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It took a year since the first sighting of Auschwitz by aerial photography before the allies could come to believe the horrible atrocities that were being conducted at that camp. Churchill arrived at a decision to bomb the death camp. However, the final decision regarding targets lay with Bomber Command.

Their decision was that Bomber Command did not have the means of precision bombing to take out only the gas chambers, and besides the Command only selected target of military value. This response was not entirely true.

World War II was TOTAL warfare. For example, Germany submarines attacked troop and supply ships without warning, precluding any chance that noncombatant seamen could save themselves. Bomber Command had already crossed a moral line when it decided to bomb Germany cities in an attempt to demoralize innocent citizens.

Bomber Command's policy was phony. They did try one raid using Mosquito fighter bombers which could perform precision bombing but poor navigational technology and enemy fights made the effort a failure.

The only other option was "carpet" bombing which involved the release of many bombs from 30,000 feet over a target. The disadvantage was that such methods depended on saturating a target area with little concern for precision.

The moral dilemma was that such a raid would probably kill many of the prisoners in the camp. The moral question is why did Bomber Command balk at killing innocents? They did it daily with attacks on cities that had no military value. The reality was that camps like Auschwitz were killing at least 1000 (!) innocents a day. In a TOTAL war situation, the allies were morally bound to carpet bomb Auschwitz and other concentration camps. There was a necessary evil of killing innocents, but this measure had to be taken in order to destroy the Nazi capacity to kill many thousands of other people.

Interviews with survivors of the camps are amazingly consistent. They would have gladly given up their lives to disable the Germany capacity to commit atrocities. As cold hearted as the decision may seem, the allies should have bombed the camp, sacrificing the few (whose lives were torturous and barbaric) to save the many.

Learn more about this author, Lorne Yacuk.
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