The collected essays in Terror from the Sky offer an interdisciplinary perspective on the bombing of German cities during World War II. The volume's contributors include historians, political scientists, and philosophers, who outline the decisions that led to the adoption of area bombing, describe its effects on the ground in Germany, and summarize debates about the issue in Britain and Germany since 1945. Three central chapters develop the case that area bombing was not morally justified. According to Igor Primoratz, the Allies, whose aerial bombing campaigns were longer, more devastating to urban landscapes, and more deadly for civilians than anyone else's to date, engaged in a form of “state terrorism,” inaugurating a path of violence that can be traced from Dresden to the present day (pp. 6–7).

The book opens with a short introduction by Primoratz, followed by paired chapters tracing the British and American decision making that led to area bombing in Germany. Stephen A. Garrett describes the gradual slide from directives in 1940, which encouraged the Royal Air Force to spare civilians, to the well-known statement of Feb. 1942, which explained that bombing was to be “focussed on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers” (p. 27). As Garrett and others have pointed out, the decision to pursue area bombing was made because the British believed such bombing would weaken enemy morale. Garrett criticizes British policy makers, however, for having failed to consider “how the ‘undermining of morale’ was actually supposed to undercut the German war effort” (p. 35). Garrett essentially concludes that the British continued to bomb urban areas because they took bombing's ability to undermine morale “as an article of faith” (p. 35). This was a “blunder” and, Garrett implies without quite saying, a crime.

It may be so. On the other hand, recent historical scholarship questions the solidity of German morale under the bombs, noting that in contrast to the boasts of National Socialist propaganda, a German Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of fate) was not realized under the bombs, and that on the contrary, bombing exacerbated social and cultural tensions. By fall 1943, the Third Reich's public relations expert, Goebbels, considered air war and its accompanying problems the most serious domestic issue the Reich faced. Of course, German morale did not collapse completely, but Garrett, like several other contributors to this volume, tends to minimize bombing's impact on civilian morale, since that helps to justify the position that such bombing served little or no purpose.

Douglas P. Lackey's chapter on the American bomb war, for its part, breaks with the comfortable tradition that ascribes indiscriminate night area-raiding to the RAF, while American planes bombed precision targets during the day. According to the planning document AWPD-1, developed in summer 1941, American bombers were to begin with precision bombing to destroy military-industrial strength. Then, “As German morale begins to crack, area bombing of civil concentrations may be effective” (p. 43). As Lackey argues, the Americans were in no way morally “superior” to the British, having allowed for the possibility of bombing civilians (when conditions were right) before entering the war, and carrying this out from 1944 onward, not only in Germany but also in Japan.

Two chapters cover the experience of being bombed. The first is by the late Earl R. Beck, who examined the German situation on the ground in what has become a standard account, first published in 1986. While Beck's description is quite measured, Martin Middlebrook's account of the firestorms in Hamburg in 1943 in the following chapter is much less so. There is no question that the experience of being fire-bombed was horrifying; however, Middlebrook's version of the event, based on a small number of first-person narratives, does little more than reiterate well-known tropes: struggling burned survivors, shrunken corpses, melted asphalt. Like Jörg Friedrich in Der Brand, Middlebrook both laments the Hamburg that was lost and condemns the bombers for their indiscriminate targeting of civilians. Indeed, given its prominence in recent debates in Germany, Terror from the Sky might have benefited from the inclusion of a section of Der Brand, either alongside, or as a substitute for, the chapter by Middlebrook. More generally, while the interdisciplinarity and convenience of such a collection are strengths, versions of half of the chapters in Terror from the Sky have been published elsewhere. Certainly, the volume brings together essays by respected authorities, but one wonders if some of the older material could not have been replaced by newer, updated scholarship, or material unavailable in English.

For a historian, the chapters on the moral issues surrounding the bombing are perhaps the least satisfying. Primoratz's careful inquiry into the possible moral foundations for area bombing shows that such bombing cannot be justified even if it is seen as a reprisal, a measure required in time of “supreme emergency,” or as a means justified by the peaceful end it was meant to achieve. Douglas P. Lackey's analysis of four types of mass murderer, however, seems an intriguing intellectual exercise, but achieves little of real substance. That Churchill and Truman, like Stalin and Hitler, made decisions that may qualify them as mass murderers seems unsurprising, to say the least. In addition, the narrative device used in this chapter, which shows Churchill's actions to be reprehensible through an imagined conversation between the British Prime Minister and a farm girl who asphyxiated under the Dresden train station, for example, seems inappropriately flippant, given the subject matter. More successful is Eric Markusen and David Kopf's chapter on whether area bombing can be considered genocide. Regardless of whether one agrees that “the strategic bombing campaigns deserve to be labeled as ‘genocidal’” (p. 173), Markusen and Kopf lay their arguments out carefully and logically, developing them with strong use of evidence and reference to broader discussion of the concepts of genocide, as well as the very pertinent danger of blurring distinctions between warfare and genocide.

The book's final chapters cover wartime debates about aerial bombing in Britain and discussions about the same issue in Germany since 1945. Mark Connelly surveys the rather muted British opposition to area bombing, pointing out that at the end of the war, it became convenient to blame the excesses of the air war on Bomber Command's head, Arthur Harris. “Bomber” Harris moved into popular culture as the sole architect of area bombing, neatly absolving Churchill and the British government of blame for the policy. In a concluding chapter, Lothar Kettenacker then traces German responses to air war after 1945 and the debate surrounding Jörg Friedrich's work Der Brand in particular. Kettenacker's analysis culminates in the reflection that regardless of its success or failure in damaging morale at the time, it was the experience of area bombing, not recognition of the Third Reich's crimes per se, or Allied efforts at reeducation, that led Germans to discount war as a legitimate means of solving conflicts in the postwar era.

Throughout the book, contributors’ determination to convince readers that the bombing of German cities was immoral is evident, as is their criticism of the conduct of more recent wars. While various authors marshal strong arguments to support this point of view, one is left wondering who actually disagrees. Of course, the traditional public discourse on the Allied side has been that area bombing was justified. Primoratz points out in his introduction that war museums in Allied countries still typically ignore the devastation area bombing wrought in Germany (p. 14), let alone, one might add, in France or other affected areas. In academic circles, however, among those most likely to read this book, it would be rare to find such an undifferentiated, noncritical perspective. Terror from the Sky thus seems at times to be arguing against a “straw man,” a problem compounded by the fact that although individual essays cite counterarguments, the book as a whole does not include any essays arguing that the bombing of German cities in World War II was justified. The debate is left incomplete.