Was the indiscriminate bombing of civilians -- in Hamburg, in Dresden, in Tokyo, in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki -- justifiable militarily, or was it "in whole or in part morally wrong"?
This is the question addressed in Among the Dead Cities by Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London and one of Britain's more prominent and outspoken public intellectuals. Almost immediately one senses what his answer will be -- an unequivocal "Yes" -- but he must be given full credit for reaching that conclusion only after a careful, nuanced analysis that gives full credit to the views and intentions of the bombers as well as making clear that the Allied bombing, however terrible, was "nowhere near equivalent in scale of moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, or the death and destruction all over the world for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was collectively responsible: a total of some twenty-five million dead, according to responsible estimates," by contrast with the toll of "about 800,000 civilian women, children and men" exacted by Allied bombing.
