Resumo de Among The Dead Cities

There can hardly be a more frustrating or thankless task than trying to
impose a moral code on war, an institution which, by its very nature, feeds on
its own excesses. Yet that is the job that A.C. Grayling, a professor of
philosophy at the University of London''s Birkbeck
College, undertakes here.
Although he cites examples from armed conflicts throughout history, Grayling
draws his chief conclusions from the bombings of cities in Europe and Japan
during World War II.

Grayling first makes it clear that he is not an apologist for Germany or Japan and that they were clearly
aggressors who merited being defeated. His moral question is: what did the
Allies owe to the innocent civilians of those two nations when it came to
planning and carrying out their bombing raids? He is specifically concerned
with area bombing, which he defines as the strategy of treating whole cities
and the civilian populations as targets for attack by high explosive and incendiary bombs, and in the end by
atom bombs.

The two great Allied proponents of area bombing were Great Britain''s Sir Arthur Harris and America''s
Gen. Curtis E. LeMay. Each, according to Grayling, had an inflated notion of
the effectiveness of the technique in winning the war. Their unfortunate laboratories
for testing their theories included not only the industrial centers of Berlin and Tokyo but also
such targets of questionable military value as Augsburg,
Frankfurt, Cologne, Dresden
and Nagasaki. At the beginning of
the war, both Germany and Britain went to
some lengths to avoid the gratuitous bombing of civilians. But as the conflict
heated up and one outrage incited another, the niceties fell away and the
rationalizations for indiscriminate slaughter blossomed. (LeMay conceded that
had the U.S.
lost the war, he might have been indicted as a war criminal.)

Beyond the great loss of innocent lives, Grayling points out that the
bombings also amounted to culturecide?the needless destruction of libraries,
schools, churches, monuments and other irreplaceable objects of artistic and
historic importance. (To America''s
credit, he notes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson removed Kyoto, Japan''s
cultural center, from the list of cities to be bombed.)

In addition to contending that it was morally wrong, Grayling further argues
that area bombing was not nearly as militarily effective as its champions
insisted it was. He says it didn''t sap the Germans'' will to fight nor break the
back of their industrial productivity. Just as it had in Britain, the
attacks seemed only to stiffen national resolve and bring out the people''s
resilience and ingenuity. According to official estimates, Allied
bombing?principally by the British?killed 305,000 German civilians and injured
another 780,000.

The lingering question is: who can punish the victor in war, no matter how
flagrant his crime?

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