World: Threat or Promise?

You have no chance. Soon we will be coming over every night, every day—rain, flood or snow—we and the Americans.

The words that came from the radio wherever Germans listened on contraband frequencies were German. But the accent was British, the voice pleasantly impersonal. Burly Air Marshal Sir Arthur Travers Harris, chief of the R.A.F.'s Bomber Command, had gone on the air to promise that his bombers (and the Americans') would "scourge the Third Reich from end to end."

The Germans had heard such threats from other sources before. They had heard them with...