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WARS OF WHOLE POPULATIONS
Trenchard’s belief in the awesome power of strategic area bombing was elaborately substantiated by the Italian Air Force general and military philosopher, Giulio Douhet, who encapsulated strategic bombing into a coherent theory of air power in his book, The Command Of The Air, published in 1921.
Douhet contended that the decision in future wars “must depend upon smashing the material and moral resources of a people caught up in a frightful cataclysm which haunts them everywhere without cease until the final collapse of all social organisation… the decisive blows will be directed at civilians, that element of the country at war least able to sustain them.” (p.54, English edition of 1943)
Douhet warned that Europe would have to reconsider its rules of warfare and institute a reversal of taken for granted historical principles of honour. A new principle of warfare was required:
“ this general principle of war…seems inhuman to us because of the traditional notion which must be changed. Everyone says, and is convinced of it, that war is no longer a clash between armies, but is a clash between nations, between whole populations. During the last war this clash took the form of a long process of attrition between armies, and that seemed natural and logical. Because of its direct action, the air arm pits populations directly against populations, and does away with the intervening armour which kept them apart during the past war. Now it is actually populations and nations which come to blows and seize each other’s throats.
“This fact sharpens that peculiar traditional notion which makes people weep to hear of a few women and children killed in an air raid, and leaves them unmoved to hear of thousands of soldiers killed in action. All human lives are equally valuable; but because tradition holds that the soldier is fated to die in battle, his death does not upset them much, despite the fact that the soldier, a robust young man, should be considered to have the maximum individual value in the general economy of humanity…
“Any distinction between belligerent and non-belligerent is no longer admissible today either in fact or theory.
“War is won by crushing the resistance of the enemy; and this can be done more easily, faster, more economically, and with less bloodshed by directly attacking the resistance at its weakest point. The more rapid and terrifying the arms are, the faster they will reach the vital centres and the more deeply they will affect moral resistance. “(p.158/9).
The first two British wars of the twentieth century – the conquest of South Africa and the Great War on Germany – changed the nature of war in Europe and the world, from limited wars with limited objectives fought with mercenary troops to unlimited wars of economic attrition with unlimited objectives fought with national armies. This had far-reaching consequences. The distinction between combatants and non-combatants and between belligerents and neutrals became blurred and ultimately indistinguishable.
International law, which had grown up in the period of the limited dynasty wars, made a great deal of such distinctions. Previously, non-combatants had extensive rights which sought to protect their ways of life as much as possible during periods of warfare and neutrals had similar rights. In return, there were strict duties on noncombatants to remain non-participants in the fighting. All these distinctions broke down in 1914-1915, with the result that there were wholesale violations of existing international law and conventions of honour.
These violations were more extensive on the part of the Entente side than on the German/Austria-Hungarian side. That is a fact distorted by anti-German atrocity propagandists in the British press. But the British recognised it and understood the weakness of the Germans in possessing a sense of military honour that would disable them from competing with England in the eradication of civilians.
The Germans still maintained the older traditions of the professional army, and their geographical and strategic position, with limited manpower and economic resources, made it to their advantage to maintain the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant and between belligerent and neutral. By maintaining the distinction of former conflicts they would have had to fight just the enemy army and not the enemy civilian population, and, once the former was defeated, would have had little to fear from the latter, which could have been controlled by a minimum of troops. If they could have maintained a distinction between belligerent and neutral, it would have been impossible to blockade Germany, since basic supplies could have been imported through neutral countries.
The German plan of War – a defensive form of offence – called for a short, decisive war against the enemy armed forces, and they never expected nor desired a total economic mobilisation or even a total military mobilisation, since these might disrupt the existing social and political structure in Germany which was a very successful socialised economy. For these reasons, Germany made no plans for industrial or economic mobilisation, for a long war, or for withstanding a blockade, and hoped to mobilise a smaller proportion of its manpower than its immediate enemies to defend herself.
But ‘German atrocities’ in Belgium – where Belgian civilians were encouraged to blur the distinction between combatant and non-combatant by indulging in behind the lines terrorist attacks on German supply lines – were used by the British to justify their own planned violations of international law. As early as August 1914, the Royal navy was treating food as contraband and interfering with neutral shipments of it to Europe. In November 1914, Britain declared the whole sea from Scotland to Iceland a ‘war-zone’, covered it with fields of mines, and ordered ships going to the Baltic, Scandinavia, or to the Low Countries to go by way of the English Channel, where they were stopped, searched, and much of their cargo seized, even when these cargoes could not be declared contraband under existing international law. In reprisal the Germans on February 18, 1915, declared the English Channel a ‘war-zone,’ announced that their submarines would sink shipping in that area, and ordered shipping for the Baltic area to use the route north of Scotland.
And it was further declared by Liberal England and Redmondite Ireland that there could be no neutrals in the fight between Civilisation/Democracy and Barbarism/Prussianism. And so more and more of neutral Europe were sucked in to the conflict as Britain extended the war into a world conflict.
Italy was one of those countries that had been neutral at the start of the Great War but had been encouraged by British demonstrations of force in the Mediterranean and Dardanelles into seeing where its future interests lay and joining with the Entente. And the Italian officer, Douhet was one such – along with his compatriot Mussolini – who was impressed by this show of force and reorientation of Italian strategic thinking.
It was the Italians who first used bombing in warfare, to my knowledge, in the assault on the Ottoman territories in present day Libya in 1908. And of course, the bombers have returned to Libya recently to destroy a functional state, create ground for Jihadists and unleash a flood of migrants on the European mainland that the government of Libya had previously prevented.
Between 1918 and 1939 Douhet’s ideas on air warfare and Hugh Trenchard’s proposals were readily accepted and implemented by the British government which began to regard area bombing as a necessary part of warfare, no matter how immoral it was regarded by others – including even Hitler.
Douhet’s theory received support from the commander-in-chief of the USAAF, General Billy Mitchell. Trenchard, Douhet and Mitchell unanimously predicted that future wars could be won by airpower alone, and that terror attacks on cities by independent air forces with high explosive, incendiary bombs and gas, could destroy a nation’s will to resist. The view that “the bomber would always get through” to the enemy country, no matter what happened, was expressed by Stanley Baldwin, the British Prime Minister. It provided a boost to the air theorists’ arguments that the bomber would win wars for whichever country that possessed them.