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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2014
In the preface to the 1941 edition to his 1908 novel, The War in the Air, H. G. Wells wrote: ‘I told you so. You damned fools’. The books discussed here illustrate how, in the few intervening decades, air war moved from a fearful vision into reality, and detail the varied experiences and consequences of the aerial bombardment of cities and civilians. The histories of air power and the aerial bombardment of cities have centred on the Second World War, moving from the humanising endurance of Londoners during the Blitz to the entirely dehumanised horror of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The texts reviewed here extend the histories of air war and highlight the city and the home as a target for bombing while remaining the place where people carried on their daily lives.
1 Quoted in Mellor, Leo, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 For the Blitz in Britain see Connelly, Mark, We can take it! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Longman, 2004)Google Scholar, Smith, Malcolm, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London: Taylor and Francis, 2000)Google Scholar, and Calder, Angus, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1991Google Scholar; 1992). For Hiroshima see Messer, R. L., ‘“Accidental judgements, casual slaughters”: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and total war’, in Chickering, Roger et al., A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 297–313Google Scholar.
3 There is little mention of the two world wars in the major urban history of Britain, Daunton, Martin, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, iii: 1840–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. A book that does engage with the urban aspects of modern war is Marcus Funck and Chickering, Roger, Endangered Cities: Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of The World Wars (Boston: Brill, 2004)Google Scholar. For a historical geography extending back before the twentieth century see Ashworth, G. J., War and the City (London: Routledge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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6 Susan Grayzel, ‘“A Promise of Terror to Come”: Air Power and the Destruction of Cities in British Imagination and Experience, 1908–1939’, in Goebel and Keene, eds, Cities into Battlefields, 62. The bombing of Guernica has often been described as marking a new kind of war, see Patterson, Ian, Guernica and Total War (London: Profile, 2007)Google Scholar.
7 For interwar air war literature see Saint-Amour, Paul K., ‘Air War Prophecy and Interwar Modernism’, Comparative Literature Studies, 42, 2 (2005), 130–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lindqvist, Sven, A History of Bombing, tr. Rugg, Linda H. (New York: New Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Ceadel, Martin, ‘Popular Fiction and the Next War, 1918–39’, in Gloversmith, Frank, ed., Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 161–184Google Scholar. For literature during the war see Piette, Adam, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (London: Papermac, 1995)Google Scholar.
8 Barros, Andrew, ‘Razing Babel and the Problems of Constructing Peace: France, Great Britain, and Air Power, 1916–28’, English Historical Review, 126, 518 (2011), 75–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edgerton, David, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Biddle, Tami Davis, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
10 Lara Feigel, ‘‘The Photograph My Skull Might Take’: Bombs, Time and Photography in British and German Second World War Literature’, in Baldoli et al., eds, Bombing, States and Peoples, 133.
11 Vanessa Chambers, ‘‘Defend us from All Perils and Dangers of this Night’: Coping with Bombing in Britain during the Second World War’, in Baldoli et al., eds, 154, 164.
12 See Cohen, Jean-Louis, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (London: Hazan, 2011)Google Scholar, ch. 3. The increasing importance of wartime approaches to urban planning in peacetime as a response to the fear of air war is the central topic of my PhD thesis, ‘The Architecture of Survival: Planning the Future of Cities in the Shadow of Air War, Britain 1935–1952’, University of Sheffield, 2014.
13 See also Meisel, Joseph S., ‘Air Raid Shelter Policy and its Critics in Britain before the Second World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 5, 3 (1994), 300–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Dietmar Süss, ‘Wartime Societies and Shelter Politics in National Socialist Germany and Britain’, in Baldoli et al., eds, 24, 38. For the concept of war as a condition of society Süss cites J. P. Reemstma, ‘Krieg is ein Gesellschaftzustand: Reden zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung “Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wechmacht 1941–1944”’, ed. Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998, 8–13.
15 Rose, Sonya O., Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Calder, Myth of the Blitz.
16 Gabriella Gribaudi, ‘The True Cause of the “Moral Collapse”: People, Fascists and the Authorities under the Bombs: Naples and the Countryside, 1940–1944’, in Baldoli et al., eds, 224, 226.
17 Elena Cortesi, ‘Evacuation in Italy during the Second World War: Evolution and Management’, in Baldoli et al., eds, 63; Claudia Baldoli, ‘Religion and Bombing in Italy, 1940–1945’, in Baldoli et al., eds, 137.
18 Marc Wiggam, ‘The Blackout and the Idea of Community in Britain and Germany’, in Baldoli et al., eds, 21.
19 See also Baldoli, Claudia and Knapp, Andrew, Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy under Allied Air Attack, 1940–1945 (London: Continuum, 2012)Google Scholar.
20 Lindsay Dodd, ‘“Relieving Sorrow and Misfortune”? State, Charity, Ideology and Aid in Bombed-Out France, 1940–1944’, in Baldoli et al., eds, 75.
21 Michael Schmiedel, ‘Orchestrated Solidarity: The Allied Air War in France and the Development of Local and State-Organized Solidarity Movements’, in Baldoli et al., eds, 206, 211, 215, 216.
22 Edgerton, David, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
23 Jay Winter, ‘From War Talk to Rights Talk: Exile Politics, Aerial Bombardment and the Construction of the Human Rights Project during the Second World War’, in Baldoli et al., eds, 317, 322, 319.
24 Winter, ‘From War Talk to Rights Talk’, 332.
25 Prost, Antoine and Winter, Jay, René Cassin: René Cassin et les droits de l’homme: Le Projet d’une génération (Paris: Fayard, 2011)Google Scholar.
26 A famous example is Hart, B. H. Liddell, Paris, or the Future of War (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925)Google Scholar; Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, ch. 2.
27 This is the key theme in Diefendorf, Jeffry, ed., Rebuilding Europe's Blitzed Cities (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 This is particularly the case in Germany as evidenced by the response to Sebald, Winfried G., On the Natural History of Destruction tr. Bell, Anthea (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003)Google Scholar and Friedrich, Jörg, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 tr. Brown, Allison (New York: Columbia University Press:, 2006)Google Scholar. See also Arnold, Jörg, The Allied Air War and Urban Memory: The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Goebel, ‘Commemorative Cosmopolis: Transnational Networks of Remembrance in Post-War Coventry’, in Goebel and Keene, eds, Cities into Battlefields, 163, 165, 177.
30 Lisa Yoneyama, ‘Memories in Ruins: Hiroshima's Nuclear Annihilation and Beyond’, in Goebel and Keene, eds, 185–202; Julie Higashi, ‘The Spirit of War Remains Intact: The Politics of Space in Tokyo and The Yasukuni Shrine’, in Goebel and Keene, eds, 217, 203.
31 James Meikle, ‘Queen unveils memorial to Bomber Command’, The Guardian 28 June, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/28/queen-memorial-bomber-command?INTCMP=SRCH (last visited 1 August 2014).
32 ‘Queen unveils RAF Bomber Command memorial’, BBC News website, 28 June, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18600871 (last visited 7 February 2012).