Among the Dead Cities - A. C. Grayling.doc
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1、 AMONG THEDEAD CITIESThe History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan A. C. Grayling ForMadeleine Grayling,Luke Owen Edmunds,Sebastian, Thomas, Nicholas and Benjamin Hickmanand Flora Zemanwho are our futureand need us to do justice in all things.The term “war crimes
2、” 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 1945Contents1 Introduction: Was it a Crime?2 The Bomber War 3 The Experience o
3、f the Bombed 4 The Mind of the Bomber 5 Voices of Conscience 6 The Case Against the Bombing 7 The Defence of Area Bombing 8 Judgement MapsAppendix Acknowledgements Bibliography Notes A Note on the AuthorPicture credits Other Books By the Same Author1Introduction: Was it a Crime?In the course of the
4、Second World War the air forces of Britain and the United States of America carried out a massive bombing offensive against the cities of Germany and Japan, ending with the destruction of Dresden and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Was this bombing offensive a crime against humanity? Or was it justif
5、ied by the necessities of war? These questions mark one of the great remaining controversies of the Second World War. It is a controversy which has grown during the decades since the war ended, as the benefit of hindsight has prompted fresh examination of the area bombing strategy the strategy of tr
6、eating whole cities and their civilian populations as targets for attack by high explosive and incendiary bombs, and in the end by atom bombs.Part of the reason why the area-bombing controversy continues to grow is that in todays Germany and Japan people are beginning to speak about what their paren
7、ts and grandparents endured in the bomber attack, and to see them as victims too, to be counted among the many who suffered during that immense global conflict. What should we, the descendants of the Allies who won the victory in the Second World War, reply to the moral challenge of the descendants
8、of those whose cities were targeted by Allied bombers?This fact that the descendants of the bombed have begun to raise their voices and ask questions about the experience of their parents and grandparents provides one powerful reason why it matters today to try to reach a definitive settlement of th
9、e controversy.Another and connected reason is that history has to be got right before it distorts into legend and diminishes into over-simplification, which is what always happens when events slip into a too-distant past. At time of writing there are still survivors of those bombing campaigns, both
10、among those who flew the bombers and those who were bombed by them. Historians of the future will in part be guided by judgements we make now. With our proximity to the war, its survivors still in our midst or close to our personal memories, but with the hindsight of a generations length from the ev
11、ents, what we say will help shape the futures understanding of this aspect of the Second World War.A third and even more contemporary reason for revisiting Allied area bombing is to get a proper understanding of its implications for how peoples and states can and should behave in times of conflict.
12、We live in an age of tensions and moral confusion, of terrorism and deeply bitter rivalries, of violence and atrocity. What are the moral lessons for today that we can learn from the vast example of how, when bombing brought civilians into the front line of the conflict in the Second World War, the
13、Allies acted?In the decades after 1945 these implications were obscured by the fact that a much larger and more important moral matter occupied the mental horizon of the post-war world, and quite rightly so the Holocaust. This egregious crime against humanity was a central fact of Nazi aggression an
14、d the racist ideology driving it, and in comparison to it other controversies seemed minor. Other controversies do not fade through lack of attention, but grow unnoticed, until as we have seen in recent years with neo-Nazi efforts to exploit the victimhood of the bombed for their own political purpo
15、ses they become a worse problem than if they were addressed with clarity, frankness and fairness.In all these ways a new urgency attaches to the question: did the Allies commit a moral crime in their area bombing of German and Japanese cities? This is the question I seek to answer definitively in th
16、is book.To explain my personal motivation for trying to answer this question, I need only describe what I can see from where I sit writing these words. There is a small park across the road from my house in south London, completely grassed over, with a scattering of chestnut and linden trees standin
17、g in it. The trees have been growing there for half a century, and are close to maturity. As always, the chestnuts are first to break into leaf in spring; in the height of summer the lindens tassels of yellow flowers make a fine show against the dark green of their heart-shaped leaves. It is easy to
18、 judge the age of these trees, because the open space in which they stand became a park just a little over fifty years ago, so the trees and their park began life together. Before then, for a few years, that open space was filled with ruins, a bare scar of bricks and rubble cleared to ground level.
19、Before then again it was a row of houses; a dozen of them, three-storeyed semidetached Victorian villas identical to the others still standing near by -one of them being the house where I live, and from whose windows I look out.The green and tranquil appearance of this little London park belies the
20、reason for its existence. It is in fact a Second World War bombsite. The houses that stood there were blown up in the Blitz of 1940-1. It is possible to follow the line of bombs that destroyed them as they fell in this street, to be succeeded by more falling in the next street there is a little park
21、 there too, also with fifty-year-old linden trees and on to the very big park just beyond. Until 29 December 1940 this big park was not an open stretch of grass and playing fields, but a tangle of crowded built-up streets on either side of the Surrey Canal. It is now, as a result of one of the worst
22、 nights of the Blitz on London, an expanse of 120 acres containing football and cricket pitches, a lake, cycling paths, shrubberies, and avenues of trees. Here and there stubborn protuberances of broken brick and concrete remain, half buried beneath ivy, with some ruined adjoining walls standing bes
23、ide them. One street is left intact in the park, with houses along one side and a stoutly constructed Victorian school on the other, still alive with children each day in term time (my youngest child began her education there).The street and its school protrude into the parks open spaces as a remind
24、er of what had been a densely crowded urban scene, and therefore as a memorial to the nights when bombs rained down on London, killing and destroying. Contemplating the street where I live and the surrounding area, I am daily reminded of the horrors of that time, and the memory drives home a point t
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