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“Fire…We’re going to put him in it. That’s saying, friends, that we’re going to put fire around him, all around him. We’re going to put it over him and underneath him. We’re going to bring it down on him and on to him. We’re going to put it in his eyes and up his asshole� and in his baby’s diaper. We’re going to put it in his pockets, where he can’t get rid of it�
- the opening lines of James Dickey’s To the White Sea

Before the rubble had even stopped bouncing at the end of World War II, the victorious Allies were looking at ways to punish the Axis Powers, specifically Germany and Japan. Different ideas were bandied about, such as the Morgenthau Plan, and Stalin’s very Stalin-esque idea of mass executions. (Sometimes you have to scratch your head at how Stalin-y Stalin was).

Eventually, the Allies settled on an International Military Tribunal in both Europe and the Far East, which came to be known, informally, as the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Trials. These two courts tried (and mostly convicted) the surviving bigwigs of the German and Japanese regimes most responsible for the outbreak and conduct of the bloodiest war in history. Hundreds and thousands of smaller, less visible trials followed in the wake of Nuremberg and Tokyo.

Almost as soon as they were in the dock, the defendants began asserting a tu quoque defense. This is a fancy, lawyerly way of saying “you did it too.� In logic, tu quoque is a fallacy; in law, it is not going to save your butt. But if you’re Hermann Goering, and you’ve already got the cyanide capsule between your teeth, you might as well attempt to show your opponent’s putative hypocrisy.

The postwar trials have been heavily criticized as creating crimes that never before existed, and as administering a particular brand of justice known as “victor’s justice.� The assertion is that the trials are somehow unfair because the Allies did things that were as bad as the Germans or the Japanese.

As an argument against the existence of the Military Tribunals, the notion of “victor’s justice� is illogical and obnoxious. (And begs the question, what’s the opposite of “victor’s justice�, and should that have been implemented instead?). Nothing about it changes the fact that men such as Kaltenbrunner, Frank, and Matsui had participated in crimes beyond imagination, that they � in the words of Arendt speaking of Eichmann � “should not inhabit the world� because “no member of the human race can be expected to want to share the earth� with them. They were guilty and deserved what they got a thousand times over.

The criticism of the International Military Tribunals says less about norms of international law (again, the notion that Axis leadership didn't deserve punishment is ludicrous), and more about our own (meaning the Allies) discomfort with the way we won the war. And nothing crystallizes that discomfort more than the bombing war. Hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese (and French and Italian) civilians died beneath the wings of British and American bomber fleets. Sometimes this was the result of collateral damage. More often, it was the product of a systematic campaign of destruction.

The bombing war over Germany � especially the nighttime incendiary attacks by British Bomber Command � is the subject of Jorg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945. For an English speaker, its most unique aspect is that it is an unrepentant criticism of the bombing war written by a German who refuses to hedge his position by acknowledging larger contextual issues (you know, like the Holocaust). It is a polemic, of a sort. However, it is one of the most dispassionate polemics I’ve ever read.

(A note on the translation by Allison Brown: It’s good. I took four years of German in high school, which means that if I had read this book in its native tongue, it would have taken me approximately 6,000 years to translate. Partially because that was 16 years ago in high school, partially because I was mostly drunk � I was an American teenager after all � when I actually visited Germany. Thus, I can’t say for sure how close Brown’s translation is to the original. I can say it is very readable. I can also strongly assume � based on the way Friedrich molds his story � that she captured Friedrich’s detached tone).

Sometimes, the easiest way to explain a book is to describe what it is not. So, this is not a history of the bombing war. There is no chronology here. If you’re looking for Dresden, for instance, you find it in half a dozen different places. There are no lengthy discussions about strategy, or time spent on personalities. If you want a historical overview of the Allied bombing campaigns, you should head on over to Richard Ovary. The Fire is something very different.

The Fire is an impressionistic work. A mélange of understated facts and vivid first-person accounts, arranged around different themes. The first chapter, for example, is called “Weapon.� Within that chapter are several subheadings: Fire Protection Engineers (about the flammability of German cities, especially the so-called “Old Town� found in many European metropolises); The Heavy Bomber (about the Flying Fortress and the Mosquito); Radar (about Radar); and The Crew (about the different members of the bomb crew). The layout contained in the Contents is important, because Friedrich’s writing style is almost stream-of-consciousness, the topics melding into each other without delineation. There is no true structure within the book itself. This is either artful or incoherent, depending on whether the book is gripping you or not.

At its heart, The Fire is an argument against the area bombing of civilians. The only place this is explicitly stated, however, is in an Afterword written expressly for American and British readers. Here, Friedrich (rather oddly) condemns the Anglo-American bombing war by reference to the American bombing war in Iraq, which Friedrich supported.

Friedrich never overtly lays out his thesis within the narrative. Instead, in an act of constrained fury, he piles on the brutal, unrelenting facts. The Fire strongly reminded me of Len Deighton’s classic novel Bomber in the scientific, bloodless particularity of his details:

The bomber raced across the heavens; the town below was stationary. When the bomb fell, it needed thirty to forty seconds to reach the ground. Because it continued to travel in the direction of the plane’s motion, the bomb had to be released a few seconds before the target was reached. But the ballistics of the bombing war were not totally understood, and the wind also had great effect. Since they were lighter, the incendiary bombs had a more complex trajectory, so they were bundled into clusters to add weight. But the cluster’s curve as it fell to earth was not the same curve as that of a 4,000 pound blockbuster mine. And the pilot had a reflex that had to be taken into account, a reflex that caused him to drop the bomb a bit prematurely, just to get it over with, since his life had never been in such jeopardy as it was just then…These split seconds added up from wave to wave to create a “creep-back� effect. The bombers crept back along the approach for miles. It could not be avoided. This creep-back effect was accounted for in the plans, so the indicator marking was placed ahead of the actual target.

There is a lot about this book that I loved. I thought the chapter on the bombers was excellent, as was the chapter entitled Protection, which explained in grueling detail the tactics civilians used to guard themselves from the bombs. (There are, I learned, many awful ways to die in a bunker).

Right smack dab in the middle, however, I almost quit. There is a lengthy, 173-page chapter devoted to a city-by-city account of the bombing war. I am not exaggerating. City-by-city. This is actually the only part of the book that had true organization. Friedrich’s rhythm is to introduce a city, describe its ancient history, its architectural wonders, its illustrious citizens. And then he describes its annihilation. For instance, going to a random page, take Stettin, where Friedrich starts in the distant past:

Stetting was one of the strongest fortresses of Europe. The Swedes, Brandenburgers, French, Russians, and Poles had all either laid siege or been besieged there. Its history was marked not by its buildings but by the shells that cannons outside the city walls had fired into the interior. In 1677, a third of the buildings had not survived the prolonged stranglehold of the Great Elector; none were left unscathed. Following in his footsteps, Russians and Poles only succeeded in destroying 150 buildings, in 1713, but these generals did manage to purge Stettin of its Gothic and Renaissance architecture…Thus the Basilica of St. James, which had been started in the early Gothic style and completed in the fourteenth century, had a completely baroque interior, since the incendiary projectiles of the Elector had destroyed it down to the crypts�

Once the history/architecture lesson is complete, we jump to the bombs:

The final besiegers came through the air. The first Wellingtons appeared as early as 1940 and 1941, in search of sites that could do with a load of bombs…In 1943, the distinction between industrial and city targets had become irrelevant, so London was very pleased to hear on April 21 that 339 Lancasters and Halifaxes had succeeded in reaching, perfectly marking, and hitting a site over six hundred miles away. The bitter 6 percent loss of aircraft had been worth the sacrifice, since one hundred acres of the city center were reported as devastated. While that assumption was greatly exaggerated, 586 people had definitely been killed

Initially, I thought this a tremendously effective way to make a point. Then he made the point again, and again, and again. I started getting restless, but fleetingly, I still thought this was a kind of genius, to demonstrate the relentlessness of the bombing campaign. But then I lost interest as repetitiveness turned terror into dullness. I actually put the book down for a long time, before I finally, slowly, slogged through this chapter. There are a lot of great rhetorical devices, but causing numbness in your reader isn’t one of them.

As I mentioned above, The Fire does not place the bombing war into a larger historical context. It is a story told in a vacuum. Friedrich’s implicit argument is that the environment that bred the bombing war (namely, the German Reich) does not mitigate the crime of the Allied air war.

I do not endorse this view. Then again, I do not necessarily disagree with it. This isn’t avoiding an argument as much as it is acknowledging that the complexity of the moral issues is far too involved for the tail-end of an amateur book review.

The Fire is provocative, and in that way, I recommend it � despite its shortcomings � for people interested in the tangled question of waging moral war. It should be read alongside bombing proponents for a fuller picture. It is one-sided, to be sure, but when you place it alongside other one-sided books holding the opposite view, well, now you’re onto something.

Whether or not the bombing war against Germany (and Japan) was necessary for ultimate victory, thereby justifying its tremendous cost in lives and infrastructure, it was a tragedy. When statistics are presented showing the futility of the Allies� bombing campaign, bombing proponents often fall back on the last argument for their cause: righteousness. The argument goes that the citizens of your enemy deserve to be punished by dint of their citizenship. This is a rather indefensible position. The children who burned in Hamburg were no more guilty than the peasants executed in Belorussia or the Chinese slaughtered in Nanking or the families atomized in Hiroshima. War is indiscriminate murder that invariably causes suffering to people in an inverse proportion to their responsibility for causing war in the first place. If The Fire does nothing else, it grimly demonstrates that.