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

Web Maintainer’s Note: This reviewer combined his review of Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang with his review of Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan by A. C. Grayling.

Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang. Ivan R. Dee (http://www.ivanrdee.com), 1332 North Halsted Street, Chicago, Illinois 60622-2694, 2006, 272 pages, $16.95 (softcover).

Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan by A. C. Grayling. Walker and Company (http://www.walkerbooks.com), 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011, 2005, 320 pages, $25.95 (hardcover).

Moral questions regarding the use of force are often the toughest issues for practitioners and thinkers of warfare to face. Most military people recognize, at least on an instrumental level, the need for restraint in warfare; morality plays an important role if for no other reason than to provide a vision for how we ought to fight. Yet morality can be a tough taskmaster, leading to stinging critiques of our performance on the battlefield and forcing us to confront episodes of history that one might prefer to leave undisturbed.

Two recent works provoke that level of discomfort. Both Firestorm, edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, and A. C. Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities take fresh looks at “area bombing” during the Second World War. In doing so, they force the reader to face up to the very real moral issues surrounding the use of airpower in this period.

Firestorm is an edited volume based on a colloquium held at the University at Edinburgh in May 2003 “to discuss the causes, the conduct, and the consequences of the bombing” (p. ix) of Dresden in February 1945. The contributors do not share one particular viewpoint regarding the event; in fact, the authors disagree at times on certain conclusions. But collectively they provide an important reexamination of the bombing of Dresden and the ways it “has come to symbolize the military and ethical questions involved in the waging of total war” (p. x).

The work offers a number of important contributions to the scholarship on Dresden. Richard Overy makes a compelling case, based on recently discovered primary sources, that the number of civilian casualties resulting from the raid was significantly less (approximately 25,000) than previously unsupported assertions by authors such as David Irving. Both Tami Davis Biddle and Sebastian Cox agree that the raids represented “business as usual” for both the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Force’s (USAAF) Eighth Air Force. However, while Cox argues that Dresden was a militarily significant target, as a center of administration and communication as well as war industry, Sönke Nietzel maintains that the raid, in the end, produced no military advantage for the allies.

The contributors assert other, more disturbing, conclusions. Biddle makes the case that one of the Allied objectives for the Dresden raids was to create an obstacle, through the use of refugees, to hinder the German Wehrmacht’s attempts to reinforce the Eastern Front against the approaching Soviet offensive. She also notes that, unlike what one might have expected to happen at the beginning of the war, no debate occurred amongst Allied war leaders about the use of civilian refugees for this purpose. Biddle attributes this lack of debate to “hardened attitudes” among the war leaders at this stage of a long and exhausting war, as well as their anxiety about the conflict’s future direction in the immediate aftermath of the Ardennes offensive. Donald Bloxham contends that the bombing of Dresden was, in fact, a war crime: “Had an independent war crimes tribunal with full international jurisdiction been established in 1945, there would have been a strong prima facie case for it to consider the bombing [of Dresden] as a war crime” (p. 180). In doing so, Bloxham provides a thoughtful discussion on the principle of proportionality and airpower—that is, what is the balance between the hoped-for military advantage gained from area bombing on the one hand and the resulting civilian deaths and destruction of property on the other? All in all, this volume is an important addition to the literature on the use of airpower and morality in the Second World War.

In Among the Dead Cities, British philosopher A. C. Grayling takes a similar yet broader tack than Donald Bloxham’s contribution in Firestorm by seeking to answer the question “Did the Allies commit a moral crime in their area bombing of German and Japanese cities?” (pp. 2–3). Unlike Firestorm, which focuses exclusively on the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, Among the Dead Cities casts a critical eye at area bombing throughout the war, including the USAAF’s XXI Bomber Command’s firebombing of Japanese cities starting in March 1945. In doing so, the book provides a passable synthesis of the history of the intellectual development of the RAF’s bombing doctrine, as well as the history of Bomber Command in the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO), but does not make any new contributions to the current understanding of the field. Grayling also scrutinizes British public dissent of the RAF’s area-bombing campaign and makes a compelling case that the government was aware of the humanitarian impact of this policy. He also analyzes the arguments used in defense of area bombing. Grayling is to be credited for at least presenting these defenses; in some cases, however, he discounts generally effective arguments, such as Richard Overy’s compelling line of reasoning about the CBO’s overall impact on the German war effort.

Nonetheless, as rich, detailed, and nuanced as Grayling’s moral argument is against Bomber Command’s efforts in Europe, he fails to make a similarly strong case against the USAAF’s efforts in the Pacific. In fact, the disparity in both prose and evidence between the two suggests that the discussion of the area-bombing campaign against Japanese cities was added as an afterthought. Two examples will illustrate. First, Grayling devotes almost 60 pages to examining Bomber Command’s efforts in Europe but spends only three pages to investigate the United States’ efforts over Japan. As a result, he does not unearth and examine the reasons underlying Maj Gen Curtis LeMay’s decision to change tactics from precision to area attacks. Second, Grayling does not conduct a systematic analysis (as he did with Bomber Command) of the military gains achieved by the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japanese cities against the costs of doing so, implicitly assuming that the American effort against Japan was disproportionate since no military gain could possibly offset the humanitarian costs. Although it would not be difficult to conduct such an analysis, Grayling’s failure to do so and his broader lack of attention to the bombing of Japanese cities in comparison to his effort with Bomber Command constitute an important defect in this work.

Grayling’s work has further flaws. First, it is internally inconsistent. In but one example, at the beginning of the book, he notes that his work “is not intended to impugn the courage and sacrifice of the men who flew RAF . . . bombing missions over Nazi-dominated Europe” (p. 7). Yet at the end of the day, he chastises Bomber Command aircrews for not refusing to accept the orders to bomb German cities. Second, and more importantly, he attempts to link Bomber Command’s efforts and the resulting destruction of German social fabric to the so-called Morgenthau Plan—the proposal by Henry Morgenthau, US secretary of the treasury at the time, to divide, deindustrialize, and pastoralize Germany to ensure it would never again become powerful. Grayling offers no evidence in support of such a provocative assertion other than noting the coincidence that the ends of area bombing would go a long way toward establishing conditions necessary for the Morgenthau Plan’s success.

Despite its flaws, Grayling’s argument against Bomber Command is compelling—certainly worthy of reading and inclusion in any good library. Taken together with Firestorm, both volumes represent important contributions to the literature on airpower and morality in warfare. Beyond their significant contributions in historical and moral argument, the two books include themes that resonate today. As our nations confront the threat posed by radical fundamentalism, when might it be appropriate—if at all—for the exigencies of national security to trump our moral responsibilities, codified as international humanitarian law, for the protection of civilians and noncombatants? Even though today’s precision weapons produce less collateral damage and less destruction overall, certain types of dual-use targets—such as electrical power—if disabled, could result in human suffering beyond the military advantage gained in striking them. In our contemporary “long war,” should military leaders guard against becoming callous over an extended and exhausting conflict against an adversary who does not hold himself to the same moral and legal traditions and who is willing to use our readiness to restrain our conduct in this manner to his military advantage? Do current doctrine, technology, or organizational imperatives lend themselves to causing human suffering, even as an unintended consequence? In an era of instant news and when every bomb could have an indirect strategic effect, war fighters and commanders need to examine the moral lessons that can be gleaned from past conflicts. Such an examination could produce discomfort and perhaps even anger. But if it leads to a more discriminate and proportional use of the military instrument, such an examination will be well worth the effort.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.