A real disappointment from a historical perspective. Although I agree with the author’s conclusions that the firebombing of German cities and the atomic bombing of Japanese cities were not unjustified and criminal, his analysis is extremely burdensome and convoluted. As an Oxford professor of philosophy, the author seems more interested in using what are objective issues, i.e., whether the Allied bombing of German cities and the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan were militarily or legally justified, as the basis for examining the subjectivity of such topics as morality, ethics, etc. The overwhelming majority of the book examines the different subjective interpretations of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’, etc., by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other philosophers, with virtually no connection to the issue at hand.

The author’s bootlicking of Churchill is also extremely irritating. Rather than being the racist, imperialist warmonger that he was, the author depicts Churchill as the ‘cautious or ‘reluctant civilian killer, a diehard anti-fascist whom was always concerned about civilian casualties during the war. Churchill’s willingness to do something that was militarily unjustified and morally wrong, as this author concludes, was due to the influence hawks in Churchill’s War Cabinet had on him and, naturally, Stalin.

I wouldn’t recommend this book. ( )

Not perfect, but well worth reading. Among the Dead Cities is about the ethics of “area bombing” during WWII, including the USAAF bombings of Japanese cities but mostly focused on the RAF night bomber attacks on Germany. I’d previously read another book on more or less the same topic (A History of Bombing) which was a polemic; in Among the Dead Cities author A. C. Grayling is much more thoughtful and unbiased.


Grayling’s contention is this: although the Axis states committed atrocities far beyond anything done by Allied bombing, and although the heroism and sacrifice of Allied air crews is unquestionable, “area bombing” of enemy civilians was still wrong. I find his arguments flawed, but I’m not at all sure that his conclusions aren’t correct - and I’m disturbed by that.


Grayling starts by discussing the bomber war - from the Allied side, although the Blitz and the attacks on Warsaw and Rotterdam are mentioned briefly. The centerpiece is Operation Gomorrah, the multi-night attack on Hamburg in 1943. He later explains his reasons for making this his focus, rather than the attacks on Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki - the outcome of the war was still in doubt in 1943 - thus if the Hamburg attacks were unethical, it follows that all the later area bombing attacks were, too. He then discusses the experience of the bombed, and includes photographs. I’ve seen lots of pictures from Bergen-Belsen and Dachau and similar places, and they are horrifying, but so are the photographs of objects that require study before you can determine that they are the carbonized remains of human beings in the streets of Hamburg.


However, Grayling’s next chapter, “The Mind of the Bomber”, is weaker. There’s a capsule biography of Arthur Harris; although it’s surprisingly even-handed and not unsympathetic, Grayling concludes that Harris was just a hair short of insubordinate, callous, and unrealistically optimistic in his bombing campaign. Unfortunately, he then descends into conspiracy theory - was there a “plan” among the Allies to commit “culturicide”; to obliterate German libraries, monuments, history and culture so thoroughly that Germany would never rise again. Grayling has no physical evidence that such a plan existed, other than suggestions by fanatics who were no way involved air operations, and he doesn’t speculate as to who would have devised such a plan and how it would be implemented. He just asks the question - was there a “plan”? (To be fair, he never goes so far as to claim a “conspiracy”). Not only is this a rhetorical trick, it diverges from his main argument - if the area bombing of Axis cities was unethical, it doesn’t matter whether it was planned as “culturicide” or not.



After a chapter on those opposed area bombing during the war, Grayling discusses “The Case Against The Bombing”. I found this very weak; almost the entire chapter is a detailed discussion of international law as applied to bombing. Grayling is forced to admit that, according to the international law that existed in 1939-1945, the the area bombing of enemy cities was legal. The law in force (insofar as any international law is ever “in force”) was the 1899 Hague convention. The provision were that an enemy city could not be bombarded (of course, artillery bombardment is what’s meant, but in the absence of other provisions this must be construed to apply to aerial bombardment as well) if it was undefended, and if defended the inhabitants had to be warned in advance. Well, Grayling concedes that the German cities were not undefended, and that the populace certainly had adequate warning that they would be bombed (because the British were very touchy about civilian casualties early in the war, many of the first bomber missions were leaflet raids). Grayling and Lindqvist share a couple of very naive ideas: if only there had been definitive international laws prohibiting area bombing, it wouldn’t have happened, and if only the Allies hadn’t insisted on unconditional surrender, the destruction of German and Japanese cities could have been avoided. There are, of course, a lot of jokes about ivory-tower philosophers, but with both of these contentions Grayling appears determined to prove the stereotype accurate. How anybody who has studied the history of international law in the 20th century could believe that it would have any sort of deterrent effect in the absence of international law enforcement is beyond me, and how anybody could think that there were imaginable peace terms that the Axis could have offered and the Allies found acceptable is also mystifying. Grayling repeatedly uses statement similar to “by 1944, anyone who could count would realize the war was won”; unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to pick up on the difference between the war being won and the war being over. He also uses the tired argument that the Japanese surrender was not prompted by the atomic bombings but by the Soviet entry into the war and the general situation in the Pacific theater.


Grayling follows with a chapter on the defense of area bombing, which is almost a straw man setup. The various contentions that area bombing affected civilian morale, that it diverted war materials and troops from the front lines, and that it caused severe transportation problems are all dismissed without serious consideration; Grayling’s counter arguments are generally based on postwar analyses. In hindsight, these arguments are largely correct - civilian morale in Germany and Japan were not broken by area bombing (if anything, morale improved); the amount of military strength diverted to the home front was not as large as the Allies imagined; and until the very end of the war the Germans were able to overcome their transport problems. To be fair, Grayling does concede that the threat of area bombing of Italian cities strongly influenced the Italian surrender decision.


Despite all these criticisms, Grayling central point still stands - the area bombings of Axis cities were probably not necessary and not ethical, especially in hindsight. Much to his credit, Grayling offers a counter proposal: the British strategic bombing force should have concentrated on precision bombing, like the US 8th Air Force. Early British attempts at unescorted precision bombing were disastrous, leading to night area bombing; Grayling contends that the RAF should have instead built long-range escort capability, and points out that when the RAF did try daylight precision bombing (the sinking of the Tirpitz and the destruction of Peenemunde) it was quite successful. (He doesn’t speculate how this would have applied in the Pacific Theater, where the basic problem faced by the USAAF was that there really weren’t any precision targets to bomb).


This book provides a lot of food for thought. The results of civilian bombing in WWII were very ugly; a lot of innocent people died. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that there were better choices. Alas, history is not a video tape that we can rewind and try over. We know that what was done, worked. ( )

Thoughtfully articulated and cogently argued. ( )

Not the most inspiring work. Although this was a searing indictment of area bombing campaigns in WW2, it was very repetitive and could have been done in half the time. Also, it wasn't as international lawwy as I thought it would be, which was a bit of a disappointment. I think area bombing is fairly obviosuly morally wrong, but what about legally?? ( )

A scrupulous and ultimately devastating indictment of the British RAF bombing campaign in Europe and the USAAF one in Japan during World War II. These so-called "area" or (at least in Grayling's book) "strategic" bombing campaigns had the purpose of creating maximum deaths among citizens of the enemy nation, and of thereby breaking the will and ability to continue supporting their nation's war effort

Grayling contrasts these campaigns with so-called "precision bombing" attacks (however inaccurate WW2 "precision" bombing often was in practice), such as the RAF's dam-buster or Peenemunde rocket production facility attacks or the USAAF's attacks on Schweinfurt ball bearing plants or oil and gas production facilities at Leuna or Ploesti. Instead, Grayling focuses especially on "Operation Gomorrah", the 1943 attacks on Hamburg, as a hard case in that the war was not yet won as it arguably was in the more famous cases of Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. He finds (and rightly, in my view) that "Gomorrah" served no useful purpose and was immoral.

Not all of Grayling's arguments are fully convincing, but to his credit he always considers and evaluates counterarguments. In the main example of this, he argues that morale was if anything hardened and war production not very much reduced by area bombing. Yet he also admits that among the reasons the German economy could weather the bombing storms were plentiful slave labor and the plunder of Europe for raw materials, machinery, and production. To employ the kind of analogy Grayling frequently does, if the Nazis devised a machine that repaired factories and cities, but was fueled by concentration camp corpses, would this "success" invalidate attacking those factories and cities?

Yet even by the RAF's lights, Grayling is right to consider the pragmatic arguments for and against area bombing; a staggering 55,000 RAF bomber crew members lost their lives in the campaign. Grayling disposes effectively of another argument -- the diversion of military manpower and materiel (esp. the feared dual antitank/antiaircraft "88s") to antiaircraft duty within Germany -- by pointing out the same diversion would have happened for a "precision" bombing strategy.

As Grayling points out, the debate is far from academic or "merely" historical. US military doctrine still holds that economic (not merely military industrial) targets are fair game in war, and that weakening enemy civilian morale is a valid strategic goal of bombing. Both postulates appear to contravene elements of newer Geneva Conventions to which the US is not a signatory -- but to which much the rest of the world is. Attacks on civilian targets, or undiscriminating attacks to which too many civilians will fall victim, may also be among the indictments of some US actions in Iraq, such as in Fallujah or Sadr City (quite aside from the necessity of the Iraq war in the first place). But those will be the topics of a different book. ( )