Chugalug2 (#125) is absolutely right. He's said it all.
Of course, "Jaw, Jaw" is better than "War, War". (Churchill), and we had far too much of that during the thirties.
But there comes a time when:
"Talking time was ended
And fighting time was come". (Kipling)
And Shakespeare warned:
"Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in
Bear it that the opposed may beware of Thee!"
When it is forced upon you, War is War. You have to hit your enemy as hard as you can with everything you've got. Harris had a Club (what a brilliant analogy!). He would have liked a Rapier (think of the crews that would save). But he didn't have a Rapier. There were no rapiers then. There were tales of a bomb in a pickle barrel from 30,000 ft (with the new US Norden bombsight). Some folk believed in fairies too. Harris simply did his best with what he had, and you can't blame him for that. That he has subsequently vilified for doing so is a national disgrace.
War is War, and it's not nice. When the scrap metal starts flying about, innocent people, men women and children, are going to get hurt as well as the combatants. That is sad, but it is so, and always will be so. In the night bombing attacks on German cities, it was a miracle if a bomber crew could find the target city, never mind pick out "military targets". What does a "military target" look like on a dark night? How about a black cat in a coalcellar at midnight? Really, the debate over whether "area bombing" was moral or not was pointless: it was the only possible kind at night. (Are the Germans exercised with any guilt over their "area bombing" of London and twenty other places?)
And how about the Far East. Was Truman justified in authorising the use of the Bomb? Or Colonel Tibbets in dropping it? Think of the appalling suffering that entailed. Yet I and many others were profoundly grateful for it. The alternative would almost certainly been an invasion of the Japanese islands, and that was a fearsome prospect, given what was known about the fanatical capability of the Japanese soldier in defence. It was soberly estimated that such an operation would cost a million Allied lives. The majority of these would be American (Jane-Doh to note). I would probably have been one of the British. The Home Army would fight to the last man and the last round. Civilian casualties would be horrendous, as experience in Okinawa had shown.
Three years before, Harris had declared: "People say that aerial bombing alone cannot win a war. I would say that it has not been tried yet, and we shall see". Now we saw. The War was over. Were Truman, Colonel Tibbets and (by extension) Harris, all wrong?
Last edited by Danny42C; 9th Feb 2012 at 21:13.