THIS BOOK gives a very striking picture of the evils of colonialism. In the 1920s and 1930s the conventional means of controlling the British Empire's unwilling subjects were proving too expensive. The Empire's rulers wanted to cut their costs and increase their profits from Empire. British workers on the other hand were increasingly reluctant to carry the burden of Empire, either with their lives or with their taxes. So the rulers tried the experiment of using planes rather than troops to repress dissent. The principal victims of this experiment were the peoples of Iraq, Palestine and Sudan.

The rulers of course claimed that these new methods would be less barbarous than the traditional Army methods of 'Butcher and bolt'. But this is doubtful in view of, for instance, the orders given by RAF officers operating in Iraq in 1920: "Villages will be razed to the ground and all woodwork removed. Pressure will be brought on the inhabitants by cutting off water power and destroying water lifts; efforts to carry out cultivation will be interfered with, and the systematic collection of supplies of all kinds beyond our actual requirements will be carried out, the area being cleared of the necessaries of life." In 1921 another RAF officer reported of one operation, "the tribesmen and their families ran into the lake, making a good target for the machineguns." These war crimes were neither punished nor publicly reported.

The inhuman, barbaric nature of colonial rule was revealed by Lord Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff from 1919 to 1929, when he fatuously told the House of Lords in April 1930 that tribesmen "have no objection to being killed."

The British Empire pioneered most of the methods of barbarism that it now stalely denounces, possibly the most notorious being the invention of concentration camps in the Boer War. The destruction of homes, crops and water supplies were routine Imperial operations. It pioneered atrocities now routinely denounced as terrorist methods, for example, "delayed action-bombs became a standard weapon of air-policing." These were used especially in Iraq.

The indiscriminate bombing of civilian men, women and children was also an Imperial idea. Naturally this could not be admitted so the myth of 'surgical air strikes', so often invoked by the USA, was first used by Britain's Air Ministry in the 1920s. The notorious 'Bomber' Harris, whose mass murder of German civilians did so little to end the Second World War, learnt his inhuman and sadistic approach in Iraq and Palestine.

All in all, this book is a blunt and effective denunciation of the methods of control used by the British ruling class in its unavailing attempts to subdue the peoples of other countries.

This book is a collection of letters between Indian soldiers and their families in the First World War, translated into English from the various languages in which they were originally written. Many thousands of soldiers from what was then the British Empire fought for the Allies in WW1, and a large number of them came from India--Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. They had enlisted for traditional warfare in South Asia, and nothing could have prepared them for what they found when they arrived in the trenches of the Western Front. Their accounts of their experiences are fascinating, powerful and moving. David Omissi, the editor, provides an excellent introduction and gives useful background information. I strongly recommend this book.