Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan

358 Pages·2006·2.43 MB·English

by  A.C. Grayling

AMONG THE
DEAD CITIES
The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII
Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
A. C. Grayling
For
Madeleine Grayling,
Luke Owen Edmunds,
Sebastian, Thomas, Nicholas and Benjamin Hickman
and Flora Zeman
who are our future
and need us to do justice in all things.
’The term “war crimes” … includes … murder,
extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed
against any civilian population before or during the war.’
US State Department to the British Ambassador in Washington,
18 October 1945
Contents
1 Introduction: Was it a Crime?
2 The Bomber War
3 The Experience of the Bombed
4 The Mind of the Bomber
5 Voices of Conscience
6 The Case Against the Bombing
7 The Defence of Area Bombing
8 Judgement
Maps
Appendix
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
A Note on the Author
Picture credits
Other Books By the Same Author
1
Introduction: Was it a Crime?
In the course of the Second World War the air forces of Britain and the United
States of America carried out a massive bombing offensive against the cities of
Germany and Japan, ending with the destruction of Dresden and Tokyo,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Was this bombing offensive a crime against humanity?
Or was it justified by the necessities of war?
These questions mark one of the great remaining controversies of the Second
World War. It is a controversy which has grown during the decades since the war
ended, as the benefit of hindsight has prompted fresh examination of the ‘area
bombing’ strategy – the strategy of treating whole cities and their civilian
populations as targets for attack by high explosive and incendiary bombs, and in
the end by atom bombs.
Part of the reason why the area-bombing controversy continues to grow is that
in today’s Germany and Japan people are beginning to speak about what their
parents and grandparents endured in the bomber attack, and to see them as
victims too, to be counted among the many who suffered during that immense
global conflict. What should we, the descendants of the Allies who won the
victory in the Second World War, reply to the moral challenge of the descendants
of those whose cities were targeted by Allied bombers?
This fact – that the descendants of the bombed have begun to raise their voices
and ask questions about the experience of their parents and grandparents –
provides one powerful reason why it matters today to try to reach a definitive
settlement of the controversy.
Another and connected reason is that history has to be got right before it
distorts into legend and diminishes into over-simplification, which is what
always happens when events slip into a too-distant past. At time of writing there
are still survivors of those bombing campaigns, both among those who flew the
bombers and those who were bombed by them. Historians of the future will in
part be guided by judgements we make now. With our proximity to the war, its
survivors still in our midst or close to our personal memories, but with the
hindsight of a generation’s length from the events, what we say will help shape
the future’s understanding of this aspect of the Second World War.
A third and even more contemporary reason for revisiting Allied area
bombing is to get a proper understanding of its implications for how peoples and
states can and should behave in times of conflict. We live in an age of tensions
and moral confusion, of terrorism and deeply bitter rivalries, of violence and
atrocity. What are the moral lessons for today that we can learn from the vast
example of how, when bombing brought civilians into the front line of the
conflict in the Second World War, the Allies acted?
In the decades after 1945 these implications were obscured by the fact that a
much larger and more important moral matter occupied the mental horizon of the
postwar world, and quite rightly so – the Holocaust. This egregious crime
against humanity was a central fact of Nazi aggression and the racist ideology
driving it, and in comparison to it other controversies seemed minor. Other
controversies do not fade through lack of attention, but grow unnoticed, until –
as we have seen in recent years with neo-Nazi efforts to exploit the victimhood
of the bombed for their own political purposes – they become a worse problem
than if they were addressed with clarity, frankness and fairness.
In all these ways a new urgency attaches to the question: did the Allies
commit a moral crime in their area bombing of German and Japanese cities?
This is the question I seek to answer definitively in this book.
To explain my personal motivation for trying to answer this question, I need only
describe what I can see from where I sit writing these words. There is a small
park across the road from my house in south London, completely grassed over,
with a scattering of chestnut and linden trees standing in it. The trees have been
growing there for half a century, and are close to maturity. As always, the
chestnuts are first to break into leaf in spring; in the height of summer the
lindens’ tassels of yellow flowers make a fine show against the dark green of
their heart-shaped leaves. It is easy to judge the age of these trees, because the
open space in which they stand became a park just a little over fifty years ago, so
the trees and their park began life together. Before then, for a few years, that
open space was filled with ruins, a bare scar of bricks and rubble cleared to
ground level. Before then again it was a row of houses; a dozen of them, three-
storeyed semidetached Victorian villas identical to the others still standing near
by -one of them being the house where I live, and from whose windows I look
out.
The green and tranquil appearance of this little London park belies the reason
for its existence. It is in fact a Second World War bombsite. The houses that
stood there were blown up in the Blitz of 1940-1. It is possible to follow the line
of bombs that destroyed them as they fell in this street, to be succeeded by more
falling in the next street – there is a little park there too, also with fifty-year-old