Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 1942. BOMBING AND MORALITY.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 June 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 1942. BOMBING AND MORALITY.

■£N that great majority of the members of the human race now linked under the banners of the United Nations, very few indeed, it may be believed, will be found to agree with the views on bombing policy expressed by the Labour member for Ipswich in the British House of Commons, Mr Stokes. As he was reported in a cablegram received yesterday, Air Stokes not only contended that first call on planes should be given to the Navy, “and not to lunatics who thought Germany could be bombed into subjection,” but added:—

I believe that the bombing of Cologne was morally wrong and that no real effort was made to limit* the targets to military objectives. We must make it clear to the Germans that decentminded Britishers do not agree with the policy of hate and revenge; also that we recognise Hitlerism as an effect and not a cause and are determined to remove the economic injustices which gave Hitler the opportunity of snatching power.

The verdict of any “decent-minded Britisher” on these observations no doubt will be that Mr Stokes is morally wrong in proposing to place his country and its allies at a hopeless disadvantage in face of an entirely ruthless and unscrupulous enemy. It is, of course, obvious that morally Mr Stokes, if he has been reported fairly and accurately, has not a leg to stand upon. His assertions read like an almost direct echo of the propagandist outpourings of Goebbels, who speaks of R.A.F. raids “against the civilian population of Germany” and declares that: “It is senseless to assume that such raids will decisively hit our war industry.”

It is of course perfectly true that British bombing in its great and increasing scale, though it is, as it always has been, directed primarily against military objectives and war industries in enemy and enemy-occupied countries, is bound to carry death and destruction also to the civilian population of the territories attacked. So far, however, as the German civilian population is concerned, this need not. even be regretted in the absence of evidence that the mass of Germans have ever received otherwise than gleefully, or at least contentedly, the news of deliberately ruthless, murderous and indiscriminate bombing by the Luftwaffe from the earliest days of the war. Goebbels and his accomplices had nothing to say about raids against the civilian population while German bombers were blasting Warsaw and many other virtually undefended cities in Europe, or during the indiscriminate bombing by the Germans of London and other selected targets in Britain. The latest indication of German sentiment in this matter has been the bombing of a number of cathedral cities in England—objectives of no military importance whatever, but places rather densely populated and at the same time irreplaceable treasurehouses of ancient architecture, sacred and secular, and of art and learning.

It is, of course, highly desirable that a distinction should be established between the German people and. the gangsters by whom they are at present ruled and very completely dominated, but this can only be done by the German people themselves. Their first step in that direction must be to overthrow their gangsters. Meantime they are responsible for these gangsters and share their infamous guilt. The weight of opinion of American and other observers who have recently left Germany is that a great proportion of her people would still be well content with all that has been done if they thought they were going to win the war, and that only the. fear of defeat, and the effects of bombing and other blows of war, have raised uneasy questionings in their minds.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the suggestion, attributed to Mr Stokes, that Hitlerism is an effect of economic injustices. There are shortcomings and imperfections in the economic policy of all nations, but it has been left to Germany, Italy and Japan to engage in predatory and murderous conspiracy and. aggression'against the rest of the world. It is a sufficient justification of all that, bombers are able to do against Germany that the German people supported and are still supporting that conspiracy.