Product Description

The bomber campaign against Germany is one of the most contentious of World War II. Was anything achieved by the deaths of thousands of German civilians-many of them women and children? Or were all means justified against Nazi Germany?

Acclaimed military historian Robin Neillands examines every detail of the allied campaign led by British Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris: the strengths and fundamental flaws, the technical difficulties and developments and, above all, the day-to-day, night-by-night endurance of the crews flying to the limit in discomfort and danger, facing flak and enemy fire. Personal experiences of British, American, Canadian, Australian and other ally fliers play a key part in this account, along with those of German airmen and civilians.

Though The Bomber War discusses Guernica and the destruction of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it concentrates on the European theater, on Germany's air war against the allies - over Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry-which led the fierce allied raids carried out against Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin and the Ruhr and-most notorious of all-the tremendous destruction of Dresden in the last months of the war. Robin Neillands also examines the complex moral issues involved in the air war, and of the case made against "Bomber" Harris. This is a timely addition to the history of conflict; the age of free-fall bombs has passed, but many veterans-on both sides-are still alive to state their case, and to tell a knew generation what their war was like.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1558137 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-30
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .2 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 450 pages

From Amazon.com
"We must make war as we must, not as we would like," observed the great British general Lord Kitchener after witnessing the carnage of World War I. Former Royal Marines commando Robin Neillands concurs in this often grim account of a bombing campaign that devastated much of continental Europe in the cause of destroying Nazism.

In this history of the Allied air war over Europe, Neillands maintains that the use of bombers as strategic weapons aimed at the enemy's ability to wage war--as opposed to purely tactical weapons aimed at enemy troops--necessarily involved the loss of civilian life and the destruction of nonmilitary targets, however unintentional. One such target was Dresden, a once-beautiful city that, some historians have protested, had no strategic importance and merely served as an example of what would happen to the rest of Germany should the fighting continue. Those historians are off the mark, Neillands counters: Dresden produced essential war materiel, such as military aircraft engines, shell fuses, and cigarettes ("a vital product for maintaining wartime morale"), and thus it was a legitimate target. So, he continues, were cities such as Berlin, Ludwigshafen, and Hamburg, the last the site of a firestorm that killed some 46,000 civilians. Their deaths were unfortunate, Neillands suggests, but necessary in ending Hitler's regime and in inaugurating an era in which total war is unthinkable.

Neillands rightly observes that most histories of the Allied air war in Europe present either the English or the American side, and he does a good job of weaving both accounts, drawing on official histories and the memories of veterans (including some German fliers) alike. More detailed and technically inclined than recent work by Stephen Ambrose and other popular writers on World War II, his book makes a useful addition to the historical literature. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
"A critique of strategic bombing as a whole, from its creation during the Great War until the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945," The Bomber War: The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany nevertheless focuses on the RAF and USAAF missions over German cities missions that have recently been branded as often little more than organized murder, given the number of civilian casualties. The author, Former Royal Marines Commando Robin Neillands (The Conquest of the Reich: D-Day to V-E Day), is a member of the British Commission for Military History.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Raining terror from the sky is a 20th-century invention. Beginning in World War I and peaking with the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in World War II, Neillands has provided a remarkably able synthesis of the extensive literature relating to the topic of bomber warfare. His command of the sources is impressive, which should be no surprise since he has written extensively on various topics in military history, (see, e.g., The Conquest of the Reich: D-Day to VE-Day). Neillands grapples with the moral issues surrounding the bombing of cities during World War II. He defends the now-controversial actions of British Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who since the war has been roundly criticized for bombing civilian areas of German cities, in the February 1945 Dresden fire bombing. Neillands argues that war erodes humanity and that to defeat the Germans (who bombed London and other British cities), the Allies found it necessary to destroy German population centers associated with war production. Moralists can continue to argue the matter, but it would seem that the air war contributed significantly to the eventual demise of the Reich. Recommended for all collections. Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.