[...]

The main figures in the book are Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt; members of the pacificist movement including Gandhi; Hitler and his entourage; and diarists like Victor Klemerer in Dresden and Mihail Sebastian in Bucharest. But sometimes it is the simple stark fact that makes you sit up straight for a moment, like this one from early in the book: “The Royal Air Force dropped more than 150 tons of bombs on India.” It was 1925! This, coming soon after an account of the proposed bombing of civilian targets in Iraq in 1920 (with Churchill writing: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”), set a theme for the book, which Baker will skllfully weave into the fabric of events mainly between 1920 and 1942 - that the bombing of villages and cities from the air represents “the end of civilisation”.

[...]

“One of our great aims,” Churchill wrote in July 1941, “is the delivery on German towns of the largest possible quantity of bombs per night!” Soon afterward, he said publicly: “It is time that the Germans should be made to suffer m their own homeland and cities something of the torments they have let loose upon their neighbors and upon the world!” Baker quotes large numbers of people who seemed to feel in these years that the entire German population, including women and children, were to blame for the Nazis “and should be punished” accordingly. For example, the writer Gerald Brenan: “Every German woman and child killed is a contribution to the future safety and happiness of Europe.” Or David Garnett (the author of the novel Aspects of Love, on which the musical is based), who wrote in 1941: “By butchering the German population indiscriminately it might be possible to goad them into a desperate rising in which every member of the Nazi Party would have his throat cut!”

The problem, as Baker makes clear, was. that the bombing served to kill and maim the civilian population, yet the survivors did not blame the Nazi leaders, who used the bombing as a further excuse to inflict suffering on the Jewish population, claiming, for example, that evictions of Jews were “justified on the grounds that Aryans whose houses were destroyed by bombing needed a place to live.” As early as 1941 a member of Churchill’s cabinet could write: “Bombing does NOT affect German morale: let’s get that into our heads and not waste our bombers on these raids.” Churchill’s rationale for the bombing, Baker writes, arose from his belief that it was “a form of pedagogy - a way of enlightening city dwellers as to the hellishness of remote battlefields by killing them.”

In April 1941 certain German cities were identified as good targets because they were “congested industrial towns, where the psychological effect will be greatest”; the same report recommended the use of delayed-action bombs “so as to prevent or seriously interfere with fire fighting, repair and general traffic organization.” The following month Lord Trenchard, who had been instrumental in establishing the Royal Air Force, admitted that “the percentage of bombs which hit the military target at which they are aimed is not more than 1 percent” And when Baker turns his attention to Washington, which he does regularly, he offers vignettes to suggest that Roosevelt was busy goading the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor so that America could enter the war.

Baker knows he is preaching to readers who already believe that the Nazis were evil, and that the German war machine, including the blitz, was, to say the least, conducted with ruthless carelessness for human life, and that many ordinary Germans were implicated in the Holocaust. It is possible that Human Smoke will infuriate those who believe that Churchill was a hero and that war, in all its viciousness, is often the only way to defeat those who declare or threaten war. Human Smoke will not be admired by those who argue that methods used to win a war may seem, especially to novelists writing more than 60 years later, impossible to justify. Nonetheless, the issues Baker wishes to raise, and the stark system he has used to dramatize his point, make his book a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified. (p.9.)

[End; p.9.]