Ebook: A History of Bombing

A daring literary and historical look at the ideologies of war and violence, by the author of "Exterminate All the Brutes"

On November 1, 1911, over the North African oasis Tagiura, Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti leaned out of the cockpit of his primitive aircraft and dropped a Haasen hand grenade. Thus began one of the most devastating military tactics of the twentieth century: aerial bombing. With this point of entry, Sven Lindqvist, the author of the highly acclaimed "Exterminate All the Brutes", presents a cleverly constructed and innovative history. Now available in paperback, A History of Bombing tells the fascinating stories behind the development of air power, bombs, and the laws of war and international justice, demonstrating how the practices of the two world wars were born from colonial warfare.

"A profound litany of what might someday be considered among the most counterproductive military actions ever taken." — The Nation

"An original work, written with a moral passion that is uncommon." — Sunday Times [London]

"Continuously interesting, often fascinating." — Financial Times

"Extraordinary and beautifully written." — San Francisco Chronicle

"Impassioned, wide-ranging." — The Times [London]

"Lindqvist plots a clear path towards the ever more horrendous holocausts that lie ahead. It is gripping stuff." — New Statesman

"Profoundly disquieting, but that obviously is Lindqvist's ultimate purpose." — Associated Press

Sven Lindqvist is a prominent Swedish writer known internationally for his books on China and Latin America. His previous works available in English include "Exterminate All the Brutes" and The Skull Measurer's Mistake (both from The New Press). He lives in Stockholm.

Translator Linda H. Rugg is an associate professor in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Picturing Ourselves.

This is a corrected version of an ebook previously available online which looks like it was auto-generated from a scanned copy. That version had all the errors you’d expect from an unedited scan—misread letters leading to nonsense words, issues reading layout which led to the first sentence of each section being rendered as gibberish, all sorts of formatting issues. There was also an omission of sections 172-175 which were missing from the original scan. This version, as far as possible, corrects those errors. Inevitably there will be things I’ve missed, particularly around spelling and words which were misread in the original conversion as other correctly-spelled words (for instance where an ‘l’ has been read as an ‘t’, making ‘while’ into ‘white’). My apologies for those. Sections 172-175 have been inserted using a translation of the corresponding sections in the Spanish version of the ebook, also available online. The cover, which was a very poor scan, has been replaced with a higher-resolution version. The illustrations have been replaced with better versions taken from the original scan, and in some places moved in the text to prevent the interruption of sections. Formatting has attempted to imitate the original as far as possible, but inevitably there are some differences. Spellings follow those of the original, which are UK English.

The major change, though, is to offer the text in two different orders. The author proposes two ways of reading the book - chronologically and by theme. The original text was arranged chronologically, in 399 numbered sections. This presentation is retained as the second half of the text. However, the author states that he prefers the book to be read thematically in 22 separate strands. As this would be difficult to do in an ebook without inserting a large number of cross-referencing anchors, I have arranged the sections by theme and appended the as the first half of the book. This seemed like it would be easier for the reader.

Matt
Newcastle, February 2021