financeguy
ONE love, blood, life
No, argues this columnist, because the phrase "war crime" has no objective meaning - but it was still morally wrong.
PETER HITCHENS: The heroes of Bomber Command deserve their memorial... unlike the butcher who led them | Mail Online
The football crowds who crudely chant his name to tease modern Germans call him ‘Bomber Harris’. His aircrews had another name for him. To them, he was ‘Butcher Harris’ because he was so ready to sacrifice their lives.
And for what? The bomber boys did what they believed was their duty and asked few questions. They had enough to worry about, not knowing if they would live until morning. They hoped that the War Cabinet and the Air Marshals knew what they were doing.
Arthur Harris had no such excuse. Nor did the architects of the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes. That, by the way, is what we did. As Harris himself said, the aim of his offensive should be unambiguously described as ‘the destruction of the German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany’.
To remove all doubt (and Harris was annoyed that Winston Churchill wouldn’t admit the truth in public), it was aimed at ‘the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale at home and on the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing’. He stated ‘these are not by-products of attempts to hit factories’.
Harris actively preferred this form of warfare to the more difficult but immensely more militarily effective targeting of oil refineries, railway marshalling yards and warlike installations which many experts believe would have been far more damaging to Hitler, and would have drawn away just as many guns and planes from the Russian front (the lame excuse for the bombing of homes).
To this day, few British people know what we actually did to Germany. We know of and are rightly angered by the Luftwaffe attack on Coventry and by the London Blitz. But these wretched events were tiny compared with the ruin we inflicted on Germany.
PETER HITCHENS: The heroes of Bomber Command deserve their memorial... unlike the butcher who led them | Mail Online