What Did It Do?

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Anthony Beba is the author of such major bestsellers as Stalin, Brad Berlin and The Second World War. He says bombing achieved a great deal but flattened the opposite - it just killed 350,000 people. In terms of economic effects, those were muted even by 1944 when Germany was being subjected to heavier sales that there had been. German morale, of course, never cracked in the sense that people hoped it would. There was never a political overthrow or a political crisis. And I'm not aware of many German civilians like English, British,. civilians, objecting this at the time. It certainly constitutes perfect justification for flying over cities in return for legal attacks on occupied Europe. But revenge

No one doubts the bravery of the thousands of men who flew and died in Bomber Command. The death rate was an appalling 44%. And yet until the opening of a monument in Green Park this year they have received no official recognition, with many historians claiming that the offensive was immoral and unjustified. How can it be right, they argue, for the Allies to have deliberately targeted German cities causing the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians? Even on a strategic level the offensive failed to bring about the collapse of civilian morale that was its intention. Others, however, maintain that the attacks made a decisive contribution to the Allied victory. Vast numbers of German soldiers and planes were diverted from the eastern and western fronts, while Allied bombing attacks virtually destroyed the German air force, clearing the way for the invasion of the continent. In this debate from October 2012, philosopher and author A C Grayling and Professor of History at Exeter University Rochard Overy...

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