Not too long ago, I finished reading Among The Dead Cities, by British philospher A. C. Grayling. The book is about the morality of area (or indiscriminate carpet) bombing, and its history up to the end of WWII.

The very beginning goes back to some eccentric Italians back in 1911 while they were fighting the Turk in Libya. While flying over enemy lines on a reconnaissance mission, on a whim the pilot dropped a handful of grenades as he flew by. Such an unsporting stunt disgusted the public, but Giulio Douhet, the commander of Italy's aviation battalion saw the future in this action. After a career of more downs than ups for an aviator - he spent his last year in uniform in prison for predicting disaster for the Italian army in 1917 - Douhet published "The Command of the Air" in 1921. This book spelled out the strategy that motivated much of the thinking behind the Allied bombing campaign of WWII.

"Take the centre of a large city and imagine what would happen among the civilian population during a single attack by a single bombing unit. I have no doubt that the impact would be terrible... What civil or military authority could keep order, public services functioning, and production going under such a threat?... A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air. The time would soon come when, to put an end to horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct for self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to war."

As WWII started, part of the preparations that arose out of the fear of area bombing was that the British Ministry of Health actually issued a million extra death certificates to local authorities. The government estimated that some 3 to 4 million refugees would be driven from the cities and a similar number would fall victim to psychiatric disturbances from the terror and confusion of the bombing. Now, as it turned out, both the British and the German civilians bore up rather well under the bombing, and if anything morale actually rose, as did industrial production in Germany until the last months of the war. But the fears at the start of the war were real and in some circles the certainty remained throughout the war that area bombing and the terror it induced offered a clean and easy way to victory.

What I found surprising in Grayling's book was just how reluctant both the British and the Germans were when it came to bombing civilians - initially at least. Germany had severely bombed Guernica in 1937, and Warsaw at the onset of WWII but went to great lengths to avoid such targets in the West. They desperately tried to abort a mistakenly launched bomber raid on Rotterdam on May 14, 1940, but failed. The very next day, the British retaliated with their first attack east of the Rhine. They sent 97 bombers to industrial targets in the Ruhr Valley. Orders specified that the action must not degenerate into indiscriminate bombing, and that civilian targets were to be avoided.

These initial raids however were extremely costly - the attrition rate for the British was sometimes over 15%. But by March 1942 the sturdy Avro Lancaster was introduced. And the notorious Arthur 'Bomber' Harris had been promoted to head up Bomber Command in the previous month. There were other technical advancements that made incursions into Germany safer. Harris was a firm believer in the Douhet doctrine and that air power, almost alone, could defeat Germany. The extent of Harris' foot-dragging when it came to carrying out plans to target industrial sites was shocking. He regarded any effort that diverted his attention from destroying civilians as wasteful. The Germans had similar ideas though, and in retaliation to Harris' new tactics, they launched the Baedeker Raids on cities such as Bath and Exeter. Their raison d'etre was also to terrify and demoralize. Baron Gustav Braun von Sturm said, "Ve vill go out und bomb every building in Britain marked mit three stars in the Baedeker Guide."

Germany could not keep pace with Britain who was soon launching 1000 bomber night raids on German cities. By 1945 they were running out of targets and the cities chosen seem almost entirely gratuitous.

The American role in Europe contrasted greatly with the British. The Eighth US Army Airforce stationed in Britain concentrated on bombing industrial target, particularly oil and transportation facilities. While the British bombed by night, the Americans bombed by day, sacrificing safety for accuracy. So effective was their tactic that by Spring 1944, when the Germans started to introduce some 1,200 deadly (but fuel hungry) jet-fighters (Messerschmitt 262), there was no fuel to get them aloft. They had to be towed out to the runway - by cows!

Oddly, when it became possible for American bombers to attack the home islands in Japan, the tactics that served them so well in Europe were abandoned in favour of those of Bomber Harris. The final target, Nagasaki, did have some military importance, but it was Urakami Cathedral, largest and oldest in Japan, that served as the sighting target.

The case against area bombing, and here is where history ends and philosophy begins, rests on the notion that to be justified, any act of violence in war must be both necessary and proportionate. Those fighting must distinguish between combatants and non combatants, military targets and hospitals, schools, churches and cultural institutions. Those fighting must not intentionally harm non combatants. Note, this doctrine does allow for the killing of innocents - collateral damage - but any killing should be proportional to the intended purpose. For example, if an enemy is holed up in a house full of 10 non combatants, destroying the entire house and everyone in it would be out of proportion to the intended effect of killing the one enemy combatant. We're on firmer ground if the opposite is true. We can probably get away with sacrificing one innocent if our intention is to wipe out the 10 enemies hiding in the same house. There are of course moralists who would disagree with this: Jesus, Sakamoni, Kant etc, but none of these thinkers seem to have much influence over the way war is conducted.

Grayling condemns the area bombing of civilian targets on these grounds. Bombing was important to the Allied Victory, and he praises the efforts of the American-style precision attacks on Germany's industrial capacity as morally defensible. Winston Churchill, who was at Omdurman as a young man, and knew a massacre when he saw one, after watching film of a British raid on the Ruhr, asked his cabinet colleagues "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?" In his BBC Victory Address Churchill made no mention of Bomber Command, no campaign medal was struck, and Harris was not permitted to publish a final despatch summarizing his work in the war.

I am struck by the innocence of the age. I don't suppose it would have appeared so back then, but I can't picture a politician, even Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, lowering himself to talk to the public about the various types of torture at hand. As we embrace torture, the distinction between combatant and non combatant also crumbles. Obviously, in an industrial age, the highly trained employee in the weapons factory is a more valuable target than an ignorant soldier sitting in a trench. Less obvious are the weakest and most vulnerable members of a society targetted to undermine a miscreant leader. The economic sanctions against Iraq killing hundreds of thousands in the 90's are a fine example. I'd like to say this is new but it's not. Seems like we're losing ground, morally at least, going back to the days before the Geneva conventions - to medieval times. The bomber command of those days consisted of guys catapulting plague-ridden cadavers into besieged cities.
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Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime. Saint-Just