Wartime architectural damage means Coventry, Dresden and maybe Bomber Harris to most. This book attempts to counter this trend of mythologizing such damage, considering the use that wartime destruction of architecture and historical monuments had in the lowering of morale and for propaganda purposes. Commentaries on large-scale destruction have so far focused more on the resulting human damage than on the effect on the architectural heritage, with the result that the bombardment of historic monuments has almost been taken for granted as an inevitable but essentially unproblematic aspect of "total war". However the debate surrounding the morality of thi type of damage made it an important and highly visible issue during World War II and this book aims to recover the significance and resonance that architectural and cultural damage had at the time.