Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595585478 ISBN 13: 9781595585479

Publisher: The New Press, 2010

Synopsis

From British bombing in Iraq in the early 1920s to the most recent conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, this detailed analysis explores 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 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.

About this title

Review

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.

About the Author

Yuki Tanaka is a research professor at Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University and a coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Journal. He is a co-editor, with Marilyn B. Young, of Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (The New Press).

Marilyn B. Young was a professor of history at New York University. She was a co-editor (with Lloyd C. Gardner) of The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach-In on U.S. Foreign Policy and Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past and (with Yuki Tanaka) of Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, all published by The New Press.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1595585478
• ISBN 13: 9781595585479
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Tanaka Yuki, Young Marilyn B.