THE ETHICS OF BOMBING
—As a constant reader and, speaking generally, an admirer of The pectator, I should like to express my profound disagreement, which will y be shared by many of your readers, with your comments, under News of the Week " in your last issue, upon Dr. Temple's address to ocation on the 19th inst. ; for both that address and your comments it appear to disclose a strange confusion of thought.
When we rejoice at a naval or military victory, the greater the victory greater is our joy, not surely because a larger number of our enemies e been sent to their death, but because our enemy's strength has eby been weakened and our own ultimate victory brought nearer. 'lady, in the case of the bombing of Lilbeck and Rostock, we rejoiced at the number of civilians killed or ancient buildings demolished, but ause important plants producing weapons of war to be used. against and our Allies had been destroyed and victory was thereby brought Cr.How the Archbishop or anyone else can bring himself to " con- the satisfaction openly expressed " at such a result is to me a tery, for the " desolation " to which he alleges that our satisfaction directed is quite inseparable from the destruction of the military
yes which was the purpose of the raids.
Is it not time that people in authority like the Archbishop began to .lise that this war is being fought not merely to preserve our own
stence as a free nation (itself surely an adequate motive), but to save . sawn and everything that makes life worth living for free peoples, that we are coming to a pretty pass if we are not to be allowed express our satisfaction with anything that conduces to that result? is a hateful and cruel thing which in these days involves appalling enngs to civilians as well as to those actively engaged in it ; but do let remember the issues which this war, above all wars which have ded it, involves.
We scrupulously avoided bombing open towns until the Germans began do so, and it became clear that if we refrained from retaliation in kind should lose the war, with all the consequences which that would entail only to us but to the rest of the world. But, even so, the bombing these cities of Lubeck and Rostock was directed not against ancient trigs, but against factories and war workers engaged in producing tons for use against us and our Allies, and, if that involved the
destruction of those buildings, that was a necessity which, however regrettable, cduld not be avoided. That being so, I shall continue, pace the Archbishop, to rejoice, as also will, I believe, the great majority of our people, at any destruction of German war factories, whatever the consequences, which may be the means of hastening our victory, and to feel that we have every moral
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