Richard Overy, whose work I enormously admire, has an article on the RAF's WWII Bomber Command campaign up on CIF. Overy balances very nimbly between honouring the heroism of the men who took huge and usually fatal risks in fighting a terrible enemy, and acknowleding the immorality of a strategy that aimed to kill German civilians qua German civilians.
In my Bourgeois Liberty, I counterpose the Anglo-American model of warfare - massive accumulations of materiel providing substantial force-protection for a citizen army - to the German-Japanese model of hyper-militarisation generating an exceptionally able (and brutalized) combat-soldiery. The story of Bomber Command reminds us that 'democratic warfare' itself can expose a vanguard of its military personel to terrible odds, and that highly technologised warfare can end up replacing face-to-face brutalization with arms' length de-humanization.
Overy will have a new book out on the Bombing Campaign in 2013. I heard him deliver a talk on the subject at Oxford a year ago (he's an excellent lecturer and discussant). It will be, I anticipate, a profoundly important work.
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