In Secret Casualties of World War II, author Simon Webb shines a light on the higher-than-expected number of civilians who died from friendly fire during the London Blitz and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

It's an important bit of history, and one more people should know -- if for no other reason than to ensure such things don't happen again. However, I wish Webb had approached his topic more as a historian, rather than a commentator.

For instance, in a chapter setting the stage with a discussion of German bombing runs over London during World War I, Webb makes his opinions clear:

There may, in some remote corner of the multiverse beyond our reach and comprehension, exist an alternative world in which the firing of thousands of heavy artillery shells into the skies above one's own cities will not end badly. In our world though, the results of such an action are not difficult to foresee. Apart from any harm caused to airships or aeroplanes, people on the ground will be killed, either by red-hot chunks of metal falling to the earth or by shells which explode not in mid-air but when they land in a street or on a house.

Later in that same chapter, Webb further supposes that, because anti-aircraft measures were not terribly effective at the time, England's citizens would have been better served simply by letting the Germans bomb them unmolested. Because the English fought back, he suggests, more civilians were killed.

We know that the anti-aircraft guns were useless if considered strictly from the point of view of shooting down aeroplanes. Let us suppose that if, instead of firing thousands of shells at the German aeroplanes, no aggressive action at all had been conducted against them when they flew over British cities. It was largely because they were forced to fly at such great heights, to avoid the AA guns, that the bombs dropped from the aeroplanes went all over the place. If the planes had been able to fly in low and had time to aim carefully and release their bombs from rooftop level, then in all probability no schools or homes would have been destroyed. This goes for both the air raids in the First World War and also the Blitz of 1940. By firing their artillery, the British caused the Germans to fly higher and to release their bombs hurriedly and without time to work out the optimum time to release them.

Well, yes, that's true. Of course, the English could have avoided all casualties if they'd simply surrendered as soon as Hitler made a move against them ... and I'm not sure why Webb stops short of making that suggestion as well.

Instead, he pushes his argument further by stating the blackout regulations during the Blitz, meant to deprive German bombers of a clear target, was actually orchestrated by the English government to sacrifice civilian lives in order to protect their military sites. Britain, he says, should have made it easier for the Germans to hit military targets, even if that meant England would quickly be taken out of the war entirely.

By attempting to protect strategic targets -- as well as Buckingham Palace -- from German bombers, Webb says, English leaders callously chose to kill English citizens and allow private property to be destroyed.

Webb presents his information -- which, admittedly, involved a lot of comprehensive research -- as if he's unveiling a big secret, although he notes at several points in the text that the British, at least, were well aware of the "friendly fire" casualties -- he even cites contemporary headlines proving it was fairly common knowledge -- but despite it all they still supported the nation's efforts to defend itself from the Nazis. It seems inconceivable to him that they might prefer fighting back, even if those efforts were not terribly effective, rather than just sit there and let Germany bomb them into submission.

He complains on a few occasions that Wikipedia -- yes, Wikipedia -- doesn't have more information about those civilian deaths.

Webb also has a habit of repeating himself -- a lot -- and reminding readers of things he just said or is about to tell us. In a chapter on the Blitz, for instance, he writes:

We have in this chapter looked at some of the direct effects of artillery fire on British targets, that is to say heavy shells exploding in factories, hotels and public houses. Such incidents were, in the main, caused by shells not behaving as they were intended to do, due to defective fuzes or fuzes which had not been correctly set. In the next chapter we shall be thinking about the consequence for civilians when the shells did as they were supposed to do and exploded thousands of feet in the air. Before doing so, we need to remind ourselves what we have so far learned.

And so, Webb begins restating all of the points he had just finished making. And then, exactly two pages later, he writes:

We have looked in this chapter chiefly at shells which did not behave as they should have done, that is to say which exploded on the ground, rather than in the air. In the next chapter we are going to look at the dangerous effects of artillery shells which did behave as expected, that is to say those which exploded tens of thousands of feet above the ground.

Another example, from later in the book. Webb writes on page 124 that "a total of 542 people died of war-related injuries in London during the whole of 1943." He writes on page 126, "In the whole of London in 1943, 542 people died during air raids."

Suffice it to say, the book quickly becomes tedious reading, when the narrative keeps bogging down in long-winded and repetitive prose. One senses that Webb needed to read his own book once more before publishing, just to catch and remove his many repetitions.

Webb also engages in a lot of assumptions and "thought experiments" and he asks readers to base their conclusions on his assumptions. The problem is, you can't pose a theory and then base later arguments on the theory as if it were fact.

His arguments aren't entirely consistent, either. He repeatedly claims that the big guns are practically useless against an aerial assault and therefore shouldn't have been used at all against attacking planes. Then, in his discussion on Pearl Harbor, he notes that six returning U.S. planes were misidentified by the gunners as Japanese, and five of the six were shot down. While the error was tragic, it certainly sounds like the gunners were fairly accurate in their shooting.

He even blames the deaths by suffocation of 173 civilians in Bethnal Green on March 3, 1943 -- when hundreds of people panicked and crammed into the underground station for shelter -- on the scary noises caused by British anti-aircraft guns. He mocks the accuracy of British and American troops in a section on the liberation of France from Germany. And he implies that Winston Churchill was a cold-blooded killer who was directly responsible for the deaths of 5,000 to 50,000 English civilians.

It sounds like Webb has an axe to grind. A history book on the subject would have been interesting, but this 159-page commentary is not.