Global view: Did the Allies in World War II 'lower themselves' to the level of their enemies?

By Bret Stephens

The death last week of Paul Tibbets Jr., the pilot of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945, is an opportunity to revisit the debate about the strategic value and moral justification of the aerial bombardment of civilian targets in wartime. It also casts some light on the controversy surrounding Michael Mukasey's nomination to be the next attorney general of the United States.

Judge Mukasey will likely only squeak into office after he refused to state that waterboarding met the legal definition of torture.

In a recent article in Commentary, essayist Algis Valiunas recounts that when war broke out in Europe in 1939, Franklin Roosevelt "issued a plea that all combatant nations do the decent thing and refrain from bombing." He continues, "President Roosevelt's high-mindedness did not count for much once the action was under way." The Nazis, for whom terror from the skies was no more anathema than every other form of terror they practiced, were the first to bomb civilian targets, beginning with Warsaw and moving on to Rotterdam and London.

Within a couple of years, the Allies were retaliating in kind, which in current parlance would be known as "lowering oneself to the level of one's enemies."

An estimated 45,000 people died this way in Hamburg. U.S. and British air forces would repeat the procedure over Dresden, Tokyo, Yokohama, Hiroshima, Nagasaki -- cities of real or at least arguable military significance. Hundreds of smaller cities and towns of doubtful strategic value were also reduced to ash and rubble, bringing the total civilian death toll to about 600,000 Germans (including 75,000 children under 14) and a roughly equal number of Japanese. How can this be justified?

The horror of what was done to Hamburg and the other cities dwarfs in moral scale the worst U.S. abuses in the war on terror (real or alleged), which are so frequently cited as evidence that we have debased ourselves beyond recognition.

The question here isn't about the intrinsic morality of the bombing. It's about whether the good that flowed from the bombing outweighed the unmistakable evil of the act itself.

Among historians, there is a lively debate about whether that result was achieved.

Yet as historian Richard Overy has noted, "There has always seemed something fundamentally implausible about the contention of bombing's critics that dropping almost 2.5 million tons of bombs on tautly stretched industrial systems and war-weary urban populations would not seriously weaken them."

Whatever side one takes here, the important point is that the debate fundamentally is about results. Note the difference with the current debate over waterboarding, where opponents argue that the technique is unconscionable and inadmissible under any circumstances, even in hypothetical cases where the alternative to waterboarding is terrorist attacks resulting in mass casualties among innocent civilians.

According to this view, it is possible to wage war yet avoid the classic "choice of evils" dilemmas that confronted past statesmen such as Churchill and Roosevelt.

Or, to put the argument more precisely, it is possible to avoid this choice if one is also prepared to pay for it in blood -- if not in one's own, then in that of kith and kin and whoever else's life must be sacrificed to keep our consciences clear.

Paul Tibbets, too, had a clear conscience. "Why be bashful?" he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2003. "That's what it took to end the war." Tibbets needed no instruction in the cruelties of war. But he also understood that awful things would have to be done in order to be spared greater harms. One senses Judge Mukasey understands that too -- further evidence of his fitness to serve as attorney general.

Bret Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.