Battlefields in the Air: Canadians in the Allied Bomber Command

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

The controversy provoked by the CBC film The Valour and the Horror
continues to resonate. There were the Senate hearings and a court case;
there have been countless articles and one book. Now, aviation writer
Dan McCaffery has written a popular account of the bomber offensive
against Germany from a Canadian point of view, with the aim of trying to
assess the validity of the charges made by the filmmakers. In brief,
those charges were that the bombing deliberately targeted civilians,
that the campaign directed by Sir Arthur Harris deliberately wasted
aircrew lives, and that the bombings had relatively little effect on
German war production or the eventual outcome of the war. McCaffery
treats these questions squarely. He acknowledges that the air effort did
aim to kill civilians and destroy their houses, but he understands that
technology did not permit pinpoint bombing and he recognizes too that in
total war, war workers and morale are targets of importance. He acquits
the senior commanders of throwing away lives, though he does recognize
that some decisions were less than wise (when in war have they ever not
been?). And he rejects entirely the claim that the bombings had little
effect. German war production was reduced by about 20 percent, and
thousands of guns, fighter aircraft, and perhaps a million personnel had
to be devoted to defence of the Reich. What a difference they might have
made in the East or in Normandy.

Battlefield in the Air is well-written and always interesting. This is
not high scholarship, but it is nonetheless convincing.