In war, as in famine and pestilence, one finds the earthly basis for visions of hell. Wartime agony is immemorial, but the 20th century brought the military arts of inflicting suffering and death to diabolical perfection. For many in World War II, terror and death rained from the skies: one did not have to be a soldier in order to suffer like one. The bombers carried the war to civilian populations, and the names of cities ravaged by air attack—London, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—figure as largely in the history of the war as the sites of monumental battles. Indeed, apart from the Holocaust, it is principally the great bombing episodes that give World War II its horrific blazing signature.

Four new books consider this air war, and particularly the one waged by the British and Americans against Germany, which killed some 600,000 civilians: Michael Bess’s Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II ¹; Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945 ²; A.C. Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the World War II Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan ³; and Marshall De Bruhl’s Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden.⁴ All four recount the history of air warfare in theory and practice; describe the nature of the attacks and the damage done to human life, property, and cultural inheritance; and examine whether the bombings were militarily necessary or morally justifiable.