A Summing Up

As always, I’m grateful for all serious contributions. My main desire, over the bombing issue, is to get people to think rationally rather than emotionally. I was baffled that so many of my critics accused me of unfairly trying to place the blame on poor old Arthur Harris, as if he wasn’t a committed supporter of the policy and as if senior military officers weren’t responsible for the conduct of their campaigns. It’s almost as if they were saying ‘he was only following orders’. On the contrary, he was chosen precisely because he was the ideal man for the job Churchill and Portal had in mind. Churchill, of course, is so much more important, and had responsibilities, faults and talents so much greater than anyone else,  that it would be absurd to have suggested that his monuments should be diminished because of this one issue.

I was also baffled by the frequent assumption that because I didn’t mention Lindemann or Churchill or Portal, I didn’t know they were involved. Of course I do.


I believe there is a statue of Portal, and if so I feel much the same way about it, but Harris has always seemed to me to be the boorish, crude personification of the belief that war justifies any evil. It is in a way to his credit that he was so frank about it.  If that were so, then why did it matter who won? If it isn’t so, and it obviously isn’t, then there have to be points at which the civilised person says ‘That’s going too far’. And there will always be

In e-mail and telephone arguments with my critics, I have yet to find one who was prepared to argue rationally. If I pointed out that there was a choice over what and how we bombed, they had forgotten I had said it within 30 seconds, and returned to the insistence that ‘there was nothing else we could do’.

If they described to me the horrors of being bombed, and I said that this was exactly why I thought it wrong to inflict the same on others, they would briefly acknowledge this point, and then return to the theme of ‘you weren’t there, you couldn’t know’. When I point3ed out that people who *had* been there and *did* know also opposed the deliberate bombing of civilians, they went back to ‘We had no choice’.

Or they would do the slippery slide of saying ’there are bound to be innocent casualties in any war’, so I would say ‘but these were not accidental deaths caused by a campaign to bomb German factories and airfields. These were deliberately chosen targets’  . And then we would be back to ‘But you weren’t there’ or ‘We had no choice’. It was like swatting molehills. Flatten one, and another pops up, forever.

This is the irresistible cult of ‘We Won the War’, which I describe and criticise in my book ‘The Rage Against God’, pointing out that for millions of British people – and I was once one of them – this has replaced the Christian religion as the principal belief.

It was quite amusing, in one place, to be denounced as a ‘Born-Again Christian’ (I don’t claim to be such a thing.  Being born once was quite enough for me) and later in the same accusation to be denounced as a Trotskyist (I haven’t been one of those since 1975, and am unwelcome at their tea-parties). It was less amusing to come across a suggestion that people who didn’t approve of Harris’s bombing  tended to be Holocaust-deniers, a pusillanimous falsehood which diminishes those who advance it.

It is so sad for our country that this mass of delusions about the 1939-45 tragedy continues to clutter up our minds. Alongside it are the others – the Americans are our reliable friends, the end of our Empire was civilised, we punch above our weight in the world, the world listens to us - mirages which prevent us from seeing the scale of our decline, or recognising the very urgent need to reverse it.

On the Good Bad Books issue, I’m grateful for the response, and for the recommendations. Oddly enough, the educated middle class have for years been quite happy to own up to reading thrillers of a certain sort – le Carre,  P.D.James’s detective stories, maybe Eric Ambler in the right company.   And of course Sherlock Holmes. But not, I think, the sort of books I mentioned. By the way, I just don’t like Bernard Cornwell’s books. I may have been influenced by the fact that Sean Bean is the actor chosen to star in the TV version, and I just can’t enjoy his performances in anything.  I also seem to recall feeling there was something anachronistic about the language and the minds of the characters, and anachronism is something which I cannot stand in historical fiction.

This is so very much not the case with  (for instance )C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series. Forester was a genius, in my view, and not just because of Hornblower but because of small masterpieces such as ‘Death to the French’, ‘The Good Shepherd’, ‘The Ship’, ‘the Gun’ and ‘Brown on Resolution’. His storytelling skill is extraordinary. Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic books are better than Hornblower, but that doesn’t mean Hornblower isn’t good.

What about Bad Good Books? I think that phrase could describe a lot of the respectable, prizewinning output of modern British novelists (I name no names, but I exempt William Boyd and, to some extent, Sebastian Faulks from my view that most modern novel-writing is done for effect, and has little to say while providing poor, thin pleasure to the reader).

On the absence of Christianity from Martin’s ‘Game of Thrones’, I am sure it is very important, and I’m again grateful for some of the thoughts about the absence of any real force for good in the books. I think Mary Renault also rejected Christianity and its traditions (I’d be grateful for any information about this) but (I think it’s in ‘The King Must Die’) there’s a passage in which a captured Jew is enslaved by the Cretans and forced to take part in the (almost invariably fatal) bull-dancing which is a kind of sacrifice.  He scorns the idolatry utterly, and baffles the other captives when they ask him what sort of gods he worships, and he says he worships only one God, and  describes Him as having a face of fire. He dies very soon afterwards. I always felt that in this she recognised (perhaps without welcoming it) that  -like them or not - the great monotheist religions were a great transforming power, quite distinct from anything that had gone before.

One contributor argues that Christianity is based upon human sacrifice. Well, sort of. The crucifixion is said, in the Church of England’s 1662 Prayer Book, to be a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, satisfaction and oblation ( I think I have that formula right) for the sins of the whole world. That is to say, there is to be no more sacrificing from now on. It is done, for all time past, present and future.

Once again, I think people who live in a world where sacrifice has been seen for 2,000 years as obsolete, would be quite shocked if they were plunged back into a world where it was normal,  with temple cellars full of the offal of slaughtered cattle, and one or two of the more arcane rites demanding the occasional human sacrifice, perhaps a child,  to keep things on an even keel.

The Christian world is very different from what preceded it, from what would have happened if there had been no Christianity, and from what is to come if Christianity dies out among us.  This seems to me to be beyond argument.