Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-century History

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-century History
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Marilyn B. Young
Edited by Yuki Tanaka
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:298
Dimensions(mm): Height 201,Width 134
Category/GenreMilitary history
ISBN/Barcode 9781595585479
ClassificationsDewey:358.414
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher The New Press
Imprint The New Press
Publication Date 16 September 2010
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

From British bombing in Iraq in the early 1920s to the most recent conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, this detailed analysis explores the history of indiscriminate bombing, examining the fundamental questions of how strategies of mass killing originated and have been employed for decades. The book includes contributions from scholars in the US and Europe as well as a bold new argument by Japanese historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa claiming that it was the Soviet invasion rather than atomic bombing that led to the Japanese surrender of the Pacific.

Author Biography

Marilyn B. Young is a professor of history at New York University. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow; is the author of numerous books, including The Vietnam Wars, 1945 1990; and co-edited Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam (The New Press). Yuki Tanaka is Research Professor at Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University. Since the mid-1980s he has been concentrating his research on war crimes and is the author of several books, including Japan's Comfort Women and Hidden Horrors.

Reviews

Young, a professor of history at NYU, and Tanaka, of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, bring together eight essays by American, Japanese and European scholars on a disturbing subject: why has aerial warfare, beginning in WWI, emphasized civilian targets? Aerial bombing affects civilian morale, a vulnerable element in a country mobilized for total war. Tanaka demonstrates that during the interwar years the British considered air strikes in Iraq a cheaper, more "humane" way of maintaining imperial control than conventional ground operations. Ronald Schaeffer, Robert Moeller and Mark Selden each show that area bombardment was regarded, in particular by Britain and the U.S., as a shortcut to victory long after evidence ceased to support the belief. Selden goes so far as to assert that "[m]ass murder of civilians has been central to all subsequent U.S. wars." Discussing the morality of bombing, C.A.J. Coady is the only contributor who engages the moral principle of double effect: keeping collateral damage under the restraints of morality, reason and law. Still, this is better read as advocacy than scholarship.