'Enemy cities were pulverized or fried to a crisp. It was something they asked for and
something they got.' In the closing months of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of
Japanese mostly civilians died in a final outburst of violence from the air. American planes
were beginning to run low on plausible targets when it was decided to use two atomic weapons in
a final terrible flourish to try to end the war. What place the firebombing and atomic bombs
have in explaining Japan's surrender has remained a hot area of debate ever since. Richard
Overy's remarkable new book rethinks how we should regard this last stage of the war and the
role of the bombs. The popular view that bombing worked in this case has now to be set in a
broader context of what was happening in Japan in the months before surrender. The easy
equation 'bombing equals surrender' is no longer viable. This book explores the way in which
the willingness to kill civilians and destroy cities became normalized in the course of a
horrific war as moral concerns were blunted and scientists airmen and politicians endorsed a
strategy of mass destruction they would never have endorsed before the war began But it also
engages with the new scholarship that shows how complex the effort to end the war was in Japan
where 'surrender' was entirely foreign to Japanese culture. This book puts together firebombing
atomic bombing and the Japanese search for an end to the war into a single striking
narrative.
