Morality and Bombing and Op. Gomorah
Human Progress
Editors at National Review Online famously mused about whether we ought simply to "nuke Mecca." Such toxic scorn is part of the lingering poison spread by our bombs, by our continued defense of what Churchill and Truman ordered in 1945. Conservative journalists, would not, I think, have quipped back and forth about whether to "level every building, gas all the schoolchildren, and incinerate all the old people and women" of Mecca. If it took the deployment of soldiers, to do over the course of weeks what the SS did to the Warsaw Ghetto, I don't think journalists would joke about whether to order it. But the quick, decisive nature of a nuclear attack—it's like putting an entire city inside a microwave—helps us ignore the blood-soaked realities. We can skip over the details of the slaughter, which we neatly hide in two bumper-sticker syllables: "Nuke 'em!" - John ZmirakJohn Zmirak helps us to look at our conduct in WW II in his recent Godspy piece- in which he discussed Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden. He also points to the inversion of War's logic in the twentieth century - which finally moved us into "total warfare" and in which civilian lives were held in ransom against their own governments.
An Avro Lancaster over Hamburg - the curved streaking is caused by a combination of the movement of the photographing aircraft and the long exposure time required for taking photographs at night - courtesy of Wikipedia
One battle that Zmirak does not mention, perhaps because it was mostly the responsibility of the British was Operation Gomorrah- the bombing of Hamburg.The roots of this premeditated, ritual mass slaughter lie back in the 1920s. As Military historian Williamson Murray explains in The Luftwaffe, 1933-45: Strategy for Defeat, generals shocked by the slow, pointless attrition of World War I, tried to imagine ways to break such future deadlocks. Deeply elitist, both fearful and contemptuous of their own nation's working classes, these strategists decided that proletarians were not made of such strong stuff as soldiers; subjected to protracted assaults from the sky, they theorized, any populace would rise up and demand surrender.
This theory was almost completely unsupported by the facts; the civilian rebellions in Germany, Russia, and Austria during World War I were not provoked by enemy firepower. But the theory won the day through much of Europe. While most of Germany's victories were accomplished through close air support of combat troops on the ground, Hitler threw resources into strategic bombing instead—leveling cities like Rotterdam and Warsaw, and trying to force a British surrender from the air. Thankfully, he failed—as this strategy failed on every front where it was tried.
Civilians, it turned out, reacted surprisingly to bombs; they grew angry at the men who were dropping them. Their morale quickly rose instead of declining. Their war effort increased. The Allied bombing of Germany did not even succeed in crippling the German war machine, which moved its production underground. At best, Murray concludes, Allied bombing helped shorten the war by a few months—chiefly by forcing the Germans to use their T-88 guns for anti-aircraft instead of antitank warfare. - John Zmirak
In July and August of 1943, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, head of the RAF's Bomber Command, decided to destroy the city of Hamburg. Operation Gomorrah sent 728 plans loaded with incendiary bombs to attack the sprawling port... The result was a firestorm that created temperatures high enough to melt metal and bricks and consumed all the oxygen in the center of the city, asphyxiating and incinerating 45,000 people. The bodies of small children looked like fried eels on the livid pavement. In air-raid shelters people became bones suspended on congealed fat. More than a million Germans fled into the countryside. Half of the houses in the city were destroyed.Operation Gomorrah is another great black mark over the Allied war effort in "the good war". It is heartening that historians are now finally starting to look at World War II with a little more objectivity rather than glossing over American and British war crimes as necessities in the "battle against imperialism and fascism."
During this epic of destruction, the Americans bombed the burning city in daylight, aiming at shipyards and factories. But the smoke was so thick , they ruefully admitted they missed most of their targets. Their bombs fell on the hapless civilians. It would be hard to deny they participated in the slaughter but most of the onus for the raid fell-deservedly-on the British. Not that any serious blaming occurred As one RAF airman put it, 'To whom could you express doubts?... What would have been the result? Court martial!" FDR thought Hamburg was 'an impressive demonstration' of air power's potential and hoped it would soon be applied to Japan, an idea which General Arnold eagerly concurred. - Thomas Fleming in The New Dealer's War- pp.275-276
Michael Brendan Dougherty
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Source: Killing Women and Children FirstLooked at from the sanest perspective—that of the helpless citizens caught up in the frenzy of war—the duty of soldiers on both sides is to resolve the military decision at minimal cost in civilian life. By deciding to kill several hundred thousand Japanese citizens, in order to spare American troops, we reversed the logic of combat, making civilians hostages to the well-being of men under arms. This hellish inversion defined the Cold War—in which relatively few Soviet or American soldiers would -
Related: Operation GomorrahOn the night of July 27th, shortly before midnight, 739 aircraft attacked Hamburg. Owing to unusually warm weather, along with the deliberate planning of the raids (which trapped the city's firefighters in the bombed-out center of the city by following-up with incendiary bombing of the periphery), the bombings culminated in the spawning of the so-called "Feuersturm" (firestorm). Quite literally a tornado of fire, this phenomenon created a huge outdoor blast furnace, containing winds of up to 150
Reader Comments (16)
I would posit that war has always been "Total War". I don't know how one applies the notion of ethics and morality to a business that primarily involves killing people. Condemnation of particular events like Op. Gomorrah seems predicted on the notion that there is a "clean" way in which war can be fought. Few would agree that that is the case.
Just my 2c.
Is there a situation where the notion of ethics and morality more fittingly applies?
Warfare falls under the principle of self defense which in turn falls under the natural law which is written into the souls of men.
The problem you have is with the remoteness of the given situation in relation to the natural law in which remoteness causes a difficulty in being able to understand how to apply the natural law.
If you were standing in a room full of 5 year olds and another man was also in that room with a gun pointed at your head, if the only means you knew of to stop the man from shooting you was for you to kill all the 5 year olds would you kill all the 5 year olds in order to save your own life?
The answer is no, of course you would not. You would not choose to intentionally commit evil in order to bring about a good. That is you would not intentionally kill all the 5 year olds in order to save your own life.
The reason you would not is because you recognize that there are limits to the self defense. A limit which you would cross if you killed all those children.
The particular scenario I just gave is not remote because the threat is directly to you and immediate, while the only means of saving your life was for you to commit an obvious evil which is easily weighted in the balance as a far greater evil than the loss of your own life.
Thus the choice in the scenario is easy to make. But the choice in the scenario is only a variation of degree from those choices made in warfare according to the principle of self defense.
not edited, read at your own risk.
Yes, some people would shoot the children, they also would drop a bomb on those children.
Would you shoot those children?
From your answer, I think that you would not.
Would you drop a bomb on those same children to save your own life?
Would you drop a bomb from 10000 feet where you couldn't see those children whose faces you have just seen in order to likewise save your own life?
Would you drop a bomb from 10000 feet where you couldn't see those children whose faces you have never seen in order to likewise save your own life?
Each situation becomes a little more remote, but not different in kind.
Warfare is like that. If a man breaks into your house and starts shooting, you can defend yourself.He is the aggressor, you are the defender. The same is true in war. Wars start for the same reason men break into houses. It's just on a larger scale.
While historically there have been exceptions, virtually all wars occur because an aggressor seeks to unjustly profit by his aggression. The same holds for men breaking into houses, the house breaker seeks to unjustly gain by his aggression.
Thus, it can at least be said, the exceptions not withstanding, that the act of unjust aggression in war is evil since an unjust act is a evil act. As to whether the men are evil, the cause of an evil must in some manner likewise be evil since the cause is in the effect.
The cause of wars is game theoretic and has nothing to do with abstract notions such as Justice or Evil. Wars occur when parties in conflict act on misestimates of their respective strength.
I would argue that to understand conflicts with regards to game theory is to hold a deeper truth than to attempt to analyze the morality of any particular situation on a case by case basis. Understanding the dynamics of a system allows you to change its course. Understanding a specific case - judging it to be moral or immoral, for example, affords one no such power.
Please explain what you mean by "deeper truth"
For instance - if an Israeli soldier shoots an unarmed boy that is an evil act. But because the soldier committed an evil act an unjust act does not mean that a Palestinian is justified or righteous when he blows himself and other Israeli soldiers up in revenge.
If a state seeks to unjustly profit by agression - say steal oil from another state's property - the state under attack has a right to defend itself. One side is clearly in the right in such a situation - however the defending state should not then set about a policy of indiscriminate torture against POWs from the aggressor state.
This is how morals are applied to warfare. Just War theory does a much better job, I think of constraining the evils attendent in warfare than say game theory - which -as far as I can tell is a pragmatists parody of Just War theory.
First, he seems concerned with figuring out the causality of events and very technical question of why group/state A goes to war with group/state B in any given circumstance. That is at issue only tangentially in considerations of whether a war is just or not. German (mis)estimates that the French would collapse in August 1914 and the war in the west would be over immediately falls under such a 'game theoretic' rubric. Okay, so what? That is interesting for the historian (so I find it interesting), but it does not explain, indeed does not even attempt to understand, whether the Germans were morally justified in attacking through Belgium first. The "ideas of 1914" attempted to make Germany's strategic disadvantages into a moral case of self-defense, and the Germans believed it (much as many Americans now believe attacking Iraq out of the blue was just), but this is to muddle two different questions and assume that if something is supposedly strategically necessary it is therefore also morally right.
Even if we grant that game theory is useful in making decisions that might, for example, prevent a war, moral theology is the only thing providing us with a binding obligation never to start wars. Game theory might make preemptive wars seem rational and advantageous in certain circumstances, but moral theology takes the broader view that aggression can never be truly advantageous because it is corrupt and base.
Second, Mr. Shledetsky is plainly a materialist if he believes there is no natural law and simply a cynic if he thinks justice and problems of good and evil are not involved with warfare. There is a clear moral difference between an army targeting military installations and forces in the field and committing massacres of cities or mass bombardments. In answer to one of the other questions: not all wars are started by evil men, but men who start wars are evil.
Total war is an entirely modern phenomenon with few real precursors. Non-combatants have been caught up in war since the beginning, but until the twentieth century there was still the understanding that they and their settlements are not legitimate targets. War need not be total, but it is almost bound to be in a mass society (which is another good reason to scrap mass societies). In that sense, there can almost never be ius in bello in modern warfare, at least not as it has been conducted by conventional armies in the 20th century.
So war is to be avoided. Yes. But how does one go about preventing war? Talking about the morality of this and that is just that - talk. You are not going to get heads of state to back down from stealing their neighboors' bread by condemning that action as immoral. Even if you got planetwide buy-in to the concept of "moral theology", wherein all nations hold war as reprehensible -- this is not a stable situation, as their is great incentive for any one party to violate this mutual understanding to get the jump on their unsuspecting adversaries. However, were one to make war a lose-lose situation, there is no incentive for all out war and huge deterant from escalation.
With regards to questions of morality vis a vis Total War, we disagree, I think, because all commenters thus far hold that the death of a soldier is somehow less tragic than the death of an innocent civilian. Thus soldiers killing soldiers is acceptable - especially if the righteous are smiting the wicked.
Smiting is not ok. War, being inherently evil, can never be morally right. Thus the "muddle" between the questions of morality and causality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war
Total war is a 20th century term to describe a war in which countries or nations use all of their resources to destroy another organized country's or nation's ability to engage in war. The practice of total war has been in use for centuries, but it was only in the middle to late nineteenth century that total war was recognized as a separate class of warfare.
"Total war is fought heedless of the restraints of morality, custom, or international law, for the combatants are inspired by hatreds born of modern ideologies. Total war requires the mobilization not only of armed forces but also of whole populations. The most crucial determinant of total war is the widespread, indiscriminate, and deliberate inclusion of civilians as legitimate military targets.
Note the emphasis on modern ideology and total war as a modern phenomenon (we might stretch back 'modern' to include the early modern wars of religion, but those were full-scale wars on a different order of magnitude). If it has been in use for centuries (which I did not deny, but simply said that the targeting of civilians and their settlements was usually regarded as unacceptable until the 20th century), we need to be specific as to how many centuries. Three? Ten? I would grant perhaps two and a quarter. Note especially the last sentence from the quote--the indiscriminate or deliberate inclusion of civilians as military targets. This is, I believe, exactly what I was getting at, and it confirms my claim that total war and the just conduct of a war are not really compatible. The rise of total war in the West is, incidentally, a function of democratisation in the Western world.
We're arguing at cross-purposes. You find the claims of moral theology lacking because they are not likely to convince a statesman to act one way or another. In this sense, just war considerations are usually irrelevant to his decision-making process, because such statesmen are indifferent to the claims of Christian truth. Even nominally Christian rulers, such as the current president, are not really bound by its constraints, but instead serve the idol of Necessity, real or imagined. All right, I grant that this is the case, has usually been the case and usually will be the case. That changes nothing about the inherent justice or injustice of any given war or any given action in war--this is what Michael was originally aiming at, I believe, before we digressed. You seem to be looking for practical ways to stop them, which is all very well and good, or at least you are arguing that without significant incentives not to go to war they will continue to do so as and when necessity requires. Just war theory provides the moral argument that can only be effective if the statesmen in question have consciences, but if they do have any inklings of a conscience it may have some effect in preventing them from going to war. That is its (limited) practical virtue.
Bl. Augustine formulated the requirements for just war as a way of discerning whether and how Christians could lawfully use violence as members of a Christian polity, not because he expected Galla Placidia and Valentinian III to pay attention to his arguments when they were deciding whether to fight the Goths. Just war theory was developed with the assumption that the question of just war would only be raised in Christian polities, as Christians were effectively the only ones at the time with moral qualms about using violence for political ends. It is an assessment of moral theology designed to keep Christian princes honest, if you will, by setting a standard against which the Church can measure whether or not the ruler's wars are legitimate or something tyrannical and to be resisted. It was a theory designed for Christians and the Church for the assessment of whether to support secular rulers or not. Grotius was the one who tried make it a matter of international law, which was a noble attempt but evidently futile.