“Black, White and Grey”: Wartime Arguments for and against the Strategic Bomber Offensive

Authors

David Ian Hall, Royal Military College of CanadaFollow

Abstract

The strategic bomber offensive against Nazi Germany has attracted more than its fair share of attention, most of which has been highly critical, both on moral as well as pragmatic grounds. Scholarly articles and books, in addition to a much larger number of sensationalized popular accounts, have appeared at a steady rate since the end of the war.¹ More recently, journalists and television producers—capitalising on the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the Second World War—have taken an interest in this controversial yet highly marketable and therefore profitable subject. Partly revisionist, and deliberately emotive, their “factions” (part fact and part dramatic recreation or fiction) all too often have focused narrowly on a single, spurious theme; the Anglo-American bomber offensive was orchestrated and conducted by a group of “bloodthirsty bone-heads and blimps,” whose policy of saturation bombing was a grievous crime against humanity.²

Recommended Citation

Hall, David Ian "“Black, White and Grey”: Wartime Arguments for and against the Strategic Bomber Offensive." Canadian Military History 7, 1 (1998)