In the closing months of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Japanese, mostly civilians, died in a final outburst of atomic violence. Richard Overy rethinks how we should regard this. How did decisions to kill civilians and destroy cities become normalised; how were moral concerns blunted; and why did scientists, airmen and politicians follow a strategy of mass destruction?
He also engages with new scholarship showing how complex the effort to end the war was in Japan, where ‘surrender’ was an entirely foreign concept. Overy is Honorary Research Professor of History at Exeter and author of The Dictators and The Bombing War.
