BOMBING OF GERMANY
Sir,-Mostly I agree with your leading articles, but I am sorry you had to write that one in the issue of February 18. It is a bad article, and, worse than that, it is reactionary-or, rather, it will encourage the reactionaries. What you say is that, although we may have feelings of decency (and you Aope we shall have such feelings), we must not express them, because if we do we shall be helping the enemy. But it is not a far cry from expressing feelings of decency to expressing any sort of critical protest, and such a sentiment, voiced in such a journal, will be seized on with delight by our own reactionaries, who proceed on the assumption that any criticism of the war effort, and indeed any utterance of unpleasant truths, is helpful to the enemy. Anyway, sir, I doubt your logic. You admit that it is "creditable" to be disturbed by the horror of the raids on Germany; and then you argue that it is "exceedingly dangerous" to say so (that is,
make protests). I have been brought up to believe that an individual, or a nation, should do the thing that is right (i.e., "creditable") without counting the price; as a man, seeing another drowning, should not hesitate to try to save him, even at great risk. The other point is that your whole argument that these horrible things are necessary to shorten the war and save lives is exactly the the argument which the Nazis used, with equal force, te justify all the "frightfulness" of the blitzkrieg — the machine-gunning of civilians on the roads, the smashing of. Rotterdam, and so on. Yet such methods did not shorten the war for them, and they will not shorten the war for us, or make another less likely. And what shall
our soul?-
AUDAX II
(Wellington)
(We expressed our own feelings of horror quite frankly; three times over. If our correspondent will quote the sentence in which we said that others should not do so, we shall be grateful. If he can’t, he has not read us carefully enough to say whether our article wes good or bad.-Ed.).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 244, 25 February 1944, Page 3
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363BOMBING OF GERMANY New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 244, 25 February 1944, Page 3
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