Recrossing the Rubicon
I wish to express another viewpoint on the European theater’s terror-bombing issues touched on in “Crossing the Rubicon,” the interview with author Donald Miller in the December 2006 World War II.

For most civilian victims — particularly the Poles, the first and most thoroughly brutalized victims of Nazi Germany (and the Soviet Union) — the moral issues the Allies wrestled with were moot. To start, the Germans had crossed the Rubicon immediately upon invading Poland on September 1, 1939 (with their Soviet allies following suit on September 17).

Because daily life in Nazi- and Soviet-occupied Poland brought more beatings, torture, starvation, slavery and death, by 1944 the bombing of any German target meant only one thing to the Poles: hope. Considering their own huge and ongoing losses at the hands of barbaric invaders, how could Poles have possibly cared that a few German civilians were being killed? The only regret would have been that some of the millions of Polish and non-Polish slaves working in the Third Reich would have been killed along with them. Those Poles forcibly deported to Germany would have included not only those slated for farm or industrial labor but also young girls for the brothels and some 200,000 children with sufficient Aryan features to be taken from their mothers and adopted by German families.

My mother was a slave laborer in Chemnitz, Germany, when an Allied air raid in the spring of 1945 almost killed her and her siblings. Death would not have been a big deal, since they were almost dead already. With the guards scattering and bombs exploding all around, she managed to escape to Italy and joined the Polish army there.

Even if the consensus is that the terror bombing of civilians serves little strategic purpose, any strikes that bring the war home to the aggressor nation do have significant impact on both the enemy (realization of vulnerability or that the tide of war might be turning) and ally. For the ally, the ability to strike back, whether in the darkest early days of a war or in the later years when there seems to be no end in sight, provides an incalculable psychological boost to one’s spirit of fight and survival.

The exception to the idea that terror bombings do not hasten the end of a war would be the case of the two atomic bombs dropped on civilian populations in Japan, which, at that late stage of the war, certainly brought things to a quick end.

Americans derived a much-needed boost in morale from the first air strikes on Japan. The impact of the first bombing runs on Germany, however, were of far greater importance to the occupied peoples of Europe, who were able to enjoy a small measure of payback when the horror of war was finally brought to the German civilians.

Henry Sokolowski
Mississauga, Ontario

Donald Miller provides an accurate account of the air war fought by the Eighth Air Force in “Crossing the Rubicon.” I was with the 365th Squadron, 305th Bomb Group, from September 1942 until October 14, 1943, when I was shot down over Schweinfurt in my 23rd air battle.

Flying deep into German air space without fighter escort was indeed a stressful experience, to say the least, and resulted in heavy losses. Sixty bombers were shot down on the Schweinfurt mission.

The operations portion of the interview is dead-on as to what actually took place. The only criticism I have is not directed at the author but to the photo on P. 48 showing a waist gunner in action. By this time, we finally had been issued electric heat suits to replace the bulky flying jackets and pants we previously wore. However, I was never issued a flak jacket and never saw one in my bomb group, up to and including October 1943.

Joseph Kocher
Marysville, Pa.

Victim of the Sturm
I would like to add some information about the September 27, 1944, raid on Kassel in which the Eighth Air Force suffered its greatest single-group loss (“Perspectives,” December 2006). I was a pilot on a similar raid on Magdeburg the next day, with similar losses.

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