Terror bombing

Terror bombing is a strategy of deliberately bombing civilian targets and strafing civilians in order to break the morale of the enemy and make its civilian population panic.

Picasso's "Guernica"

Legal framework

International law in 1945

International law relating to aerial area bombardment before and during World War II rests on the treaties of 1864, 1899, 1907 which constituted the definition of most of the laws of at that time. The most relevant of these treaties are the Hague Conventions of 1907 because they were the last treaties ratified before 1939 which specify the laws of war on aerial bombardment. Of these treaties there are two which have a direct bearing on this issue of bombardment. These are "Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907"^[1] and "Laws of War: Bombardment by Naval Forces in Time of War (Hague IX); October 18, 1907"^[2]. It is significant that there is a different treaty which should be invoked for bombardment of land by land (Hague IV) and of land by sea (Hague IX)^[3]. Hague IV which reaffirmed and updated Hague II (1899)^[4] contains the following clauses:

Article 25: The attack or bombardment of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended, is prohibited.

Article 26: The Commander of an attacking force, before commencing a bombardment, except in the case of an assault, should do all he can to warn the authorities.

Article 27: In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps should be taken to spare as far as possible edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not used at the same time for military purposes.

The besieged should indicate these buildings or places by some particular and visible signs, which should previously be notified to the assailants.

In 1923 a draft convention, promoted by the United States was proposed: The Hague Rules of Air Warfare, December, 1922-February, 1923"^[5], There are number of articles which would have directly affected how nations used aerial bombardment and defended against it; these are articles 18, 22 and 24. It was, however, never adopted in legally binding form^[6].

In response to a League of Nations declaration against bombardment from the air^[7], a draft convention in Amsterdam of 1938^[8] would have provided specific definitions of what constituted a "undefended" town, excessive civilian casualties and appropriate warning. This draft convention makes the standard of being undefended quite high - any military units or anti-aircraft within the radius qualifies a town as defended. This convention, like the 1923 draft, was not ratified, nor even close to being ratified, when hostilities broke out in Europe. While the two conventions offer a guideline to what the belligerent powers were considering before the war, neither document was legally binding.

After World War II the judgement of the Nuremberg Trials^[9], the records the decision that by 1939 these rules laid down in the 1907 Hague Convention were recognised by all civilised nations, and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war. Under this post-war decision, a country did not have to have ratified the 1907 Hague conventions in order to be bound by them^[10].

The legality of the status of area bombardment in during World War II rested on the language of 1899 and 1907, from a time before aerial mass bombardment was possible — language which, despite repeated diplomatic attempts, was not updated in the immediate run up to the conflict.

In examining these events [aerial area bombardment] in the light of international humanitarian law, it should be borne in mind that during the Second World War there was no agreement, treaty, convention or any other instrument governing the protection of the civilian population or civilian property, as the Conventions then in force dealt only with the protection of the wounded and the sick on the battlefield and in naval warfare, hospital ships, the laws and customs of war and the protection of prisoners of war.^[11]

International law since 1945

In the post war environment, a series of treaties governing the laws of war were adopted starting in 1949. These Geneva Conventions would come into force, in no small part, because of a general reaction against the practices of the Second World War.

• Protocol I, Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts.
• Nuclear weapons can be seen as a type of area bombardment weapon and it is not clear that their use is illegal ^[12].

World War I

The first ever aerial bombardment of civilians was during World War I. On January 19, 1915, in which two German Zeppelins dropped 24 fifty-kilogram high-explosive bombs and ineffective three-kilogram incendiaries on Great Yarmouth, Sheringham, King's Lynn, and the surrounding villages. In all, four people were killed, sixteen injured, and monetary damage was estimated at £7,740, although the public and media reaction were out of proportion to the death toll.

There were a further nineteen raids in 1915, in which 37 tons of bombs were dropped, killing 181 people and injuring 455. Raids continued in 1916. London was accidentally bombed in May, and, in July, the Kaiser allowed directed raids against urban centres. There were 23 airship raids in 1916 in which 125 tons of ordnance were dropped, killing 293 people and injuring 691. Gradually British air defences improved. In 1917 and 1918 there were only eleven Zeppelin raids against England, and the final raid occurred on August 5, 1918, which resulted in the death of KK Peter Strasser, commander of the German Naval Airship Department. By the end of the war, 51 raids had been undertaken, in which 5,806 bombs were dropped, killing 557 people and injuring 1,358. The Zeppelin raids were complemented by the Gothaer bomber, which was the first heavier than air bomber to be used for strategic bombing. It has been argued that the raids were effective far beyond material damage in diverting and hampering wartime production, and diverting twelve squadrons and over 10,000 men to air defences. The calculations which were performed on the number of dead to the weight of bombs dropped would have a profound effect on the attitudes of the British authorities and population in the interwar years, because as bombers became larger it was fully expected that deaths from aerial bombardment would approach those anticipated in the Cold War from the use of nuclear weapons. The fear of aerial attack on such a scale was one of the fundamental driving forces of British appeasement in the 1930s.

Inter war years

• Theoretical developments in the use of Aerial Warfare
  • Area bombing Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell
  • Blitzkrieg
• Use of aerial bombardment as part of British colonial policy, Sir Hugh Trenchard. In Iraq, around 1924, the techniques of 'Air Control', as it was called, were developed, which included target marking and locating, as well as formation flying, by the Trenchardian school which included Bomber Harris, Charles Portal and Sid Bufton.
• Use of aerial bombardment as part of French colonial policy
• Use of aerial bombardment by Italians in Ethiopia during the Italo-Ethiopian War

* Use of aerial bombardment by Japan in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War(notably, Shanghai, Canton(Guangzhou) and Chungking)

Spanish Civil War

In the 1930s, the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica both conducted aerial attacks during the Spanish Civil War. The bombing of Guernica was the foremost example, leading to the seminal painting of "Guernica" by the artist Picasso showing all the horror and terror of such attacks. Many other cities were also bombed in this conflict, including Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla, Zaragoza, Malaga, Bilbao, Alicante, and Valladolid.

World War II

File:FirestormHamburg.jpg

Firestorm in Hamburg.

Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki.

During attack on Poland in 1939, the German airforce carried out bombing of cities in Poland, including many cities without any military presence. Among the targets were Frampol, Wieluń, and Warsaw.

The Luftwaffe terror bombed Rotterdam during the German invasion of the Netherlands and carried out intensive bombing of cities in the United Kingdom, including London and Coventry, in a bombing campaign known in Britain as "the Blitz", from September, 1940, through May, 1941. The goal of this campaign was, after the invasion plan was dropped, to force Great Britain to a Peace agreement by lowering the morale of the British population by intensive bombing of civil targets.

In World War II, the British RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF XXI Bomber Command both engaged in the aerial bombing of cities. The most known is the Dresden bombing of February 13-15, 1945, which left the city in ruins and claimed at least 25,000 lives. The RAF Bomber Command did target civilian housing and other civilian infrastructure which was known to cause a large loss of life among civilians. It is estimated that raids of Allied air forces on the Third Reich killed between 305,000 and 600,000 civilans of which about 80,000 were children ^[13]. The primary objective of these attacks was to damage economic infrastructure to seriously weaken the enemy's ability to fight the war, in line with the doctrines of Total war. Senior Allied commanders like Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and politicians also hoped, in the early years of the war, that the morale of the Axis populations and governments could be so undermined by these tactics that they would sue for peace. However the resilience of Londoners under the Blitz, and the failures of Operation Gomorrah (the bombing of Hamburg) and the Battle of Berlin to break the morale of the Germans, showed that this was unrealistic to all but the most ardent advocates of area bombardment, like Arthur "Bomber" Harris. The Germans harboured similar unrealistic hopes for their V1 and V2 rockets. With only conventional warheads and limited to area targeting they did not make any difference to the military outcome. The Nazi government propaganda ministry made much of their use as reprisal weapons (Vergeltungswaffen) on the population of London in response to the Allied strategic bombing campaign waged against German cities. In the Pacific Theater, Japan specifically terror bombed Chinese civilian targets, inflicting massive civilian casualties in the Bombing of Chongqing and various other bombings.

The fire-bombing of Tokyo, Kobe, and other targets in Japan is another example.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that "most cruel bomb", forced the Japanese Government into "enduring the [unavoidable] and suffering what is unsufferable" and agreeing to unconditional surrender of their armed forces under the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.

Aerial bombardments since World War II

Recent treaty obligations explicitly make the deliberate targeting of noncombatants a war crime. During the course of both the First Chechen War (1994-1996) and Second Chechen War (1999-present) the Russian Military has implemented the use of carpet bombing across the separatist republic of Chechnya with a devastatingly high cost of civilian casualties most acutely apparent in the capital city of Grozny. With modern precision-guided munitions (or "smart bombs"), fewer casualties are caused among the civilian populations than with area bombing. This was demonstrated in the use of "smart" munitions before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke of Shock and Awe bombings that he hoped would lead to an Iraqi surrender without the destruction of large areas of Baghdad. Modern weapons however still cause collateral damage and there is still a high percentage of 'dumb' bombs for example used in Iraq and Afghanistan (around 30% [14][15]). There are instances in all recent conflicts of civilians being killed by airborne munitions, with most bombs missing their targets. [16] In the Kosovo War, NATO intended to bomb military and political targets in Serbia and Montenegro. However, scores of civilians were mistakenly killed in the bombings, leading to international protest.

During the Vietnamese War the USAF increasingly resorted to 'box bombing', a form of carpet bombing in which the entire area within 'the box' (usually miles wide) is destroyed by fire. Civilian deaths in the war are thought to top 3 million, at least half of which are attributed to USAF bombardment.

See also

• Command responsibility
• Geneva Conventions
• Jus in bello
• Nuremberg Charter
• War crimes
• Strategic bombing during World War II

References

• Grayling, A. C. (2006). Among the Dead Cities. New York: Walker Publishing Company Inc. ISBN 0-8027-1471-4.
• U.S. Air Force: List of documents and web links relating to the law of armed conflict in air and space operations
• International Review of the Red Cross no 323, p.347-363 The Law of Air Warfare (1998)
• Le droit des conflits armés, by Charles Rousseau, Editions Pedone, Paris, (1983)

Notes

1. ^ Laws of War : Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907 available from the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School, entered into force: 26 January 1910.
2. ^ Laws of War: Bombardment by Naval Forces in Time of War (Hague IX); October 18, 1907, available from the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School,
3. ^ International Review of the Red Cross no 323 cites: Charles Rousseau, References p. 360. "the analogy between land and aerial bombardment"
4. ^ Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague II); July 29, 1899, available from the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School, entry into force 1900-09-04
5. ^ The Hague Rules of Air Warfare, 1922-12 to 1923-02, this convention was never adopted'.
6. ^ Rules concerning the Control of Wireless Telegraphy in Time of War and Air Warfare, from the International Committee of the Red Cross's section on international humanitarian law verified 26 February 2005
7. ^ Protection of Civilian Populations Against Bombing From the Air in Case of War, Unanimous resolution of the League of Nations Assembly, 30 September 1938, verified 2005-02-26
8. ^ Draft Convention for the Protection of Civilian Populations Against New Engines of War. Amsterdam, 1938, verified 26 February 2005
9. ^ "Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 1 Charter of the International Military Tribunal", proceedings of the Nuremberg Trials, available from the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School, verified 26 February 2005.
10. ^ Judgement : The Law Relating to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, available from the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School, verified 26 February 2005.
11. ^ International Review of the Red Cross no 323, p.347-363 The Law of Air Warfare (1998)
12. ^ International Court of Justice General List No. 95 Legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons 8 July 1996
13. ^ German Deaths by Air Bombardment
    • 600,000 about 80,000 were children in Hamburg, Juli 1943 in Der Spiegel © SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003 (in German)
    • Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls lists the following totals and sources:
      • more than 305,000 (1945 Strategic Bombing Survey);
      • 400,000 Hammond Atlas of the 20th Century (1996)
      • 410,000 R. J. Rummel, 100% democidal;
      • 499,750 Michael Clodfelter Warfare and Armed Conflict: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1618-1991;
      • 593,000 John Keegan The Second World War (1989);
      • 593,000 J. A. S. Grenville citing "official Germany" in A History of the World in the Twentieth Century (1994)
      • 600,000 Paul Johnson Modern Times (1983)