In The Weekly Standard, Hitchens considers whether the destruction of German cities was justified.
There is something grandly biblical and something dismally utilitarian about this long argument between discrepant schools of historians and strategists. In the Old Testament, God reluctantly considers lenience for the “cities of the plain,” on condition that a bare minimum of good men can be identified as living there. The RAF code name for the first major firestorm raid on Hamburg was “Operation Gomorrah.” And this was a city that had always repudiated the Nazi party. Some say that Dresden was not really a military target and that it was obliterated mainly in order to impress Joseph Stalin (perhaps not a notably fine war aim) while others–Frederick Taylor most recently–argue that Dresden was indeed a hub city for Hitler’s armies, and that doing a service to a wartime ally is part of the strategic picture in any case.
This leaves us with a somewhat arid and suspect antithesis: Were these bombings war crimes, and if so, were they justified on the grounds that they shortened the duration of the criminal war itself?
Anthony Grayling, a very deft and literate English moral philosopher, now seeks to redistribute the middle of this latent syllogism. He argues from the evidence that “area bombing” was not even really intended to shorten the war, and that in any case it did not do so. And he further asserts that the policy was an illegal and immoral one by the same standards that the Allies had announced at the onset of hostilities. This, at least, has the virtue of recasting a hitherto rather sterile debate. And some of what he says is unarguable.