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In spite of my comments below, I thought this was a very good book. It is the most thorough book I've read about the bombing of Germany during the war. I read only English, so that necessarily limits my choices. Even the best books I've read (see any of the Martin Middlebrook works on the air war) don't go into the detail of the process and effects as Friedrich does here.

I'm not entirely clear on the division the chapters imply. "Weapon" describes the technology. "Strategy" covers the objective of the campaign and the resulting damage on the whole. "Land" breaks down the results by region and city, and gives us short historical sketches of the cities put to flame. "Protection" is sort of about civil defense and the reaction of the people. "We" and "I" are somewhat more personal accounts of the previous chapter, maybe? Finally, "Stone" is mostly about the attempt to protect art and archives.

Although there are one or two particular statements I found outrageous ("The Nazi regime pronounced ... fifteen thousand death penalties in the last four years of the war."), I was most troubled by the general tone of the middle part of the book.

The Second World War was essentially a continental scale murder-suicide. The Nazi regime decided that non-Aryans could be (or should be) murdered, and by the end of the war dictated that Germany should be burnt to the ground and defended to the last man.

The core of the book is a lamentation of the murder of the innocents: the women and children and non-combatants in the cities, the destruction of their art and architecture. The case is made that it was criminal to involve these innocents in such a war. I will not deny that the Allies attack on the population centers was barbaric. But I have a reaction against the author's tone.

Innocence or guilt is not a binary state: either wholly innocent or wholly guilty. They occur at ends of a spectrum. Is only the soldier, the combatant, responsible for war? The soldier pulling the trigger of a machine gun is certainly culpable, as is his partner who feeds him the ammunition. The quartermaster who brings the ammunition to the battle is responsible as well. What about the railroad engineer who transports it from the factory to the army? The munitions worker? The baker and butcher who feed the munitions workers? For all these, it seems to me, we're moving along the spectrum from very guilty towards mostly innocent.

The suicide part of the Nazi murder-suicide could have been stopped at any time by the surrender of the regime. The author notes that even at the very end, there were fanatics in every city and town and village who were offended, outraged by those flying white flags of surrender. But it isn't mentioned that early in the war, the Nazi regime was widely popular and supported.

The author seems to be making the case that the bombing campaign was responsible for the destruction of German history: the toppling and burning of the historic buildings and the torching of the libraries and archives. I'm not convinced. As long as the military was unwilling to end the fight, they'd have battled in the streets of the cities and the Allies would have dismembered the buildings with artillery instead of bombs. Does it really matter if the cathedral is destroyed by 500lb bombs and thermite or by howitzers and tanks? I maintain that the destruction of German history is the fault of the Nazis and not we who defeated them.

The book, of course, is about what happened to German cities and their residents. It isn't about the death camps, it isn't about the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi war machine outside German borders. It sounds like the author doesn't think that the fate of the millions in the death camps were the result of anything like a death penalty imposed by the Nazis. The author seems to argue that German civilians were as innocent as the millions of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, French, and other innocent civilians who were murdered, who weren't munition workers, or the bakers and butchers who supported them. On the Guilt/Innocence spectrum, the civilians of the nations conquered by the Nazis aren't even on the scale the author uses. The book is about German civilians - not about civilians who suffered similar fates in Warsaw, Rotterdam, or Coventry (who I would argue were truly innocent).

But, as I said, in spite of my dislike of the tone of much of this book, I found it worthwhile. Friedrich goes into many details that were not obvious to me before. For example, I knew that the Allies spent much effort in figuring out how to burn down Japanese cities. I didn't know we made the same effort for Germany. All the film I've seen of bombing Germany is of large, high-explosive bombs falling from the bombers. But Friedrich points out that HE was just a small percentage of the tonnage: most of it was incendiary; millions of 4 pound sticks. And we get a lot of detail, on a personal level, of what it was like to be on the receiving end of this.

I would like to think that mankind has put this sort of war behind him, but this is not the case. When looking at news reports of Yemen, to name just one modern war, we see that it is the civilian who bears the brunt of war, wholly innocent or not.