Bombing the City is a much-needed study on the human and social costs of the aerial warfare of World War II. In this comparative history, Aaron William Moore provides insightful analysis of the firsthand accounts of citizens of Japan and Britain, two empires subject to heavy regimes of aerial bombing during periods of national mobilization in World War II and the Asia-Pacific War. This is not a story of innocents suffering, but rather of diverse individuals confronting the new reality of urban areas transformed into battlefields by rapidly evolving technologies of bombs and delivery systems. By examining an extensive collection of writings by noncombatants who lost their family, friends, and cities to aerial bombings, the book offers a window into the complexity and contradictions of life during total war.
In this social history, Moore brings to light a wealth of firsthand written accounts of ordinary people's experiences and memories, drawing on diaries, letters, reports, and memoirs from residents of medium-size cities in Japan and Britain. The compelling and varied testimonies push the reader to abandon any notion of a homogeneous people—even as the state asserted unity against the enemy during wartime—and to develop a clear sense of the diversity of voices and viewpoints.
Residents of urban areas in Japan and Britain became targets of aerial bombardment because the state identified them as mobilized entities contributing to the war effort. Moore identifies the city itself as the structuring context of individuals’ experiences of air war. He portrays these individuals in the fullness of their social and material settings. Disrupted food systems led to malnutrition; collapsed buildings and homes meant that normal family life and social interaction could not be sustained. Moore's insightful close readings of the accounts help readers to understand the “emotional landscape” of bombed cities (p. 82): the anger, desperation, mourning, exhaustion, and confusion of people in the midst of the bombed cities are expressed powerfully in both Japanese and British accounts.
Moore spotlights medium-size cities like Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Liverpool, Manchester, and Hull that grew as “historically important” and “powerful” regional urban centers in tandem with industrialization, imperialism, advances in transportation networks and communications, and urban planning. Each of these modern cities was a “tangled web of deeply interdependent systems” that came to be seen as “the war machine's workshop” (p. 10). The book also illuminates the ways that informal social networks in regional cities contributed to the construction of knowledge about the war, in contrast to official state discourses. Moore describes the resentment of dwellers of these “second” cities of iconic urban centers such as Tokyo and London, which in the contemporary media were often valorized as having sacrificed more and exhibiting superior bravery.
Moore effectively situates the regional Japanese and British cities embedded in closely interrelated processes of industrialism, imperialism, and war in the modern age. Though bitter enemies during wartime, Japan and Britain had much in common. They were both maritime empires, confident in their industrial power, that “prided themselves on professional armed forces,” and shared assumptions about world order and “civilization,” a living tradition of monarchy, and parliamentary forms of government (pp. 7, 11).
The chapters center on themes of inquiry related to aerial bombing: family and nation; affect (terror and anger) and faith; collapse of urban environment and systems; and gender, class, and age. Moore structures each chapter by framing the theme with passages from six featured Japanese and British diarists from a range of socioeconomic classes, educational backgrounds, and ages (though most were in their teens and twenties during the war). Within a single paragraph, he weaves together the words and perspectives of writers from what were then enemy nations. He effectively illuminates the ways that common material circumstances and experiences during bombardment often led to similar feelings, psychological states, and conclusions by people on either side. His analyses pay careful attention to the witnesses’ employment of a rich range of affective, intellectual, spiritual, physiological, auditory, sensory, and tactile categories in order to evoke their experiences of their neighborhoods’ destruction, which could be “in turn mesmerizing and terrifying” (p. 54).
Moore emphasizes the diarists’ growing skepticism over the media and government's triumphal and heroic propaganda about the course of the war, as well as the often inadequate official efforts to respond to enemy attacks on cities. Despite their own extreme personal loss and pain, the writers still express support of the war effort; bombing of the enemy's cities; and, not infrequently, long-held class, racial, and gender-based prejudices. Moore makes a compelling case for the need to rethink simplistic assertions about victimization and heroism when remembering (in public history) and justifying war.
Because one of the significant features of twentieth-century war was the evolution of air war as a strategy and a practice, this reader wished for a clearer chronology and exposition about the transnational technological, doctrinal, and military transformations in aerial bombardment itself, as well as the shifts in the discursive expressions that marked the “transition from moral outrage to acceptance” of air war (p. 1). What had initially been selective precision attacks from the air on military and industrial targets with the goal of crippling the war-making capabilities of the enemy (tactical bombing) expanded to a doctrine of strategic attacks on noncombatants and nonmilitary targets—with the distinct goal of demoralizing the enemy into surrender. The bombed had been living with extensive war mobilization campaigns in the media and education that contributed to citizens’ willingness to shoulder their “responsibilities” for the goal of victory. How much air power contributed to bringing World War II to an end continues to be a topic of debate. Pride in technological superiority also promoted the normalization of strategic bombing at the state level, and in turn the reasons that British and Japanese citizens themselves came to accept the violence from the air practiced by their own governments.
The norms governing ethical standards for warfare shifted considerably between Guernica and Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Readers may profitably pair Bombing the City with studies that do detail the evolution of strategic bombing, such as Michael Sherry's The Rise of American Air Power and Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History edited by Marilyn B. Young and Yuki Tanaka.Footnote 1 Moore contributes to a growing body of research that demonstrates the social costs of increasingly sophisticated and remote technologies of war, by looking at the formative period of aerial bombardment.
Moore concludes, “the experience of being bombed did not necessarily create a hatred of war, but a desire for more, and more inhumane, forms of it” (p. 2). For Moore, it is precisely this banal ascent to “evil” (that is, supporting the war effort, regardless of the means) that proves that “people very much like ourselves” contribute to making “such a destructive war” possible (p. 2). He challenges the reader to engage in the difficult project of “confronting the inhumanity of our wartime past,” especially in the context of ongoing political and diplomatic uses of commemoration, public history, and textbooks to promote simplistic narratives of triumph or victimization.
Bombing the City is engaging, well written, and impeccably researched. The book is a valuable contribution to world history, Asian studies, and World War II studies. It also serves as a model of comparative history. The study will inspire students and veteran scholars alike to work toward a fuller accounting of the voices and experiences of ordinary citizens in the history of world war.
