Bombing the City Civilian Accounts of the Air War in Britain and Japan, 1939–1945

World War II is enshrined in our collective memory as the good war - a victory of good over evil. However, the bombing war has always troubled this narrative as total war transformed civilians into legitimate targets and raised unsettling questions such as whether it was possible for Allies and Axis alike to be victims of aggression. In Bombing the City, an unprecedented comparative history of how ordinary Britons and Japanese experienced bombing, Aaron William Moore offers a major new contribution to these debates. Utilising hundreds of diaries, letters, and memoirs, he recovers the voices of ordinary people on both sides - from builders, doctors and factory-workers to housewives, students and policemen - and reveals the shared experiences shaped by gender, class, race, and age. He reveals how it was that the British and Japanese public continued to support bombing elsewhere even as they experienced firsthand its terrible impact at home.

List of figures; Acknowledgements; Note to the reader; Featured diarists; Introduction: attacking the people: democracy, populism, and modern war; 1. Give unto Moloch: family and nation in WWII; 2. The muses of war: terror, anger, and faith; 3. Romancing stone: human sacrifice and system collapse in the city; 4. Defending our way of life: gender, class, age, and other oppressions; Conclusion: victory for the people: pacifism and the ashes of the post-war era; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Aaron William Moore is the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh. His research has received support from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust. In 2014, he was awarded the prestigious Leverhulme Prize for his work in comparative history.