Senior Lecturer Amanda Alexander writes in 2016:
This article argues that the narratives told about the Great War helped to establish the bombardment of civilians during World War II as an ethical, military and legal possibility. It shows that the literary representation of the Great War was antagonistic towards civilians, suggesting that a fairer war would affect the entire nation. Military strategists accepted this premise and planned for a future war that would be directed against civilian populations. International lawyers also adopted this narrative and, constrained by it and their disciplinary conventions, found it hard to posit any strong legal or ethical objections to aerial bombardment.
World War II is often described, by historians and lawyers, as a “Good War.” The inverted commas are used deliberately and ironically. They signal an unwillingness to naively accept the appellation; a sophisticated understanding of the moral complexity of the war. Yes, the cause was just. Yet, it is felt, there were deeply problematic aspects to the Allied campaign. Chief amongst these was the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations during the war.2 Commentators today point to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki as testimony to the brutality and inhumanity of Allied tactics – they speak against the “goodness” of the war.3 Indeed, for historians, one of the troubling questions about the war is why Britain and the United States were so ready to use these tactics.
To a modern international lawyer, these acts were also crimes against the laws of war. Lawyers have asked how and why the law broke down at this time and these questions have affected their faith in the strength of their discipline.5 The failure of the post-war tribunals to prosecute and punish these crimes further compromises the claims of international law. For many lawyers, the lack of attention given to aerial bombardment seems to undermine the legitimacy of those trials,6 exposing them as victors’ justice and a mockery of international justice at its inception.7
I will argue that the reason that aerial bombardment was accepted so readily was that it was not universally seen, in the interwar period, as a defilement of the idea of a good war, nor as illegal. Although there was some argument that bombardment of civilians was immoral or illegal, there was also a strong cultural narrative that suggested that a war against civilians could be an appropriate way of waging war. The story of the Great War that was established toward the end of the 1920s was strongly antagonistic towards civilians. It blamed non-combatants for sending young men out to be sacrificed while they remained (unfairly) safe from the horrors of war. The same account can be seen in the work of military strategists and it was deployed by the leaders of the nascent air forces. International lawyers, imbued with this cultural narrative and discomfited by the failures of their discipline, were unable to posit any strong legal, or even moral, prohibition on the bombardment of non-combatants. In this way, the hostility towards civilians left aerial bombardment as an unsettled legal problem and a military possibility that was eventually embraced.
…Until the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions were drafted in the 1970s, there were no rules to prevent the starvation of civilians, no consensus about illegality of area bombardment, no agreement about the usefulness or meaning of a principle of proportionality.9 Moreover, as I have argued, it was only in the 1990s that these principles were actually accepted as customary international law, binding on everyone.
The Great War introduced, for the first time, a large contingent of educated, scholarly men, steeped in the motifs and themes of a classical education, to battle.14 Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Erich Maria Remarque are the best known of these war writers; their work has been established as the canon of war literature.15 Their poetry and memoirs replaced traditional tales about honorable and patriotic warfare with a new story of disillusionment and betrayal, horror and pointlessness. They portrayed a war where young men were sacrificed by the “Old Men,” their patriotic fathers and mothers, wives and sweethearts.
…It was at this time, the end of the 1920s, that “the disillusioned trench soldier emerged as the ‘authentic’ voice of the Great War.” From this moment on, their narrative pushed out the other accounts and became the only possible story about the war. Indeed, Watson shows that other experiences of the war had to be recast in these terms to be accepted as legitimate accounts of the Great War.
…In this now ascendant narrative, one of the most common themes was the juxtaposition of the trench poet’s pity and love for fellow soldiers with antagonism towards the
non-combatant population.…The rest of the world, however, seemed to care little for the soldier’s suffering. The trench poets felt that non-combatants were indifferent to the plight of soldiers.
…Yet, the trench poets did not reserve their dislike only for these militant examples of womanhood. Their work displays a more general hostility towards women.35 Gilbert describes a disgust for the feminine that acted as a counterpoint to the love between soldiers.36 Others have pointed out that the war, and the vulnerability that men felt at the front, threatened traditional gender roles and created animosity towards women.
…The trench poets felt that these non-combatants were incapable of understanding the reality of the war. When they returned home they could not communicate with or feel
comfortable with their families.…As a result, soldiers expressed a desire to bring the war home, to make the “smugfaced crowds”41 understand and take responsibility for their support of the war….The military strategists of the interwar period also had a narrative that they told about the last war…
…The strategists shared, with the poets, a willingness to replace this foolish “cannon-fodder” war with a war against the civilian population – for both strategic and moral reasons. It should be remembered, the strategists pointed out, that the purpose of war was to enforce a policy or, as Liddell Hart put it, to subdue the enemy’s will to resist, with the least possible human and economic loss to itself.53 The destruction of the opposing armed forces was “only one means, and not necessarily the best one, to the attainment of that goal.”54 If that could be achieved in a more effective way – such as by bringing the war to the people – then that was the method that should be used. And now the weapon was available to do this: “Aircraft enables us to jump over the army which shields the enemy government, industry and people, and so strike direct and immediately at the seat of the opposing will and policy.”
…consistent narrative was maintained by the military thinkers about the complicity of the non-combatant population in war, and the appropriateness and possibilities of bringing the war home to them.
…All this work and progress in [1920s] international law may well justify the interpretation of the period, overall, as one of utopian energy and enthusiasm. It is interesting, however, that very little of this effort was directed towards the position of civilians in warfare. …those idealist international lawyers, with an interest in warfare, tended to focus their energy on the maintenance of peace rather than the regulation of warfare. They considered that their job was to help prevent war… Lawyers accepted, willingly or unwillingly, a vision of totalitarian war, conflating the people, the nation and the state.
…[J.M. Spaight, the leading authority on air warfare] went even further, making an argument that the entire economic life of a nation should be considered a target… Even after World War II, Spaight still found himself able to state that at least nothing had happened in that war that was as bad as the “loss of the flower of the generation” in World War I.
…International lawyers, between the wars, agreed on a certain story about the laws of war. They knew that there was little protection for non-combatants and little could be expected; nations would not sacrifice military utility for humanitarian reasons. They considered that what law did exist was unsettled, complicit in the depredations of war or likely to be set aside as soon as war began… They knew that international law did little to actually protect civilians… Law would only be used where it facilitated military interests. …lawyers felt that any law that did exist was likely to be disregarded in a war, since there was nothing except the fear of reprisals that might stop military staff bent on winning a war.136 Lawyers expressed a general belief in the weakness of their discipline.
