A History of Bombing is an anti-war book to beat all anti-war books. And although it was written before events in Afghanistan, reading it now gives on an overriding sense of deja-vu.
Last week, for instance, I was sent a fax by the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan asking me to join a protest against the current use by the US of cluster bombs. These, known in Chinese as "mother-and-son bombs," also appear in Sven Lindqvist's history. Aiming to spread death and injury to as many living targets as possible rather than damage a specific installation, they consist of a canister that opens in the air and disperses smaller bombs over a wide area. These then explode throwing some 200,000 projectiles in every direction.
In Vietnam B-52s often dropped explosives on military structures, napalm to scorch out their contents, then cluster bombs to kill people trying to help their burning comrades. Sometimes time-release cluster bombs were dropped to kill people who emerged when they thought the danger was past. Small wonder some people are protesting, even in pro-American Taiwan.
But these are not the only things that will be familiar to readers of today's news reports. In a book focusing mostly on 19th and 20th-century history, there are also Muslim extremists, letter bombs, carpet bombing, plus almost routine claims to be trying to avoid civilian casualties, limit attacks to military objectives, and use minimum necessary force.
In essence, A History of Bombing argues that aerial bombardment is most often used by a developed power on technologically less-sophisticated people, though using the word "developed" to describe nations that research, produce and use such things as napalm, landmines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons is hard to do without irony.
Lindqvist's main perspective is that racist attitudes marked the early use of bombing. Before everything was changed by Churchill's decision to bomb German cities in 1940, bombing from the air was only thought permissible in colonial actions. The British, for example, bombed Somalia following the rebellious activities of a "Mad Mullah" in 1920. The French bombed residential areas of Damascus in 1925, saying they were dealing with bandits. And in 1923 the British bombed Baghdad, then part of a British protectorate, following a "rebellion" stirred up by a new sheik.
"Was it right for an entire city to suffer for one man's crime?" wondered a senior British official in a report back to London. He was rewarded for his worries by enforced early retirement.
It takes a Swede, no doubt, to write a book of this sort. The British, Americans and Japanese, he asserts, all still refuse to admit to atrocities committed during World War II. Only in 1995 the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum had to abandon a planned exhibition because of protests by veterans at any depiction of the human suffering caused by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is no reference in any museum in Britain, Lindqvist claims, to the wartime bombing of German cities. And Japan's Yasukuni shrine, which premier Koizumi visited earlier this year, continues to glorify the actions of men intent on patriotic self-sacrifice rather than unprovoked attack.
Much of the detail Lindqvist offers -- of the attack on Guernica in 1937, the fire-bombing of Hamburg and Dresden in 1943, the fire-bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities in 1945, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- is too terrible to read for more than very short periods.
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