Defeating Death Only with Death
Devastation, 1941: An East End Street, by Graham Sutherland, 1941. [Tate]
What a degrading war this is besides being a bloodthirsty and terrible one. The poisonous gasses, the Zeppelins, the torpedoes, and the hidden treacherous mines, all strike a note of mean unfairness; in modern slang it’s simply “not cricket.” … But as someone said the other day, “There are no civilians now, we are all soldiers.”
—Diary of Ethel Bilbrough, Chislehurst, Kent, 1916
Such wars will be short-lived because their main targets will be the most vulnerable elements in the countries involved. Perhaps, for all their attendant atrocities, they will prove more humane than past wars because, ultimately, they will cause less bloodshed.
—Giulio Douhet, Italian Air War Theoretician, 1921
The civilian population must be prepared to suffer harm today from which a hundred years ago they would have been immune. As Samuel Johnson remarked in Rasselas: “Against an Army sailing through the clouds, neither walls, nor mountains, nor seas could afford any security.”
—An American Jurist, 1925
From the very beginning, there was an element of make-believe about international treaties aimed at protecting civilians from aerial attack. Acceptance of the 1899 prohibition against the use of projectiles from balloons was predicated on the presumption that such attacks would not be very effective in any case, and limiting the prohibition to five years was enough to satisfy signatories who would not be bound by laws against making the most of innovations in aerial technology. And when the Germans justified their Zeppelin raids in 1915–16 as retaliation for an illegal blockade against innocent civilians, the British merely retaliated in kind with their own aircraft.
Revulsion against attacking civilians from the air and viewing it as immoral made a comeback after the war, and Article 22 of The Hague Rules prohibited aerial attacks “for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants.” But for all the indignation at the aerial bombing of innocents in Spain and China in the 1930s, both sides during World War II came to regard civilians in the cities as legitimate and important bombing targets. In October 1940 British public opinion was still split down the middle on the morality of “bombing the civilian population of Germany,” but by April 1941, 55 percent approved, while only 36 percent disapproved, and when questioned about their feelings on hearing about a heavy air raid on a German city in July 1943, most people expressed their satisfaction. During and in the wake of the war, American public opinion had no qualms about the morality of bombing civilians or of using the A-bomb. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, two-thirds of the population were in favor of the indiscriminate bombing of Japanese cities.
The table below describes U.S. public opinion seven months later. Whereas half of those surveyed favored a “friendly attitude” toward German civilians after the war, 10 percent supported the “extermination” of Japanese civilians and another 10 percent, punishment and torture.
In an editorial published in the wake of President Truman’s announcement of the Hiroshima bombing, the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano took the high moral ground, turning its thoughts to a story about Leonardo da Vinci:
He planned a submarine, but he feared that man would not apply it to progress, namely to the constructive uses of civilisation, but to its ruin. He destroyed that possible instrument of destruction. . . . Leonardo chose the path of vanquishing death by thought, the only ideal of life. The road of men who have not his Christian charity must defeat death only with death.
Such sentiments cut no ice in the United States at the time. Some months after the use of the A-bomb against Japan, the National Opinion Research Center asked a sample of Americans: “If you had been the one to decide whether or not to use the atomic bomb against Japan, which one of these things do you think you would have done?”
The breakdown of answers was as follows (percentages):
Bombed one city at a time 44
Wiped out cities 23
Bombed where there were no people 26
Refused to use 4
Don’t know 2
In another poll carried out by Gallup in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima (on August 8, 1945), 85 percent of Americans approved of the action. Have opinions softened since? Yes, if the 2015 Sagan poll, which found that only 46 percent of Americans still approved of the bombing, can be relied upon. But Sagan and Valentino add a sobering gloss to this finding, arguing that if Americans today faced a wartime threat similar to that of 1945, a clear majority would no longer feel constrained by the nuclear taboo. They used a survey experiment involving a hypothetical war between the United States and Iran to gauge opinions and found that the principle of civilian immunity went out the window in face of “the pressures of war.” A clear majority — three-fifths or respondents — would approve of going nuclear in such circumstances, and an even higher proportion would approve of a bombing campaign like that against Tokyo in March 1945.
Still, article 51(2) of Additional Protocol I to the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) stated that “the civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence, the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population, are prohibited.” Almost half a century later, in 1993, the UN Security Council declared that the convention had become customary international law, binding even those states that had not signed the convention. In 1980 Protocol III of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons took another step in the same direction, declaring the use of napalm against civilian targets a war crime. The United States used a form of napalm by another name against military targets for the last time in Iraq in 2003. President Obama signed the treaty on his first full day in office, although his signature was subject to the caveat that the prohibition may be set aside when use can save civilian lives.
Such legislation, and Obama’s reservation, supports the plea that American political scientist Michael Walzer made in his 1977 book Just and Unjust Wars for civilian immunity in warfare as a basic human right. But Walzer also proposed an exceptional category that he called “a supreme emergency,” when the traditional jus in bello norms of a just war no longer apply. He defined a supreme emergency as a situation in which the danger of defeat was imminent and its consequences “literally beyond calculation” and “unimaginably horrific.” For Walzer, a prime example of a supreme emergency was the situation facing the United Kingdom between the British retreat from Dunkirk (May 26–June 4, 1940) and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941). Walzer’s definition is designedly very narrow: in his view, as soon as the United States entered the war the supreme emergency was past, and the United Kingdom was subject again to legal and moral constraints. But during the window between Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, Walzer saw the area bombing of German cities as a justifiable last resort. The irony is that, as we have seen, the RAF was incapable of the kind of bombing that Waltzer envisaged during the period he reckoned to be a supreme emergency. As late as two months before Pearl Harbor, so inaccurate were RAF bombers that “on any given night only about one in five crews put bombs within five miles of their target.” They were really effective only from 1943 on, when the existential threat was over. Walzer found that the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and indeed the indiscriminate firebombing of cities in Germany and Japan in early 1945 did not meet his criterion of a supreme emergency.
Excerpted from The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars by Cormac Ó Gráda. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
