Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
In Among the Dead Cities author A.C. Grayling examines the morality of Allied air attacks on civilians during WWII. He is joined by Christopher Hitchens, the author of Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays to debate whether the targeting of civilians can be justified in times of war. This event was hosted by the Goethe-Institut in Washington, DC.
A.C. Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a fellow of the World Economic Forum and the author of Meditations for the Humanist.
Bio
A.C. Grayling
A.C. Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a fellow of the World Economic Forum and the author of Meditations for the Humanist.
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens is an author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2008.
Military operations conducted by airplanes, helicopters, or other aircraft against aircraft or targets on the ground and in the water. Air warfare did not become important until World War I (191418). The British, French, German, Russian, and Italian armed forces had flying units, including biplanes armed with machine guns for dogfights with enemy fighter aircraft. Zeppelins and larger airplanes carried out bombing raids. The 1920s and '30s saw the development of the monoplane, the all-metal fuselage, and the aircraft carrier. During World War II (193945), the Battle of Britain was the first fought exclusively in the air, the Battle of the Coral Sea was the first between carrier-based aircraft, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first use of nuclear-armed bombers. In the jet age, air power has continued to be used in strategic bombing of an enemy's home territory (as in the Vietnam War, 196574), destroying enemy air forces (as in the Arab-Israeli wars), attacking and defending carrier-based naval fleets (as in the Falkland Islands War, 1982), and supporting ground forces (as in the Persian Gulf War, 199091).
Downloads are important. I download lectures and watch them at the gym while I work out. This is the kind of resource--five years old, scholarly--that should be available for download by now.
It's amazing how many times I can listen to this and each time discover ever more evidence of the canting hypocrisy of Hitchens. His animus against Churchill is especially evident - indeed it sticks out like a sore and ugly thumb: made even uglier by the fact that of the two speakers, Hitchens probably owes more to the example and heroism of Churchill. Grayling's points are based - no doubt - upon admirable moral scruples: we applaud him for it. But he can actually [I]know nothing[I] about how it actually felt to be caught up in the midst of a war for survival, and to be a people with their backs against the wall, expecting annihilation to come any day. How facile, then, Grayling's preoccupation seems to be, and how idiotic and puerile are the points Hitchens' makes in criticism of Churchill's aims, and how misplaced is the sarcasm and pseudo-erudition Hitchens self-consciously lavishes on his animadversions. Hitchens is a great and valuable crusader against the threat of Islam in the West, but when he talks rot he does so spectacularly and tirelessly: and this is one such example.
Graylings' points are no doubt effectively made and pertinent, and would have been conclusively pertinent if they had been made about attacks being made on a nation and a people who had come to the end - or were nearing the end of their campaign to obliterate a whole race and to expunge the sovereignty of so many ancient states of Europe, and to plunge it into the barbarism of Nazism. But such was not the case. Nazi germany was fully engaged in, and if anything, accelerating, its programme of genocide. As Hitchens ably puts it, nothing short of an annihilation of Germany - on the widest possible basis - would have stopped the beast in its tracks. And this the Royal Airforce and United States Airforce did; and thank God they did it. Of course so many good Germans died. That is obvious to anyone capable of thinking. But Hitchens' remark on the matter is ill-framed and trite, and worse, misleading - because it leaves unmentioned the obverse point - which is that so did so many good Jews and Englishmen and Frenchmen and Czechs and Poles get slaughtered - by the German military machine..........in fact many more in number than the good Germans who died. This will entirely negate the spurious point made by Hitchens.
For all his brilliance, I think Grayling has wasted the time he spent in writing his book by barking up the wrong tree.
I found Grayling's talk very important because it highlights a little-discussed aspect of World War II: the deliberate targeting of civilian populations in Germany and Japan as part of the Allied bombing campaign.