Monday night, PBS’s American Experience series will broadcast a new documentary titled The Bombing of Germany, about the strategic-bombing campaign carried out against the Nazis by American forces in World War II. Coming from the liberal-leaning PBS and in an era where denunciations of American military actions — even in the “good war” against Nazi Germany — have become commonplace, it would have been no surprise if this film was yet another revisionist attempt to decry Allied tactics as immoral. This impression is reinforced by the introduction to the film on PBS’s website, which highlights the number of German civilian casualties incurred by Allied bombing and the “defining moments that led the U.S. across a moral divide” that would make it easier to drop a nuclear bomb on Japan. Indeed, the narration heard during the opening moments of The Bombing of Germany goes straight to this conclusion when it says that by the time the war ended, the bombing left “both German cities and America’s lofty ideals in ruins.”You can read more about this show at the link. I've always found the air war in Europe to be a very interesting subject. Some of those raids involved hundreds if not thousands of combatants, all tens of thousands of feet in the air in a very hostile battleground.
But, fortunately, there is more to this documentary than the facile conclusion that the bombing of Germany was so immoral that it cannot be defended even in a war in which the future of civilization was at stake. By the time the 50-minute film is over, liberals expecting another trashing of America are left with some conclusions that not only reinforce the morality of American tactics during that war but also might affect the way we think about contemporary conflicts.
Monday, February 08, 2010
The Bombing of Germany
That's the title of a PBS American Experience documentary that will air tonight:
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1 comment:
I wish you'd posted this early in the day so I could have read it then, rather than after the show aired. I've pretty much given up on PBS and quickly scan my TV schedule (which usually doesn't give episode titles).
I woulda watched it.
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