'Insightful, rigorously researched and splendidly written' Donald L. Miller, author of Masters of the Air During World War II, Allied bombing obliterated every major German and Japanese city. Before the dropping of the atomic bombs, conventional bombing had killed approximately 400,000 Germans and 330,00 Japanese, the vast majority civilians.
Two-thirds of Germans who died under the bombs did so in 1944 and 1945, and in the last year of the war cities with little military were obliterated. In Japan, American bombers destroyed all but three major Japanese cities, and the people in them, after March 1945. These raids occurred, in other words, when Allied victory was assured and when precision bombing techniques were far more advanced than they were earlier in the war.
Fire and Fury asks why.
Based on extensive archival sources, interviews with bombing survivors, airmen, and published first-hand accounts, the book looks at the bombing campaign from an avowedly human perspective Allied, German and Japanese. It recreates the experience of living through the death of a city. It presents the complex personalities of the senior airmen, and explores why bombing campaigns that seem so excessive seventy-five years later seemed reasonable, to many, at the time. It explains why those campaigns became so murderous so late in the war. And it asks, with the full benefits of time's fullness, whether it was all worth it.
Perfect for fans of Max Hastings, James Holland and Antony Beevor.
'Outstanding' Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World
'Clear, well-argued and grippingly told' Keith Lowe, author of Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg, 1943
About the Author :
Randall Hansen holds a Research Chair at the University of Toronto. He was director of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies for eleven years and Research Director of the Joint Initiative on German and European Studies for fourteen years. He has had visiting fellowships at the Institute of Contemporary History, Berlin, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) Vienna, the Free University of Social Studies (LUISS), Rome, Trinity College, Dublin and the Department of History, UCLA. Before taking up his current position, he was a Tutorial Fellow in Politics at Merton College, Oxford. He is author of Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance in the Last Year of WWII and Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan.
