A Culture of Official Squeamishness? Britain’s Air Ministry and the Strategic Air Offensive against Germany

Although it waged the largest and most costly of Britain’s Second World War campaigns, RAF Bomber Command was not mentioned in Prime Minister Churchill’s 1945 Victory Speech and its Commander-in-Chief, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, was left off the Victory Honours List. The crowning insult to Bomber Command veterans was the lack of a campaign medal for the strategic air offensive. This article uses case studies of the campaign medal saga, still very much alive today, and the perceived reluctance of the wartime Air Ministry to acknowledge the RAF’s resort to area bombing to test the argument of some historians that this slight of Bomber Command was due to “official squeamishness” in the Air Ministry and elsewhere in the government in the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden.