With improved bombing planes being constructed day by day, we face the problem of aerial bombardment—the problem of war and the problem of law. If it is true that the accepted practice governing conduct in any one war becomes the standard for future conflicts, we are indeed in a bad way. The seeming extravagances of 1918 are so recent and so vivid. They are as yet the last word, simply because there are none others more recent.
But it is not always true that extreme practices become precedents for future action. I am not inclined to be so pessimistic as Mr. James M. Beck, who told the American Bar Association:
During the World War, nearly all the international laws…were immediately swept aside in the struggle for existence; and civilized man, with his liquid fire and poison gas and his deliberate attacks upon undefended cities and their women and children, waged war with the unrelenting ferocity of primitive times.
Nor do I think we can accept absolutely the opinion of other publicists that the peasant woman on her farm and the soldier on the field of battle are equally subjects for belligerent attack. International law, it is true, was tested by the equity of the sword and the truth of the rifle. But the tests were not final tests. The tests will not be complete until the last dollar of indemnity has been paid and the last remembrance gone of neutral nations rallying against the offending belligerents. There is no need for jumping hastily at conclusions and saying that the next war will be horrible war any more than there is for saying that it will be exclusively an aerial war.
We should recognize as international law not the extreme humanitarianism of the dreamer nor the wild imaginations of the applied scientists. We should recognize only what is in real life practicable and applicable, and useful and reasonable, else the man in uniform will declare to the publicists of the printed book that the regulations may be on paper, but do not jibe with facts and conditions.
Admiral Mahan’s refusal to permit the United States to subscribe to an anti-gas convention over a quarter of a century ago, is an example in point. The new weapon was then relatively unknown, in its effects or its values. The proposed weapon was not “demonstrably inhumane,” he said. And then why, he added, should the choking of soldiers with gas be forbidden, when it was still permissible to use a midnight torpedo to choke and drown a battleship full of sailors.
During the progress of the World War, a German writer claimed that aerial bombing “is unable seriously to further the war aim” and “can only serve to terrorize.” He expressed a hope that aerial combat would vanish and that “modern war law would again confine aerial navigation and flying to the service of reconnaissance.” In August, 1922, the International Law Association, meeting at Buenos Aires, declared that the radius of operations of military aircraft ought to be limited—a vain attempt to take from armies all the advantage of deep penetration into enemy areas, and from a certain type of plane the distinctive features secured from its wide cruising range. Mere theoretical attempts these, and so without value. Maturer judgment and more expert opinion at the Hague in 1923, drafted rules as follows:
Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, or destroying or damaging private property not of military character or injuring noncombatants, is prohibited.
Aerial bombardment is permitted only when directed at a military objective, that is to say, an object of which the destruction or injury would constitute a military advantage to the belligerent. Such bombardment is legitimate only when directed exclusively at the following objectives: military forces, military works, military establishments or depots, factories constituting important and well- known centers engaged in the manufacture of arms, ammunition, or distinctively military supplies, lines of communication or transportation used for military purposes…In cases where the objectives so specified are so situated that they cannot be bombarded without the indiscriminate bombardment of the civilian population, the aircraft must abstain from bombardment.
These rules, it will be noted, permit bombardment practically without stint in what military men call the "theater of operations” and set up the criterion of the military objective in the “zone of the interior.” It will further be noted that the articles do not say that bombs must fall exclusively on military objectives, only that they must be directed exclusively at such. They do not say that the bombardment of civilian population is prohibited, merely the indiscriminate bombing of such. Nor do they make the old distinction between combatant and noncombatant. They take into consideration the modern “selective service” idea and “industrial mobilization” for war, and permit attacks on factories making “distinctively military supplies.” Under these rules, the old excuse of aiming at a military objective and hitting an “innocent bystander,” may still be pleaded. War is not a game of tag in which an army may march into a city, or a government set up its military factories next to a town, and there “touch wood” and be “safe.”
Note the words of that disenchanting British journalist with a fiery pen, Mr. C. E. Montague, who says:
When the long row of hut hospitals, jammed between the Calais-Paris Railway at Etaples and the great reenforcement camp on the sand hills above it, was badly bombed from the air, even the wrath of the R.A.M.C. against those who had wedged its wounded and nurses between two staple targets scarcely exceeded that of our Royal Air Force against war correspondents who said the enemy must have done it on purpose.
The bombing will be avowedly at military objectives. If the manpower of the nation is reduced, if the manufacturing efficiency of the country is hurt, if the morale of the foe is lowered, so much the better. But these will be only incidental values. The military commander and the strategic statesman will speak and think only of military objectives.
His reports will mention only them. The newspapers of his country will cite them and them alone. Truly, as Professor Garner has remarked:
The rules proposed by the commission undoubtedly leave a large discretionary power to aviators. To a much larger degree than in land and naval warfare, they are made the judges of the legitimacy of their attacks. They must determine in each case and with little opportunity for investigation and verification whether a particular object falls within the category of military objectives, and if so whether it is situated outside the immediate zone of land operations, and if so whether it can be bombarded without indiscriminate bombardment of the civilian population; and, finally, whether in the case of a city, town or building situated within the zone of land operations there exists the reasonable presumption of military importance required by the rule. Manifestly, the most scrupulous aviator will commit errors of judgment under these circumstances if he resorts to bombardment at all.
We cannot put too much trust upon mere rules. Not that these are so likely to be disregarded in the heat of action, but rather more that the rules are too frequently inapplicable to the changed situations which arise when the next war really comes. There were rules of war prior to 1914, and as Lord Cave has said: “No one conceived of the possibility of an infraction by civilized people of the rules laid down.” Still, one nation employed a new naval weapon, the submarine, contrary to all existing laws regarding sea warfare—laws drawn up without full appreciation of the uses of the submarine. Another nation tried to starve the noncombatant population of its opponent into submission, stating that “economic pressure” would bring the foe to their knees “as surely as the winter will strike the leaves from the trees.” Both belligerents extended the uses of aircraft beyond any previously imagined limitations and developed them to an amazingly new utility. A group of diplomats in Washington after the conflict tried to restrict the use of toxic and asphyxiating gases because these were deemed to have been condemned by the unanimous opinion of the civilized world; and yet their treaty has never been fully ratified and is not effective. Indeed, as Lord Cave went on to remark: “Experience has shown how little reliance can be placed upon the sanction of public opinion.” We are finally thrown, possibly more than we might wish, upon the ordinary decency of the individual belligerents. And that great British authority on aerial combat laws, Mr. J. M. Spaight, has declared:
In air warfare more than its elder brethren of the land and the sea, the heart and conscience of the combatants are the guaranty of fair fighting, not any rule formulated in a treaty or in a manual.
This is not an empty suggestion. While a propagandist in Berlin and another in London are hurling abusive epithets at each other, the British Tommy trying to pick off the German sniper, says Mr. Montague, comes to dub his foe with an affectionate nickname. He gives him cigarettes if he captures him. When a stray dog wanders across No Man’s Land, his owner becomes not a brutal Boche, but simply “him that lost the dog” and a man to be sought earnestly in every open cafe of the occupied Rhineland, anti-fraternizing orders to the contrary notwithstanding. If I may be pardoned a personal experience, I should like to relate how after mingling with lawyers, young university liberals, and editors of the progressive ‘‘intelligentsia” who were almost unanimous in foreseeing the horrors of war and the awful destruction new weapons might accomplish, I turned to mingle with military men charged with determining military policy and methods, and found the latter thought of aircraft in a purely professional manner, as instruments to accomplish the military objective with as little loss and terrorizing as possible. It is another instance of the chasm between the theorist and the man who holds fast to facts. It is the imagination of the theorist and not the weapon of the soldier that runs wild.
The directing soldier clings to practicality and looks for tangible results. Get you a huge dirigible to bomb your enemy’s city; and his swooping airplanes will bring it down. Get you a big bombing plane capable of carrying huge missiles, and swifter fighting planes will bring it down. Get you a group of bombers and a host of fighting planes to protect them on their raid and then go out to bomb the enemy civilian population centers, and what will be the practical result, from a purely military standpoint? As your raiding squadron penetrates into enemy territory its dangers become greater. Its chances of success become less. It must pass through successive lines of enemy planes and over successive sites of enemy fighting squadrons and their airdromes. Its effective force lessens as it proceeds, just as did the cavalry force of Morgan’s raid in 1863, when he started with 28,000 and lost all but a few over a thousand. Then you come to bomb the city of your choice; it is provided with defensive fighting planes which can rise from the ground with fresher pilots, greater speed, and fuller gasoline tanks. It is provided with antiaircraft guns which make your raiding party keep aloft to such heights that your bombing will likely be ineffective. In 1918, Amiens was repeatedly approached by German planes which regularly turned off when the antiaircraft artillery opened on them. What matter if the guns brought down not a single plane? They had protected Amiens just as well. A Guynemer or a Richthofen might disregard such an aerial barrage; but the average flyer does not. Then your raiding planes must come home through hordes of hostile aviators roused to head them off.
The simple military fact is that the results of long-distance civilian bombardment are not worth the effort. If bombing could be continuously and effectively carried out, civilian morale might be depressed; but occasional raids and scattered bombing serve only to stimulate the foe to greater efforts against you. And if your methods are forbidden by international conventions, or even by draft conventions not yet ratified and legally effective, you will find that your transgressions will be accepted, as were those of the Germans, as a “challenge to all mankind.” Your foes will be joined by increasing numbers of allies, and you will go down to as sure and ignominious a defeat as Germany did.
Is the risk worth the results? Is it sound to make such efforts for such returns? Unopposed there might be chances for big successes. But opposition will come in whining “archies,” droning pursuers, and additional foes. As the world goes on, mechanical contrivances on opposite sides of the battlefield tend to counteract one another. The enthusiastic scientist makes great predictions, but the enemy scientist equalizes his achievements. In his last report as chief of staff of the Army, General Pershing said:
During the World War, extravagant tales of havoc done to enemy cities and installations were often brought back, in good faith, no doubt, by some of our aviators, but investigation after the Armistice failed, in the majority of cases, to verify the correctness of such reports. Again, the damage done to the Allies by the enemy’s bombing craft, including Zeppelins, was almost negligible even from a material point of view, certainly so from a morale point of view and in its effect upon the final results. Of course, some damage was done by aircraft bombing, and it would doubtless be somewhat greater in another war, but until it becomes vastly more probable than at present demonstrated, then it cannot be said that we are in a position to abandon past experience in warfare.
When the imaginative gentleman says he is frankly looking facts in the face and predicts an era of general bombardment in spite of treaties, conventions, and rules which indicate a public opinion to the contrary, we can at least find consolation in the military mind. I do not mean the mind of the enthusiast with his single hobby. I mean the mind of the mature strategist who will actually direct operations and issue orders in the conflicts to come. That mind is convinced of the impracticability of extensive bombing operations against civilians. That mind considers simple causes and looks for definite results. That mind places no credence in Jules Verne pictures of sheer mechanical warfare, nor upon fantastic imaginations of aerial invasions of the enemy’s capital and the administration of melancholic gasses to make legislators agree to terms of peace. That mind realizes that the offense and defense develop so nearly at equal rates, that the distant bombardment of huge cities would not only be atrocious but would also be of scant value compared to the employment of the same bombs and planes in the more immediate vicinity in the theatre of operation. The principle of the “military objective” is not only a phrase in the new draft rules for aerial warfare; it is a fixed doctrine of modern military art, closely linked to the idea of the economy of force. There are railway lines nearby that can be bombed so as to disrupt or destroy the essential movement of enemy reserves. There are ammunition depots nearby in the theater of operations that can be bombed so as to cripple the effectiveness of the enemy artillery. So why waste materials, personnel, and time, in inaccurate attempts to destroy the Cologne bridges or Berlin factories?
I have said that we cannot put too much exclusive trust on mere legal rules for aerial warfare, or we shall be disappointed as to their effectiveness. But now that military men are becoming thoroughly aware of the real characteristics, values, and limitations of air bombers, we can trust to their tactical ability to hew to the line and fight for the winning of a war along sound military lines. The chief hope of the new rules lies not so much in the fact that they were drawn by a set of very distinguished jurists, as in the fact that they conform so well to the principles of military strategy and tactics. They will be applied, not by barristers before a court, but by soldiers in the field. There will be errors in interpretation and errors in commission, as there are in every war, for the principles of strategy and tactics seem to be violated almost as regularly as those of international law. Yet the rules will tend to govern just the same.