‘Foreshadows and Repercussions’: Histories of Air War and the Recasting of Cities and Citizens

Abstract

In the preface to the 1941 edition to his 1908 novel, The War in the Air, H. G. Wells wrote: ‘I told you so. You damned fools’. The books discussed here illustrate how, in the few intervening decades, air war moved from a fearful vision into reality, and detail the varied experiences and consequences of the aerial bombardment of cities and civilians. The histories of air power and the aerial bombardment of cities have centred on the Second World War, moving from the humanising endurance of Londoners during the Blitz to the entirely dehumanised horror of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The texts reviewed here extend the histories of air war and highlight the city and the home as a target for bombing while remaining the place where people carried on their daily lives.