Fire from the sky

AARON WILLIAM MOORE is impressed by a considered and inclusive account of the US bombing of Japanese civilians during the Second World War

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Richard Overy is one of the best scholars of the history of Second World War bombing, so I was pleased to see him take up the topic of the air war against Japan.

Debates around the morality of targeting civilians, the use of atomic weaponry and the principal cause of Japan's surrender continue to vex historians, but Overy has avoided many of the usual pitfalls by engaging with the Japanese side of the story. Rain of Ruin lucidly explains the rapid rise of air power leading up to the Second World War and continues on to its culmination in the astonishing brutality of the atomic bomb in 1945.

Some readers will be surprised at how slowly countries such as Britain and the US reacted to the threat of aerial bombardment. Many of those things we take to be iconic armaments of the war - notably the B-29 bomber and atomic weapons - were introduced only later in the conflict, at enormous costs, and with many problems. “By early 1944,” Overy reminds readers, “only 16 B-29s were operational out of 97 delivered by the Boeing factories, though eventually 3,760 would be produced at a final cost of almost $4bn” - more than the cost of the atomic bombs.