In this thread the OP mentions the bombing of civilians as a war crime.
Being a civilian myself I’m personally all for not bombing them but if I were a general why wouldn’t I? These are the people who make the economy run, grow the food, build tanks, raise the next generation of soldiers meant to kill my soldiers. Why aren’t they a military target?
Granted today the US with smart bombs and its generally overwhelming military strength can afford to stick to strictly military targets. So, is it merely the current ability to be extremely accurate in targeting? I doubt that’s the whole case since we saw the wholesale destruction of cities in WWII (ala Dresden). At one point our military found the concept acceptable. What’s changed?
IANAS (I am not a soldier), but I think it might be the more general acceptance of the idea that the actions of the government do not necessarily represent the ideals of the populace. So, bombing a town full of people and no real military or governmental things doesn’t accomplish much except get everybody pissed off. True, it does mess up the food supply or communication lines, but the true bang for the buck is in destroying military targets.
It probably dates back from the days of chivalry. For centuries, wars were fought by mercenaries who were expected to be fighting each other in neat rows on a battlefield. Looting and rape were countenanced, but the idea of massacreing a bunch of civilians was considered barbaric. (It was also much more difficult to do so, in a time when most soldiers used swords – you couldn’t catch everyone).
Generals who attacked civilians were considered butcher. One Swedish general burned down the city of Magdeburg during the 30 Years War, and his name has been passed down in German history as the worst of killers.
As time went by, it became possible to kill civilians more efficiently, but doing so was considered bad. Part was a fear of retaliation – if you burned down their city, they would burn down one of yours the first chance they got. Generals who wanted to take a city were apt to besiege it, which was considered more honorable.
As military technology evolved, it became easier to wipe out civilians. But tradition (in Europe, at least) was that you didn’t do it (the Japanese had a different tradition at Nanking).
Part is also our feeling that women and children are innocent, and should not be killed. It looks like that’s dying out, too.
Uhhm, I can’t really back this up but I believe I’ve heard from several credible sources that ‘precision bombing’ has yet to happen in war. I’ll admit that this has perhaps changed somewhat with smart-bombs but I will also say that first of all, SB’s are really expensive and second of all, I bet they aren’t as accurate as most people believe. Or in any case, just because they are really accurate doesn’t mean that you can get away from the problem of how do you determine what to hit? After all, what if you need to hit something but you don’t know which target is military and which is civilian?
But now back to my first point. The ability to bomb with any degree of precision hasn’t beem around for very long (if at all). Although WWII saw lots of new airplane technology and a lot of bombing, there is no question that bombing was not very accurate in terms being able to pinpoint exactly where you wanted the bomb to fall. Apparently things got better during Viet Nam, but I think most people who know something about this subject would say that bombing was still pretty innacurate. Getting into Desert Storm and the other recent ‘peace-keeping’ actions, aside from smart-bombs, I don’t think that you can bomb witht the precision of say being able to hit a single person from a high altitude. I admit that this is a pretty high standard for accuracy, but I’m guessing that the accuracy is much worse than this even now.
I’d be happy to hear from someone who knows what they are talking about, I’ll need some sort of verification of their credentials to believe them however. Cite sources that I can look up, something like that. I’m definitely not a creditable source so anyone reading this list shouldn’t take my word on what I’ve just written.
Not to mention nukes (the above were conventional bombings):
In Nagasaki 70,000 people died.
In Hiroshima 140,000 people died.
In all cases (separately) several hundred thousand people were left homeless.
So, it seems, Europeans and Americans have been able to attack civilians with wholesale destruction (although I will admit Nanking was more abhorrent). Maybe we all hated Germans and Japanese so much that pictures of dead women and children didn’t bother us too much (or the media politely withheld such things).
Whatever the case the generals saw fit to do this. I read somewhere that Hamburg (I think…maybe it was Dresden) was particularly heinous since it represented a cultural center and had precious little in the way of war making capacity.
BTW: I found this link here at SDMB which seems to have covered some of this subject already. I hate to kill my own thread but I’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s worth adding to or not.
Or the media not-so-politely encouraged such things. WWII is a long, long way before my time, but I remember when studying the time period how the conventional US press depiction of the Japanese, in print and in editorial cartoon, was as a pack of little yellow monkeys. The Germans were “the Hun”, soulless killing machines.
Now, admitting that the governments involved in the Axis were brutal, evil things (though I think Mussolini was something of a dupe, of both his own party and of Hitler), and that depicting the enemy as non-human and evil is de rigeur in any good war, it has to be conceded that this attitude of racial and cultural superiority helped to mollify those who may have objected to things like the atom bomb.
And I’m not looking to restart that debate, either…
Surely keeping the Civilians is of more use than getting rid of them. As you pointed out, they make the ecomomy run, build tanks and other weapons etc.
Surely it is then only logical to leave them alone, over throw the government, get to work on some good propaganda and turn them to your side?
Leaving you with more soldiers to take over the next country!
Anyway, as an aside, I thought the latest generation or nuclear stuff, neutron bombs and the like, only knock out electrical things (EMP weapons) and leave people, even the enemy soldiers, un-harmed.
Civilian population is a legitimate target for two( at least) strategic reasons. First one can defeat a nation by destroying the enemy’s will to fight. Second is the fact that war material is produced by civilians-destroy the civilians and the faucet dries up.
Whack-a-Mole, the true horrors suffered by German civilians in the bombing campaigns didn’t really become a matter of public record until only recently. I have a book here published in the Seventies sometime (and I truly wish I could find it so I could give a better cite than some half-remembered book :)) about the strategic bombing activities of Air-Marshall Harris’ RAF Bomber Command and US 8th Air Force, and most of the text focusses on the raids on the industrial complexes of the Ruhr Valley, notably the “Dam Busters” raid on the Moehne dam, with only a passing mention made of the raids on Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, and Dresden. Even then, no mention is made of civilian casualties: just some odd figure like “Berlin suffered three hundred Conventrys” IIRC. (The Luftwaffe’s raid on Coventry in 1940 was the peak of German destructiveness).
In England, anyways, having suffered the Blitz, such images wouldn’t have stirred up much sympathy. These raids were retribution, pure and simple.
I don’t know who said it, but “Tactical bombing is knocking the milk pail every day; strategic bombing is an effort to kill the cow.” All of Bomber Command’s activities were intended to demoralize Germany and compromise her ability to wage war. In retrospect, was that the right decision? Sounds like a Great Debate to me…
I was a kid during the Second World War, but I remember many things about it. It is true that there was a lot of propaganda about the Japanese and the Germans, but I don’t think that had much to do with the question of civilians being bombed. The bombings of London and of Pearl Harbor were things that we saw pictures of from ground level. When it came to bombing enemy cities the only scenes we saw were taken from the bomber. That was much less personal and it was assumed we were hitting targets not people. Remember this was the first time bombing had been done on a large scale. Another thing was the difference between the media of today and the media back then. There was no TV, so if you saw something about the war it was at the movies in short news films, a fairly long time after it happened.
RealityChuck I’m not sure what you were saying started with chivalry, but killing civilians goes way back. To get an idea read about the Israelites raiding the cities of the Canaanites. Many seizes in history ended with the citizens all being killed.
If I’m reading this right some posters think we are more willing to kill civilians now than in the past. I think that we are less likely to condone bombing civilians, because we see it almost as it is happening. Then there is a chance that we’re no better and no worse.
maybe if it were considered okay to kill civilians in wars, we’d have less wars.
but wars are good for the economy, and sometimes the only way to solve problems. So, for civilians to support a war, they will be more willing to do so knowing that they are not supposed to be killed by the enemy.
Total War won’t end until the US gets bombed as badly as the countries in Europe and Asia were. But since we have those two wonderful natural buffers (The Atlantic and Pacific), that probably won’t happen unless it’s a nuke attack.
Actually, the attack on Pearl Harbor (and other targets in Oahu) was against military targets, and was fairly “surgical” as these things go.
As for the OP (which probably does belong in Great Debates), here’s one rationale for sparing civilians: One could advance a principle of “just war” that one ought to use the minimum force necessary to prosecute the war. After all, killing people and breaking things are in general bad, and while it may certainly be necessary to resort to these things, they surely never rise above the status of “necessary evil”, engaged in to prevent an even greater evil (e.g., the triumph of Nazism). Now, hypothetically, consider a situation in which one utterly destroys the enemy’s homeland and its civilian population, while leaving its military forces in the field completely untouched. Eventually, the enemy’s armed forces would have to capitulate, as they ran out of ammunition, spare parts, and fuel, but as a practical matter they’d still pose a threat in the meantime, and you’d probably have to kill them anyway. On the other hand, if you could annihilate the enemy’s armed forces, while leaving their homeland and civilian population untouched, then while in theory they could eventually rebuild a military machine, as a practical matter you could easily overrun and occupy their homeland–including its munitions factories and so on–and force them to capitulate. And, clearly, the destruction of the enemy’s military forces and civilian population entails more destruction and death than the destruction of the enemy’s military forces alone. So, by restricting attacks only to that element of an enemy nation which poses a direct and immediate threat–its armed forces–the necessary evil of inflicting death and suffering on other human beings is (theoretically) minimized to only that which is necessary to bring about victory and end the war.
Obviously that’s very schematic and overly neat, but I think that would probably be the basic idea in principle anyway. I’d also point out that one common rationale for “strategic bombing” referred to above, to “break the enemy’s will to fight”, has probably been empirically disproven (with the possible exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were rather special circumstances)–mostly, doing that sort of thing just seems to make people even more determined to go on fighting.
Sorry Chronos, I guess I didn’t really make myself clear enough.
Neutron bombs, as far as I know, do the initial blast thing, and wipe out the target city or whatever. But after that, I believe a much lower Megaton Neutron Bomb can knock out a lot more of an army leaving people unharmed.
Whereas one of the other types of nuclear bombs, does lots more initial damage and fallout and the like aimed at killing people.
I think… I’ll try a search or something later on when I get to an inexpensive internet connection!
How can war be good for an economy? You build things and then break them rather than use them. You could accomplish the same purpose by employing people to dig holes and then fill them in and nobody gets killed.
I suppose such a thing would be nice in principle but in practice it’s a way to see more of your own soldiers get killed and potentially lose the war. I believe one (of many) problems with the war in Vietnam was along these lines. For some reason we refused to bomb the crap out of Hanoi and other such places because it would be out-of-line with our supposed ‘good guy’ image. Would we have won the war had we bombed Hanoi? Would fewer Americans have died? I don’t know but the US certainly wasn’t doing everything it could to win that war which almost certainly cost more lives than necessary.
I don’t think so. I think any general worth his salt would surrender in this case. Sure, they could hang on awhile and fight and cause some damage but to what effect? You are going to lose no matter what when parts, ammunition, fuel and so on run out. You’d be sacrificing lives both the enemy’s and your own troops fro little to no gain. Better to surrender and try and keep as much of your army as you can to perhaps fight another day.
As for your take on bombing to break the will of the people I think you are correct. Over and over it has been shown that the populace of a nation getting the snot knocked out of it by bombing become less likely to capitulate…not more likely. Even in Iraq where they had zero defense against such things and are ruled by a supreme sh*thead that many would be happy to see disappear the populace still started supporting their country more and more during the Allied bombing campaign.
When I mention targeting civilians as a strategic aspect of war I am suggesting it as a means of undermining a country’s infrastructure so they are less capable of continuing a war.
Nope. Sorry Neiller but Chronos is right and you have it backwards. Neutron bombs are meant to kill people with a minimum of physical destruction (minimum here is a relative thing as compared to a conventional nuke). In short, a neutron bomb doesn’t make a very big BOOM but it spews out a great deal of very lethal radiation. Also, the radiation it produces happens to be relatively short lived. I believe an area hit by a neutron bomb could be habitable again within 10 years as opposed to 50 or more for conventional nukes.
It is the nature of the neutron bomb that got it banned. Presumably part of attacking an enemy is to get your hands on their goodies (land and whatnot). While using nukes may quickly kill your enemy the leftovers are going to be worthless to the victor. As a result an attacker is less likely to want to use nukes. The neutron bomb changed that since now you can quickly annihilate the enemy and then move in not long after. Such a thing can encourage using such weapons. In the interests of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) as a way to avoid nuclear war the Neutron bomb has been banned.
Despite all the public works programs that the government funded, economists typically state that the Great Depression didn’t end until WWII.
Not everything used in the war gets destroyed. The liberty ships that survived went on to be used for decades by the merchant marine.
Technology also got a huge boost from WWII. Examples are nuclear power, computer theory, radar, aerospace, etc.
In short, just pouring money into a populace doesn’t have as great an effect as also pouring money into an infrastructure that will, eventually, create new jobs