WWII
Fire from the sky
BOOKS REVIEWS
AARON WILLIAM MOORE is impressed by a considered and inclusive account of the US bombing of Japanese civilians during the Second World War
Human cost Citizens among the wreckage of Tokyo, following the US firebombing of 9–10 March 1945. ”The Americans were determined to make the defeat of Japan their own project,” writes Aaron William Moore
GETTY IMAGES
Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan
by Richard Overy Allen Lane, 224 pages, £25
Richard Overy is one of the best scholars of the history of Second World War bombing, so I was pleased to see him take up the topic of the air war against Japan.
Debates around the morality of targeting civilians, the use of atomic weaponry and the principal cause of Japan’s surrender continue to vex historians, but Overy has avoided many of the usual pitfalls by engaging with the Japanese side of the story. Rain of Ruin lucidly explains the rapid rise of air power leading up to the Second World War and continues on to its culmination in the astonishing brutality of the atomic bomb in 1945.