater in their minds than to the German military of political apparatus.   Harris told Churchill in November that 19 German cities had been "virtually destroyed" and that the Ruhr was
 
105SAO IV, Appendix 30
106USSBS, A Detailed Study of the Effects of Strategic Bombing on Darmstadt, p 8 and Albert Speer interrogation in SAO IV, App 36
107Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power (New Haven: Yale, 1987), p 156
52
"largely out."  The coup de grace for Germany's will to war was the destruction of Berlin. "We can wreck Berlin from end to end," Harris told Churchill, "if the USAAF will come in on it.  It will cost between 400-500 aircraft.  It will cost Germany the war."108
Arnold declined to participate.    He    (along with Portal) was concerned that
Pointblank objectives - including the destruction of the German fighter industry and the subsequent gaining of air superiority in preparation for Overlord - were being ignored.
Harris was by now obsessed with punitive attacks on German cities, and Berlin in
particular.   Since he could not rely on American assistance, Harris made yet another
proposal which did not include the 8AF in his calculations.   Bomber Command would
now destroy Germany's largest remaining cities with its Lancasters only.   The projected loss of Lancasters would be roughly equal to their projected production rate.   Germany would be all but defeated by April 1, 1944.  Overlord would be unnecessary:
Allowing a loss rate of 5% to sorties which is what we must expect
bearing in mind the type of target we shall be attacking...this would cost
171 Lancasters per month which compares with a planned new production
of 212  Lancasters per month.    This allows us no margin whatso-
ever...From this it appears that the Lancaster force alone should be
sufficient but only just sufficient to produce in Germany by April 1st
1944, a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable...109
Virtually the entire Air Staff - Harris's nominal superiors - were exasperated with
Bomber Command's C-in-C.   Bottomley replied to Harris on December 23, challenging Harris's statistics and formally disavowing area bombing as a viable strategy.  If Bomber Command was limited by night bombing to attacking cities, it could at least attack those smaller cities in which critical Pointblank industries were located.   Schweinfurt was the most important of these.   Either in concert with the Americans or alone, Harris was "invited" and "directed" to attack the ball bearing facilities at Schweinfurt:
108Harris to Churchill, Nov 3, 1943 in SAO II, p 48
109SAO II, p 56
53
...your efforts should be co-ordinated with and complementary to those of
the Eighth Air Force.  The aim of this force is to concentrate primarily on
the destruction of the German fighter aircraft industry and the ball-bearing
industry.   Success of this task is vital to the successful conduct of the
combined bomber offensive; the neutralising of the German Fighter Force
is certainly a pre-requisite to the successful launching of 'Overlord'...I am
to emphasize the fact that your night bomber forces would make the
greatest contribution by completely destroying those vital centres which
can be reached by day only at heavy cost; examples are Schweinfurt,
Leipzig and centres of twin-engined fighter industry...

Albert Speer was "astonished" by the RAF's "vast and pointless area bombing" and
was amazed that the 8AF did not return once more to Schweinfurt to eliminate it once and for all "at whatever the cost."110 The Germans learned from the Schweinfurt raids that 
the Allies bombed in fits and starts, rarely staying with one target set, even when they stumbled upon a critical component of Germany's war economy.   Speer feared that the strategic air forces would realize the vulnerability of Germany's electrical power grid, but the British had judged it to be too redundant and robust for destruction.   When attacks began on synthetic oil (one of the few truly essential industries which could not be spread out sufficiently), and it seemed that Germany's war machine was on the brink of collapse, Speer reassured his staff that the 8th would soon tire of this target set.   "We have a powerful ally in this matter," Speer said.   "That is to say, the enemy has an air force general staff as well."111
After Black Week, the ball bearing industry was further decentralized and when Bomber Command finally bombed Schweinfurt under pressure from Hap Arnold and the Air Staff, little further damage was done.
110Hastings, p 259
111Ibid, p 260
54
For not the last time Portal - now converted along with Bufton and Bottomley to the
precision campaign - considered sacking Harris, but decided that Bomber Command's
prestige was too great for its leader to be fired publicly.   If Harris's city campaign
amounted to insubordination, he could always plead operational, tactical or meteorological limitations.   And the PM's support (now waning a bit on the eve of Overlord) for Harris and his personal interest in the morale campaign were further reminders of Harris's unique position amongst the commanders.    He could not simply be gotten rid of without concurrence from Churchill, and there was no reason to believe that this would be forthcoming.
Ignoring the Schweinfurt directive and the pleadings from his friend Arnold, Harris
now embarked on the great operation against Berlin which was designed to utterly destroy the German will to wage war.  Instead, the "Battle of Berlin"* became the greatest debacle in RAF history, savaging aircraft and crews, wasting finite resources and creating for the Luftwaffe a decisive victory.   If Harris had few allies left at the Air Staff, Churchill was still keenly interested in creating a Hamburg-style firestorm in Berlin.112 The "Battle" of 
Berlin lasted from mid November 1943 through the following March, when Eisenhower took direct command of all bombing forces in preparation for Overlord.  Magdeburg and other cities were also raided in a vast campaign in which over 5,000 sorties were flown. 
Tactically, the campaign stretched Bomber Command and its navigational technology to their limits.  Crews were exposed to steady night fighter attacks (as Kennett said, German fighters were enjoying a "renaissance") all the way to the capital, which was itself defended by heavy AA.113 456 aircraft were destroyed in the campaign - loss rates  
112Ibid, pp 295-9
* British historians and RAF personnel have used the curious appellation "Battle" to describe the large city raids.  This stems from Trenchard and Spaight's contention that German cities, heavily defended by flak and fighters, were redoubts which "attacked" the invading bomber forces, ostensibly attempting only to destroy the machinery of war, not  kill civilians indiscriminately.  Thus the literature has come to describe
the "Battle of Hamburg" and the "Battle of Cologne," etc.  Thankfully, no one has described the events of Feb 13-15, 1945 as the "Battle of Dresden."  See Spaight, Bombing Vindicated p 51.
113Kennett, p 154
55
hovered between 6 and 12 per cent, far above what any air force could sustain.114 March was the final month of Pointblank and the Berlin campaign.  Harris had substituted one for the other, attacking no target cities listed in the January Pointblank directive from Bufton while attempting to savage the German capital.   Bufton was again writing in official dispatches that Harris was totally outside the control of the Air Staff and not cooperating in overall Allied strategy:  "This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue during the critical months ahead..."115
Around this time, Spaatz realized the potential of staging raids on Germany's
synthetic oil industry.  Concentrated in 27 centers of major importance, synthetic oil was a vulnerable target which - if interdicted - would cripple German fighter and mechanized ground units.   Spaatz also had the long-range fighter which would decimate the German defenses and give the 8AF clear air supremacy over the continent: the P-51.   Lastly, the 15th Air Force, stationed in Italy, could hit oil targets outside the range of the 8th.
"Speer's nightmare" had come true, and even though the AAF was committed to Overlord until September, Spaatz's modest oil campaign reaped "dramatic" results.   In June, the AAF devoted 11.6% of its sorties to oil.  In July this rose to 17% and August saw 16.4%.
But oil production fell dramatically from 927,000 tons in March to 472,000 in June.  Av-gas fell from 180,000 tons in April to a paltry 10,000 tons in August.  The Luftwaffe could barely get airborne.116
Portal attempted to rein Harris in and cooperate with the Americans by correctly
observing that Germany was "on a knife edge" due to the oil attacks.  Further squandering of resources by bombing morale would "prolong the war by several months at least."  Sir Charles gently chided Harris over the "magnetism" of German cities and wanted reassurance that Harris was devoting his full efforts to the target set he had been assigned.
Harris continued the morale campaign, despite the growing alarm amongst his superiors 
 
114Messenger, p 229 and Hastings, p 304
115Messenger, p 150
116Ibid, pp 318-19
56
that Bomber Command was rescuing Germany's military from imminent defeat.   Harris shot another memo   to Portal in which he complained of "too many cooks" deciding strategy and contended that despite the "diversions" of Overlord, Bomber Command had managed to destroy two and one-half cities per month.   He then repeated his contention that oil was yet another phantom:

...in the past M.E.W. [Ministry of Economic Warfare] experts have never
failed  to  overstate  their  case  on  'panaceas',  e.g.  ball-bearings,
molybdenum, locomotives, etc...The oil plan has already displayed similar
symptoms...117

On December 22, Portal told Harris only that he was "profoundly disappointed that
you still appear to feel that the oil plan is just another 'panacea.'"   He stressed that the
overriding concern of the strategic bombing forces was "to put out and keep out of action the 11 synthetic plants in Central Germany."118 Unfortunately, Sir Charles stopped just 
short of ordering Harris to implement the oil plan.   By late December, Harris was behaving like a petulant child, complaining defiantly to Portal that "I have no faith in anything that MEW says."   He contended that the Ministry was "amateurish, ignorant, irresponsible and mendacious."   Portal chastised Harris's policy of foot-dragging and excuses by saying "I should have thought that at least you could have tried harder to destroy Schweinfurt."  Harris derided the oil plan as "a quick, clever, easy and cheap way out" and declared that he had "no faith...whatever in this present oil policy."  He suggested that the best solution would be for him to resign.  Portal chose now to give in with his own "easy way out."  "I willingly accept your assurance," he wrote,
117Ibid, p 84
118Ibid, p 86.  Italics in original.
57
that you will continue to do your utmost to ensure the successful execution
of the policy laid down.  I am very sorry that you do not believe in it but it
is no use my craving for what is evidently unattainable.   We must wait
until after the end of the war before we can know for certain who was
right and I sincerely hope that until then you will continue in command of
the force which has done so much towards defeating the enemy and has
brought such credit and renown to yourself and to the Air Force.119

Perhaps any other officer displaying such insubordination would have been sacked,
and indeed Portal, Bottomley and Bufton came close to doing it.   Portal seems the most timorous of the three - knowing what he should do, but fearing the consequences (Harris had such enmity for Bufton, "an officer considerably junior to myself," that the latter was virtually powerless to influence, much less order Harris).   As Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles alone was answerable to Sinclair and the PM - two staunch supporters of area bombing and Harris.   Sinclair further was the major representative for the RAF's official line: that Bomber Command raided only factories, military installations and other precision targets.  Harris and Bomber Command, partly because of the official campaign of duplicity (though Harris himself thought this hypocritical) benefitted immensely from the precision-bombing argument offered to the public.   To have fired Harris (if that was even possible) would have opened up the entire RAF strategy to public scrutiny and debate, with the war not yet won.
Paradoxically, at this time area bombing was once again gaining currency within
the RAF and even the AAF.  Operation Thunderclap - a psychological warfare plan - was incubated in the summer of 1944 by the British Chiefs of Staff to be implemented at a point when German surrender was imminent.  Mass bombing of Berlin and other eastern German cities would convince the Nazis that a guerilla war carried on after formal surrender would be futile.   Terror bombing   of civilians would comprise the largest
 
119Ibid, p 93
58
component of Thunderclap and for the first time, surrender was not the assumed end result.  The bombing would constitute a message on the eve of surrender rather than bring about final victory on its own.
Response to the proposal in July was lukewarm.   Portal and the Air Staff were
against diverting bombers back to the phantom of "morale" and the Joint Intelligence
Subcommittee agreed, adding that attacks on Berlin were still costly.   The Director of
Plans summed up the general feeling by saying that "the game is not worth the candle."
Thunderclap would be held in reserve until such time that massive morale bombing might make a difference by creating confusion in the east and aiding the Red Army.   A final blow to
Berlin, delivered by both air forces, would utterly destroy its administrative functions and the flood of refugees from the raids would hamper troop movements, preventing a speedy eastward reinforcement of the German army.120
The Americans were at first dubious.   Generals Charles Cabell, director of plans,
and Jimmy Doolittle, now commanding the 8th AF, both suspected that the British were trying to drag the AAF into area bombing and implicate the Americans in any ethical backlash at the end of the war.   Spaatz had always shown ambivalence regarding the moral issues, and he now argued against  Thunderclap in seemingly ethical terms although his arguments were usually pragmatic or political.   Like Doolittle and Cabell, he feared that the RAF wanted the AAF "tarred with the morale bombing aftermath which we feel will be terrific."121 As with the RAF, the AAF was fighting its own constant battle with 
the other services (and within the Army itself) for autonomy and resources.  Spaatz knew how important the public perception was in the US of a precision-oriented,   even "humane" strategic bombing force which would ultimately gain victory and save Allied lives as well as the lives of German civilians.   Spaatz also rejected the British argument

120Ibid, pp 98-103; Hastings, p 346; Messenger, p 185
121Ronald Schaffer, "American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German Civilians,"
Journal of  American History 67:2, Sept 1980, p 325 (hereafter Schaffer); and Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment (NY: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp 83-4 (hereafter Wings)
59
that morale bombing could somehow diminish the German military in the field or compel the government to surrender.   The general and Eisenhower were wary of Thunderclap as well as British discussions concerning the use of gas against Germany in retaliation for V-1 and V-2 attacks.    Eisenhower repeated Spaatz's purely military reasoning when he said "I will not be a party to so-called retaliation or use of gas.  Let's for God's sake keep our eye on the ball and use some sense."122 These sentiments would not last long.By January, Thunderclap took on the guise of an intensive tactical operation designed to support the Soviet drive in the east.   Attacks on Berlin, Breslau and other cities would aid the Red Army by blocking German reinforcements while lowering the morale of civilian refugees.  For bombing on this scale, the AAF would have to be brought in, and the Soviets would have to be consulted at Yalta.   Churchill wanted to offer the Soviets evidence of military support in the east, and Portal agreed that while oil was still the major priority, "a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the East but will also hamper the movement of troops from the West."123 In preparing for likely inquiries from the Soviet delegation, the PM asked Sinclair what plans the RAF had for "basting the Germans in their retreat from Breslau."   Sir Archibald responded with a cautious note stressing that the retreating German army was a target suitable for tactical air forces, both Anglo-American and Soviet.  The best use for heavy bombers continued to be Germany's vulnerable oil facilities.    As a sop to Churchill, Sinclair added that "opportunities" might arise for bombing Berlin as well as Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz, which are not only the administrative centres controlling the military and civilian movements but are also the main communications centres through which the bulk of the traffic moves...The possibility of these attacks being delivered on the scale necessary to have a critical effect on the situation in Eastern Germany is now 
under examination.
122Wings, p 79
123SAO III, p 101
60
Churchill was not pleased with the Air Minister's careful tone; he was interested in
a large-scale, punitive raid on
Germany's remaining urban centers without deference to the priority on oil.  He wrote to Sir Archibald a terse note whose meaning was unmistakable:

I did not ask you last night about plans for harrying the German retreat from Breslau.  On the contrary, I asked whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in East Germany, should not now be considered especially attractive targets.  I am glad that this is 'under examination'.  Pray report to me to-morrow what is going to be done.124
The message was quite clear to the Air Staff; on the 28th Bottomley and Spaatz
issued a new target set which included oil as first priority but listed in second position
Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and "associated cities where heavy attack will cause great
confusion in civilian evacuation from the East and hamper movement of reinforcements from other fronts."   Harris   had official sanction once again for his area campaign, and Spaatz would now join him in a final, furious series of raids which would kill thousands of civilians.
Within the U.S. Army Air Forces (and before it the Air Corps and Air Service),
analyses of the relationship between strategic bombing and victory had been taking place since the interwar period, when the American doctrine of precision bombing evolved at the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS).   At first embracing the doctrines of Douhet and Trenchard, the Air Corps steadily moved towards a strategy of precision bombing as more cost-effective and militarily efficacious.  Further, American analyses of terror bombing in
Spain and China found that the effects on morale were not only limited, but that bombing an enemy's civilian population centers often raised morale and unified national will.125
 124Ibid, pp 102-3; Messenger, p 185; Hastings, p 398
125For a comprehensive survey of American strategic doctrine in the interwar period, see Wings, chapter two and Kennett, pp 86-88
61
US observer groups in Europe came to similar conclusions after the start of WWII, and by 1942 Alexander Seversky would conclude in a book for a mass readership that the British terror campaign was wasteful in its vast and pointless destructiveness:
Another vital lesson, one that has taken even air specialists by surprise, relates to the behavior of civilian populations under air punishment.  It had been generally assumed that aerial bombardment would quickly shatter morale,  causing  deep  civilian  reactions,  possibly  even  nervous derangements on a disastrous scale.  The progress of this war has tended to indicate that this expectation was unfounded...
These facts are significant beyond their psychological interest.  They mean that haphazard destruction of cities - sheer blows at morale - are costly and wasteful in relation to the tactical results obtained...Unplanned vandalism from the air must give way, more and more, to planned, predetermined destruction.  More than ever the principal objectives will be the  critical  aggregates  of  electric  power,  aviation  industries,  dock facilities, essential public utilities and the like.126

The United States Strategic and Tactical Air Forces (USSTAF) had, however been
bombing "blind" through clouds employing H2X, a radar navigation device which
afforded a CEP of only two miles in poor weather.  
Arnold had directed in November
1943 that when weather prohibited precision, radar bombing would be used against GAF
targets, but as the Americans made deeper penetrations into
Germany, this rule was
expanded to include cities with "associated" military or industrial targets.  Thus, the 8AF had been involved in a semi-area campaign by default with results often similar to the RAF's morale campaign.  In April and May of 1944, the 8th bombed
Berlin in a series of area attacks designed to bring about German surrender on the eve of Overlord.127
While continuing the precision campaign, Spaatz kept his options open by directing
the Special Planning Committee in February 1944 to study the future German target set

126Alexander Seversky, Victory Through Air Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), p 145 127Hastings, p 384; Messenger, p 151; Wings, pp 67-8
62
after the destruction of the Luftwaffe.   In an analysis which far surpassed in scope and
method any similar study by the British, the SPC finally rejected morale as a suitable
target.  Morale was already low in German cities, the Committee found, and there was no evidence that the social disruption would result in public pressure to end the war.  In fact, the bombing was increasing Nazi controls over the population, and there were no viable political channels in
Germany outside the party to negotiate with or surrender to the Allies.128
Immediately after the Normandy landings, Spaatz - after consultations with George
Marshall, Hap Arnold and Robert Lovett (Assistant Secretary of War for Air) - had plans drawn up for psychological warfare.   The subsequent operation called for undefended "virgin" towns to be attacked on a single day all across
Germany.  Fighters would join in strafing transport targets and villages.   This came to be known as "Clarion" and was the subject of heated, emotional and ethically-based debate within the AAF.129 The chief opponent of Clarion and other terror campaigns planned by USSTAF and the RAF was a colonel named Richard Hughes, a British expatriate who joined the US Army after moving to the United States in 1929.  Hughes served on the Air War Plans Division, and exercised great care in US target selection for the 8AF, feeling that while German civilians must be "made to suffer," they should not be subjected to promiscuous bombing and strafing.   Hughes criticized Clarion and a similar plan named "Shatter" - designed by a team led by Colonel Lowell P. Weicker, USAR - on largely military and pragmatic grounds, but he also stressed the moral aspect.   Pragmatically, Hughes rejected the utilitarian connection between terror and German surrender.   Morale was a "will of the wisp" and terror attacks would give the Nazi propaganda machine a valid grievance. Finally, the United States "represented in world thought an urge toward decency and better treatment of man by man."  Hughes's views were shared by Generals Lawrence Kuter and 
128Wings, p 71
129Kennett, pp 161-2; Wings, pp 73-79
63
Charles Cabell and Secretary Lovett, who feared that the "inhumanity of indiscriminate
bombing" would lead to political problems for the AAF in Congress and general
disapproval amongst the American polity.   Weicker continued to stress the value of
morale bombing, citing the terroristic effect of V-weapon attacks on
England.   Morale
bombing was a way to demonstrate the costs of war directly to the German people.
"These Air Forces are not over here just to play cricket.  Our Number One responsibility is to get on with winning the war, to shorten it as much as we can, and by so doing, save Allied lives."   Spaatz decided for the time being not to implement Weicker's plan, citing the diversion of resources and Lovett's views on the political/ethical backlash at home.130
Thunderclap elicited a strongly negative reaction from many US officers, both on
moral and political grounds.  General Cabell wrote that the British plan "gives full reign to the baser elements of our people" and that the AAF should resist being sucked into "baby killing schemes."131 General Kuter, the assistant chief of staff for war plans also based 
his objections along utilitarian grounds.   Since German civilians had less influence on their government than in a democracy, morale bombing could hardly be expected to bring about a revolt. Kuter also resented the large burden to be carried by USSTAF in the British plan; the AAF would be required to do "the majority of the dirty work" despite its commitment to precision bombing.   General Arnold, however, kept an "open mind" and would soon have terror-related proposals of his own.
The "War-Weary Bomber Project" was an American plan supported by Arnold
which called for filling older B-17s with 20,000 lbs of H.E. and sending them in the
general direction of a V-site or "fortified" German city.   The crew would bail out some distance from the target, after having set the controls on automatic pilot.  
Arnold noted that hundreds of such War-Weary aircraft set loose all over Germany would have a tremendous effect on civilian morale.  Spaatz was dubious regarding the practicability of 
130Wings, p 77
131Ibid, p 83;  Sherry,  p 260; David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (London: William Kimber, 1963),
p 110
64
the plan, but agreed that there was no reason why the planes should not be launched
against  cities   with  "associated"  military  targets.    The  War-Weary  project  never
materialized, largely because the British feared German retaliation against London.132
Clarion was carried out with "indifferent" results, despite the protests of Ira Eaker,
who told Spaatz in an "eyes only" letter that such a campaign "would absolutely convince the Germans that we are the barbarians they say we are, for it would be perfectly obvious to them that this is primarily a large scale attack on civilians as, in fact, it of course will be."  Eaker contended that Clarion was a waste, especially since the oil campaign was "the one thing where we really have the Hun by the neck."  The day might come when such an attack on morale would reap results, but for
Germany, that day had not yet arrived. In tones which seem both ethical and political, Eaker argued strongly that "we should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the bomber at the man in the street."133
Thunderclap got under way in modified form in February, with the 8th Air Force making the first major raid, the "precision" bombing of Berlin.   Despite Doolittle's objections that the Berlin mission would be costly and have no terror value since its citizens had been bombed for years, Spaatz ordered the 8th to raid the capital on the third of the month.  Twenty-five thousand civilians perished.134
Dresden was the ultimate result of Thunderclap, although the raid on this city was
not unique in inception or technique.  The attack was similar in effect to raids on several of
Germany's other old cities built with wooden, closely-spaced habitations such as Hamburg and  Lubeck
Dresden had been on Harris's list of remaining targets for months, and the Spaatz/Bottomley directive gave it new importance.   On February 4, the Soviets formally asked for attacks on German communications in the east and specifically mentioned Berlin and Leipzig.   The raid itself has been amply documented in David 
132Wings, pp 85-6
133Ibid, p 92
134C & C III, P 726; Sherry, P 260; Wings, pp 96-7
65
Irving's book and elsewhere: on the evening of the 13th, some 800 RAF bombers attacked the city, with 400 from 8AF on the following day, ostensibly attacking marshalling yards, which by the 15th were obscured by smoke and clouds during the second AAF attack.  An exact or even close figure for the number of dead will never be known, although David Irving's original estimate of 135,000 is certainly incorrect.   Citing the most recent data from East German and Soviet sources, Irving wrote to the Times in 1966 to revise his figures.   The official toll was listed as 18,375 dead and 35,000 missing (many of these may have been refugees).  The "expected" total for fatalities was roughly 25,000, although some historians today put the figure at closer to 35,000.135
Even though the attack on Hamburg may have killed more civilians, and Bomber
Command had been trying, with limited success, to create just these conditions for years, Dresden was different for several reasons.  Shortly after the raid, an RAF air commodore briefed the press, telling reporters, among other things, that the attack was designed to cause destruction in areas where refugees were gathering in large numbers, and to disrupt relief supplies.  An AP reporter wrote a dispatch which stated that "Allied Air Chiefs have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hastening Hitler's doom."136 Somehow, the story 
cleared the   British censor and was printed in papers all over America and broadcast in Europe and elsewhere.   The official denial appeared in Reuters the next day, but the damage was done; both the AAF and RAF were caught in a public relations crisis. Richard Stokes once again rose in the House of Commons to protest area bombing.  The disease and destruction in the cities the Allies would soon be occupying might be impossible to overcome, Stokes pointed out.   He further decried the government's policy of creating a "crescendo of destruction."137
135Dudley Saward, Bomber Harris, The Story of Sir Arthur Harris (Doubleday, 1985), pp 297-8 136Messenger, p 87; Wings, p 99
137See Hansard Commons, v. 408: March 6, 1945
66
In the midst of growing public disenchantment over Britain's role in the air war,
Churchill now sought to distance himself from a policy of which he was perhaps the chief architect.   On the 28th of March, the Prime Minister addressed the morale bombing campaign in terms which suggested that he found it ethically objectionable.  The memo to Portal and the Chief of Staff would seem, to a casual reader, to be a pragmatic and ethically-based challenge to
Britain's major strategic contribution to the war:
29 March 1945.   Prime Minister to General Ismay (for Chiefs of Staff Committee) and the Chief of the Air Staff
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing
of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under
other pretexts, should be reviewed.   Otherwise we shall come into control
of an utterly ruined land.  We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing
materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary
provision would have to be made for the Germans themselves.   The
destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of
Allied bombing.    I am of the opinion that military objectives must
henceforward be more strictly studied in  our own interests rather than that
of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the
need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil
and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on
mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.138

Portal and Bottomley were taken aback by this disingenuous signal from Churchill,
who now seemed to be washing his hands of a very dirty business.  Bottomley showed the message to Harris, who replied that the PM's conversion was "an insult" to the Air
Ministry and Bomber Command.   Harris made an argument for the morale campaign in
 
138SAO III, p 112
67
fundamentally utilitarian terms, while curiously denying that Britain had been engaged in a deliberately-planned terror campaign:

We have never gone in for terror bombing...I...assume that the view under
consideration is something like this: 'No doubt in the past we were justified
in attacking German cities.   But to do so was always repugnant and now
that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from
proceeding with these attacks.'   This is a doctrine to which I could never
subscribe.   Attacks on cities, like any other act of war, are intolerable
unless they are strategically justified.  But they are strategically justified in
so far as they tend to shorten the war and so preserve the lives of Allied
soldiers.
Now Harris's argument took a curious twist.   While the utilitarian justification for
violating noncombatant immunity usually runs along the lines that one is proscribed from doing X unless the positive effect Y ensues, the Chief of Bomber Command argued that it was unethical for him not to do X unless it could be proved that Y would not result.  The option of undertaking other means (e.g. precision bombing) with Y in mind was never a possibility:
To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect.   I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier...139

The Air Marshals and the Chiefs of Staff refused to accept Churchill's effort at
separating himself from Bomber Command's long-standing policy.  The PM was told that he would have to withdraw the minute and submit a more satisfactory one.   This was done, with Churchill substituting a new message a few days later of a somewhat more moderate tone:

139In Longmate, pp 345-6
68
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so
called 'area bombing' of German cities should be reviewed from the point
of view of our own interests.  If we come into control of an entirely ruined
land, there will be a great shortage of accommodation for ourselves and
our Allies: and we shall be unable to get housing materials out of
Germany for our own needs because some temporary provision would
have to be made for the Germans themselves.  We must see to it that our
attacks do not do more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to
the enemy's immediate war effort.  Pray let me have your views.140
As to the growing public misgivings over what was apparently a terror-bombing policy after all (and the Prime Minister's sudden change of heart), Harris attributed the feelings of shock to a misplaced sentimentality:

The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden could be easily explained by any psychiatrist.    It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepardesses.  Actually Dresden was a mass of munition works, an intact Government centre, and a key transportation point to the east.   It is now none of these things.141

Conclusions
By the end of the war, Germany's "heart" had almost ceased to beat.   General
Erhard Milch, using the same metaphor, said after the war that the Bomber Command
morale campaign   "inflicted grievous and bloody injuries upon us but the Americans
stabbed us to the heart."142 With a smaller force than Lindemann or Tizard had
projected, Bomber Command had savaged so many cities by the Spring of 1945 that
planners were running out of targets.  But to what end had over 55,000 aircrew lost their lives, and what was gained by killing hundreds of thousands of German civilians?  As we
140SAO III, p 117
141Longmate, op. cit.
142Hastings, p 408
69
have seen, the closest Bomber Command or the Air Staff ever came to strategic analysis of the morale campaign was the series of memos by Trenchard, the Co's and others which purported to gauge the state of mind (and fortitude) of the German people.  Their character and tenacity under bombing was judged to be Germany's critical weakness, which if exploited would surely lead,   somehow, to surrender of the Reich.   Britain chose a "strategy" which was never focused, flailing out at the softest targets Bomber Command could find, which endured the bombing on an ever increasing scale.  The workers, despite what Cherwell surmised, continued to man the factories which were for the most part on the peripheries of the large cities.
The means by which victory would take place - riots, revolt, decline in productivity
- were never examined under close sociological or psychological scrutiny.   Only Lord
Cherwell's argument regarding the behavior of de-housed workers approached a reasoned (if completely speculative - he had misinterpreted data from Zuckerman's studies at
Hull) argument for what Bomber Command could hope to achieve.   Other than the Cherwell minute, there was no reasoned, utilitarian rationale for the area campaign and the deliberate killing of Germany's urban residents.   One can reasonably suggest that such a strategy can be justified as long as the results are not yet known and when other options have been exhausted: an experiment in terror is acceptable when the other criteria are met (just cause) and when the evidence indicates that the good end achieved will outweigh the harm done. (We should also remember Walzer's injunction of the "supreme emergency,"
although Britain's supreme emergency ended or at least became less severe when the
Soviets entered the war.)   Evidence gathered throughout the war made it clear even to
MEW and the Air Staff that despite the routine terror attacks on German cities, production continued to rise.143 By 1943 MEW estimates showed that Bomber Command claims of 
143 Terraine has shown the following figures: for tank production, 760 per month in early 1943, 1229 per month in Dec '43, and 1669 in July 1944; for aircraft, Germany produced 15,288 in 1942, 25,094 in 1943 and 39,275 in 1944.  The German economy, unlike in Britain, had remarkable slack and produced "guns and butter" for much of the war.  See also USSBS Over-all Report (European War) and USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale: v 1
70 having seriously disrupted German production were fiction.  Bomber Command had preferred "intelligence" from dubious sources since the beginning of the Ruhr campaign that conformed to its own predilections.144
Bomber Command slipped gradually but relentlessly toward a strategy of terror
bombing from almost the beginning of the war.   After France fell and when Germany
demonstrated its inability to deliver a knockout blow, Britain was free to develop the
means to deliver her own.   The lessons of the GAF's failure - that bombing can weld
people together as well as inure them to further suffering - never found their way into
British planning (even though Churchill had recognized this, both in 1917 and in his
memo to Portal).  The limitations of a tactical air force employed in terror bombing did,
however, drive Churchill to devote 1/3 of
Britain's industrial resources to the production of strategic bombers.
Britain did not adopt terror bombing simply because it was the only activity which
she could engage in with any success - the Admiralty constantly pressed for bombers to aid in the war against U-boats, and others in the military argued for diversion of bombers to North Africa and other theatres.  The morale campaign was, however, the only strategic contribution Britain could make for several years, at least until the Americans could be brought in.   Even after the entry of the US, the specter of a debacle on the continent against an enemy even Trenchard admitted was superior was always an implicit (and sometimes explicit) theme in British strategic thinking.   The result was that the area campaign became the real panacea.
Deluded by its own internal assessments of German morale, Harris and Bomber
Command became driven by a loose, uncritical assumption that morale bombing would
crush the German war machine by punishing the very people the Chiefs of Staff and the Air Staff said they wanted to influence - its workers.  This "strategy" was never admitted in public and never fully articulated internally.   It was ultimately found wanting but was
 
144Overy, p 144; SAO III, pp 302-3; Verrier, pp 320-2
71
continued because Harris could not (and after the Spring of 1944 would not) switch to daylight/precision raids.   The other factor militating against participating in the oil campaign was Churchill's desire for a punitive campaign against Germany as a whole. The morale campaign was thus a method without a clearly defined goal - the means employed became an end.   Beyond its vaguely Trenchardian means, Bomber Command never really had a strategic view until the disavowal of area bombing by the Air Staff in 1944 and the embrace of Spaatz's oil campaign.
If the strategy of Bomber Command was hard to detect, the ethical restraints against
killing non-combatants never seemed to enter the equation at all - at least within the RAF.
Publicly, Sinclair invoked the rule of double effect to stave off "incorrigible" MP's, but the argument was insincere.  Civilian deaths were not collateral, they were the central tenet of Bomber Command's "strategy."  Even here, Bomber Command could not come to terms with the consequences of breaking the jus in bello criterion against the slaughter of non-combatants.   If they were not "innocents," but modern combatants in the "pre-fabricated battle," then a strictly punitive campaign could possibly have been justified, even in just war terms.   The internal argument, as far as it went, was however that the very people being bombed would revolt (recalling the panic in 1917-1918 London after a modest series of attacks by Gotha bombers) and demand an end to the war.145 Panic and 
"internal collapse" would surely follow area bombing and in turn would mean defeat of the Nazis.
If there is scant evidence of ethical misgivings over the morale campaign within the
RAF, and no evidence for a systematic analysis of the psychological effects of aerial
bombardment,  the  situation  within  the  AAF  was  very  different.    Schaffer  has
demonstrated convincingly that the "ethical" objections to area bombing by the RAF
within USSTAF were often veiled political and pragmatic arguments.  Arnold and Spaatz are represented by the official AAF history as moral agents who made strategic decisions
 
145Kennett, pp 24-6
72
on both deontological and utilitarian grounds.   The American air chiefs were worried
about the post-war world and how morale bombing would affect relations with the
occupied Germans.   They were also, however, concerned with the domestic American
perception of air power and the AAF's morally "clean" precision-bombing heritage.
Spaatz, Arnold, and even Kuter and Lovett were prepared to use terror when it would
make a difference in the surrender of the German state towards the end of the war.  

This as a more authentically utilitarian argument than had been formulated by Bomber
Command and was similar in effect to USSBS findings after the war that gradual and steadily increasing bombing of towns and cities made almost no impact on morale of civilians.  In fact, morale tended to be slightly higher in those cities which were categorized as "heavily bombed" (i.e. 30,000 tons on average) than in those receiving a more moderate tonnage (6,000).146 Repeated bombings of the same city also resulted in diminishing returns.
True shock occurred in cities which were unmolested for long periods and suddenly
received large-scale, savage blows, especially at night.  The result was not civilian riots or demands for German surrender, however. Lethargy, fear, other minor psychiatric
disorders and anxiety were far more common.  As the SBS pointed out, controls in a
police state leave few avenues for protest and policy change.147
While the AAF, in the internal critiques of Thunderclap and Clarion, had reached
the conclusion that terror bombing was not likely to have the desired effects, the RAF
chose to bomb in the dark, without critical examination of its first principle or a coherent strategy for its Air Marshals.  Throughout the war, the dialectic of morale bombing and victory was never subjected to any scrutiny in a formal way within the Air Staff or Bomber Command.
146See USSBS Summary Report (European War), p 22; USSBS Over-all Report (European War), p 96 and USSBS The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale: v 1 passim.  Unfortunately, the detailed effects of civilians under bombing are beyond the scope of this paper, apart from the broad lessons which were apparent to MEW, the Air Staff and the AAF during the war.  See also Janis.
147USSBS Over-all Report, pp 96-9
73

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following bibliography contains both citations listed in the thesis and sources
which served as general background.  Primary sources dealing with the evolution of the
RAF morale bombing campaign are virtually non-existent in the United States.  The
official history (SAO) contains many primary sources in the form of personal letters,
directives and memos, as well as appendices including an interview with Albert Speer.
Messenger cited material from the Public Records Office at Kew, and it is possible that
the PRO files will produce major work in the future on the internal RAF debates.
Schaffer's Wings of Judgment, while lacking an ethical or analytical framework, is an
invaluable work on the divergence between stated policy and actions within the AAF.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey represents the largest body of primary
source material on both the economic and psychological effects of mass bombardment
from the air.

H.R. Allen, The Legacy of Lord Trenchard (London: Cassell & Co, 1972)

Allen Andrews, The Air Marshals: The Air War in Western Europe (NY: William Morrow, 1970)
Uri Bialer, Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932-
1939 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980)

P.M.S. Blackett, Fear, War, and the Bomb (NY: McGraw Hill, 1948)

Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A Study of His Military Thought (London: Cassell & Co,
1977)
Angus Calder, The People's War (NY: Pantheon 1969)

Roland Chaput, Disarmament in British Foreign Policy (London: George Allen &
Unwin)

Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol IV (1951)
______________, Their Finest Hour, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1949)
Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds. The Army Air Forces in World War II
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948-1958), Vol I, "Plans and Early
Operations"

C & C II, "Europe: Torch to Pointblank"
C & C III, "Europe: Argument to V-E Day"
74

Gordon Daniels, A Guide to the Reports of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, (London: Royal Historical Society, 1981)

Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air (Office of Air Force History, 1983)

Meryl Fialka, International Law and Allied Bombing of Civilians During World War II
(Unpublished Master's Thesis, University of Chicago Political Science Department,
1955)
Noble Frankland, The Bombing Offensive Against Germany (London: Faber and Faber, 1965)
Haywood Hansell, Jr.,The Strategic Air War Against Germany and Japan: A Memoir (Office of Air Force History: 1986)
Russell Hardin, "Deterrence and Moral Theory," Canadian Journal of Philosophy: supplementary volume 12, pp 161-193

Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive, (London: Collings, 1947)

Max Hastings, Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bomber Offensive 1939-1945 (London: Michael Joseph 1980)

J. Bryan Hehir," Ethics and Strategy: The Views of Selected Stratetgists" (Unpublished
Paper)

F. A. Iremonger, William Temple (Oxford University Press: 1948)
David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden  (London: William Kimber, 1963)
Irving L. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress (Rand Report: 1955)

Brian Johnson and H. I. Cozens, Bombers: The Weapon of Total War (London: Methuen, 1984)

James T. Johnson, Can Modern War Be Just? (New Haven: Yale 1984)
______________, "Recent Strategic Developments: A Critical Overview" (unpublished paper)

R.V. Jones, Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton ,1978)

Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: 1982)
Basil Lidell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare (London: Faber and Faber)
75
Louis Lochner, ed., The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1948)
Norman Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Offensive Against Germany 1939-1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1983)
Charles Messenger, 'Bomber' Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive (NY: St Martin's, 1984)

Martin Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg: Allied Air Forces Against a German City in 1943 (NY: Scribner's, 1981)

R.J. Overy, The Air War, 1939-1945 (Stein and Day, 1980)

The Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Commons (HM Stationery Office) v
379
Hansard  Commons*** Mar 31 and May 27, 1943 Hansard Commons, v. 408
The Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Lords (HM Stationery Office) v. 130 Barry Powers, Strategy Without Slide-Rule (London: Croom Helm, 1976)
George Quester, Deterrence Before Hiroshima (New York: John Wiley, 1966)

Paul Ramsey, The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (New York: Scribner's
1968)
Hans Rumpf, The Bombing of Germany (NY: Holdt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963)
Fritz Sallagar, The Road to Total War: Escalation in World War II (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation Report, 1969)

Dudley Saward, Bomber Harris, The Story of Sir Arthur Harris (Doubleday, 1985)

Ronald Schaffer, "American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German Civilians," Journal of  American History  67:2, Sept 1980
______________, Wings of Judgement (NY: Oxford University Press, 1985)
Alexander Seversky, Victory Through Air Power (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1942)

Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power (New Haven: Yale, 1987)
Malcolm  Smith, British Air Strategy Between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984)
76
C.P. Snow, Science and Government (Harvard University Press: 1961)
J. M. Spaight, Air Power and the Cities (London: Longman's, Green & Co, 1930) ___________, Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944)
Lord Tedder, With Prejudice (London: Cassell & Co, 1966)
John Terraine, The Right of the Line, The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939-
1945 (London: Hodeder and Stoughton 1985)

Lord Sir Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941)

Anthony Verrier, Bomber Offensive (London: Pan Books, 1974)
United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Air Force Rate of Operations (Military Analysis Division)

USSBS, Area Studies Division Report (Area Studies Division: Jan, 1947)

USSBS, Bombing Accuracy, USAAF Heavy and Medium Bombers in the ETO (Military Analysis Division: Nov, 1945)
USSBS, The Defeat of the German Air Force (Military Analysis Division: Jan, 1947) USSBS, Description of RAF Bombing (Military Analysis Division: Jan, 1947)
USSBS, A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Lubeck
USSBS, A Detailed Study of the Effects of Strategic Bombing on Darmstadt  (Area Studies Division: Jan, 1947)
USSBS, A Detailed Study of the Effects of Strategic Bombing on Hamburg (Area Studies Division: Jan, 1947)

USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale: v 1, v 2, (Morale Division: May, 1947)

USSBS Over-all Report (European War, September, 1945)

USSBS Summary Report (European War, September, 1945)

Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books 1977)
D.C. Watt, "The Air Force View of History," Quarterly Review, v 300
77

Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945 , Vol 1, "Preparation"

SAO II, "Endeavor"

SAO III, "Victory"
SAO IV, Appendices