Well let me see now - "Which "Germany" was he talking about, I wonder?" - He wrote his letter in June 1943 - So could it probably have been these Germans he was talking about:

They all knew what Lebensraum meant and what it would involve

Many other wonderful pictures of rapturous Germans welcoming the news of the take over by armed force of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. They did not give two hoots for the devastated cities that they created Warsaw, Rotterdam, etc, etc. No-one needed to demonise them - they did a damn good job of doing that entirely on their own.

The Archbishop's comments were made at the time with the full approval of Lambeth Palace - so are relevant for the time.

International law did not protect civilians from bombardment from the sea, the ground, or the air:

The 1923 Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare was the first authoritative attempt to clarify and formulate a comprehensive code of conduct, but they were never adopted in legally binding terms. Growing awareness of the military potential of aircraft throughout the 1920s and 1930s ultimately proved too serious an obstacle to reaching an agreement.

One of the main stumbling blocks was the inability to establish an acceptable definition of a legitimate military target under the new conditions of total war between industrialised states. Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby summed up this conundrum nicely when he wrote:

"It is generally agreed, for example, that the man who loads or fires a field-gun is a military target. So is the gun itself, and the ammunition dump which supplies it. So is the truck-driver who transports ammunition from the base to the dump. So -- in the last two World Wars -- was the man who transported weapons, ammunition, raw materials, etc., by sea. But are the weapons and war-like stores on their way from the factories to the bases, and the men who transport them, not also military targets? And what about weapons under construction in the factories, and the men who make them? Are they not also military targets? And if they are not, where do you draw the line? If they are military targets, are not the industrial areas and the services -- gas, electricity -- that keep industry going, also military targets? Or is it permissible to starve these civilian workers by blockade, or shell them if you can get at them, but not to bomb them from the air? This is surely a `reductio ad absurdum'."

Factories making armaments and the transport bringing them to the battlefronts naturally were included in the category of legitimate targets once the means of attacking them were available. Consequently those civilians in them or dangerously close to them might just have to be equated with civilians in legitimately attacked places. Moreover, precedent was on the side of the air planners. Naval bombardment of ports and towns was an accepted act of war. It was even codified in Article 2 of the Convention on Naval Bombardment, signed at The Hague in 1907. Article 2 stipulated that a naval commander who used his ships' guns to destroy military objectives in an undefended port or town `incur[red] no responsibility for any unavoidable damage which may be caused by a bombardment under such circumstances'. The advent of air power merely increased the opportunity of reaching and destroying such targets.

Justified - YES
Necessary - YES