Burleigh shows little tenderness to those on the Allied side who criticised ruthless retaliation, such as British bombing of Germany: Bishop Bell of Chichester is described as "more than slightly in love with his self-image as a brave dissenter". But then clergymen rarely emerge with credit from a debate on war. Archbishop Temple is quoted by Burleigh as saying that the "worst of all things is to fight and do it ineffectively". The Bishop of Oxford thought to oppose bombing was "neither common sense nor Christianity". Hensley Henson of Durham said: "In the interest of the human spirit and its intellectual, artistic and, above all, its ethical preferences and promises, we dare not lose this crusade." 

In Burleigh's account, "Bomber" Harris, who "had the constant strain of committing his entire command to battle almost daily, for three years", comes out of the moral debate rather better than most of those involved. He truly believed that his bombing offensive would shorten the war, and that the loss of the lives of his air crews, and of German civilians, was preferable to the much more numerous casualties of First World War trench warfare and Britain's efforts to starve Germany into surrender. 

Burleigh is highly critical of those who seek to combine ruthlessness with conscience, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has grisly fun at the expense of Henry Stimson, the American War Secretary, who in effect had to take the decision to use the A-bombs against Japan, and where to drop them. He was known as "a New England conscience on legs", and was severely critical of the big raid on Dresden. He was horrified at the proposal that one of the Japanese targets should be the historic town of Kyoto, which he had visited. But he had no second thoughts about obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

People who try to wage war righteously are almost bound to be inconsistent. And recent post-war experience shows that attempts to limit bomb-loads and differentiate between target areas on a moral basis, as practised by both Anthony Eden in the 1956 Suez War and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, do not work from any point of view and, in retrospect, are liable to seem ridiculous as well as hypocritical. Burleigh's book should be read, and reflected on, by anyone inclined to take a high moral line on Afghanistan and Iraq. And by those who have to take decisions on getting in, or getting out. It would be interesting to know what Tony Blair, for instance, thinks of it. But then he never reads books, poor fellow.