Feb. 13 marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the allied bombing of the eastern German city of Dresden. In a series of aerial bombardments lasting until Feb. 15, 1945, the Allies dropped around 3,900 tons of conventional and incendiary bombs on the city, setting off a massive city-wide firestorm and leveling hundreds of buildings, leaving 25,000 dead citizens of Dresden in its wake.  

Dresden was not the only European city that suffered such bombardments. Even French and Belgian cities were devastated by allied bombing raids as the allies sought to dislodge the German occupiers — but Dresden has come to symbolize the barbarity of World War II, which became the first war in human history to employ aerial warfare on a mass scale and introduced the practice of obliteration bombing of civilian populations in major cities as a strategic means for waging war. 

The firebombing of Dresden is often held up as an example of the immorality and barbarity of obliteration bombing since it was already late in the war and Germany was clearly on the brink of defeat. Furthermore, the historic city of great artistic and architectural beauty offered little in the way of a strategic advantage should one occupy it. It was a railroad and communication hub, and did have some war industries, but these could have been targeted with more precision bombing, which indeed they were just a month later in March 1945.  

The moral issues raised by these bombardments are with us still, and perhaps even more so in our era of nuclear weapons capable of the mass annihilation of millions of people in the blink of an eye. That’s because the civilian deaths we saw in European cities during World War II as a result of obliteration bombings were not the result of the proverbial “collateral damage,” which could be justified as a foreseen but allowable circumstance of bombing military targets located in civilian centers.  

The allied leaders, such as England’s Winston Churchill, were very clear that their intent was to bring Germany to its knees through the lowering of German civilian support for the war by the terror-from-above campaign of indiscriminate bombing of civilian centers. The goal was to break the spirit of the German people by laying waste to the cities and not just to the economic and strategic military facilities.  

In response to the criticism that such practices were both immoral and contrary to all of the agreed-upon international laws about maintaining the distinction in war between combatants and noncombatants, the defenders of obliteration bombing countered by pointing out that modern warfare had changed in the era of the industrialized nation state and that warfare now involved the totality of a nation and its resources, up to and including its human resources. Therefore, the new concept of “total war” was introduced into the conversation to legitimate the bombing of the innocent on the grounds that they are not actually innocent at all but direct participants in the war-making machine of their nation.  

To be sure, the practice of bombing civilian populations was first carried out by the Nazis and therefore, from the British and American perspective, the allies were just inflicting upon the Nazis what they had already done to us. Nevertheless, one barbarism does not justify another, and the fact that others may commit evils is never a justification for our own embrace of the same. It is, in standard Catholic understandings of morality, better to suffer a million evils from the hands of others than to commit a single evil ourselves.   

And this principle of total war as a justification for the mass killing of civilians reached its high point in the American arguments as to why the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also 80 years ago, were both morally legitimate and “necessary.” In both instances neither Japanese city was of decisive military importance, and the entire purpose of the bombings was to demonstrate not only our capacity for obliterating entire cities with a single bomb, but also our manifest willingness to do so.  

Indeed, President Harry Truman, in the days following the bombings, and before the Japanese surrender, made a statement wherein he promised that if Japan did not surrender, they would now witness a “reign of terror” from the air the likes of which the world had never seen.  

Of course, none of this is consonant with Catholic moral teachings in its development of just-war theory. One of the bedrock principles of all Catholic moral theology is the absolute inviolability and dignity of innocent human life. The direct and intentional killing of innocent human life is never justified and is always and in every circumstance gravely evil. There are zero exceptions to this principle, and it is the moral norm that stands behind the Church’s praiseworthy and steadfast opposition to abortion and euthanasia.  

In line with this, Catholic just-war teaching has always emphasized the absolute necessity of maintaining the distinction between civilian noncombatants and combatants in war. Furthermore, the teaching also emphasizes that the noncombatants are to be preserved from direct attack since they really are “innocent” of direct complicity in war-making and are not to be held directly responsible for the decisions of their political and military leaders.  

There are obviously going to be some ambiguities here. A civilian who works in a factory that makes battle tanks might die in any attack on that factory. But in that case the killing of the civilian would be a foreseen but unintended consequence of bombing a war factory, and such killing in a war that is otherwise adjudicated to be a just war is allowable.  

Nevertheless, the indiscriminate obliteration bombing of civilian centers is clearly immoral in the light of Catholic principles and cannot be justified based on notions of “total war” justifying such slaughter. And that would include the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is simply no way to justify from within the categories of Catholic moral theology the intentional and directed mass killing of 100,000 civilian citizens in a city like Hiroshima through the use of a single bomb whose sole purpose is just such indiscriminate slaughter.  

This is not complicated. In Catholic teaching, you may never, ever, directly intend the killing of innocent human beings. And the turning of entire cities into legitimate targets of annihilation on the grounds that “none therein are innocent” would have us believe that the children, mothers, old men playing dominoes in the park, the mentally and physically handicapped, the shopkeepers, teachers, nurses, doctors, taxi drivers and street sweepers are to be viewed as guilty of war complicity to such an extent that they deserve targeted death.  

But if that is true, based on the new concept of “total war,” where all facets of a nation and all of its citizens are viewed as such an interlocking whole that everything within a war-making nation is now considered fair targets of destruction, then, in reality, what it argues for is not that it is now okay to kill millions of people indiscriminately, but rather that modern warfare is intrinsically immoral since it is impossible to fight a modern war within the boundaries of morality. In short, the concept of total war, if true, makes all such wars inherently immoral.  

The concept of total war is not Catholic teaching, and the moral prohibition against the direct targeting of civilian populations in war is still considered gravely evil — and always will be. To say otherwise and to obliterate the distinction between combatant and noncombatant is to cross over from judging war based on a moral calculus into judging it as a barbarian.  

This moral truth was already being pointed out in 1944, at the high point of the war, by a Jesuit named John Ford who wrote an important and courageous article in Theological Studies that year entitled, “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing” (September, 1944). After a lengthy analysis too detailed to summarize here, he concludes:  

“The conclusion of this paper can be stated briefly. Obliteration bombing, as defined, is an immoral attack on the rights of the innocent. It includes a direct intent to do them injury. Even if this were not true, it would still be immoral, because no proportionate cause could justify the evil done; and to make it legitimate would soon lead the world to the immoral barbarity of total war. The voice of the Pope and the fundamental laws of the charity of Christ confirm this condemnation.” 

These words are as pertinent today as they were in 1944 — perhaps more so in the era of hydrogen bombs and the increasing spiritual poverty of those countries that possess them. It also raises the thorny question of the morality of America’s nuclear-deterrence strategy, where both military installations and civilian population centers are targeted with weapons of indescribable mass destruction. And since our targeting of such centers involves the moral will to use those weapons against civilian centers, if need be, then such targeting is also manifestly evil.  

In our age of “wars and rumors of war,” perhaps it is time for the Church to take up this issue again at its highest levels of authority. The firebombing of Dresden is now 80 years in our rearview mirror. But we still seem to need reminding of why remembering it matters.