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    Among The Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
    Unavailable
    Among The Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
    Unavailable
    Among The Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
    Ebook472 pages7 hours

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

    By A. C. Grayling

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    About this ebook

    In Among the Dead Cities, the acclaimed philosopher A. C. Grayling asks the provocative question, how would the Allies have fared if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg Trials? Arguing persuasively that the victor nations have never had to consider the morality of their policies during World War II, he offers a powerful, moral re-examination of the Allied bombing campaigns against civilians in Germany and Japan, in the light of principles enshrined in the post-war conventions on human rights and the laws of war.

    Grayling begins by narrating the Royal Air Force's and U. S. Army Air Force's dramatic and dangerous missions over Germany and Japan between 1942 and 1945. Through the eyes of survivors, he describes the terrifying experience on the ground as bombs created inferno and devastation among often-unprepared men, women, and children. He examines the mindset and thought-process of those who planned the campaigns in the heat and pressure of war, and faced with a ruthless enemy. Grayling chronicles the voices that, though in the minority, loudly opposed attacks on civilians, exploring in detail whether the bombings ever achieved their goal of denting the will to wage war. Based on the facts and evidence, he makes a meticulous case for, and one against, civilian bombing, and only then offers his own judgment. Acknowledging that they in no way equated to the death and destruction for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was responsible, he nonetheless concludes that the bombing campaigns were morally indefensible, and more, that accepting responsibility, even six decades later, is both a historical necessity and a moral imperative.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMay 26, 2009
    ISBN9780802718662
    Unavailable
    Among The Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
    Author

    A. C. Grayling

    A. C. Grayling is the Founder and Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and its Professor of Philosophy. Among his many books are The God Argument, Democracy and Its Crisis, The History of Philosophy, The Good State and The Frontiers of Knowledge. He has been a regular contributor to The Times, Guardian, Financial Times, Independent on Sunday, Economist, New Statesman, Prospect and New European. He appears frequently on radio and TV, including Newsnight and CNN News. He lives in London.

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    Reviews for Among The Dead Cities

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    • 5/5
      Thoughtfully articulated and cogently argued.
    • 3/5
      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 - this 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 th 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.
    • 5/5
      A dense book to read, a philosophical tract by Grayling on whether area bombing of civilians is justified in war. The main focus of the book is on Arthur "Bomber" Harris's bombing campaign of German cites like Dresden and Hamburg in World War 2. He also focuses on the firebombing of Tokyo and the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US forces. This is a very clever book, as it is designed to inflame passions, in the early chapters it is clear that Grayling believes that area bombing was and is wrong. On the other hand it has to be remembered that the purpose of this area bombing was designed to defeat Hitler, surely something no-one can disagree with. However was the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians in German cities (whether or not they supported the Nazis) acceptable behaviour from a civilised nation. I (and Grayling) think not. But does not the simple fact that these events happen in wartime justify them e.g, is it a case of whatever is neccessary to ensure victory. Again I think not. The cleverness of Grayling's argument is that he waits until the last chapter to reveal he is not intrinsically opposed to bombing (as the book would suggest) but he is opposed to area bombing as conducted by both the UK and US and also Germany in the Blitz. This is where I disagree with Grayling, in as much as I am opposed to all bombing, whether it targets civilians or not. This book should be compulsive reading for all international leaders, not least those in Israel and Palastine. Unfortunately it seems it was not read by Mr Bush and Mr Blair. All in all one of the most fascinating books I have read. I throughly recommend it.
    • 5/5
      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 effortGrayling 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.
    • 4/5
      An interesting book that examines the moral faults of the Allies during WWII for area bombing of cities in Germany and Japan. Grayling gives a careful examination of the mind of the bombers, their aims and balances them against those expressing against contemporary voices, such as pacifist Vera Brittain who spoke out against the bombing of German cities. In the end, Grayling does not suggest that Great Britain and the United States are somehow worse than or equal to Germany and Japan for their crimes against humanity during the Second World War. However, he suggests, our claims of a thoroughly just war are tarnished by the pursuit of a bombing policy that punished women and children, and likely did not speed an end to the war. An engaging read.
    • 5/5
      AC Grayling's Among the Dead Cities is his examination of the Allied policy of area bombing civilian populations during the Second World War, and asking whether it was morally justified. He chooses to focus not on the attacks on Dresden, or on the atomic bombs, but on an attack on Hamburg much earlier in the war that he cites as being more stereotypical of the strategy as a whole. Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with Grayling, one of the most respected humanist philosophers extant, he concludes that area bombing was not necessary; it was not proportionate; it was against basic humanitarian principles; it was against prevailing moral standards; it was against the law and that it was wrong. He plays fairly with the opposing viewpoints, and his conclusion is well-weighted and supported. It's not an easy read, but is best summed up by Grayling's view of the war as A just war against morally criminal enemies, in which in some important respects the eventual victors allowed themselves to join their enemies in the moral depths, a fact which should be profoundly and frankly regretted. ... What we can claim is that [the Allies] were far cleaner than those of the people who plunged the world into war and carried out gross crimes under its cover, and that the explanation - not the excuse - for why we allowed to get our own hands to get dirty at all is because of what we had to clean upOne of the most telling pieces of information quoted by Grayling was how various Allied civilian populations saw the acceptability of area bombing of civilian populations as the War raged. Support for the policy was highest in Allied populations in America - never subjected to sustained aerial bombing of its civilian population - and was at its lowest by far amongst Londoners who had endured the Blitz.Grayling's argument is interesting historically, but he makes it with an eye cast unavoidably towards our present. Unspoken but echoing is the maxim that those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.