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

This comparative study of Japanese and British civilian descriptions of being bombed in World War II serve as a way to understand the universality of total war. Examining issues of gender, class, and regional and urban history, it confronts how ordinary people were both victims of the air war and helped make it possible.

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.