Our conduct in war

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AMONG THE DEAD CITIES: THE HISTORY AND MORAL LEGACY OF WWII BOMBING OF CIVILIANS IN GERMANY AND JAPAN

By A. C. Grayling

Walker & Co., $25.95, 384 pages

REVIEWED BY ERNEST W. LEFEVER

It seems that the outpouring of books and movies about World War II will never end. This is right and proper because in that conflict the stakes for Western civilization -- indeed for humanity itself -- were never higher. In 1940, Winston Churchill called Hitler's slaughter of Jews in Poland and Russia "a crime without a name." Ten years later aboard Williamsburg, the presidential yacht, he said to Harry Truman, "You, more than any other man, have saved Western Civilization." He was right.

If ever there was a just war, the Western cause in World War II was it. America, Britain, and their allies defeated the two most powerful, barbaric, and expansionist regimes in history. At great sacrifice we, and ironically the Red Army, made the world safe for democracy and freedom -- at least for a while.

But our conduct in that war against Germany and Japan raises moral questions that call for further scrutiny and soul-searching. In his fact-studded book, "Among the Dead Cities," A. C. Grayling, a British philosopher, grapples with a fundamental ethical problem in that titanic struggle. He questions the morality and military necessity of the Allied bombing of cities in Germany and Japan that by war's end claimed 800,000 civilian lives and injured three times that number. Though these deaths by bombing don't begin to match the six million lives lost in the Holocaust, they deserve our attention.

Before I assess Mr. Grayling's significant book, permit me a personal note. A religious pacifist during World War II, I along with other like-minded Americans criticized on moral grounds what we then called the "obliteration bombing" of German cities. In September 1945, shortly after Hiroshima, I went to Britain as a volunteer relief worker where I saw what the Luftwaffe had done to London and Coventry. Later, in West Germany, I walked among the rubble that was once Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne and Dresden, and a score of other flattened cities.

By 1948, when I returned to Yale University, I was no longer a pacifist but had become an advocate of the Christian just war doctrine. Even so, I still questioned the necessity and morality of bombing civilian populations. A year later I visited Japan and saw what American firebombing had done to Tokyo.