Among the Dead Cities
Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified?
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- €9.99
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- €9.99
Publisher Description
Britain and the USA carried out a massive bombing offensive against the cities of Germany and Japan in the course of the Second World War, which ended with the destruction of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Was the bombing of civilian targets justified by the necessities of war? Or was it, in fact, a crime against humanity? How should we, the descendants of the Allies who won the victory in that war, reply to the moral challenge of the descendants of those whose cities were targeted? A.C. Grayling looks at the stands people took, both for and against, and crucially asks what are the lessons that we can learn for today about how people should behave in a world of tension and moral confusion, of terrorism and fragile democracies. Among the Dead Cities is both a lucid and revealing work of modern history and an investigation of conscience into one of the last remaining controversies of that time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Allied bombing of Axis cities, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and made smoking ruins of Dresden, Tokyo and Hiroshima, remains one of the great controversies of WWII; this probing study does the issue full justice. Philosophy professor Grayling (The Meaning of Things) focuses on Britain's "area bombing" of entire German cities, a strategy adopted initially because bombers couldn't hit smaller sites and then, as attitudes hardened, continued as a deliberate attack on civilian morale. Grayling scrupulously considers the justifications for area bombing that it would shorten the conflict by destroying Germany's economy and will to resist, that civilian workers were also combatants or that it was simply the rough justice of war and finds them wanting. British bombing, he contends, did little damage to the German war effort at an unconscionable price in innocent lives, in contrast to American pinpoint bombing of industrial and military targets, which succeeded in paralyzing the German economy with few civilian casualties. (The Americans, he sadly notes, resorted to area bombing in their devastating air campaign against Japan.) Drawing on firsthand accounts by theorists, architects, victims and opponents of area bombing, Grayling situates a lucid analysis of the historical data within a rigorous philosophical framework.
