Over Tokyo

The Allied bombing campaign of the Second World War remains hugely controversial. Postwar moralists — like a few critics during the war — have accused the politicians, air marshals, and generals who led the offensive of deliberately slaughtering innocent people. As some 250,000 Canadians served in the Royal Canadian Air Force at the time, the debates over the morality — or lack thereof — of the bombings have had their fierce partisans here.

The first Canadian salvo in this exchange of charge and counterclaim was the CBC’s The Valour and the Horror, which aired in 1992. One of its three episodes dealt with the air war against Germany, and it argued that the airmen were deliberately kept uninformed by their Royal Air Force commander, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. The aircrew were not told that their task was the indiscriminate dropping of explosives on civilian homes; instead, the targets were described as rather important factories and infrastructure objectives...