Reaping the whirlwind

“The wartime bombing of cities remains a bitterly controversial issue in the twenty-first century. More than a few writers, not all of them German or Japanese, claim that it represents an Allied war crime. . . .  I believe that we should never for a moment waver in our conviction that the Allied cause in World War II, even granted the embarrassment of the association of the United States and Britain with Stalin’s tyranny, remains immeasurably morally superior to that of the Axis. I am highly critical of many aspects of the bomber offensive, especially in its last 1945 phase, when it contributed more to punishing the Germans than to defeating them. But it was undertaken with the military purpose of achieving or hastening the defeat of Germany, and later Japan. Those powers were responsible for initiating the bombing of civilians and had no possible legitimate grounds for complaint when their own peoples suffered the same fate.” – Max Hastings, Bomber Command