Bombing Civilians : A Twentieth-Century History
Author(s): Marilyn Young
A groundbreaking historical analysis of indiscriminate bombing, from the 1920s to the present war in Iraq. "You press a button and death flies down. One second, the bomb is hanging harmlessly in your racks, completely under your control. The next it is hurtling down through the air and nothing in your power can revoke what you have done.""--Charles Lindbergh With contributions from scholars from Japan, the United States, and Europe, "Bombing Civilians" examines a crucial question: why did military planning in the early twentieth century shift its focus from bombing military targets to bombing civilians?
From the British bombing of Iraq in the early 1920s to the most recent conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, "Bombing Civilians" analyzes in detail the history of indiscriminate bombing, examining the fundamental questions of how this theory justifying mass killing originated and why it was employed as a compelling military strategy for decades, both before and since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book includes major new arguments, such as Japanese historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's bold claim that it was the Soviet invasion rather than the atomic bombs that compelled the Japanese to surrender in the Pacific War. Combining historical and contemporary analysis, "Bombing Civilians" makes an important argument about international law and the morality of war. With contributions from:, Tony Coady, Helen Durham, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Tetsuo Maeda, Tim McCormack, Robert Moeller, Mark Selden, Ron Schafer, Michael Sherry.
Product Information
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.
General Fields
- :
- : The New Press
- : The New Press
- : 0.331
- : 01 September 2010
- : 210mm X 140mm X 19mm
- : United States
- : 01 August 2011
- : books
Special Fields
- : Marilyn Young
- : Paperback
- : 358.414
- : 304
- : illustrations
