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An interesting and quite valid interpretation of the wartime arguments over ethics suggests an overriding "unselfconsciousness" among the strategists, politicians, and military leaders.

An interesting and quite valid interpretation of the wartime arguments over ethics suggests an overriding "unselfconsciousness" among the strategists, politicians, and military leaders.

<blockquote>''Secure in their sense of having a job to do, no one appears to have questioned the relation between the carrying out of that job and the moral and political world-order in which the job was created.''<blockquote><ref>Barrie Paskins and Michael Dockrill, '''The Ethics of War''', (Minneapolis:

<blockquote>''Secure in their sense of having a job to do, no one appears to have questioned the relation between the carrying out of that job and the moral and political world-order in which the job was created.''</blockquote><ref>Barrie Paskins and Michael Dockrill, '''The Ethics of War''', (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1979), p. 246.</ref>

University of Minnesota Press, 1979), p. 246.</ref>

   

   

Both this lack of general reflection and the sense that bombing was a job or even a duty are further emphasized in that operational

Both this lack of general reflection and the sense that bombing was a job or even a duty are further emphasized in that operational

<blockquote>''...orders were usually little more than a statement of the objectives that had to be achieved, and of the means that would be provided to this end.  From then on it was the business of the military.''<ref>Zuckerman, "Bombs and Morals", p. 42.</ref>

<blockquote>''...orders were usually little more than a statement of the objectives that had to be achieved, and of the means that would be provided to this end.  From then on it was the business of the military.''<ref>Zuckerman, "Bombs and Morals", p. 42.</ref></blockquote>

We know the means (strategic bombing, in all its forms), but what were the ends? "For the American forces, killing was sometimes an end in itself... It was connected in American minds to victory, however casually they measured it..."<ref>Sherry, "The Slide To Total Air War", p. 25.</ref>  Yet as brutal and cold as the militarists were, they almost had to be. And although they were not without blame, the significant portion of culpability need not rest on the generals' shoulders. Nor should the responsibility lie with the bomber crews themselves. At thirty thousand feet, the human effects of the raid are all but lost. This has been called an "ethics of altitude."

We know the means (strategic bombing, in all its forms), but what were the ends? "For the American forces, killing was sometimes an end in itself... It was connected in American minds to victory, however casually they measured it..."<ref>Sherry, "The Slide To Total Air War", p. 25.</ref>  Yet as brutal and cold as the militarists were, they almost had to be. And although they were not without blame, the significant portion of culpability need not rest on the generals' shoulders. Nor should the responsibility lie with the bomber crews themselves. At thirty thousand feet, the human effects of the raid are all but lost. This has been called an "ethics of altitude."