For the month of April, as part of the annual A to Z Challenge, I will be endeavoring to write a short personal post every day on the subject of war and peace—short because of time, War and Peace because of the times. To make things more bearable, I will endeavor to include music in every post.
At twelve years old, my mother was evacuated from London during the Second World War along with her whole school, Parliament Hill School for Girls, when Germany was bombing the city. She was one of 6,000 evacuees from London who were relocated to St. Albans in early September, 1939 and billeted out to foster parents. Mum had to live with two or three different foster families during that time, and was miserable being separated from her family. Her younger brother stayed at home with their parents and suffered through nerve-shattering bombings, one of which struck quite close by while he was out on an errand, its blast sweeping him up and dropping him some distance down the street. After Mum returned to London the bombs continued to drop, and the family used to go to air-raid shelters for the night. When she told me these stories, she must have softened them for me, because I never felt the terror that she must have done, and she never wanted me to have to do so. But that war changed her life in so many ways that I can only guess at. And for many years after it was over, Britain continued to feel its after-effects.
Now, eight years after Mum’s death, I am finally reading and re-reading all the essays she wrote in the United States while taking night courses in pursuit of a B.A. She was in her fifties by then. Reading a personal narrative that I had read quickly years ago and just as quickly forgotten, I was appalled at my earlier insensitivity. It was called “A Direct Hit.”
Now, as I think of the thousands upon thousands of civilians across the world being subjected to aerial bombings day after day, most of them without access to air-raid shelters or adequate medical facilities, I tremble to think of what my mother went through in her impressionable teenage years. She used to tell me that the worst part of the V-1s, or “buzz bombs”, that the Germans deployed in the last year of the war was when, after buzzing around overhead, they suddenly went quiet. That meant that, you had about 12 seconds to take cover, before the missile hit the ground and exploded; but the silence was terrifying, because you didn’t know where it would strike. The V-1s were“Vengeance bombs,” reprisals for Churchill’s relentless bombing of German cities, and intended to strike the maximum terror into the hearts of Londoners.
When you think about it, aerial bombing has to be one of the most diabolical inventions of the modern age. A pilot can destroy many human habitations and human lives in one sortie without having to face them directly, and without having to get his or her hands dirty. The victims, in turn, never even get to see the face of the person who rained death upon them. It is easy for the perpetrator of the bombing to see the whole enterprise as a game. All the more so today, with the advent of remote-activated bombs and drone warfare.
The Chinese invented gunpowder back in the 9th century and developed the rocket as a weapon in the thirteenth century, but it fell out of use—“until the English rediscovered it at the beginning of the nineteenth century” writes Sven Lindqvist, in his mind-blowing A History of Bombing (p. 1). The first bombs dropped in an aerial attack were by an Italian military officer near Turkish-controlled Tripoli, North Africa, in November, 1911. Each of the four “bombs” was in fact a hand grenade, weighing only 2 kilos, or 4.4 pounds (p. 1-2). Contrast this with the 500-, 1,000-, and 2000-pound bombs that have been routinely dropped on the Gaza Strip over the past two and a half years. In fact, as early as April, 2024, it was estimated that the bombs dropped on Gaza since October 2023 had totaled more than 70,000 tonnes, more than the combined bomb tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London in the whole of the Second World War.
While in these early days, most militaries were reluctant to use this new form of warfare on civilian populations, the British had no such compunctions in their colonies. In a 2003 interview Lindqvist said, “Britain had been bombing civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, and Africa since 1919 instead of using infantry and artillery.” As his interviewer, Mats Bigert, noted, Lindqvist’s book argues that” the period between the two world wars provided, more or less, an aerial bombardment training camp for the colonial powers.”
According to Lindqvist, two things helped to lay the groundwork for the wholesale adoption of aerial bombing in the 20th century. One was the ability to imagine doing so, and this imagination was fired by a number of works of fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A second essential prerequisite for bombing fellow human beings to blazes was the ability to designate these unfortunates as savages or barbarians. The argument was circular, it seems, because “savages” could be bombed without moral scruples; but then again, “civilized” peoples could be bombed into savagery (Lindqvist, p. 2). Furthermore, bombing brutalizes the bombers themselves, turning them into savages.
As I remember, it was in the late 20th century, in the first Gulf War of 1990-1991—also known as the first space war—that remote-operated, precision-guided weapons began to be heavily employed by the United States. As a result, there was a tremendous disparity between the number of Iraqi and U.S. casualties: some 50,000 Iraqis were killed, in contrast with only 298 American service members, and of those deaths, half were a result of “non-hostile causes.”
In the 21st century, the disparity has only grown. A month into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, according to the U.S.-based rights group HRANA, 3,527 people have been killed in Iran since the war began, 1,606 of whom were civilians, including at least 244 children. In contrast, 13 U.S. service members have been killed during the same period, six of whom were killed in the crash of a U.S. military aircraft. And in Israel, missiles launched from Iran and Lebanon—where Israel is waging another war—have killed 19 people. Every human death in war is a tragedy, but the disproportionality of the carnage is striking.
It never ceases to shock me that war-makers can be so cavalier about dropping bombs on fellow human beings. Bombing an enemy seems especially easy when the enemy is made up of people of color—people seen as different from oneself in some essential way.
The term “bombs away!”, the title of this piece, was first used by bomber pilots in the 1940s when releasing their payload. It means “Here we go!, or Here goes nothing!” idiomatically, as the speaker is doing something daring and exhilarating. Who remembers then-Presidential candidate John McCain in 2007, getting laughs from the crowd as he advocates the bombing of Iran to the tune of the Beach Boys song Barbara Ann: “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran“?
More recently, on March 23, 2026, the current President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces said that if the U.S couldn’t make the desired deal with Iran, “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.”
On that note, let me offer the following songs to accompany the letter B:
Bombs Away by Johnny Clegg and Savuka, a song from their December, 1989 album, Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World, released in late-apartheid South Africa, just before Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years in prison.
Bombs Away by the English rock band, the Police, a song on their album Zenyatta Mondatta, released in 1980, at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
And finally, as an antidote to all the bombs:
Bangladesh, by George Harrison on the double-album The Concert for Bangladesh (1971), live recordings of two August, 1971 concerts he organized in aid of the Bengali refugees of the Bangladesh liberation war (see my blog post of the same name).
Put those bombs away!
Tell Me Another 