A. C. Grayling - Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified?

Among the Dead Cities

For

Madeleine Grayling,

Luke Owen Edmunds,

Sebastian, Thomas, Nicholas and Benjamin Hickman

and Flora Zeman

who are our future

and need us to do justice in all things.

TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES

Towards the Light , A. C. Grayling

The Oresteia , Aeschylus

Aesthetic Theory , Theodor W. Adorno

Being and Event , Alain Badiou

On Religion , Karl Barth

The Language of Fashion , Roland Barthes

The Intelligence of Evil , Jean Baudrillard

Key Writings , Henri Bergson

I and Thou , Martin Buber

Never Give In!, Winston Churchill

The Boer War , Winston Churchill

The Second World War , Winston Churchill

In Defence of Politics , Bernard Crick

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy , Manuel DeLanda

Cinema I , Gilles Deleuze

Cinema II , Gilles Deleuze

A Thousand Plateaus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Anti-Oedipus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Origins of Analytical Philosophy , Michael Dummett

Taking Rights Seriously , Ronald Dworkin

Discourse on Free Will , Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther

Education for Critical Consciousness , Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of Hope , Paulo Freire

Marxs Concept of Man , Erich Fromm

To Have or To Be? , Erich Fromm

Truth and Method , Hans Georg Gadamer

All Men Are Brothers , Mohandas K. Gandhi

Violence and the Sacred , Ren Girard

The Three Ecologies , Flix Guattari

The Essence of Truth , Martin Heidegger

The Odyssey , Homer

The Eclipse of Reason , Max Horkheimer

Language of the Third Reich , Victor Klemperer

Rhythmanalysis , Henri Lefebvre

After Virtue , Alasdair MacIntyre

Time for Revolution , Antonio Negri

Politics of Aesthetics , Jacques Rancire

On Late Style , Edward Said

Course in General Linguistics , Ferdinand de Saussure

An Actor Prepares , Constantin Stanislavski

Building A Character , Constantin Stanislavski

Creating A Role , Constantin Stanislavski

Interrogating the Real , Slavoj iek

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Among the Dead Cities

Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified?

A. C. Grayling

The term war crimes... includes... murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during the war.

US State Department to the British Ambassador in Washington, 18 October 1945

Contents

Looking back from the safe distance of long hindsight on the Second World Wars aerial bombing campaigns, it is easy to merge them into the general catastrophe of the war, across which lies the black shadow of that staggering crime, the Holocaust. This makes the question of the bombing war less salient than it might otherwise have been, for if there had been a full debate about it in the immediate aftermath of the war, conclusions about its moral status might have had an earlier impact on practice in subsequent conflicts.

Nevertheless everyone with a particular interest in the bombing campaigns of 193945 is aware that there is a large ethical question mark hovering over them. Yet it is difficult to identify historians of the bombing war prepared to venture an unequivocal judgement on this point. Even the supreme historian of this subject, Richard Overy, whose The Bombing War: 19391945 (London, 2013) is the definitive investigation of the relevant archival and statistical details relating to the European theatre, places more emphasis on the fact that bombing was a wasteful and too often ineffective tool than on what is relevant to us today in reflecting on it, which is that we need a clear outcome from a moral audit of one main aspect of it, namely, the years-long campaign of indiscriminate massive aerial bombardment of civilian populations.

That this strategy was immoral is no longer a matter of contention. When the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention was being drafted, a clause outlawing such attacks was proposed, but the British and US governments rejected it. In 1977 two Protocols were added to the Fourth Convention, one of them outlawing indiscriminate bombing attacks on civilian populations; the UK signed it, the USA to date has not. The question of the morality of this strategy remains a live one therefore, and addressing it seems to me an even more important task than judging whether the economic and manpower effects of the strategy were helpful in the circumstances of the time.

In the body of this book I make the following points very clear: that the primary obligation of the Allied Powers was to defeat Nazism and Japanese militarism, and that the war against the Axis Powers was overwhelmingly justified; but that these facts do not excuse everything done by the Allies in their conduct of the war. I also make it very clear that the moral questionability of indiscriminate bombing of civilians is a matter separate from the courage and sacrifice of the officers and men of the bomber forces, for whom I have the greatest respect. When the memorial to Bomber Command was opened in Green Park, London, in 2013, commemorating the 55,500 men killed in the course of the bombing campaigns, I welcomed it; the tribute is to all the victims, among whom the young air crews themselves number.

Saying this has not prevented some veterans of the bombing war from being bitter in their response to this book, thinking that if we condemn the strategy we thereby impugn the sacrifice they and especially their dead comrades made. But it is important to keep these matters apart. We must learn from the past; that is one of the chief reasons for studying the past. Yet we only learn from the past if we confront its realities, which means accepting the bleak, horrible, violent facts of the bombing war, and putting them into connection with the aims of those in charge of the strategy, and with the effects of its conduct.

Richard Overys conclusions about the relative wastefulness and ineffectiveness of the bombing strategy echo my own here, though in the introductory matter to his book he in effect argues that this fact is not directly relevant to the question of the morality of the strategy. I agree: in the pages that follow I argue that even if the strategy had been more effective in interdicting or redirecting resources from Axis war efforts, it would not have made the relevant aspect of the bombing strategy any more acceptable from the moral point of view. It is heartening to think that there were people in Britain during the war themselves subjected to bombing attacks in 19401 and missile attacks in 1944 who thought likewise, and even in the midst of that time of danger campaigned to stop it.

It is in the footsteps of those isolated wartime anti-bombing voices that I follow here. There are historians of the war and the bombing campaigns Richard Overy has already been mentioned; Sir Max Hastings, Sebastian Cox, David MacIsaac, the RAFs official historians Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, and a number of others, have all focused on the bomber war itself who write very particularly as historians, not as philosophers interested in the lessons to be learned from history. That is the difference between their contributions and this one. It is with due deference to their distinguished books that I lay claim to a place for a book like this alongside theirs.

Nothing substitutes for a close view of what bombing actually meant, how it was carried out, and what effects it had, in coming to understand why our efforts against the harms of war should vigorously target the too-great acceptability of what is now called collateral damage, a phrase coyly masking the maiming and killing of non-combatant women, children and elderly folk, together with the destruction of such cultural resources as schools, hospitals, libraries and art galleries, all needed for the peace that must always at some point follow strife. If the following book has a single purpose, it is to contribute to tearing away the mask drawn over the true effects of bombs and missiles on the bystanders of conflict who in the Second World War, by the Luftwaffe, by the RAFs Bomber Command in Europe, and by the USAAF in Japan, were put directly on the front line and killed in their hundreds of thousands. A frank examination of that history is a contribution to the future; that is what is attempted here.