November 2000

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

"Beware Men Untouched..." -- Air Wars in the 20th Century

James R. Bennett is Professor Emeritus of English, University of Arkansas. He founded Style journal, the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States, and the PeaceWriting awards for unpublished books. Bibliographer of control of information in the US and of political prisoners and trials, and his Peace Directory is forthcoming in 2001.

Blood and destruction shall be so in use, / And dreadful objects so familiar, / That mothers shall but smile when they behold / Their infants quartered with the hands of war. --Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Beware men untouched by concern for the moral consequences of their acts. --Anthony Lewis

Pablo Picasso, "Guernica"

For most of my life I thought the 1937 Nazi Condor Legion's bombing of the Spanish town, Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War, was the first aerial bombing of an unwarned civilian target in wartime. Probably Picasso's powerful painting of the incident, with its arms and legs and heads screaming against the atrocity (I kept a print of it on my office wall), and my dislike of Nazis, blocked awareness of earlier mass civilian bombings. Guernica was a momentous testing town for the Nazi blitzkrieg bombing of Rotterdam and Warsaw, and the bombings of Coventry and London, and other cities, but it was not the first bombing of a non-military city. Earlier in 1932 in Cuba, General Gerardo Machado's planes bombed the town of Gibara to crush a local uprising. During the 1930s the practice of air bombardment spread widely--of Ethiopians by Italy, of Chinese by Japan, of Finns by the Soviet Union. And earlier still, German zeppelins bombed English cities during World War I. (Michael Sherry's book on air war is my principal source of air war history.)

But President Roosevelt in 1937 and 1938 had the State Department condemn Japanese bombing of civilians in China as "barbarous" violations of the "elementary principles" of modern morality. Secretary of State Cordell Hull also arranged an informal embargo on the sale of aviation equipment to nations using "airplanes for attack on civilian populations," with the Senate cooperating in its own "unqualified condemnation of the inhuman bombing of civilian populations."

Likewise, the Nazi and Spanish Fascist bombings (Franco's bombing of Barcelona in 1938) were universally condemned in the US, founded upon the distinction between combatant and noncombatant. Nevertheless, the US began manufacturing long-range B-17s, as strategic air war was becoming Anglo-American policy. By 1938 Roosevelt discussed the advantages of long-range terror bombing, and he ordered a significant enlargement of the Air Force. By 1941 he was convinced of the value of aerial bombing for winning wars. By the time of the London Blitz (1940-41), countercity warfare was virtually taken for granted.

However, when the US entered the war against Germany, its official air policy was to strike at military targets--submarine pens, ballbearing plants, fighter aircraft factories. The US therefore bombed their targets during daylight. In contrast, the British Royal Air Force (RAF), like the Luftwaffe, bombed cities at night, imprecisely, to slaughter civilians and to terrorize, although this was denied by Bomber Command. The RAF Bomber Command's second Hamburg raid in 1943 ignited the war's first great firestorm by dropping thousands of incendiaries and high explosives. The air heated to 800 degrees centigrade (1500 degrees F.), to bake and melt, explode and asphyxiate 40,000 people. It transcended all human experience and imagination, and anticipated Tokyo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The British had moved from rationalizing city bombing by claiming they were striking economic targets, to overt vengeance and reprisal, killing and rendering homeless as many Germans as possible.

Eventually, the US joined Britain in indiscriminate "area" incendiary raids. Darmstadt was incinerated in September 1944. 25,000 were killed in Berlin on Feb. 3, 1945. The climax came at Dresden in Feb. 1945, when one US and two British assaults created a firestorm visible to bomber crews 200 miles away. The city, clotted with refugees fleeing the Soviet armies, was not a military target except very marginally; rather, it was Germany's cultural capital. Some 30,000 people died in the bombing. Despite the continued claims of precision bombing , by the end of 1944, terror, not precision, bombing constituted three-fourths of US raids. By the end of WW II in Europe, US bombing of Germany had claimed between 800,000 and a million German lives. So inured had the nation become to bloody destruction, it hardly noticed this new, horrendous addition to mass killing.

In his book on the ethics of British bombing of German cities, Stephen Garrett argues that after the spring of 1944 the assault on German civilians was devoid of ethical justification. Yet about 80% of all the bomb tonnage dropped on Germany by the Allied air forces came during the last ten months of the war.

In the meantime, in the Pacific, US bombers were even less scrupulous. The Japanese had bombed only military targets at Pearl Harbor. But while it took several years to jettison moral restraint over bombing European civilians, counter-city warfare was taken for granted against Japan from the beginning, in a clear reflection of racial prejudice. As early as 1934 Secretary of State Cordell Hull warned Japan's ambassador of his island's vulnerability to air war. When the war started, US anti-Japanese fear, contempt, and aggression permitted indiscriminate incendiary bombing without any agonizing over morality, although a pretense was maintained of precision bombing of military targets.

In Nov. 1944, Tokyo was bombed for the first time since Doolittle's raid. In Dec. 1944, Gen. Curtis LeMay bombed Hankow, China, a Japanese operation center. Five of Formosa's eleven principal cities were destroyed in the spring of 1945. Nagoya, Japan was torched on Jan. 3, 1945. A climax was reached in Tokyo in March, when Gen. LeMay burned up 100,000 people in 1800 degrees F., a million people were wounded or made homeless, and sixteen square miles of the city burned out. As in Europe, munitions were specifically designed to increase the probablity of creating firestorms--the big M-47 napalm bomb and the M-69 magnesium clusters--and bombing patterns were employed to trap civilians within a ring of fire. Sherry calls these bombings the "triumph of technological fanaticism."

According to Stephen Ambrose, "From the beginning, the Japanese-American war in the Pacific was waged with a barbarism and race hatred that was staggering in scope, savage almost beyond belief, and catastrophic in consequence." Lewis Mumford called the saturation of civilian targets the "unconditional moral surrender to Hitler," and David Lilienthal warned, "The fences are gone. And it was we, the civilized, who have pushed standardless conduct to its ultimate."

Morally numbed by several years of incremental "area" slaughters, hatred, and patriotism, the next step seemed natural or inevitable to most Americans, and consistent with successful, "unconditional surrender" vengeance. Obedient to the mindset which justified strategic bombing of cities by both Allied and Axis powers, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima August 6, and Nagasaki August 9, 1945.

Within three years, the US Strategic Air Command was routinely selecting urban targets in the USSR for nuclear bombing with the primary objective of annihilating population. The Cold War, Sovietphobic, massive "retaliation" was WWII "area bombing" vastly multiplied. Indiscriminate mass slaughter of civilians from the air had become as natural to the presidents and generals as eating breakfast.

And so these leaders continued: mass bombings of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and the "precision" bombings of Iraq; the air attacks, brief in duration, on the capitals of Libya (Kaddafi's child killed) and Panama (a working class district destroyed), the invasion of Grenada (an asylum bombed), and the sustained helicopter terrorizing of the peasantry of El Salvador. The bombing of Vietnam was unimaginably, horrendously atrocious. During the Nixon/Kissinger administration alone (from 1969 to the end of the war in 1973), the US dropped four million tons of bombs (the equivalent of over 250 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs) at a cost of $50 billion. The secret Christmas 1972 bombing of North Vietnam was, in the words of Anthony Lewis, "the most destructive single episode of international violence in recent history." For eleven days US B-52s bombed Hanoi and Haiphong over 2000 times, for political not military purpose (to persuade South Vietnam to accept a truce). Again, secretly and against international law, US B-52s dropped over 75,000 tons of bombs (equivalent to about six Hiroshimas) on one area of neutral Laos from 1964 to 1969, seeking to annihilate the population through "automated war." Again in secrecy and illegally, the B-52s dropped 40,000 tons (about three Hiroshimas) in a little more than one year (1969-70) on Cambodia.

What can we do?

We must face the truth about US aggression and violence--that war is fundamental to the country's history. As General Patton declares in the film "Patton:" "Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle."

We must expose the hypocrisy which enables the national aggression and violence. While passing judgment on Iraq's use of poison gas against comparatively few of its Kurdish population, we suppress the history of US chemical warfare against Vietnam, where the US sprayed perhaps as much as eighteen million gallons of chemicals over the forests and the people of Vietnam.

We must hold our government to the principles of international law--of Geneva, the Hague, Nuremberg--and to the jurisdiction of the World Court. We must listen to tribunals that have denounced US war crimes on the basis of international law.

We must not make heroes out of pilots who bomb noncombatants indiscriminately and then deny it happened through a code and language of warrior masculinity.

Particularly, we must beware men and women untouched by concern for the moral consequences of their acts, for they will make even mothers unable to see, hear, or feel dreadful slaughter.

Shakespeare has Macbeth express his emptiness, which is also that of the advocates of air wars against civilians, so far are they morally lost in killing without remorse in total war: "...I am in blood / Stepp‚ in so far that, / should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

Write to the author for a fuller version of this essay, and for citations: James R. Bennett, 2582 Jimmie, Fayetteville, AR 72703 <jbennet@comp.uark.edu>

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