No Prouder Place: Canadians and the Bomber Command Experience, 1939–1945

J.L. Granatstein, Distinguished Research Professor of History Emeritus,
York University, served as Director of the Canadian War Museum from 1998
to 2000. His latest works are Who Killed Canadian History?, Who Killed
the Canadian Military, and Hell’s Cor

David Bashow is an Air Force fighter pilot who now teaches at the Royal
Military College of Canada. He understands flight, and his experience
informs this big book on the Canadian role in the Royal Air Force’s
Bomber Command in World War II. He has used British official documents
and the vast literature on wartime bombing, but this is not a detailed
sortie into the huge array of Canadian documents. For the detail, Bashow
relies on the official history of the RCAF and extensive correspondence
with veterans. His conclusions, however, are very different from those
of the official historians.

To Bashow, the bombing campaign was a success. Yes, the casualties were
terrible—almost 10,000 RCAF aircrew killed out of 81,000 American and
British Commonwealth fatalities—but the campaign succeeded in
crippling German production and forcing the diversion of vast quantities
of aircraft and guns to the defence of the Reich. His account of both
the aircrew casualties and the cost of the bombing campaign to the Nazis
is careful and precise.

Still, this is above all a story of courage. The aircrews went off on
their operations all but certain that death, maiming, or imprisonment in
a POW camp awaited them, if not on one night’s mission, then on the
next. Only 0.2 percent of Commonwealth aircrews, Bashow states, refused
to fly. The RCAF was more humane in its approach to such cases than the
British, although Canadian senior officers clearly recognized that
instances of “lack of moral fibre” could not be permitted to
proliferate.

The Allies and the Germans employed science in their service, each side
taking one step forward and being countered almost at once by the other.
The raids were most devastating in 1943, perhaps, when cities like
Hamburg were engulfed in firestorms, but as the war went on, the
technology permitted the bombing to grow more precise. Still, German
civilians, their houses smashed, their lives disrupted, bore the brunt
of the air war. It was a heavy price to pay for having supported Hitler.

This is a good book, well illustrated with photographs and paintings,
and clearly written. It deserves a wide readership.