Copyright © F. J. P. Veale, 1953, 1968
I disliked the Nuremberg Trials for three reasons: First,
trials of the vanquished by the victors are never satisfactory and are
generally unfair. Secondly, the execution of the political and military
leaders of a beaten side by the victors sets a most dangerous precedent. The
Germans were certainly guilty of “crimes against humanity”; but war is not a
humane business and it would always be possible for the victors in any way
to find enough examples of atrocities to justify vindictive punishments.
After the next war, if there is one, trials and hangings will follow as a
matter of course. We may go further. One of the indictments of the German
leaders was not that they waged war inhumanly, but that they made war
aggressively. They did; they desired large annexations of territory in the
East. But have we not heard of other nations who have acquired extensive
empires without consulting the wishes of the inhabitants? Thirdly, one of
the judges—Russia—ought certainly to have been in the dock and not on the
bench.
I comforted myself at one time by thinking that these
horrors were confined to three nations, Germany, Spain and Russia. Nothing
can be said to extenuate the excesses practised by the Germans. The only
fair questions were, who were the culprits? and who ought to be the judges?
It is not usual to hang officers for obeying cruel orders. The citizens in a
police state in abdicating their rights as men have ceased to admit the duty
of obeying conscience. As for Spain, it is high time to resume friendly
relations with a noble people. But it must be admitted that there is a
strain of cruelty in the Spanish character. In the country of the
Inquisition and the bull-ring, civil war was not likely to be gentle. In
speaking of Russia, one cannot do better than quote what Amiel, whose
perspicacity is never at fault, wrote as early as 1856: “The harsh gifts of
late have left their stamp on the race of the Muscovites. A certain sombre
obstinacy, a sort of primitive ferocity, a background of savage harshness,
which under the sway of circumstances might become implacable and even
ruthless, a coldly indomitable force that would rather wreck the world than
yield, the indestructible instinct of the barbarian horde still persisting
in a half-civilized nation.… What terrible masters would the Russians be if
ever they should spread the might of their rule over the southern countries!
A polar despotism, a tyranny such as the world has not yet known, silent as
the darkness, keen as ice, unfeeling as bronze, a slavery without
compensation or relief.”
Perhaps in times to come, not so far distant, it may not be
so readily forgotten that this was the enemy against whom the Germans
fought.
But are there only three culprits, two of whom may plead
some excuse? What of the destruction of Hiroshima by the Americans, of
Dresden by the British, when the war was practically over? It is not
pleasant to think of these things.
We must not speak too positively of retrogression. There was
another side to European humanity before the insanity of nationalism. In
dealing with “inferior races” the record was not good. The Irish have not
forgotten the Tudors and Oliver Cromwell. Or listen to this horrible extract
from the Daily Journal of March 1737: “They write from Antigua that
they continued executing the Negroes concerned in the plot to murder all the
inhabitants of the island: sixty-nine had been executed, of whom five had
been broken on the wheel, six were hung upon gibbets and starved to death,
of whom one lived nine nights and eight days and fifty-eight were chained to
stakes and burnt.” Or think of the tortures inflicted on the assailant of
Louis XV, which were gleefully witnessed by at least one English gentleman.
Our ancestors were not all saints.
Some of us hope that now that war has been divested of all
romance and chivalry, it may soon go the way of cannibalism and human
sacrifice. It is a matter of life or death for civilization.
W. R. INGE
26th March 1951.
At the time of its publication this point of view was
considered so wilfully perverse that no British newspaper with a national
circulation would review this book.
Fortunately, however, this book did not pass unnoticed.
Among those who praised it was the Very Rev. William Ralph Inge, formerly
Dean of St. Paul’s, who later contributed a Foreword to the revised and
greatly enlarged Edition which was published in the United States in 1953.
This American edition was translated into Spanish and published in Spain
under the title “El Crimen de Nuremberg” in 1954, and later in the same year
into German and published in Germany under the title “Der Barbarei
entgegen”.
Since the publication of the first edition in 1948 many new
facts have come to light and public opinion has changed. Few now maintain
that an accuser is a fit person to act as judge of his own charges, in fact
many now remember that they were always opposed to the Nuremberg Trials,
although they omitted to make public their opinion at the time. The
publication of
The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939-1945
by H.M. Stationery Office in September 1961 confirmed officially with a
wealth of detail the view expressed in this book concerning the character of
the air attack on Germany during the Second World War.
I recommend this new edition to the reader.
From the first it was apparent that 1914 was certain to be a
memorable date in history because in that year began a war in which a vast
number would be doomed to die violent deaths and which would certainly lead
to sweeping changes to the map of Europe if only for the worse. For a decade
historians limited themselves to investigating the origins of this struggle
which they explained to their own satisfaction by attributing it to the
chance that Germany was ruled by an emperor who was obsessed by an insane
ambition to conquer the world. From patriotic motives, at first to assist
the war effort and later to justify the dictated terms of peace,
professional historians, many of them men of great eminence and learning,
laboured to confirm and endorse the Wicked Kaiser Myth. Once however this
had been exposed as an impudent propaganda fiction, they failed to find any
generally acceptable explanation for the blind homicidal frenzy which seized
the nations of Europe during the period, 1914-1918, and ultimately they
became resigned to leaving the problem for solution to the psychologists and
psychiatrists. Thus the First World War came to be regarded as a bizarre
episode of history, mainly of significance as a grim warning to posterity of
the consequences of allowing greed and pugnacity to overcome reason.
The conclusion that the great struggle which broke out in
Europe in 1914 resulted from a pathological wave of hysteria which afflicted
the most advanced nations of mankind in that year is now held up for
admiration as the most remarkable achievement of modern historical research.
But this diagnosis was first put forward over thirty years ago by
Field-Marshal Lord Allenby who bluntly declared, “The Great War was a
lengthy period of general insanity.”
The view that the beginning of this struggle in 1914 and still more that its
continuation after 1916 were essentially the result of an irrational and
compulsive urge was accepted as self-evident and undeniable throughout the
thirty-nine weekly televised programmes entitled ‘The Great War’ broadcast
by the B.B.C. in 1965.
Not until after 1939 when another world war broke out,
rendered inevitable by the terms of peace imposed on the vanquished after
the First World War, was it realised how profound were the effects which the
latter struggle had had on the character, outlook and ethics of the average
Western civilized man. Since the times when the Dark Ages had gradually
evolved into the Middle Ages, the story of civilization in Europe had been
one of slow but steady upward progress. The advance of civilization apart
from occasional fluctuations remained continuous until the beginning of the
20th century, by which time it had come to be regarded as an established law
of nature that progress was an automatic process of unending duration. As
the late Dean Inge observed, belief in Progress became a kind of religion
with most educated men. Apart from the steady accumulation of scientific
knowledge, arbitrary violence had gradually become controlled by the rule of
law, manners had become milder and in warfare primitive savagery had become
modified by the tacit adoption at the end of the 17th century of an
unwritten code of restrictions and restraints which later codified at the
conventions of Geneva and the Hague, became known as the Rules of Civilized
Warfare. The fundamental principle of this code was that hostilities should
be restricted to the armed and uniformed forces of the combatants, from
which followed the corollary that civilians must be left entirely outside
the scope of military operations. It was widely believed that war, being an
essentially barbarous method of settling international disputes, was bound
ultimately to die out. With seemingly full justification the outlook at the
beginning of the 20th century was one of unclouded optimism.
As early as 1770, by which time the horrors of the Thirty
Years War had become generally forgotten, the Comte de Guibert could express
the already prevailing complacency by writing:—
“Today the whole of Europe is civilized. Wars have become
less cruel. Save in combat no blood is shed; prisoners are respected; towns
are no more destroyed; the countryside is no more ravaged; conquered peoples
are only obliged to pay some sort of contributions which are often less than
the taxes they pay to their own sovereign.”
In the 19th century this happy state of affairs was taken
for granted: no one dreamed that it would shortly come to an abrupt end. To
us it seems fantastically unreal, now that prisoners of war are faced with
the prospect of being subjected to war-crimes trials at the pleasure of
their captors, or of being sent to work indefinitely as slave labour; towns
with their inhabitants are obliterated by terror bombing; conquered peoples
are uprooted from their homelands and mass-deported abroad; and the property
of the vanquished is either appropriated as a matter of course by the
victors or systematically destroyed.
The war which broke out in Europe in 1914 seemed at first
indistinguishable from the civil wars which previously had periodically
devastated that continent. During the struggle, however, quite unforeseen by
any one, civilization began a retrograde movement without a parallel in
history. While the struggle lasted this retrograde movement was not
generally perceived but after the wave of optimism generated by the creation
of the League of Nations had faded, the realization dawned that somehow the
times had become out of joint. Working below the surface a profound
psychological change had been taking place. Many of the men then living in
obscurity who in the next decade were to rise to power and fame—for example
Yagoda, Stalin’s chief of the G.P.U. during the Great Purge, Heinrich
Himmler, the S.S. leader, and Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of systematic
genocide—might have been reincarnations of men who had flourished in the
times of the Merovingian Kings. Even the outlook of so irreproachable a
character as Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard with his then novel recipe for
victory—“bomb the enemy civilian population until they surrender”—was nearer
akin to that of an Iroquois war chief than to that of a professional
European soldier of the 19th century.
Hardly perceptible for twenty-one years, when hostilities
were resumed in 1939 the reversion to primitive practices in warfare soon
became headlong until at last all pretence of complying with the was abandoned and both sides tacitly adopted the principle
that any act was justifiable if it held out even a remote hope that it might
stave off the frightful consequences of defeat.
An explanation is clearly needed to account for the fact
that governments composed of educated men, reared in the 19th century and
brought up to accept as a matter of course the standards of conduct then
accepted by everyone, should have so quickly and easily overcome their
natural repugnance and adopted and carried out such enormities as the
systematic extermination of a defenceless minority on account of its racial
Origin, the mass-deportation of enemy populations numbering millions, and
the deliberate slaughter of enemy civilians by terror bombing in order to
generate among the survivors a disposition to surrender unconditionally.
It was many years after hostilities had ceased in 1945
before historians realized that this problem existed. In Germany the
thinking powers of historians were for long paralysed by the ruthless
brainwashing to which they with the rest of their countrymen were subjected
in 1945 to force them to accept the propaganda fictions of the victors. In
Britain and the United States historians were so preoccupied investigating
the crimes against humanity committed by the vanquished that they overlooked
the background of concentrated terror bombing against which these crimes had
been committed. They failed to realize that genocide and terror bombing were
not isolated phenomena but symptoms of the same retrograde movement which
had mysteriously overtaken Western civilization.
It is commonly assumed that genocide and terror bombing were
accepted respectively by the governments of Germany and Britain without
protest or opposition from those they ruled who, it is assumed, were as
completely subject to the spirit of the times as their rulers. The facts as
now disclosed do not support either assumption but the subject remains
uninvestigated.
Taking first the case of Germany, a strict censorship
enforced by drastic penalties controlled the publication of news and the
expression of opinion. It is impossible to determine the number of those who
expressed opposition to the regime as any who so ventured came to an
untimely end. One cannot protest effectively in secret and to protest
publicly was equivalent to suicide. It is doubtful also whether any specific
information was available concerning what was taking place behind barbed
wire in the concentration camps, most of which were in remote occupied
territory, inaccessible to civilians. It has been contended that it would
have been impossible to put to death millions of persons without some facts
about it becoming generally known. Estimates of the number of victims vary
from ten millions to less than a quarter of a million, and the larger the
estimate accepted the stronger this contention becomes. It will always be a
subject for regret that the victorious Allies did not put the question
beyond dispute by appointing in 1945 a commission composed of impartial
judges selected from neutral countries to investigate the facts. The
findings of such a body would have been accepted by posterity as final. The
Allies however deliberately rejected this obvious course. The findings of
the Nuremberg Tribunal are of course worthless: a court which convicted
Admiral Dönitz against whom the prosecution had failed to produce even the
shadow of a prima facie case was clearly incapable of disposing even
of the simplest problem. After the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in 1961
another opportunity arose to dispose of this question by an enquiry by an
impartial tribunal. Once again this course was emphatically rejected, a fact
which in itself is highly significant. It remains therefore impossible to
say with confidence whether the German people consented without protest to
the departures from civilized standards, by its rulers during the Second
World War.
Recently indeed several books have appeared disclosing that
throughout the war there was an active underground resistance movement in
Germany. Those who participated however seem to have been mainly political
rivals of Hitler, jealous of his rise to power and intent on bringing about
the downfall of his regime so as to be able to replace it by a regime of
their own. His crimes against humanity do not seem to have greatly concerned
them.
The situation in Britain was very different. There was no
official prohibition on expressions of opinion as such, but persons who
ventured to express opinions which the authorities deemed might hamper the
war effort were put in prison without a trial or even without a specific
complaint against them. With regard to the bombing of the enemy civilian
population, everyone knew that civilians in Germany were being slaughtered
wholesale but it was believed that this was an unavoidable by-product of an
air offensive against military objectives. The comforting reflection was
accepted that the German civilian population could at any moment bring its
sufferings to an end by surrendering unconditionally.
It would not indeed be correct to say that what was
officially termed “the strategic bombing offensive” was carried out to the
last day of the war without opposition, protest or misgivings. Questions
were asked in Parliament as to the character of this air offensive which
were fully reported in the Press with the answers given. Certainly it cannot
be said that the Ministers of the Crown upon whom fell the duty of answering
these questions, resorted to evasion or equivocation. In accordance with the
British tradition they kept a stiff upper lip and gave clear and emphatic
replies, without any signs of embarrassment such as might have been expected
from them having regard to the fact that as recently as March 1942 Mr.
Churchill’s War Cabinet had accepted the plan laid before it by Professor
Lindemann by which ‘top priority’ as an objective for air attack was in
future to be given to “working-class houses in densely populated residential
areas.”
This decision of the War Cabinet was kept a closely guarded
secret from the British public for nearly twenty years until it was
unobtrusively revealed in 1961 in a little book entitled Science and
Government by the physicist and novelist, Sir Charles Snow, in which
occurred the following oft-quoted passage which was immediately translated
and published in every language in the world:
Terror bombing as proposed in the Lindemann Plan was a
novelty in warfare rendered possible by the conquest of the air during the
first two decades of the 20th century. Genocide, on the other hand, was only
the revival of an ancient practice, once probably worldwide, which had long
been abandoned in Europe and which barely survived, in company with
cannibalism, among the savages of Africa. It has never seriously been
contended by anyone that either genocide or terror bombing were in
accordance with the moral standards accepted at the time by all civilized
peoples.
We do not know what were the thoughts in private of Hitler’s
colleagues concerning his “final solution of the Jewish Problem.” Some of
them surely must have found it at least disturbing that the Führer should
have recourse to a practice which had only recently been stamped out in
Africa by European Colonialism as the first step towards introducing
civilization into that continent.
We know however that the members of the British War Cabinet
who accepted the Lindemann Plan fully realized its enormity because
concurrently with its acceptance it was decided that on no account must any
inkling of its terms reach the public. The following extracts from the
parliamentary reports of Hansard are set out verbatim here immediately after
the passage quoted above, not to suggest that British politicians are
exceptionally mendacious—politicians whatever their nationality have never
been renowned for veracity—but to establish that those responsible for the
acceptance of the Lindemann Plan were conscious of a feeling of guilt. They
instructed those entrusted with the task of answering questions on the
subject to give emphatic and unambiguous denials designed to stifle all
further enquiries, as the following passages from Hansard show. Some or
indeed most of them may have replied in the innocence of their hearts
without personal knowledge of the truth but credulously believing what they
were told by their departments.
On the 11th March, 1943 (a year after the acceptance of the
Lindemann Plan) in the House of Commons, Mr. Montague, a Labour Member,
having expressed the hope that our air raids on Germany were still being
concentrated, as he believed they were, on military and industrial
objectives, Captain Harold Balfour, Under-Secretary for Air, replied that he
could give the House “an assurance that our objectives in bombing the enemy
were industries, transport and war potential. There is no change in our
policy. We were not bombing women and children wantonly for the sake of so
doing. It is not for us to turn back. If innocent people, women and children
suffer in the execution of our policy in Germany the remedy lies with the
German men and women themselves.”
(Hansard, 12 March 1943.)
On the 30th March, 1943, in reply to the Labour Member,
Richard Stokes, the Secretary for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, replied
blandly that, “The targets of Bomber Command are always military but
night-bombing of military objectives necessarily involves bombing the area
in which these are situated.” (Hansard, 31 March, 1943.)
On the 9th February, 1944, in the House of Lords, Dr. Bell,
the Bishop of Chichester, in a memorable speech demanded a statement of the
Government’s policy “in regard to the bombing of enemy towns with special
reference to the effect of such bombing on civilian life.” Viscount
Cranbourne, Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, replied for the
Government that he was “very ready to give an assurance that the aim of our
intensive attacks on German cities was to hamper and, if possible, to bring
to a standstill enemy war production and not aimlessly to sprinkle bombs
with the object of spreading damage among the enemy population. The
R.A.F. had never indulged in purely terror raids.” (Hansard, 10
February, 1944.)
The last and most illuminating debate on the subject of
terror bombing took place in the House of Commons on the 6th March, 1945,
only three weeks after the ghastly mass air raid on
Dresden on the 13th
February, 1945.
This debate was initiated by the irrepressible Richard
Stokes who demanded to be told the truth concerning an authorised report,
issued regarding this raid by the Associated Press Correspondent from
Supreme Allied Headquarters in Paris which gloatingly described “this
unprecedented assault in daylight on the refugee-crowded capital, fleeing
from the Russian tide in the East,” and declared it showed that “the
long-awaited decision had been taken to adopt deliberate terror-bombing of
German populated centres as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.”
Mr. Stokes began by reading this report which he reminded
the House had been widely published in America and had been
broadcast by Paris Radio.
In Britain on the morning of the 17th February it had been released
by the Censor but in the evening of that day it had been suppressed from
publication, presumably as a result of the indignant protests which it had
aroused.
Mr. Stokes insisted on being told, “Is terror bombing now
part of our policy? Why is it that the people of this country who are
supposed to be responsible for what is going on, the only people who may not
know what is being done in their name? On the other hand, if terror bombing
be not part of our policy, why was this statement put out at all? I think we
shall live to rue the day we did this, and that it (the air raid on Dresden)
will stand for all time as a blot on our escutcheon.”
Here a private member, Rear-Admiral Sir Murray Sueter,
interposed with the fatuous observation that “all targets are very carefully
planned by the Bombing Committee. The Committee go into each target which is
of military importance, necessitating the carrying out of this bombing.”
Commander Brabner, Joint Under-Secretary for Air, then spoke
on behalf of the Government. “May I conclude on a note of denial,” he
observed apologetically. “The report which has just been read stated that
the Allied Commanders had adopted a policy of terror bombing. This is
absolutely not so. This has now been denied by Supreme Allied Headquarters
and I should like to have an opportunity of denying it here. We are not
wasting our bombers or time on purely terror tactics. Our job is to destroy
the enemy. It does not do the Hon. Member justice to come to this House and
try to suggest that there are a lot of Air Marshals or pilots or anyone else
sitting in a room trying to think of how many German women and children they
can kill. We are concentrating on war targets, and we intend to remain
concentrated on them until Germany gives up.”
Quite unabashed by this expression of official disapproval,
Mr. Stokes asked two supplementary questions, “If the report issued with the
authority of Allied Headquarters in Paris was untrue, why when protest was
made against it was this not stated at once, and why was it said at first
that it was impossible to suppress a report approved by Allied Headquarters
stating its official policy, although in fact it was immediately afterwards
suppressed?”
Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary for Air, had pointedly
left the House when Mr. Stokes began to read this report so imprudently
approved by Supreme Headquarters in Paris. No doubt by this time he knew the
contents of this compromising production by heart. Realising that Commander
Brabner’s rambling evasions of the questions put to him, instead of
disposing of them, would be more likely to arouse curiosity as to the truth
and so lead to further enquiries, he decided to dispose of the subject
finally himself. “This report,” be declared, “is certainly not true. The
Hon. Member can take that from me. How it was handled, what newspapers
published it, and whether publication was authorised, are matters which the
Hon. Member had better discuss with the Ministry of Information.” (Hansard,
March 7th, 1945.)
In passing it may be noted that this denial was in a sense
true. No decision, long-awaited, had just been reached to adopt deliberate
terror bombing of German main centres of population. The decision to do this
had been reached three years before when in March 1942 the Lindemann Plan
was accepted by the British War Cabinet. Ever since then it had been
ruthlessly carried into effect: the Dresden massacre was merely the
culmination of this policy.
Referring to the above quoted report issued from Allied
Headquarters, the subject of the above debate, David Irving in his book,
The Destruction of Dresden,
published in 1963, observes complacently, “What might be termed the ‘mask’
of the Allied Bomber commands for one extraordinary moment appears to have
slipped.” It was however only a brief moment. “The debate on the 6th March,
1945,” he writes proudly, “was the last wartime debate on Bomber Command’s
policy: the British Government was able to preserve its secret from the day
when the first area raid had been launched on Mannheim, the 16th December,
1940, right up to the end of the war.”
The apparent indifference of the British public to the
adoption of terror bombing as a method of waging war may be explained by the
fact that the emphatic denials of the Ministers of the Crown were almost
universally accepted as true. Officially this problem did not exist, hence
the public apathy which certainly contrasts strangely with the frenzied
moral indignation professed in Britain and elsewhere in 1966 when the
Americans began to bomb communist troop concentrations, oil depots and
ammunition dumps in Vietnam on the ground that bombs which missed their mark
might endanger civilian life. The distinction between these cases is that
the outcry in 1966 was perhaps more an expression of anti-American feeling
than of a humanitarian regard for human life. In 1945 the death of German
civilians troubled few people in Britain simply because the victims were
Germans.
Be this as it may, the worldwide outcry of 1966 certainly
tends to support the view that Winston Churchill and his colleagues were
justified in fearing in 1942 that if the terms of the Lindemann Plan were
made known to the public, an outcry, similar to that which arose in 1966,
was to be expected.
Long afterwards in 1961 H.M. Stationery Office described in
four volumes with a wealth of horrifying details the terror bombing
offensive against Germany carried out from March 1942 to May 1945 in
accordance with the Lindemann Plan.
Immediately after hostilities had ceased in 1945, various
aspects of the Second World War began to be subjected in print to
unqualified condemnation. With regard to terror bombing, the eminent
military critic, Captain Liddell Hart, in a little book entitled The
Evolution of Warfare,
published in 1946, declared that victory had been achieved “through
practising the most uncivilized means of warfare that the world had known
since the Mongol devastations.” Adverse criticism was at first mainly
directed to the adoption of the novel system of ‘war-crimes trials’ as a
method of disposing of enemy prisoners of war. Widely reported with gusto in
the Press these so-called trials were soon in progress all over Europe and
in the Far East. With regard to them therefore no question arises, as in the
cases of genocide and terror bombing, whether an innocent public was kept in
ignorance of what was happening. It cannot be denied that this particular
reversion to barbarism was accepted by the public with astonishingly few
misgivings.
Nevertheless there were occasional faint and disregarded
protests. A booklet written by the present author twenty years ago provides
the core of this book. Much of it is reproduced here in the same words in
which it was written except that what was then put forward as daring and, in
the opinion of most people, perverse speculation, is here stated as
undeniable and long established fact. This booklet was published in 1948
under the pseudonym ‘A. Jurist’, under the title Advance to Barbarism.
The word “Advance” was chosen in preference to “Retreat” or “Reversion” in
deference to the belief, then still widely held, that progress was an
unending and automatic process, from its essential nature advancing ever
upwards. It was the first book which attempted to deal with the retrograde
movement into which civilization entered in 1914, of which terror bombing,
genocide and war-crimes trials were the principal symptoms, as a single
phenomenon. From the lack of authoritative information available, much of
this booklet consisted of speculations. In 1948 no one had ever heard of the
Lindemann Plan, or for that matter of Lindemann himself except as a
professor of physics who was known to be an adviser of Mr. Churchill on
scientific subjects. Terror bombing was not a recognised term since
officially it had never taken place. The term used in this booklet was
“indiscriminate bombing” which means of course something quite different:
terror bombing was not indiscriminate, being directed, as we now know,
against working-class houses. With regard to war-crimes trials, the present
author briefly pointed out the objections to trials in which the accusers of
a prisoner of war acted as judges of their own charges, objections which
were as obvious in 1948 as they are now.
This little book is cited here as an example of a small
group of books published within a few years of the end of hostilities in
1945 which prove that the main features of the retrograde movement which had
begun in 1914 were not accepted entirely with out opposition or comment as
is so generally believed. Probably numerous similar books were written at
the same time which failed to find publishers bold enough to defy the rigid
taboo then in force on all mention of the subjects with which they dealt.
Outstanding among the few books fortunate enough to find
publishers immediately after the War was a little book entitled Epitaph
on Nuremberg, by the influential man of letters, Montgomery Belgion, in
which for the first time were examined the flimsy arguments put forward to
justify the trial at Nuremberg of the captured leaders of the vanquished
side.
To this day this book, published in 1946, remains one of the most outspoken
and boldest examinations of the nature of the Nuremberg Trials. After a
brief but lucid outline of the circumstances leading up to the decision at
the Yalta Conference to adopt an entirely novel method of disposing of
captured enemy leaders, and a careful analysis of the legal principles
involved, the author found himself driven to the conclusion that the
Nuremberg Trials were not inspired by any overwhelming passion for justice
and by a righteous determination that crime should not escape punishment. In
essence, he pointed out, a trial is a means by which an existing law is
enforced, and that at Nuremberg there was no existing law to enforce. The
Tribunal merely invented the law as it proceeded and adjudicated
accordingly. “The hands may have been the hands of Justice,” Mr. Montgomery
Belgion wrote, “but the voice was Propaganda’s voice.” In short, the purpose
of the trials was purely political. “The giving of a delusive appearance
that Germany had caused the War,” he declared, “was an act of high policy
which the Tribunal was entrusted to perform when it was given the job of
passing sentence on most of the accused.” (Page 86.) It had soon been
recognised, he pointed out, that “Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles
which declared Germany solely guilty for the First World War had neither
moral weight nor judicial validity,” and so the victors of the Second World
War decided to hold trials of the vanquished that would, they hoped,
conclusively establish for all time Germany’s guilt. “That”, he submitted,
“was the real object of the Nuremberg Trial; it was a gigantic ‘put up
show’, a gigantic piece of propaganda.” (Page 88.) “The Trial was decked out
to look like an authentic judicial process: the victors showed a really
astonishing contempt for justice and truth and a really pathetic faith in
sophistry.” (Page 74.)
The conclusions of the author of this little book are
remarkable if only because it was published three years before these
conclusions were confirmed beyond any possible doubt by the publication in
1949 by the U.S. State Department of the short hand transcript of the
deliberations held in London in 1945 to make arrangements for the so-called
trials in Nuremberg during which General Nikitchenko, who later acted as one
of the two Russian judges on the Tribunal, clearly disclosed the real nature
of the trials. “We are dealing here,” General Nikitchenko declared, “with
the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose
conviction has already been announced at both the Moscow and Yalta
Conferences by the heads of State.… The fact that the Nazi leaders are
criminals has already been established. The task of the Tribunal is only to
determine the measure of guilt of each particular person and to mete out the
necessary punishment.”
It must be admitted however that such books at the time
exercised no perceptible influence on public opinion. So far as war-crimes
trials were concerned the man in the street naturally preferred to rely on
such weighty authorities as Professor Arthur Goodhart, Professor of
Jurisprudence at Oxford University, who emphatically pronounced that
war-crimes trials were an admirable innovation which would facilitate the
speedy administration of justice, and Lord Justice Wright, one of the
greatest English lawyers of his generation, who declared that so long as
accused persons did in fact receive justice, it was immaterial that the
court which tried them was composed of their accusers.
It is indeed hard to account for the equanimity with which
the vast majority of lawyers accepted this view.
For thousands of years in all civilized countries the principle has been
accepted that criminal prosecutions and civil actions could only be decided
by the decision of a strictly impartial court. “The very essence of a fair
trial is a third-party judgement,” as Victor Gollancz pointed out in 1961
with regard to the trial of Adolf Eichmann by Jewish judges.
For lawyers to dispute this was no less astonishing than if a conference of
eminent surgeons unanimously passed a resolution that no example could be
found of anyone having benefited by a surgical operation, or as if a synod
of leading Christian ecclesiastics approved a declaration that prayer could
never be anything but a waste of time.
Had the Council of Nicaea, for example, passed such a
resolution, historians of the Christian Church would have been set a
difficult task reconciling this resolution with Christian thought and
practice both before and since. Future historians of the development of
jurisprudence will have similar difficulty in explaining how it came about
that the Nuremberg Trials were approved by so many leading jurists from the
most highly civilized countries in the world.
With regard to terror bombing which ranks with genocide and
war-crimes trials as one of the three culminating features of the retrograde
movement of civilization which began imperceptibly in 1914, it must be
admitted that this innovation was accepted by public opinion without
opposition or misgivings. The reason was that officially terror bombing was
merely a figment of the imagination of the mendacious Dr. Goebbels. As
previously stated, on the 7th February, 1944, two years after the Lindemann
Plan had been put into operation, Viscount Cranborne solemnly declared, “The
R.A.F. has never indulged in purely terror raids.” Also the British public
first heard of this infamous plan when its adoption by Mr. Churchill’s War
Cabinet in March 1942 was casually disclosed in the paragraph quoted above
from the little booklet entitled Science and Government, by Sir
Charles Snow, published in 1961.
Some six months afterwards voluminous details of the air offensive launched
in accordance with this plan were published by H.M. Stationery Office in the
four massive volumes referred to above. Nothing also was generally known to
distinguish the mass air raid on Dresden as the crowning atrocity of this
campaign. When the character of this air raid was disclosed in a book
written with official approval and assistance in 1963, it was presented and
widely accepted as an original discovery by an enterprising and industrious
author.
With the wealth of information now available, it is hard to
realise how little was known in the years immediately following the end of
the Second World War of the nature of that struggle. Such booklets as
Epitaph on Nuremberg and Advance to Barbarism mentioned above,
whatever merits or shortcomings they may have possessed, at least
demonstrated the possibility of making bricks without straw. They also
expressed in print the misgivings and suspicions felt by many at the time,
hitherto only expressed in Parliament by such upholders of earlier standards
of conduct as Dr. Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, and Richard Stokes, M.P.
The British authorities, while the “strategic air offensive”
was going on, were under no delusions as to what would be the reaction of a
wide section of the public if its true nature was allowed to become known.
Thus, in a minute dated the 28th February, 1943, Sir Archibald Sinclair
explained to Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, that it was
necessary to stifle all public discussion on the subject because if the
truth had been disclosed in response to the enquiries being made by
influential political and religious leaders, their inevitable condemnation
would impair the morale of the bomber crews and consequently their bombing
efficiency.
For nearly two decades it remained possible to do little
more than speculate concerning the so-called Allied strategic air offensive
against Germany. The particulars given in Advance to Barbarism were
derived from the disclosures made in a little book entitled Bombing
Vindicated
by J. M. Spaight, Principal Assistant Secretary of the Air Ministry,
published in 1944, perhaps the most illuminating book written during the
Second World War, as confirmed by Air Marshal Harris’s book, Bomber
Offensive,
published in 1947.
It is not in the least remarkable that Hitler and his
adherents were able to keep hidden from their countrymen the crimes against
humanity being committed in Germany: anyone who ventured to protest at what
was taking place faced death or being sent to a concentration camp which not
seldom amounted to the same fate. When the war came to an end and the
victims of the Nazi regime were released, a flood of information poured
forth concerning the iniquities of the vanquished: nothing however was
revealed concerning the conduct of the victors which remained as shrouded as
ever by a cloak of silence. It may seem strange that it was considered
necessary to maintain this cloak of silence for so long after victory had
been won when the Government was in a position to say like Lady Macbeth,
“What is done cannot be undone.” It is even stranger that it was found
possible to do so after the emergency war legislation designed to suppress
all expression of opinion deemed likely to hamper the successful conduct of
the war had been allowed to lapse. In contemporary Russia or Spain this
would have been an easy matter as in these countries functioned an official
censor whose duty it was to censor the publication of all books and
newspapers. But in Britain no censor had existed since the times of the
Stuart kings. After 1945 everyone in Britain enjoyed the right once again to
express any opinion they liked which was not libellous, seditious,
blasphemous or obscene.
Nevertheless it was found possible to keep the truth from
leaking out concerning terror bombing for upwards of two decades, although
no legal machinery existed to control public expressions of opinion.
In no other country in the world would this have been
possible. The British however are politically the most advanced people in
the world, with unique powers of self-discipline when it is made to appear
to them that national interests are at stake. These powers had first fully
bloomed in 1936 when all the European and American newspapers were freely
discussing an alleged association between King Edward VIII and a Mrs. Wallis
Simpson. Yet for many months the entire British Press, as if edited by one
man, preserved an unbroken silence. Naturally there was much verbal
speculation and gossip in Britain but only those who read the Press knew any
details, and as those British newspapers that specialised in
scandalmongering remained silent with regard to l’affaire Simpson
most people discounted as mere rumours what the foreign Press was saying.
Few realized in Britain that a grave constitutional crisis was threatening
which was causing the Government the gravest anxiety.
It was not until after the abdication that it became known
how the Prime Minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, had dealt with the matter.
Fortunately the leading national newspapers had recently fallen under the
control of a few wealthy men, the so-called Press Barons of Fleet Street.
Mr. Baldwin approached them personally, explained the situation frankly and
appealed to them not to report l’affaire Simpson in the newspapers
controlled by them and to bring pressure to bear on the smaller newspapers
to ignore the subject until he had had time to ascertain the King’s
intentions and to decide what had best be done. He stressed that the Crown
was the link which bound together the British Empire and if this link was
weakened, the unity of the Empire would be in peril.
Mr. Baldwin did not appeal in vain. The British Press
remained silent. It was not until he had consulted at length with the Prime
Ministers of the Dominions that he gave the signal to his stooge, the Bishop
of Bradford, to give public expression to the heartfelt misgivings felt by
the latter concerning the King’s mode of life and in particular the erring
monarch’s resolve not to follow the example of his grandfather, Edward
VII, when involved in an affaire de coeur, but to marry
the lady in question. The taboo of silence was lifted. Edward VIII abdicated
and retired into exile. Before the bulk of the British public had realised
the gravity of the situation, this unique episode of British history was
over with a minimum of excitement, scandal and recrimination.
In 1945 the Baldwin technique was adopted to prevent facts
from being disclosed concerning two outstanding features of the war which
had just been brought to a victorious conclusion. A taboo of silence was
imposed on editors and publishers similar to that imposed so successfully
nine years before in regard to l’affaire Simpson. In some ways this
taboo was even more remarkable than the earlier taboo because no national
interests seemed to be involved and yet it was found possible to maintain
it, practically unbroken, for upwards of two decades.
An explanation still remains to be found why in 1945 the
British authorities should have considered it necessary or even desirable to
impose a taboo of silence on all mention of terror bombing and war-crimes
trials.
Except that they were both, like genocide, symptoms of a
world-wide tendency to revert to primitive practices in warfare, they were
otherwise quite unconnected. They became linked entirely by a chance
circumstance. The conception of terror bombing can be traced back to as
early as the 1920s when Air Marshal Trenchard recommended the construction
of large, long-range bombers designed for attacks on the civilian population
of an enemy. The conception of war-crimes trials had originated as recently
as November 1943, from an unconsidered suggestion by Mr. Winston Churchill
at an alcoholic orgy held to celebrate the conclusion of the Teheran
Conference. Without seemingly premeditation, the communist dictator, Stalin,
proposed that when victory was achieved 50,000 German officers and
technicians should be massacred. This proposal could not be dismissed as
merely a result of drinking numerous toasts in vodka because everyone
present knew that as recently as the spring of 1940 Stalin had carried out
such a massacre of 15,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest where their
bodies were subsequently found. President Roosevelt made the suggestion the
subject for one of his tasteless jokes but Mr. Churchill indignantly
declared that “the British public will never stand for mass-murder!” adding,
probably as an afterthought, “No one, Nazi, or no, shall be dealt with
summarily without a legal trial.”
An open breach between these ill-assorted allies was
ultimately averted by a makeshift compromise. In deference to the strange
susceptibilities of his British guest, Stalin agreed to forego his massacre
and consented to “a legal trial” taking place before the prisoners were put
to death. Later this compromise was formally confirmed at the conferences
held in Moscow and in Yalta.
It was not until after the unconditional surrender of
Germany in 1945 that the difficulties of carrying out in practice this novel
idea became apparent. At the Yalta Conference it had been agreed that a
score of the most prominent political and military leaders of the vanquished
should be selected, labelled ‘war-criminals’ and subjected to a trial before
a court composed of British, American, French and Russian judges. According
to the Russian judge, General Nikitchenko, the only duty of the court would
be to rubberstamp the decision of the politicians at the Yalta Conference
that the prisoners were guilty. All seemed plain sailing. This view of the
matter was naturally acceptable to Russian judges as being in accordance
with communist theory and practice, but many were doubtful if Western judges
could be found who would be equally accommodating. This difficulty was
eventually surmounted by agreeing that the facts upon which the charges were
based should be laid before the court in the usual way for adjudication,
each judge being left free to reach his own conclusions on the facts placed
before him.
This solution however immediately aroused widespread
consternation. Most of the victorious Powers had skeletons in their national
cupboards and were determined that no evidence should be produced to the
court which would reveal these skeletons. To meet these objections, it
became necessary to sift the evidence carefully beforehand. In addition, the
court was directed, as it saw fit, to exclude any evidence submitted by the
defence as irrelevant, by which was meant any evidence which would not
support a conviction.
Britain had a particularly gruesome skeleton in her cupboard
in the shape of her terror bombing campaign. In popular estimation in 1945
the most obvious of Hitler’s crimes was his initiation of what was then
known as indiscriminate bombing, that is to say, bombing unrestricted to
military objectives. Nevertheless, to the general astonishment, no charge
relating to German bombing was preferred against any of Hitler’s surviving
colleagues. “To have done so,” Mr. Justice Jackson, the chief American
prosecutor at Nuremberg, later declared frankly, “would have been to invite
recriminations which would not have been useful at the trial.”
In short in 1945 the British Government found itself in a
painful dilemma. A verdict based on carefully selected facts would not
accomplish the purpose the trial was intended to serve, namely, to act as a
substitute for Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles by establishing
Germany’s war-guilt for all time. As the trial proceeded it would soon
become clear to all that it was a mere bizarre farce, to use the description
applied to it by the Oxford historian, Dr. Alan Taylor, twenty years
afterwards.
Yet although it had become clear that the trial would serve
no useful purpose of any kind, it was impossible for the British Government
to refuse to take part because the proposal that a trial of the vanquished
leaders should take place after victory had come in the first place on
behalf of Britain from Mr. Churchill himself.
To preserve their secret the British authorities realized
that it would not be sufficient to provide that evidence of British terror
bombing should be excluded from consideration by the court at Nuremberg if
concurrently the fact that terror bombing had taken place was allowed to
become common knowledge as a result of free discussion in Britain of the
subject. The court might then be tempted to take judicial notice thereof and
enquire further, with the result the veracity of H.M. Ministers would
ultimately be called in question.
It was therefore decided to impose a stringent taboo on all
discussion of terror bombing. But it was realised that if free discussion
were permitted of the nature of the Nuremberg trials and the other similar
war-crimes trials then going on, the question was bound to be asked why had
it been considered necessary to sift the evidence before it was laid before
the court, thereby rendering worthless any verdict it might give, and why no
charge of having initiated indiscriminate bombing had been included in the
indictments. It was soon realised that too many people knew the answer to
the latter question and if free discussion on the subject was permitted the
truth would soon leak out. A similar taboo to that on discussion on terror
bombing was therefore imposed on discussion of war-crimes trials.
Scores of memoirs, books and articles have made familiar to
all every detail of the Abdication: the taboo of silence imposed by Mr.
Baldwin is remembered with unstinted admiration by foreigners as an
outstanding example of British self-discipline in a national crisis.
This taboo of 1936 remained in force for only a few months
and was limited to newspaper editors. The taboo imposed in 1945 extended not
only to editors but to authors, reviewers and historians: it remained in
force for upwards of sixteen years. Only persons personally affected by this
taboo realised that it existed: when in 1961 it was lifted surprise was
expressed that no one until then had heard of the Lindemann Plan. Except for
Air Marshal Harris, terror bombing found few defenders.
Although the British public seemed outwardly indifferent to
this belated revelation, it may be that the vehement outcry in Britain when
the American air force began to bomb military objectives in Vietnam in 1966
was a retarded expression of the horror subconsciously felt in 1961.
Those upon whom fell the task of enforcing the taboo of 1945
were no respecters of persons. They suppressed not only would-be authors
striving to express their views for the first time in print but authors of
long established repute and men of international fame. For example, the
memorable book Politics: Trials and Errors
by the late Lord Hankey was accorded ‘the silent treatment’ because it
revealed the truth concerning the invasion of Norway in 1940 and denounced
the conviction as a war-criminal of the former Japanese ambassador to
London, Shigemitsu. Fortunately Lord Hankey’s appeal for rectification of
this glaring miscarriage of justice won the support of General MacArthur and
Shigemitsu was shortly released. Of all the books published in the post-war
period, this book alone can be said to have definitely influenced the course
of events.
Another distinguished victim of the taboo was Dean Inge,
from 1911 to 1933 Dean of St. Paul’s. Not only was he the author of many
learned works on philosophy and mysticism but he was also one of the most
gifted journalists of his time. Among contemporary writers he had no rival
in expressing a point of view lucidly, adequately and in the fewest possible
words: his epigrammatic sayings, terse, stimulating and uncompromising, were
quoted in the Press throughout the world. Editors competed eagerly for his
articles: he commanded the highest rates of pay in journalism. Although a
tireless critic of the shallow optimism, muddled thinking and the catchwords
of democracy accepted by all but a few in the years after the First World
War, the possibility that his articles needed censorship had never before
1945 occurred to anyone.
Naturally great was the Dean’s surprise and indignation when
after the Second World War he found that his articles when they appeared in
print had been drastically revised. His protests were vain. Fortunately a
copy of the booklet by the present author entitled Advance to Barbarism
published in 1948 came into his hands and he wrote at once, “In this book
you have well said what it was high time was said by someone.” His efforts
to review the book were politely rejected. “I had intended to write a book
on similar lines to yours,” he remarked to the present author, “but at my
age (he was then in his eighties) I cannot undertake the labour of finding a
bold enough publisher.” Another effort to give public expression to his
views on the Nuremberg Trials was again foiled by a watchful editor. “I
hardly recognised my article when I saw it in print. It had been shamefully
mutilated,” he lamented. “All mention of your book had been carefully
omitted. My protests to the editor of the Evening Standard were
politely evaded.”
Finding himself deprived of the right of free speech in his
own country, the Dean at once complied with a request that he should
contribute a preface to a revised and greatly lengthened edition of
Advance to Barbarism which was awaiting publication in the United
States. Within three days he supplied an admirable preface of some nine
hundred words in his own handwriting. Thus supported, the American edition
appeared in 1953 and aroused wide attention in the United States, receiving
no less than thirty-nine favourable reviews. Its appearance was ignored in
Britain except by Encounter, a publication, subsidised with foreign
money by an organization labelled grandiloquently the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, which denounced it hotly, presumably on the ground that a breach of
the taboo was detrimental to ‘cultural freedom’.
An amusing sequel to Dean Inge’s vain efforts to defy the
taboo occurred after his death in February 1954 when a valiant attempt was
made to clear his memory of the stigma of having held opinions conflicting
with the convictions of those considered right-thinking people. A certain
Rev. C. Magraw wrote at once to The Times to say that although the
Dean might at time have expressed regrettable doubts concerning the legal
validity of war-crimes trials, yet his final conclusion was these doubts
were baseless. “In the summer of 1947,” he wrote, “the Dean told me that he
had changed his mind and he considered the Nuremberg Trials scrupulously
fair.”
One of the essential characteristics of a taboo is that even
when innocently infringed an irrational feeling of guilt is engendered not
only in the mind of the culprit but also in the minds of his relations and
friends. Even as late as 1960 this feeling of guilty shame persisted with
regard to the Dean’s unorthodox views which, it was felt, he had only been
saved from expressing by watchful editors. When in that year his friend and
former pupil, Canon Adam Fox, published what purported to be a complete
biography of Dean Inge,
with the aid and approval of the Dean’s family, he not only avoided all
mention of the Dean’s views on the Second World War and its aftermath but
pointedly excluded from reference in the voluminous bibliography in his book
mention of the preface which the Dean had contributed to the American
edition of Advance to Barbarism. This omission could hardly have been
accidental as this preface was the last production of the Dean’s pen.
When in the following year the true nature of what was then
still known as “the strategic bombing offensive” was casually revealed by
Sir Charles Snow in his little book, Science and Government, no
attempt was made to maintain the taboo of silence on the subject. The exact
contents of the Lindemann Plan came as a surprise to everyone who had not
had access to official sources of information. No one was deeply disturbed
to learn of a decision of the British Government so long before as 1942. As
the war had been won, it did not seem to matter very much how it had been
won. It is perhaps significant that less concern was expressed that terror
bombing should have been formally adopted than that H.M. Ministers should
have lied to conceal this guilty secret. Long before 1961 all inclination to
discuss war-crimes trials had disappeared, and now it was felt that the
question of terror bombing was also an unpleasant subject about which the
less said the better.
In short, the taboos imposed in 1945 triumphantly fulfilled
their essential purpose which was to gain time until the British public
could regard terror bombing and war-crimes trials dispassionately as
happenings of long past history which were best forgotten.
Both taboos were based on the principle so well expressed by
the lines of the Victorian poet, Coventry Patmore, in his poem Magna est
Veritas:
Chapter I — Primeval Simplicity
Once the theory of evolution had during the 19th century
become generally accepted, a belief in human progress, automatic and
ceaseless, naturally followed. The record of the rocks seemed conclusive: in
the lowest and most ancient strata were to be found fossils of simple and
primitive forms of life and above them the fossils of ever increasing
complexity, culminating in the evolution of man. The story of life on this
planet was a story of steady improvement, of better adaptations of each
species to its environment. The most fitted survived.
The survival of the fittest became popularly interpreted as
the survival of the strongest. As applied to mankind this was held to mean
that the strongest races survived, their superiority being demonstrated by
success in war. Naturally this view found favour among the leading nations
of Europe who since the days of Marathon had repeatedly on the battlefield
proved their military superiority to the oriental and coloured peoples. Down
to 1914 White Supremacy by this or any other test seemed indisputable.
Warfare was accepted as a characteristic of human life consistent with the
irrevocable laws of nature. As the British economist Walter Bagehot
(1826-77) wrote in his Physics and Politics, “war is the most showy
fact in human history.” It was generally assumed that war was as old as
mankind, expressing a fundamental human instinct. In his International
Law the famous jurist Sir Henry Maine refers casually to “the universal
belligerency of primitive man,” and adds clearly without fear of
contradiction, “It is not peace which is natural and primitive but war.”
Since the war of 1914-18, the so-called War to end War, the
truth of this assumption has been widely disputed, in particular by the
psychologist, Havelock Ellis. The life of early man in the remote past, he
argued, can best be determined from the mode of life of the most primitive
of modern races living at the present day. “When Australia was first visited
by Europeans,” he pointed out, “war in the sense of a whole tribe taking the
field against another tribe had no existence among the Australian
aborigines.”
Undeniably for thousands of years the aborigines of Australia lived in
conditions of contented and peaceful stagnation. Some indeed find it hard to
believe that this exceptional state of affairs provides an example of
conditions probably widely prevailing elsewhere in the world. They regard
the case of the aborigines of Australia as evidence that when no struggle
for survival has to be fought, no progress takes place. In Europe, Asia and
Africa, man had to contend with dangerous beasts of prey, thereby developing
daring and courage, qualities for which he found an outlet later in warfare
with his fellow man. Notoriously the descendants of the original inhabitants
of Australia lack ambition, enterprise and initiative, qualities necessary
in a struggle for survival, qualities which some maintain are generated and
stimulated by warfare.
The contrary view that war is an unmitigated evil of
comparatively recent origin is well expressed by Dr. R. L. Worrall in his
Footsteps of Warfare who contends that, until mankind began to settle in
communities depending on agriculture for support, warfare was unknown. “In
those days of savagery,” he writes, “men and women lacked every feature of
modern life including all the savageries of civilization. Only with the
passing of the Stone Age and of primitive communism did there come the
supreme savagery of war.”
He pictures the sparse population of the hunting period wandering freely
through country abounding with game of every kind and dismisses as baseless
the view that clashes must have occurred between the various groups of
hunters since no subject for conflict would exist in such conditions. There
is, he points out, an entire lack of evidence of warfare in primitive times,
although he admits that had warfare occurred it is difficult to imagine what
evidence of it could have survived so vast a length of time.
From time to time in certain areas, no doubt, such idyllic
conditions may have persisted for long periods and we are at liberty to
imagine that during these periods man may have come dimly to resemble the
Noble Savage of Rousseau. Thus, on the Australian continent, for tens of
thousands of years mankind lived undisturbed by intrusive neighbours and
probably by any major changes of climate. In such static conditions,
occasions for warfare would seldom if ever arise: the Australian aborigines
were certainly peaceful if not noble savages, and so they remained until
modern times. On the other hand in Europe, Central Asia, and in North
Africa, major changes of climate occurred during the Pleistocene Period with
great frequency according to geological standards. At one period Europe
enjoyed a temperate climate as far north as Lapland; southern Europe was
tropical. Later began a succession of ice ages separated by mild periods
lasting thousands of years. During the ice ages the climate of all Europe
north of the Alps may be compared to that of Greenland at the present day.
How did the hunting communities of northern Europe, during the oncoming of a
glacial period, deal with the communities already occupying the lands to
which they gradually withdrew as their own hunting grounds became less and
less habitable? They had been accustomed, no doubt, to act summarily when,
for example, they found a desirable cave already occupied by cave bears or
wolves. Can it be doubted that in comparable circumstances they dealt with
human obstructors by similar methods? And can it be doubted that the
original inhabitants of these more habitable lands took up the natural
attitude that changes of climate were no concern of theirs and that these
intruders ought to have been content to die resignedly and quietly of hunger
and cold in their own home lands without disturbing their neighbours?
Surely, points of view so different and so irreconcilable could have only
one outcome. One party had been doomed by nature to perish and each frankly
preferred this fate should be suffered by the other.
Probably every major change of climate in the Stone Ages
resulted in a series of minor wars—minor because in each only a few hundred
individuals or less would be involved, but other wise presenting the
essential characteristics of a modern war. It is a popular delusion that man
in prehistoric times was a stupid, half-animal creature altogether different
from modern man. Some types of man as long ago as 30,000 years—the
Cro-Magnon man who inhabited southern France in the Aurignacian Epoch—had a
brain of equal or even of greater capacity to that of the average modern
European. (The average cubic capacity of a Cro-Magnon skull was 1590 c.c.:
that of a modern European is 1480 c.c.) From this we can deduce that, as
modern European brains have proved capable of grasping the fact that it is
less trouble to dismantle and remove to one’s own country a factory
belonging to a conquered people than to build a factory for one’s self, it
should not have been beyond a Cro-Magnon brain to have grasped the fact that
it was less laborious to appropriate the stone axe of a vanquished enemy
than to chip out a new one. By the same argument, this much vaunted
achievement of modern reasoning should not even have been beyond modern
man’s cousins in the Stone Age, the celebrated Neanderthal species of the
human race which, in spite of a shambling gait, great beetling ape-like
eyebrow ridges and massive chinless jaws, possessed a capacious brain of a
far from simple type. In fact, certain specimens of Neanderthal man
possessed brains above the average in size—the skull found at La Chapelle
had a capacity of over 1600 c.c., at least 120 c.c. above the modern
average, according to Sir Arthur Keith.
We are justified in believing, therefore, that the La Chapelle man, in spite
of his unprepossessing simian appearance, would have been fully capable of
grasping all the motives for a modern war, of conducting warfare in entirely
the contemporary spirit, so far as his limited resources permitted, and of
dealing with a defeated enemy in accordance with the same principles and
with precisely the same objects in view as were applied to a defeated enemy
in that Year of Grace, 1945.
One fact relating to Neanderthal man, established beyond
question but otherwise inexplicable, makes it possible to say that the first
major European war took place during the Old Stone Age at a date which
experts have estimated to have been approximately between thirty and fifty
thousand years ago. For tens of thousands of years preceding this
approximate date Neanderthal man was in occupation of a vast area stretching
from Gibraltar in the West to Palestine in the East and extending southward
from the great ice fields which then covered the northern half of Europe.
Having been in undisturbed possession of this area for an enormous length of
time, Neanderthal man disappeared, apparently rather suddenly. In strata of
a later date his remains are no longer found; thereafter are found only
traces of men of the same type as now occupy Europe.
What brought about the extinction of Neanderthal man will
probably always remain a matter of speculation. All that is known for
certain is that above a certain level all traces of his culture—known as the
Mousterian—abruptly disappear and are replaced by traces of a distinct
culture known as the Aurignacian. It is, of course, possible that
Neanderthal man died out through some unknown natural cause so that his
vacated hunting grounds were peaceably occupied by his successors, the men
of the Aurignacian Epoch. Dismissing this vague possibility, Sir Arthur
Keith writes: “Those who observe the fate of the aborigines of Australia and
Tasmania will have no difficulty in accounting for the disappearance of
Homo Neanderthalensis.”
It is hard to believe, however, that the Neanderthals
passively allowed themselves to be dispossessed of their means of
subsistence. Through hundreds of centuries they had successfully adapted
themselves to a most rigorous climate and had succeeded in the struggle for
survival in competition with some of the most formidable carnivores that
have ever existed—sabre-tooth tigers, lions, and cave bears. To quote Sir
Arthur Keith again: “Neanderthal man’s skill as a flint-artist shows that
his abilities were not of a low order. He had fire at his command, he buried
his dead, he had a distinct and highly evolved form of culture.” He was a
fearless and skilful hunter of big game. He was confronted by no such
superiority in weapons as that which made it impossible for the aborigines
of Australia to resist the firearms of the European invaders. The conclusion
reached by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn in his Men of the Old Stone
Age is that the Aurignacian invaders “competed for a time with the
Neanderthals before they dispossessed them of their principal stations and
drove them out of the country or killed them in battle.”
There is, thus, good ground for believing that the
Mousterian Period ended as a consequence of a struggle which conforms with
the definition of warfare accepted by Havelock Ellis—“War is an organised
attack of one community on another.” The outcome of this struggle was
ultimately the complete extermination of that distinct species of the human
race, Neanderthal man. Regarding this grim outcome Professor Osborn
observes:
“In the racial replacements of savage as well as of
historic peoples the men are often killed and the women spared and taken
into the families of the warriors, but no evidence has thus far been found
that even the Neanderthal women were spared or allowed to remain in the
country, because in none of the burials of Aurignacian times is there any
evidence of the crossing or admixture of the Aurignacian peoples with the
Neanderthals.”
There is no need for us to explain the fate which overcame
the Neanderthals by stressing the superior intelligence of their conquerors
or by attributing to the latter the possession of more effective weapons. It
seems probable that Neanderthal man lived in small, isolated communities,
each community quite unconcerned with the fate and perhaps unaware of the
existence of other Neanderthal communities. Each community no doubt defended
itself desperately—to quote Professor Osborn—“with wooden weapons and with
stone-headed dart and spear,” probably each such isolated struggle was
finally decided by weight of numbers.
If the conclusions of the authorities quoted above be
accepted, it becomes possible to say with confidence that there took place
in Europe in the Old Stone Age, according to the experts more than thirty
thousand years ago, a decisive struggle between the representatives of two
distinct branches of the human race, the Neanderthals and a tribe or tribes
of men similar in all physical respects to modern man. Such a struggle would
certainly merit the title of the First Great European War since its results
were infinitely more momentous than the results of any of the tribal and
civil wars which have occurred since in Europe—including any of the
celebrated European wars of modern times.
It is probable also that some of those features of
contemporary warfare which are popularly regarded as unprecedented
innovations were a normal feature of warfare in the most remote times. What
is now regarded as the old distinction between uniformed combatant forces
and the civilian population is, judged on the scale of time by which man’s
history on this planet is recorded, an innovation of yesterday—a matter of a
mere couple of centuries. In prehistoric warfare, every member of the whole
hunting community would be equally involved with no more regard to age or
sex than in warfare to-day. In the event of defeat, all would suffer the
same fate. Often, no doubt, during hostilities the women and children left
behind in a settlement were in greater danger than the able-bodied males of
the community away on a hunting expedition to collect food. It would surely
not have been beyond brains with 120 c.c. greater capacity than the modern
average to realize the tactical, material, and psychological benefits which
would result from a sudden and devastating raid on “the enemy’s main centres
of population.”
Even a recent innovation regarded as especially without any
kind of precedent may not have been lacking in the earliest warfare. In the
Stone Age men lived by hunting the herds of wild horses, deer, and wild
cattle then living in profusion on the great Eurasian plains which were also
the prey of various carnivorous animals, such as the sabre-tooth tiger and
the cave bear. No doubt, these dangerous animals were bitterly hated as
rivals for the available supplies of food, and feared owing to their taste
for human flesh when occasion offered. Opportunities for reprisals would
from time to time have occurred. We can only deduce the nature of these
reprisals from what occurs at the present day in primitive lands. In parts
of Indo-China, for example, the chief enemy is the tiger whose depredations
are, as a rule, endured with resignation by the natives. Occasionally,
however, a tiger blunders into a trap or is found overcome by old age,
accident, or disease. A formal act of retribution is then staged in which
the whole village community, men, women, and children, takes an enthusiastic
part. The victim is first reduced to complete helplessness by being deprived
of food and is then mocked, baited to frenzy, terrified by fireworks, and
finally finished off in a slow and painful manner amid general rejoicings.
The same custom prevails in far-off Tibet, where the chief enemy is the
wolf. The Swedish traveller, Sven Hedin, tells us that, when the herdsmen
manage to catch one of the wolves who live by preying on their flocks, they
first blind the victim and then beat it to death with their knouts.
By analogy we can safely assume that the men of the Stone
Age acted in the same way when chance placed at their mercy so dangerous and
hated a rival as the cave bear. Upon one individual animal would be
inflicted a kind of symbolic punishment for all the offences committed by
the whole species to which it belonged. And, if the men of the Stone Age
were accustomed to deal with animal enemies in this way, is it not probable
that, on occasion, they dealt with particularly feared and hated human
enemies in the same way? It follows that, if the above reasoning is
justified, the practice of mock-trials recently introduced solemnly as an
epoch-making innovation is nothing but a revival of a practice so long
abandoned by civilized peoples that its origin in the remote past has become
forgotten.
Although, as has been repeatedly demonstrated of late, a
mock-trial can be carried out more or less in the form of a judicial trial,
the origin and purpose of a mock-trial is entirely distinct from the origin
and purpose of a judicial trial. The former, an act of symbolic vengeance in
which the victim suffers for the misdoings of his species or nation, dates
from remote antiquity, from the dawn period of humanity when the shadowy
border line between the subhuman and the human had barely been passed. The
judicial trial is obviously of much later origin, originating at the time
when human communities had begun to adopt customs and taboos and the
necessity arose of deciding whether these had been infringed. The person
condemned at a judicial trial suffers not as a symbol but for personal acts
of which he has personally been found guilty.
It is assumed that the reader is sufficiently familiar with
the details of the Nuremberg proceedings of 1945-1946, so that there is no
need to point out how closely primitive precedents were unconsciously
followed in them. The underlying spirit will be further examined later in
these pages. One indication of this spirit may, however, be given here. The
announcement was actually made in the British Press that three British
housewives were to be selected and sent to Nuremberg at public expense to
attend these proceedings as representatives of the British housewives who
had endured the Blitz.
Incredible as it now appears, the likelihood of some such
arrangement being adopted was at the time widely discussed in responsible
and influential circles. A variation of the idea, specifically reported not
as a vague possibility under consideration but as a serious arrangement
being actively carried into effect, will be found in the Daily Mail
of November 29, 1945, under front page headlines, “Blitz Housewife to Face
Goering & Co.” Beneath is printed a report from “our special correspondent
in Nuremberg, Rhona Churchill,” which begins, “‘Mrs. Jones,’ typical British
housewife, who has stood in the fish-queue, been through the Blitz, and had
her whole domestic life turned upside down by the war, is to be invited to
come to Nuremberg and see in court the men who caused her troubles.”
Rhona Churchill cites as her authority for this
announcement, Major Peter Casson, whom she describes as an “officer in
charge of V.I.P.s” (Very Important People). This military gentleman, she
states, assured her that plans already existed to carry into effect this
proposal, and that he himself “was asking Lord Justice Lawrence’s Marshal to
make the necessary arrangements, because technically ‘Mrs. Jones’ will come
here as a guest of the British judges.”
Unfortunately, it is not known what was the reaction of Lord
Justice Lawrence when he was informed by his Marshal that the V.I.P. Officer
had appointed him to act the part of host to the fish-queueing “Mrs. Jones”.
We can but hazard the guess that it was both dignified and vigorous. Until
definite information on this point comes to hand, Rhona Churchill’s message
will remain incomplete. Nevertheless, as it stands, this message is of
unique interest to historians and anthropologists, although clearly neither
Rhona Churchill nor Peter Casson had the least comprehension of its
significance. That there could exist any reasonable objection to such a
proposal evidently occurred to neither of them although the sapient Major
expressed fears that red-tape might cause some delay. As “Mrs. Jones” would
“travel here as a V.I.P., possibly by air, live in a V.I.P. hotel, and use
one of the V.I.P. gallery seats,” Major Casson had no doubt that there would
be keen competition for the post, but he added, “We are hoping there will be
no wire-pulling and the woman who comes here will really be a typical
housewife.” He gathered that the Home Office would make the selection and
that the housewife selected would be accompanied not by two female
companions but by an A.R.P. warden and “a rank and file soldier who had won
the V.C.” He concluded by telling Rhona Churchill that he understood that
Lord Justice Lawrence had sent Mr. Winston Churchill a cordial invitation to
come to Nuremberg, not as a member of “Mrs. Jones’” troop but as his
personal guest. A close personal friend had reported, however, that the
Prime Minister was hesitating to accept “for fear that he might give a false
impression of gloating over his defeated enemies.”
It will be observed that both Rhona Churchill and the
democratically-minded Major Casson assumed as a matter of common knowledge
that “Goering & Co.” were, in fact, the men who had caused “Mrs. Jones’”
troubles. Yet, only eighteen months before, an authoritative book had been
published by a former Principal Secretary of the British Air Ministry, Mr.
J. M. Spaight, C.B., C.B.E., for the express purpose of establishing the
fact that the origin of the Blitz could be traced to a brain wave which came
to British military experts as long before as 1936. Mr. Spaight made it
clear that “Mrs. Jones” and everyone else who experienced the Blitz had
endured it not as helpless and passive victims but as a result of “a
splendid decision” to make them endure it which the British experts
themselves had come to. This most remarkable book, Bombing Vindicated,
will be examined in detail later in these pages: it is only necessary here
to note that its conclusions were accepted by all informed persons without
question at the time of its publication in April, 1944. In fact, no attempt
has been made since by anyone to contradict or refute its claims. The
British public gladly accepted Mr. Spaight’s contentions as a well deserved
compliment, but at the same time remained as firmly convinced as ever that
“Goering & Co.” were entirely responsible for the Blitz.
To social psychologists, also, Rhona Churchill’s message to
the Daily Mail is of the greatest interest because it provides a
classic example of that system of thought which George Orwell has analysed
in his startling book, Nineteen Eighty-four,
under the name, doublethink, the system which turns to practical
account the philosophical proposition that truth is what best serves the
interest of the community. Now, clearly, in 1945 it was in the interests of
the community that the belief should be maintained that the Blitz had been
endured as a result of a splendid decision to endure it by the British
public. It was desirable that “Mrs. Jones” should remain convinced that she
had voluntarily elected to undergo this ordeal as a result of her
intellectual conviction that only by undergoing it could Right and Justice
triumph. Therefore, Mr. Spaight’s facts were true and his contentions
justified. But, at the same time, for the purposes of the trial at
Nuremberg, it was desirable—and therefore true—that “Mrs. Jones” should be
an entirely helpless victim. Not only was “Mrs. Jones” a symbol: “Goering &
Co.” were also symbols. They symbolized, of course, evil overcome. The trial
at Nuremberg was not what James Whistler would have called an “Arrangement
in Grey.” It was an arrangement in black and white, jet Black and dazzling
White. The Blitz was undeniably an evil.
For the purposes of the trial no limitations of the evil
symbolized by “Goering & Co.” could be admitted. It was, therefore,
necessary—and, therefore, true—to maintain that “Goering & Co.” were
responsible for the Blitz, or as Rhona Churchill puts it, “they had caused
‘Mrs. Jones’ troubles.”
Acceptance of the plans disclosed by Major Casson to Rhona
Churchill would thus have imposed on the British public the task of
believing simultaneously two contradictory and utterly irreconcilable
assertions. This, in itself, however, would have been no obstacle to their
acceptance since, during the war years, the British public had been
carefully trained in doublethink as an essential part of the war
effort. The gallant Major himself only apprehended difficulty from official
red-tape in arranging details. Nevertheless, after that first triumphant
announcement of these plans in the Daily Mail, nothing further was
heard of them. No alternative plans were put forward by anyone. For a reason
or reasons unknown, discussion of the matter ceased and the whole subject as
quickly forgotten.
Although abruptly cut short and consigned to oblivion, this
episode provides an invaluable starting point for inquiry. The mere fact
that it was possible without causing general astonishment to announce the
existence of plans to carry out such a purpose, indicates that the British
public in 1945 was in a frame of mind which it is impossible to describe as
judicial in any accepted sense of the word. But the underlying idea is so
entirely in accord with primitive tradition that the possibility is at once
suggested that it might have been inspired by what Dr. Jung would call a dim
racial memory. Among primitive peoples of the present day and, by inference,
among those of the remote past, an essential feature of the symbolic act of
retribution was the formal mocking of the victim. Whether a modern tiger, a
prehistoric cave bear, or a captive human enemy, the preliminary part of the
ceremony consists of reminding the captive of his past power and strength,
contrasted with his present helplessness, and followed by a description of
the torments which he must shortly endure. It seems also to have been a
general practice to leave this part of the ceremony to the women of the
community, probably with the idea that this would add to the humiliation of
the victim.
A ceremony of this kind, carried out in accordance with
prehistoric ritual is clearly indicated in the story of the downfall of King
Agag in the first Book of Samuel. In a few terse, vivid sentences we are
told how the gallant Saul defeated and captured Agag but spared his life
contrary to ancient tradition and to the outspoken annoyance of the prophet
Samuel, who strongly disapproved of what has now come to be called
“pampering”. By threats of revolution, Saul is reduced to admitting that he
had sinned in not acting in accordance with traditional ferocity and, to
prevent any possibility of the captive escaping death by what we should call
a “wangle”, Samuel undertook the role of judge-executioner himself, and
“hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal”—clearly the form of
execution called by the Chinese “death by a thousand and one cuts.” Before
this gruesome work was commenced, however, the fallen King of Amalek is
recorded as observing to the prophet, “Surely the bitterness of death is
past.”
As it stands in the text this observation is utterly
incomprehensible. Brought forth suddenly from honorable captivity as a
prisoner of war to find himself arbitrarily condemned to a horrible and
lingering death by a self-appointed judge-executioner, this is surely the
last comment one would expect the unfortunate monarch to make to the
bloodthirsty old prophet awaiting him, knife in hand.
If, however, we assume that the ancient ritual had been
strictly followed—as a matter of course, and therefore not worth
recording—the significance of Agag’s remark becomes clear. For some hours
previously, Agag would have stood tied to a stake surrounded by the
daughters of Zion screaming insults, enlarging on his shortcomings, and
describing with a wealth of oriental imagery the details of the treatment
which he would shortly endure at the hands of the prophet. Even if this
ordeal had only been a matter of hours—and not twelve months—it is easy to
understand how Agag could have reached the state of mind of exclaiming to
Samuel, “I realize what you are going to do with me, but for pity’s sake
begin it at once without any further waiting!”
Passing through space and time from Gilgal, in 1079 B.C., to
Nuremberg, in A.D. 1945, it is interesting to speculate why ancient practice
was not followed in this respect at Nuremberg. Perhaps it was feared that
the presence of three housewives performing the symbolic act of gloating
would prove embarrassing to the eminent members of the English Bar, who had
been prevailed upon to take part in the proceedings on the assurance that
these would partake strictly of a judicial character? Or perhaps the problem
of deciding what exactly should be the role of these three females proved
insoluble—should their participation be limited to one ladylike stare
directed at each of the captives, or should certain sounds and gestures,
strictly in accordance with the most ancient tradition, be barred because
these had become associated in the modern mind with the music hall? A
suitable attire for the ceremony would also not have been easy to
find—traditional attire might have suggested fancy dress or a Hawaiian
chorus, while umbrellas and handbags would have been an obvious anachronism
for participants in so ancient a ceremonial. Most probably, however, the
idea was abandoned owing to the stage managers despairing of being able to
find three females who, however carefully selected and trained, could be
trusted to act the role decided upon in such unfamiliar surroundings. Women
of whatever class would to-day find it difficult to assume to order the
manners of their remote ancestresses and in which ever way their deportment
failed—whether it was too theatrical or too wooden—the result would
introduce an atmosphere of farce or even of burlesque which, beyond all
else, it was desired to avoid so far as it was possible.
To summarize the conclusions which we may arrive at with
regard to warfare in prehistoric times, we may say that, in essentials, it
in no way differed markedly from warfare to-day. It will be found that
neither in causes, conduct, nor results do fundamental distinctions exist.
With regard to causes, in prehistoric times warfare probably
usually arose as a result of a change of climatic conditions causing a
shifting of population from an area which had become uninhabitable to
another already populated. In modern times, one of the commonest causes of
war is an over-populated country seeking to find by violence an outlet for
its surplus population.
With regard to conduct, the spirit in which warfare was
conducted in prehistoric times was probably exactly similar to that in which
warfare has come to be conducted during the last three decades. In both, the
main characteristics are directness, simplicity, and an entire lack of
artificial restraints. In both, the only rule is to damage the enemy in any
way physically possible. Above all, in neither will any trace be found of
that perhaps arbitrary distinction between combatants and non-combatants,
that is to say between the enemy’s armed forces and the enemy’s women and
children. In both, democratic principles are followed: no privilege of
immunity is granted to anyone—however weak and defenceless.
With regard to results, certain distinctions appear, but
these cannot be termed fundamental. In prehistoric times, wars were wars of
extermination: one killed all the enemies one could and took away or
destroyed all enemy property upon which one could lay one’s hands. In
present-day warfare, to date at any rate, only distinguished enemy leaders
are done to death, although it must not be forgotten that, in 1945, many
quite minor German political leaders and officials were summarily murdered.
The fact remains, however, that the bulk of the enemy population is not at
present deliberately exterminated. Still, much the same result however is
achieved when an industrial population is dealt with by dismantling and
removing the factories on which it depends for subsistence, by cutting
imports, forbidding exports, and leaving the population to starve. The
consequence of this procedure will be realized if one can imagine the fate
of the inhabitants of Birmingham or Coventry if all their factories were
dismantled, and the essential machinery removed to some foreign land.
Prehistoric warfare created a desert and called it peace—solitudinem
faciunt, pacem appellant—warfare to-day creates a slum and calls that
peace.
If the Second World War be taken as an example of
contemporary warfare, the consequences to the vanquished are not merely the
unintentional result of wholesale plundering inspired by simple greed and
carried out regardless of the subsequent fate of the victims such as so
frequently followed victorious wars in classical and mediaeval times. What
the victors in 1945 intended should be the fate the vanquished was clearly
set out in the infamous Morgenthau Plan, formulated by Henry Morgenthau, the
Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, under the influence and guidance of a fellow
Jew, Harry Dexter White (alias Weit), Assistant Secretary to the Treasury,
and later unmasked as a Communist spy. This plan was accepted by President
Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, at the Quebec
Conference on the 15th September, 1944. Under this plan Germany was to be
transformed into a pastoral country by the simple process of blowing up the
mines and demolishing the factories. With regard to the existing population,
numbering some seventy millions, mostly relying on industry for support,
reliance was placed on starvation reducing their number to a level which
could be supported by agricultural and pastoral pursuits.
It was only owing to an unforeseen change in the political
situation which began soon after the conclusion of hostilities, that the
Morgenthau Plan was not carried out in its entirety. Still extensive
sabotage operations, as distinct from systematic looting, were undertaken,
for details of which the reader is referred to Freda Utley’s memorable book,
Kostspielige Rache (Hamburg, 1950, Nölke Verlag). An enormous amount
of wanton destruction was systematically carried out and this campaign was
only reluctantly abandoned when the “Cold War” broke out between the United
States and the Soviet Union. The memory of this campaign of planned
destruction has been obscured by the “Wirtschaftswunder” which to the
amazement of everyone began in Western Germany some ten years after the
conclusion of hostilities and brought unprecedented prosperity and wealth to
a land which so shortly before had consisted mainly of ruins and slums. This
astonishing outcome of defeat was of course in no way connected with the
intentions of the victors, so dearly propounded by them at the Quebec
Conference in September 1944. It was in fact in every way the exact opposite
to what Morgenthau and his sinister satellite Harry Dexter White, alias
Weit, had so carefully planned and intrigued to bring about.
In summation it may be said that prehistoric and
contemporary warfare share the same essential characteristics. The main
distinction between them is that in prehistoric warfare all prisoners are
killed as a matter of course, while in contemporary warfare only the leaders
are done to death. The employment of captive enemies for forced labour for
the benefit of their captors and of course mass-deportations are
characteristics of present-day warfare which have been adopted from warfare
as it developed after mankind had formed settled communities, a development
which will be considered in the next chapter.
Chapter 2 — Organized Warfare
Wars in prehistoric times were unplanned, unrelated, and
probably rare happenings. They might be what we should term wars of
aggression, but they were certainly not wars of planned aggression.
A community living somewhere in northern Europe, let us say
on the shores of the Baltic, would find their hunting grounds becoming less
and less able to support them owing to the gradual advance of ice fields from
Scandinavia. In desperation, they would trek southward in search of less
rigorous conditions and would find such in, say, some river valley in
southern France. The inhabitants of this valley would resent this trespass
on their hunting grounds. A clash—quite unintended by both sides—would
result. One side would be wiped out or scattered, and for the victors life
would proceed as peaceably as of yore.
All this was changed when mankind began to practise
agriculture and to form settled communities. In the first place, this
permitted a great increase in the density of populations. Secondly, it led
for the first time to the accumulation in one spot of stores of food and
desirable articles, such as weapons, tools, pottery and jewellery—that is to
say, wealth, or to use military nomenclature, loot.
From this early period at the dawn of history, wars of
conquest must be dated. The hunters, and, after the domestication of
animals, herdsmen and shepherds of the surrounding country, were inevitably
filled with covetousness when they visited those early agricultural
settlements in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates. It is no accident that
the composer of the Ten Commandments included covetousness among those sins
under the particular displeasure of the Almighty. Perhaps, as he wrote, he
had just seen in the eyes of some half-savage visitors to his native city
the feelings which they could not disguise when they contrasted the wealth
and comfort which they saw around them with their own poverty and precarious
mode of life.
From the earliest times, the settled agricultural
communities along the Nile and Euphrates were subjected to periodic raids
and invasions by the savage tribes inhabiting the desert or mountain
hinterland. These alternated with preventive wars undertaken in
self-protection by the agricultural communities. The news would come in that
the tribes were planning another attack and, to forestall this attack, a
punitive expedition would be sent forth.
Thus, as early as the times before the first dynasty in
Egypt, and in the days of the Sumerian Kings of Southern Mesopotamia, two of
the commonest varieties of warfare had arisen—the war of conquest undertaken
to acquire the property of others, and the preventative war designed to
frustrate an expected attack. These two varieties of warfare together form
one of the two main divisions into which warfare may be divided, namely
primary warfare, that is warfare between combatants at different stages of
civilization. Most of the really important wars of history have been primary
wars.
The second of these two main divisions of warfare may be
labelled secondary warfare. Secondary wars are wars between combatants at
the same or approximately the same stage of civilization. In this division
are included all civil wars and, in fact, all the wars in this division are
in essence only civil wars. Although often extremely protracted and
sanguinary, their results are generally far less important than those of
primary wars.
The question of primary and secondary wars will be dealt
with in more detail later in this book. It is only necessary here to make
clear the distinction between them since they are often confused. From the
standpoint of world history, the political and cultural results of a war
between states at different levels of civilization are always important,
even though the bloodshed may be small. In wars between states having
similar or identical civilizations, the institutional changes are often
unimportant although the loss of life may be very great.
It is a curious fact that, although the civilized
inhabitants of the Nile Valley lived under the constant menace of primary
warfare in the shape of devastating invasions by the savage tribes of Syria,
Nubia and the Libyan desert, they seemed to have indulged with enthusiasm in
secondary warfare, that is to say, in minor wars between the various
principalities into which Egypt, in pre-dynastic times, was divided. What an
attack by savage nomadic tribes upon a civilized agricultural community
could entail, we can ascertain from the glowing description of such an
attack contained in the Book of Joshua. There we read that the Hebrews, when
they invaded the land of Canaan slew “both man and woman, young and old, and
ox and sheep and ass with the sword … the young man and the virgin, the
suckling also and the man with grey hairs.”
In view of this ghastly performance in which the holy men of
Israel evidently took great pride, it is certainly remarkable that the
prophet Samuel should have had the effrontery to chide King Agag because
“his sword had made women childless.” One cannot help wondering why it did
not occur to the King of Amalek to make the obvious retort. It may be in
fact that he did so retort, but the Hebrew scribe in attendance did not
think his words worthy of record. Alternatively, it must be remembered that
Samuel had appointed himself judge-executioner and, therefore, it is likely
that, in his role of judge, he ruled any defence or objection by the
prisoner as per se irrelevant. We are required to assume that Samuel
throughout acted on inspiration from On High which, if the case,
satisfactorily explains how he managed to grasp the most novel discovery of
recent international jurisprudence, namely, that the most assured method of
securing a conviction is to permit the accuser also to act the part of
judge.
Returning to the times when civilization first dawned in
Egypt, we find evidence in plenty of primary wars in the shape of periodic
invasions by various barbarous peoples alternating with preventive wars,
leading to punitive expeditions penetrating far into Sinai, Nubia, and, even
Syria. At the same time, secondary wars were frequent in the shape of civil
wars between the native Egyptians.
The inhabitants of the lower Euphrates Valley were even more
exposed to attack by barbarous neighbours than their contemporaries living
in the Valley of the Nile. Precisely the same conditions existed there,
however. Invasions were sometimes victoriously repulsed and at other times
they led to massacres, devastation and the enslavement of the survivors.
Invariably, however, the victorious nomads ended by adopting the
civilization of the vanquished, so that in a few generations life proceeded
very much as before. Energetic rulers waged preventative wars and led
punitive expeditions far into the mountains of Elam and Armenia and even
into the plains of Syria. The ancient inhabitants of the Euphrates Valley
were more warlike than the inhabitants of the Valley of the Nile and
frequent civil wars occurred between the leading city states, Ur, Kish,
Akkad, Lagash, Umma and Eridu.
One of the earliest records of those distant times which
have survived is the famous Stele of the Vultures, now in the Louvre, dating
from about 2700 B.C. On it King Eannatum of Lagash commemorates his defeat
of the men of the neighbouring city of Umma. He proudly claims to have
killed 3,500 of them and the stele takes its name from one of its panels
portraying vultures partaking of the bodies of the slain. King Eannatum
shows himself to have been a civilized opponent. The citizens of Umma were
granted an honourable negotiated peace by which they ceded to Lagash certain
fields lying between the two cities, the new frontier being marked by a
newly dug ditch, safeguarded, no doubt, for all time by the invocation of
the curses of the gods upon the head of anyone who should presume to vary
this settlement by unilateral action. From the terms of peace it is clear
that no demand for unconditional surrender was made; the gentlemanly
Eannatum would no doubt have considered this bad form as between neighbours.
A mock-trial of the leaders of the citizens of Umma apparently did not
appeal to him: probably he would have found it an embarrassing farce.
Eannatum was satisfied with the annexation of some fields, and the payment
of an indemnity in grain by annual instalments. Realizing that the
prosperity of his subjects was dependent on the prosperity of their
neighbours, he did not insist that a valuable market for the goods of Lagash
should either be destroyed or turned into a slum. Altogether, warfare in
those remote times in Mesopotamia seems to have attained much the same stage
of reason and restraint as warfare between civilized European Powers during
the nineteenth century.
Such moderation would, of course, only have been practised
in secondary wars; in wars that is to say between states of similar culture
such as Lagash and Umma. It would not have been practised in primary
warfare, even by so enlightened a monarch as King Eannatum, against the
mountaineers of Elam or the nomads of Arabia. But, with regard even to
primary warfare, an entirely new and potent factor was beginning to make its
influence felt as a consequence of the introduction of agriculture and the
establishment of settled communities.
To a hunting community, a prisoner of war is merely an extra
mouth to feed. He is an encumbrance to be retained, if at all, only long
enough to provide diversion by torturing him to death. Generally, prisoners
taken in battle would be disposed of summarily with a stone club.
But as soon as a state of civilization had been reached in
which there were fields to be tilled, walls, temples, palaces and tombs to
be built, and mines to be worked, a prisoner of war ceased to be merely an
extra mouth to feed, and came to possess a definite economic value as a
slave.
Professor M. R. Davie expresses the opinion that “the
mitigation of war received its greatest impetus from the institution of
slavery which put an end to slaughter and alleviated torture in order not to
impair the efficiency of the captive as a worker.”
The direct, and still more the indirect, consequences of
this innovation were far reaching. Portable loot ceased to be the only
glittering prize, or, in fact, the chief of the glittering prizes, offered
by a successful war. Punitive expeditions undertaken by civilized
communities against barbarous neighbours ceased to be arduous and costly
measures only to be undertaken to frustrate an attack, but became profitable
slave collecting expeditions. In wars of conquest between civilized states,
frequently the proceeds of the sale of prisoners of war was the most
satisfactory feature of victory in the eyes of the victors. This was always
the case in preventative wars, waged by civilized states to safeguard their
frontiers—such, for example, as the wars of the Romans in Gaul and Germany.
An equally important consequence of the introduction of
slavery was that it relieved a section of the community from the necessity
of taking part in any form of manual labour. Thus arose, for the first time
in the history of mankind, a leisured class not dependent on its own
exertions for maintenance and with little to do except when called upon to
take part in war. Since slaves performed manual labour, there gradually
became implanted in this class the idea there was something degrading about
taking part in any form of labour. In short, to work was equivalent to
sinking to the level of a slave. The only form of work which a member of the
leisured class could undertake without loss of dignity was work connected
with warfare, since from such work slaves were naturally debarred. Once
implanted, this idea continued to flourish unchallenged in influential
circles in most countries down to 1918.
The establishment of a leisured class, the members of which
could only justify their existence even to themselves by taking part in or
preparing for war, gradually introduced an entirely new variety of warfare.
Hitherto, wars had been waged as a means to an end—for example, to find
additional territory for a surplus population, to collect loot, whether
portable property or slaves, to extort tribute from a weaker neighbour, or
to forestall an expected attack. But, from the rise of a leisured class
onward there will be found numerous examples of wars in which such objects
play quite a secondary role. These considerations served merely as excuses
for war. Such wars, for want of a better term, may be labelled wars for
glory.
Wars for glory are the natural expression of the need of a
ruling military caste, cut off by an oppressive sense of its own dignity
from taking part in activities open to civilians, to find an outlet for its
energies. Brought up to regard military exploits as alone worthy of
admiration, only in warfare can the members of such a caste prove themselves
worthy of their ancestors and of the traditions of the service which is
their sole pride. Only on the battlefield can they escape boredom and find
fulfilment. In days when warfare was conducted in accordance with rules
which controlled and kept within limits the destruction and suffering
inseparable from warfare, this attitude of mind enjoyed considerable
respect. To regard warfare as a means of self-expression was formerly
considered picturesque and romantic, whereas now it appears only grotesque
or exasperating. It depended, of course, on the unquestioned belief that
success in a war demonstrated the superior courage and general manliness of
the victors, where as now, as Captain Liddell Hart has well pointed out, it
merely demonstrates that the victors possess greater resources or superior
technical equipment.
During the last decade, the idea of making war for honour or glory has
become completely obsolete and may soon become incomprehensible. Perhaps it
was always more readily associated with Don Quixote than with St. George.
Still there may be something to be said for the obsolete view which esteems
fighting in order to prove oneself worthy of a tradition of which one is
justly proud. It is certainly a higher motive than inducing others to fight
so that by their fighting one can obtain possession of an oil field or
eliminate a trade rival.
In the earliest times, no dominant military caste seems to
have arisen in Mesopotamia. On one panel of the Stele of the Vultures
above-mentioned, King Eannatum had himself portrayed at the head of a
phalanx of heavy infantry armed with large square shields and copper-tipped
spears. To fight in this formation would have required some peacetime
training and leadership by officers who had studied the art of war. Judged
by their own accounts of their achievements, there was no lack in those days
of able generals. Eannatum tells us that he waged successful wars from Elam
in the East to Ur in the West. A later monarch, the famous Sargon of Akkad
(2360-2305 B.C.), boasts that he conquered “all lands from the rising to the
setting of the sun.” One of the latter’s successors, Naram-Sin (2280-2242
B.C.), considered his conquests entitled him to adopt the title of “King of
the Four Quarters of the World.” When Babylon rose to supremacy in
Mesopotamia, a widespread Empire was consolidated by the famous Hammurabi
(1728-1676 B.C.) and his successors.
But the inhabitants of lower Mesopotamia, whether of
Sumerian or Semitic stock, were not primarily a military people. Their main
concerns were agriculture and trade. To find a state created by and existing
for successful warfare, we must pass over some nine hundred years which
followed the reign of King Hammurabi, and come to the beginning of the ninth
century B.C., when the Kings of Assyria had established themselves as the
most powerful rulers in Western Asia.
The Empire of Assyria demands consideration in some detail
as the outstanding example of a state which existed mainly by warfare for
warfare. Other nations which have excelled in warfare have excelled also in
other activities. The Romans were not only soldiers but statesmen, law
makers and builders. The Normans produced great rulers, builders and
ecclesiastics. The Germans of modern times have excelled in science, music
and literature. But the Assyrians were interested in and were solely
pre-eminent in warfare. Many of their rulers were, indeed, indefatigable
builders of huge palaces, but they used the vast wall spaces chiefly for
bas-reliefs which depicted their glorious military achievements. Assyrian
artists reached very high levels of achievement, but their work was usually
limited to portraying battle and hunting scenes. Apart from the art of war
and the science of imperial administration the Assyrians adopted almost
entirely the civilization of their neighbours and kinsmen, especially the
Babylonians, though they did make noteworthy contributions to sculpture and
to literature, particularly in the compilation of the royal annals.
Like Prussia in the seventeenth century, the greatness of
Assyria can be traced to her original natural weakness. Of all the German
states, Prussia had the longest and most exposed frontiers: to put a stop to
repeated invasions by predatory neighbours, the Great Elector established a
strong army, the victories of which laid the foundations of a great military
tradition. In the same way, Assyria, in part a wide plain lying between the
upper Euphrates and the upper Tigris, was exposed to attack by the mountain
tribes of Kurdistan and Armenia to the East and North, to invasions by the
powerful princes of Syria to the West, and to tribute-collecting expeditions
by the kings of Babylon to the South. For centuries, invasions and raids had
been patiently endured, but at length there arose less patient rulers who
began to lead more and more frequently punitive expeditions against the most
troublesome of Assyria’s enemies, the fierce mountain tribes of Armenia. In
these petty wars in most difficult country, a standing army of veteran
troops was gradually established which lay ready to hand when a ruler should
arise capable of realizing the possibilities which the possession of such a
weapon offered. It was perhaps inevitable that this army, originally created
for defence, would sooner or later be employed for aggrandizement.
As a consequence of this employment, the fact has been long
overlooked that Assyria performed a real service to the civilized nations of
the Middle East by providing a barrier between them and the wild nomadic
tribes of Central Asia. In recognition of this service, Professor A. T.
Olmstead has preferred to call the Assyrians the “shepherd dogs of
Mesopotamian civilization” rather than the “wolves” they have been called by
earlier historians. From their contemporaries, however, the Assyrians
received no such recognition. They were regarded with unqualified fear and
hatred. Not until after three centuries of security from external foes, when
the Scythian hordes broke through the Assyrian barrier and carried fire and
sword throughout the Middle East, was the fact realized that there could
exist an even greater evil than subjection to the Assyrian yoke.
Perhaps the nearest parallel to the role of Assyria in the
affairs of the ancient Middle East is the role of Prussia in the affairs of
modern Europe. Relying on the possession of a splendid army originally
created as the price of survival, the rulers of Prussia earned for their
country general unpopularity and ill-will, not only among foreigners but
among their German fellow countrymen, by their high-handed and aggressive
dealings. As a consequence, few in Germany now care to remember that German
unity was first achieved by Prussian efficiency, self-sacrifice and
discipline; few in Western Europe yet realize the fact that only so long as
the army created by the Prussian Kings existed could the possibility of
attack and subjugation by enemies from the East be safely disregarded.
For many centuries the history of Assyria seems to have been
that of a minor oriental state. At times, she rose to power under able
rulers—such as Tiglath Pileser I (1120-1100 B.C.)—and then under feeble
rulers sank into obscurity again.
The military potentialities of the Assyrian veterans were
fully realized by Asshurnazirpal who ascended the throne of Nineveh in 883
B.C. He began by chastising in eight consecutive campaigns the mountaineers
of the North with unprecedented severity. He then turned his attention
westward and reached the Mediterranean where the rich Phoenician cities of
Tyre and Sidon purchased safety by a payment of “gold, silver, tin and
copper, woollen and linen garments and much strong timber from Lebanon.” His
successor, Shalmaneser, extended his dominions from Syria to the Persian
Gulf, and for nearly three centuries we find an unbroken record of conquests
which carried the arms of Assyria over the entire Middle East as far as the
banks of the Nile.
Probably, no other state in world history can compare with
Assyria as the incarnation of implacable, untiring, efficient militarism. In
a later age, in the Greek state of Sparta, all the comforts and amenities of
life were sacrificed for the benefit of military efficiency, but the
Spartans made no contributions worth mentioning to the art of war. A Spartan
army was only a large commando force composed of highly trained athletes
fighting on foot and equipped like other Greek soldiers of the time. On the
other hand, no other people until the twentieth century so revolutionized
the technique and methods of warfare as did the Assyrians. An Assyrian army
was composed of specialists in every branch of warfare. There were regiments
of heavy infantry armed with shields and spears, regiments of archers and
slingers, a chariot corps, and light cavalry. There was a corps of sappers
skilled in undermining the walls of a town and in working the various types
of movable battering rams and siege towers, some with six wheels and some
with four. There was a pontoon section able to throw a bridge across a river
or to supply bladders upon which, when inflated, the infantry was trained to
cross a stream by swimming. There was a transport section with camels to
carry baggage and even field kitchens for use during campaigns. Last, but
not least, there were execution squads, expert in disposing of prisoners of
war in a score of ingenious and painful ways.
When the records of the Assyrian warrior kings were first
discovered and deciphered in the mid-nineteenth century, our worthy
Victorian forefathers were filled with uncomprehending horror when they read
the awesome details of atrocities so proudly described therein. In their
eyes, Asshurnazirpal and his successors on the throne of Assyria appeared as
sadistic monsters, the subjects of a pathological obsession. But we, more
fortunately placed to understand their mental processes, can see that they
might have given a plausible explanation of their conduct. One reason why
the Assyrians so horrified readers of their history a century ago was that
less was then known about the military excesses and massacres of their
predecessors and contemporaries
When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945,
whereby a civilian population of some 70,000 was wiped out, it was explained
that this act in fact saved the lives of many soldiers, who would otherwise
have been sacrificed in costly landings on the Japanese mainland.
Justification along the same lines can be urged with regard to the British
terror bombing campaign waged against Germany from after the adoption of the
Lindemann Plan in March 1942 until the end of hostilities in May 1945, with
the exception only of the bombing of Dresden in February, 1945, which took
place after victory had become certain and the war had ceased to be a
military operation. Could not King Asshurnazirpal have said in reply to his
critics: “When I impaled, blinded, flayed alive, burned and otherwise
tortured to death my prisoners, the terror of my glorious name spread
through the surrounding lands. As a result, valuable human life was saved.
Thereafter, when I desired to capture a city, my gallant troops had no
longer to storm it, suffering cruel losses; since the inhabitants came forth
straightway to kiss the dust at my feet. Thereby the precious lives of my
brave soldiers were spared.”
That there is some substance in this argument cannot be
denied. It fails, however, to account for the fact that Asshurnazirpal and
other monarchs preferred bas-reliefs portraying these horrors to most other
decorations for the walls of their palaces. Evidently, therefore, they must
have taken pleasure in being reminded of them. It is upon this predilection
that the charge of sadism can be based, and not upon their method of dealing
with prisoners of war in itself, which was only the traditional method
inherited from their prehistoric forefathers, carried out by the Assyrians
on a larger scale and in a more spectacular manner. Many peoples, it is
true, have dealt with captive enemies in accordance with this venerable
tradition both in ancient and modern times. The reputation of the Red
Indians of North America is particularly black in this respect, although
some have contended that they only adopted such practices, along with
warlike and predatory habits, from the European settlers. This charitable
view is, however, at variance with the evidence of Samuel de Champlain, one
of the earliest French pioneers in Canada, who professes to have been
horrified by the treatment meted out to some Iroquois prisoners by the Huron
allies of the French after a skirmish in which, thanks to the firearms of
Champlain and his men, the Hurons were successful. It speaks volumes for the
skill and ingenuity of untutored savages that they should have been able to
shock a Christian European of the sixteenth century.
Until restrained by more civilized or at any rate more
powerful neighbours professing different and perhaps more artificial
standards of conduct, most savage peoples have observed the ancient
traditional practice in their dealing with enemies taken captive in war.
Among some peoples an interesting variation of traditional practice is met
with. The actual work of disposing of prisoners is handed over to the women,
the men merely acting as spectators. The authorities differ as to whether
this custom was due in the first place to masculine indolence, to the longer
persistence of malice in the female mind, or to recognition of the superior
dexterity of the feminine hand in achieving artistic results.
At all events it is certain that prisoners in the hands of the Apaches of
Arizona, of many nomad tribes of Arabia and the Sahara, or of the Druses of
Syria have never had much occasion for thankfulness that their captors had
adopted this strange custom.
There is no trace that any such custom existed among the
Assyrians. We have no evidence that a woman ever secured admission to the
military execution squads. There seem to have been in the Assyrian army no
regiments of lady warriors such as were a dread feature of the army of old
Dahomey, the powerful West African state founded in the early 18th century.
In the latter native African kingdom, which in some respects bore a crude
resemblance to Assyria, there existed a crack corps of virgin warriors,
whose virginity, it may be added, was safeguarded by the infliction of a
horrible death in the case of moral lapses. Dahomey also provided a novel
variation with regard to the treatment of prisoners of war. The Assyrians,
as we have seen, executed enemy leaders publicly in various ingenious ways
and enslaved the survivors. The negro kings of Dahomey trained their
schoolboy subjects in the use of weapons and accustomed them to the sight of
bloodshed by handing prisoners of war over to them for execution.
Original variation from accepted practice did not appeal to
the Assyrians. Strictly practical and conservative in outlook, they believed
that the activities of women should be limited to bearing future warriors,
to solacing the leave of warriors at home from the various fronts, and to
taking part with due enthusiasm in the annual “V Day” rejoicings. Executions
of prisoners of war, they considered, should be carried out with proper pomp
and ceremony without regard to utilitarian considerations unfitting to the
solemnity of the occasion. Another item which does credit to the Assyrians
is that their victory massacres were restricted mainly to males. There was
little of the indiscriminate massacring of women and children—even young
babies—which was so common among many ancient oriental peoples.
The collection of trophies has, in all ages, exercised a
singular fascination over the military mind. After the war of 1870, every
public square in Germany had its display of weapons captured at
Wörth, Sedan or Metz; similarly, after 1918,
every town and village in Great Britain had pieces of artillery prominently
displayed as mementoes of the “War-to-end-war”—from which disfigurements
they were, by the irony of fate, only rescued by another war following
shortly which made it necessary to melt down these mementoes for munitions.
As one might expect, the Assyrians had a passion for
trophies, a passion no doubt inherited from their prehistoric forefathers.
Bulky chattels such as cannon not being available, savages are limited to a
twofold choice. Most savages, peoples as widely separated as the Maoris of
New Zealand, the Indians of northern Mexico and the Negroes of Dahomey, have
selected the human skull as the memento or symbol of victory. The weapons of
a primitive enemy may be stolen or reproduced, but an enemy’s skull is
conclusive proof of his defeat. While warfare remained on a small scale,
skulls of deceased enemies served only for display: individual heroes
erected them on poles before their front doors. But when slaughter on a more
extensive scale began, more elaborate collections became possible. In
popular belief the credit has been given to the medieval Tartar Conqueror,
Tamerlane, for originating the idea of erecting pyramids composed of the
skulls of fallen enemies. But, more than two thousand years before the days
of Tamerlane, we find the Assyrians proudly erecting pyramids of skulls.
Thus King Tiglath Pileser records that while campaigning “by the shores of
the Upper Sea” (probably the Black Sea), he captured a city and “piled high
the heads of the inhabitants before the gates thereof.” The only credit for
originality which can justly be given to Tamerlane is that he erected
pyramids of skulls of outstanding size—or at least such was the firm opinion
of his contemporaries.
As an alternative to collecting heads, some savage peoples
have preferred to collect the private parts of their enemies. In modern
times this predilection has been displayed by the Sumalis and Gallas of
Northern Africa, certain tribes of Arabia and Syria, and the Kaffirs of
South Africa, not forgetting, of course, our gallant allies in the last war,
the Abyssinians. The immoderate gratification of this taste after their
great victory of Adowa over the Italians in 1896 aroused such intense horror
throughout Italy that some forty years later it greatly facilitated Benito
Mussolini’s efforts to rouse his countrymen to undertake the reconquest of
Abyssinia. Tastes vary in this as in so many other matters, and for reasons
unknown the Assyrians seem to have limited themselves to skull collecting.
The Assyrians would have had nothing to learn from the most
up-to-date technique with regard to despoiling a vanquished country and to
insuring that it should be open to attack for the future. A Reparations
Commission and a Disarmament Commission both military and industrial, must
have functioned as permanent state departments. One of the most interesting
of the bas-reliefs now in the British Museum shows in the background the
walls of a captured city being demolished with pick and spade by Assyrian
sappers lest they should become a menace to Assyrian security. In the
foreground is shown a procession of soldiers in military formation marching
along a path by the bank of a stream, each man carrying some article of
plunder. Contrasted with this unit, clearly acting under the orders of the
Reparations Commission, is a straggling line also composed of soldiers laden
with plunder, but in this case, scampering along through a wood. The small
size of the figures and their hurried unobtrusive progress screened by
trees, obviously symbolizes the appropriation of the goods of the vanquished
by individual plunderers, doubtful of the full approval of the authorities,
but relying upon the repeated official exhortations not to pamper the
vanquished. The whole, masterly in composition and execution, must be
regarded as the earliest example of the recruiting poster.
With regard to warfare in all its varied aspects, the
Assyrians maintained a rigid sense of proportion; they never permitted one
aspect to become so exaggerated as to distort the whole. A religious people,
they never sacked a city nor executed an enemy war criminal without piously
associating God with the deed and, in all circumstances, they acted strictly
in accordance with traditional religious practice; on the other hand, they
never allowed their warlike activities to become subservient to religion
like the Aztecs of Mexico whose wars were fought mainly for the purpose of
making prisoners for use as human sacrifices in honour of their god,
Huitzilopochtli. The Assyrians felt a proper pride in collecting military
trophies and carefully recorded the erection of any pyramid of skulls of
outstanding size but they never, like the Dyaks of Borneo, permitted warfare
to degenerate into simple head-hunting. No doubt, the Assyrians derived keen
satisfaction from the gruesome rites of their “V Days”, but such remained to
them merely an enjoyable ceremony fitly marking the end of a campaign. A
very different attitude this, for example, from the attitude of the Iroquois
of North America to whom a campaign was but an irksome, if necessary,
preliminary to the customary orgy round the torture stake. To the Assyrians,
religion, the collecting instinct, and even the gratification of sadistic
impulses remained subsidiary emotions, adorning warfare but in no way
essential to its conduct. To them, as in the opinion of Nietzsche, a good
war was its own justification.
No practice of the Assyrians can be of greater interest to
the present generation than their method of dealing with the survivors of a
vanquished population by mass-deportation. Whether the Assyrians originated
this practice is not known with certainty, but they certainly adopted it as
a routine procedure and carried it out on a scale unprecedented until the
present day.
In defence of the Assyrians, it is only fair to point out
that there are fundamental differences between the mass-deportations carried
out by them and those of recent times. In the first place, the intent in the
two cases was quite different. The purpose of the Assyrian rulers was to
create a homogeneous population and, to this end, it was their custom to
transfer the surviving population of a recently conquered country to some
distant part of the empire, at the same time filling their vacant places
with the inhabitants of another conquered district intermingled with
voluntary settlers from Assyria itself, so as to provide the new population
with a loyal core. Such shiftings of population can better be termed
mass-transfers. They are obviously totally different from recent
mass-deportations which served the simple twofold purpose of wreaking
vengeance on the outlying members of a vanquished race by robbing them of
all they possessed.
Again, the methods adopted in the two cases are totally
different. The evidence of the Assyrian bas-reliefs indicates that the
people forcibly transferred from one country to another were allowed to take
with them to their new homes their portable property and cattle. Brutality
may not have been lacking, but it would not have had official approval since
the intention was that the peoples transferred and their descendants should
ultimately become loyal subjects and supporters of the King of Assyria.
There can be no real comparison between this procedure, drastic though it
may have been, and the contemporary practice of collecting droves of
defenceless persons, men, women, and children, to the number of several
millions, against whom no personal charge of any kind is made (any so
charged would now be summarily murdered), selected merely because their
native language is the same as that of the inhabitants of the state over the
border which happens to have been defeated in a war, robbing them of all
they possess, and then dumping them in a strange country already overcrowded
and short of food, there to live or die as fate might decree. Here in our
day the motive of mass-deportations is mainly greed, combined with a desire
for revenge on the vanquished state, if only, as it were, by proxy.
A further point may be urged in extenuation of the
Assyrians. The latter were generally, dealing with semi-nomadic peoples, or
peoples who had only recently acquired by conquest the lands from which they
were forcibly deported. The injustice and suffering involved must, in
consequence, have been far less than in such mass-deportations as those
recently carried out by the Czechs and Poles in the case of the inhabitants
of Pomerania, Silesia, and the Sudetenland, who were expelled from lands
which their ancestors had occupied for many centuries. Probably the mass
transfers of the Assyrians generally amounted to little more than the
rounding up of the primitive agriculturists, herdsmen, and shepherds of a
thinly-populated country and transferring them to a distant but equally
desirable country made vacant for their reception. There is no real
comparison between this and the expulsion, for example, of the population of
Silesia, a population whose right consisted of undisturbed possession since
the days when Plantagenet Kings ruled England and the greater part of
France, when Moscow was the capital of a small principality paying tribute
to the Tartar Khans, and only Red Indians wandered where New York was long
after to be built. The three million despoiled victims of the Sudetenland
could claim an even longer possessory title since their ancestors were in
occupation of this corner of Bohemia before the first Anglo-Saxon pirates
landed in England and long before the rest of Bohemia was occupied by the
Czechs.
For three centuries, the Assyrian shadow lay like a dark
cloud over all Western Asia. Striking first in one direction and then in
another, their armies, splendidly organised and equipped, never found an
enemy able to resist them in the open field when the odds were anything like
equal. In turn, they overthrew the famous chariotry of Syria, the heavy
infantry of Babylonia, and the archers of Egypt. Widespread revolts were
crushed and powerful alliances shattered. In 645 B.C., King Asshurbanipal,
after a victorious campaign in which the powerful state of Elam was crushed
and systematically devastated, celebrated a triumph of particular splendour.
Three captive kings walked in chains behind his chariot. It must have seemed
on that proud “V Day” that the Assyrian Empire might well endure for ever.
Within less than forty years of that day the Assyrian Empire
was blotted out so completely that it soon became nothing but a hazy memory
kept alive only by mention in the Jewish scriptures and stray references
preserved in the writings of later Greek authors. It was not until the
mid-nineteenth century when the records of the Assyrian Kings were
discovered and deciphered, that their achievements became more than
legendary.
The comparison has often been made between the Assyrian
Empire and the Second Reich founded by Bismarck. Such comparisons may not be
odious, but they are often difficult to establish. Any such comparison is
hardly reconcilable with the fact that the Reich, after its foundation in
1871, preserved unbroken peace with its neighbours until 1914, a period of
forty-three years period during which these neighbours all under took
aggressive wars, Great Britain in Egypt and South Africa, France in Tunis
and Indo-China, Russia in the Balkans against Turkey and in Manchuria
against Japan, the United States against Spain, and even Italy against
Turkey in Tripoli. On the other hand, in its swift and dramatic downfall at
least, the Assyrian Empire certainly offers some scope for comparison with
the Third Reich established by Adolf Hitler.
When, in 645 B.C., King Ashhurbanipal celebrated the last
great “V Day” of Assyrian arms, the military strength of the Empire,
seemingly unshakable, was spread out over a vast area from the Nile to the
mountains of modern Persia. Suddenly, without warning, there issued from the
far and unknown North one of those great hordes of nomads such as in
historic times the plains of Eurasia have periodically sent forth. This
horde of nomads, known to their victims as Sythians, was no less formidable
than the similar hordes of Huns, Magyars, Mongols, Tartars, and Turks
destined to follow them. They swept in an irresistible flood over the entire
Middle East as far as the borders of Egypt. Resistance in the field was
overwhelmed by weight of numbers: only strongly fortified cities escaped
devastation and pillage. Then, after a decade of blood and rapine, the
Sythians withdrew as suddenly and mysteriously as they had appeared.
All the states of Western Asia suffered from this
visitation, but the Assyrian Empire, the largest and most complex political
structure of the time, was shaken to its foundations. It was not the
practice of the Assyrian High Command to record disasters and we have no
details of the fate of the Assyrian armies which tried to withstand in
battle the rush of the wild horsemen of the steppes. Only the great cities
were safe behind their walls: the countryside was devastated. Immediately
the wave of barbarians had withdrawn laden with plunder to their northern
homes, the peoples of the Middle East joined together to end the Assyrian
menace for ever.
The United Nations of the 7th century B.C. were united only
in their hatred of the Assyrians. We may be sure that the shattered remnants
of the Assyrian army resisted to the last and, when the odds against them
were not too fantastic, continued to win splendid but profitless victories.
Finally, however, only the capital, Nineveh, held out behind the vast and
scientifically planned fortifications erected by King Sennacherib. After a
long siege, the Medes broke into the doomed city in August, 612 B.C., and
the last Assyrian King in despair heaped up his treasures in one vast
funeral pile and perished in the blaze with his wives, chief officers of
state, and the surviving generals of his army.
We may not feel surprised, perhaps, that, having thus
triumphed, the United Nations immediately turned upon each other. The Medes
attacked the Lydians, and the Egyptians came into conflict with the
Babylonians. The latter, under Nebuchadnezzar, defeated the Egyptians and
established a short-lived empire which faithfully reproduced all the
characteristic features of Assyrian rule—wars of conquest, mass
deportations, massacres and mutilations, as the Second Book of Kings bears
eloquent witness. Within a few decades, the Babylonians had been conquered
by the Medes, who, in their turn, were overthrown by the Persians under
Cyrus, who established an empire of unprecedented extent which realized in
essentials the aims towards which the later Assyrian Kings had been
striving.
Thus was swiftly and utterly blotted out the great Assyrian
Empire, leaving to our Victorian forefathers a memory which to them seemed
to symbolize bestial force, cold-blooded ferocity, and ruthlessness
systematized. We, however, with our wider experience of such matters, should
be ready to grant to the Assyrians the credit of having expressed warfare in
terms which, for simplicity and purity, have never been surpassed. In their
wars may be found all the essentials of warfare without a trace of scruples
or restraints. The rules and restrictions by which warfare later became
entangled and cramped would have seemed to the generals of King
Asshurbanipal just as artificial and vexatious as they now seem to an air
marshal of to-day.
It is not only because the Assyrians were a people chiefly
interested in war, but because they were so rigidly orthodox and
conventional in their attitude to, and dealings with, anything connected
with war which makes a study of them almost sufficient in itself for a
student of warfare. Until the present generation, the course of wars in
modern times has been influenced by many extraneous influences, moral,
ethical and religious. The Assyrians acknowledged the existence of little
except military considerations. If they were extreme, it was only because
they carried to its furthest limits conventional military practice. One
feels that, if one knew all there was to know about the Assyrians, there
would remain nothing essential to learn about the nature of warfare.
Chapter 3 — Europe’s Civil
Wars
As pointed out in the last chapter, the first great step
towards the amelioration of the cruelties and crudities of primitive warfare
arose from the institution of slavery which bestowed on prisoners taken in
war an economic value to their captors as slaves.
What produced the next important step forward in this
direction?
The answer seems obvious. Suppose a stranger to this planet
were first asked to peruse the Sermon on the Mount and was then informed
that a religion professing to be based on its teaching was within three
centuries accepted as a state religion by the most civilized section of
mankind. Would not this stranger immediately decide that the effect of this
must have been completely to transform the conduct of war if not, as between
Christians at any rate, to abolish war altogether?
A priori this is certainly what might reasonably be
expected. Still, as we all know, after nearly two thousand years,
Christianity has not abolished war, neither has Christianity to any very
marked extent, even as between Christians, transformed it. To what extent
and at what date it began to exercise an ameliorating influence is a matter
of dispute. It is also a matter of dispute to what extent it was a case of
cause and effect that its acceptance by the rulers and peoples of the
Roman Empire
and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire were
concurrent events. Be this as it may, the dissolution of the
Roman Empire was followed by the so-called Dark Ages, during
which period warfare was conducted with the most primitive savagery,
although Christianity was professed in the various barbarian kingdoms into
which Western Europe became divided.
If it be complained that the bloody doings of the Frankish
and Gothic kings cannot fairly be taken as representative of Christian
conduct, in general, or of warfare, in particular, we can turn to the
Byzantine Empire where a Christianized variety of Roman
civilization survived down to the close of the Middle Ages. The result, it
is to be feared, will be disappointing. The Byzantine emperors conducted
their wars strictly in accordance with ancient oriental tradition and, in
spite of the fact that most of them were devout Christians, little
distinction can be detected except by the eye of faith between their methods
and those of the warrior kings of Assyria
a thousand years before. The principal claim to fame of one of the most
successful rulers of the Byzantine Empire, Basil the
Bulgar-Slayer, is that he made it a practice in his campaigns with the
Bulgarians to put out the eyes of his prisoners, on one occasion to the
number of 15,000.
It is also an unfortunate fact, impossible to deny, that
those European wars which have been waged with special ferocity have been
those waged in the name of religion. As an early example, the famous
Albigensian Crusade of 1209, inspired and directed by one of the greatest of
the Popes, Innocent III, to root out heresy in southern
France, may be cited. A contemporary
estimate puts the total number of those who perished at 500,000. Exact
statistics are lacking, however, since the Crusaders, immersed in their
pious labours, had probably little more idea of the number of persons whom
they had done to death than have the crew of a modern bombing unit returning
from an operational flight over a densely populated residential area. At
Béziers, the entire population, to the number of some 20,000, men, women and
children were slaughtered “by reason of God’s wrath wondrously kindled
against it.” After the capture of Minerve, in place of the usual massacre,
140 leading heretics were burnt together in one huge bonfire.
The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) supplies a late example of
warfare between Christians. Reliable, if incomplete, statistics are
available in this instance, and it is generally agreed that, as a result of
this protracted struggle, one-third of the population of Central
Europe
perished. It has been calculated the population of
Bohemia
was reduced from three millions to 800,000. At the beginning of the war, the
important city of Augsburg had
70,000 inhabitants and at the end only 18,000. For more than a generation
after the war, one-third of the arable land in North Germany
remained uncultivated. Such appalling massacres as that of
Magdeburg
in 1631
will bear comparison with similar happenings in ancient or modern times. In
brief, the preference expressed by the Emperor Ferdinand to rule over a
desert rather than a country filled with heretics, was very substantially
realized.
The evidence of sixteen centuries thus clearly demonstrates
that, whatever consequences might have been expected in theory, the
acceptance of Christianity had no perceptible practical influence in
mitigating the barbarous conduct of war.
On the other hand it is a fact that what, for want of a
better term, is called “civilized warfare” originated in
Europe, and Christianity is, and for many centuries has been,
the religion of Europeans.
It cannot be too strongly stressed that what is called
“civilized warfare” is a European product and has never been practised
outside Europe
or in countries not under European influence. In the East, warfare continued
to be conducted precisely as the Assyrians conducted their wars. When Nadir
Shah invaded India,
in 1739, he acted exactly as Asshurbanipal acted when he invaded
Elam. When the Turks set about repressing
the revolt of the Greeks in 1821, or the revolt of the Bulgarians in 1876,
they applied exactly the same methods as the Persians of Darius’ time would
have applied in the same circumstances.
Civilized warfare may, therefore, be defined as warfare
conducted in accordance with certain rules and restrictions subject to which
the nations of Europe became accustomed to wage their
wars with each other. When they had achieved military predominance, they
also insisted that these rules and restrictions should be observed by
non-European States in wars with Europeans.
It certainly requires explanation why the peoples of Europe,
alone among the peoples of the earth, should gradually have evolved a code
of conduct governing the waging of warfare, a code of conduct which, most
ancient and many modern authorities agree, is totally contrary to the whole
spirit of war. Why could not they have been content to wage war in the good
old simple way, as their forefathers had waged it, and with which so many
great military peoples of other Continents have remained content?
To answer this question regard must be had to the unique
political development of Europe. The following is a
simple statement of facts, many of which have never been wholly or even
partly explained.
At the time of the birth of Christ, there existed on the
largest continuous land surface of the globe (divided by geographers into
the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa) three main centres of settled
population, living independently of each other, each of which had recently
crystallized into an empire. The first, known as the Roman Empire, centred
round that unique geographical feature known as the Mediterranean Sea and
comprised some hundred million inhabitants. The second great centre of
population was centred in the valleys of the Indus
and the Ganges
in Northern India. No statistics have survived from
which the number of its inhabitants can be estimated, but this area is very
large and has always been extremely fertile, so it may be safely assumed
that its population was comparable to that of the Roman Empire and to that
of the third great centre of population situated far away to the East in the
valley of the Yellow River in Northern China, which, as statistics show,
even at that early date, numbered not less than sixty millions.
The political development of these three main centres of
population was curiously different. In India,
the Empire known as the Mauryan Empire, established in the third century
B.C., and reaching its zenith under the famous Buddhist Emperor, Asoka (264
to 228 B.C.), soon dissolved into a number of conflicting fragments. It had
no successor for some eighteen hundred years when the Mogul Empire was
founded by the Mongol conqueror, Barbar. This empire also dissolved within a
century, leaving India
the prey of invaders from Europe, of whom the
English, after a hard struggle with the French, ultimately achieved
supremacy.
In China,
on the other hand, the Han Dynasty (202 B.C. to A.D. 220), after flourishing
for four hundred years, broke up approximately at the same time as the
contemporary Roman Empire. After a period of civil
war and anarchy, it was succeeded by the T’ang Dynasty, which flourished for
three hundred years. From the earliest times to the present day, Chinese
history has consisted of a succession of long periods of strong central
government, separated by relatively short periods of disunity and internal
disorder. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s slogan—“Ein
Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”—came as a novel and stirring appeal to the
peoples of Central Europe. To the Chinese, from the
beginning of their long history, the proposition “One people, one empire,
one emperor” seemed self-evident, although they frankly recognised that
incursions by barbarians or the shortcomings of an individual emperor might
now and then bring about an unwelcome but temporary interlude of disorder.
As a consequence, in China,
unity has been regarded as a normal and natural condition, subject only to
temporary periodic lapses into anarchy, whereas, in
India, long and bitter experience has
accustomed the people to look upon anarchy as normal. Thus, when Indian
unity was re-established by the Mogul emperors it was regarded as a unique
achievement, Indian unity under the Buddhist Emperors having passed away so
long before that it had become merely a dim memory of the learned.
In a nutshell, the settled populations of both
India
and China
early crystallized into strong centralized empires: but, whereas, in the
case of China,
the state thus formed has survived apart from temporary eclipses to the
present day, in India,
this crystallization had but a brief existence and amorphous political
conditions have prevailed, except for relatively short periods.
In Europe political development took
a third and entirely different course. As in
India
and China
and at approximately the same time, Europe (or that
part of it bordering on the Mediterranean)
crystallized into a strong centralized state. Like the Mauryan Empire in
India
and the Han Empire in China,
the Roman Empire declined and broke up. But unlike
the Han Empire, the Roman Empire was never restored.
Its downfall was final. And, unlike the case of
India, amorphous political conditions did
not continue indefinitely. The peoples of Europe
soon began to crystallize into small independent states, each generally (but
not always) based on a more or less clearly defined geographical area. This
local crystallization is the distinctive characteristic of the political
development of Europe. Europeans have for so long
been accustomed to this local crystallization that they find it hard to
realize what an extraordinary development it is. In
India, until the establishment of British
supremacy, civil wars went on without cessation, but they were haphazard and
disconnected happenings. One local ruler or another, abler or more ambitious
than his neighbours, would establish his authority over an area of greater
or lesser extent, and his successors would maintain the state so formed for
several generations. When, however, they were ultimately overcome, the
subjects of this state had never come to regard this area as their
“motherland”. Amid general indifference, it would become divided up or
merged in another equally arbitrarily formed area, and its exact boundaries
would soon be forgotten. Men fought for the love of fighting, from personal
ambition, for loot, or from loyalty to a certain leader, family or clan, but
never for the glory or aggrandizement of a geographical area personified as
a distinct entity such as Britannia, La
France, or Germania.
Even such a well-marked geographical area as the Punjab,
“the Land of the Five Rivers,” never developed “a national consciousness.”
Similarly, in China,
the world has never been troubled by the conflicting territorial ambitions
of Sze-chwan and Kweichow, the rights and wrongs of
brave little Honan, or the integrity of the frontiers
of Shan-tung. No foreign prime minister has ever been moved to acclaim
Honan
as “sublime in the jaws of peril” and no disinterested foreign ecclesiastic
has ever been inspired to pray, even for the briefest period, for Hu-peh as
“a beacon of religious freedom.”
In Europe, on the other hand, such
states, with as little geographical justification as
Portugal
and Holland, have arisen and
survived with practically unchanged frontiers for centuries. In Switzerland,
three distinct races, speaking three distinct languages, have long come to
consider themselves “a nation,” while, more remarkable still, the artificial
union, so late as 1830, of the Flemings, speaking a dialect of Dutch, and
the French-speaking Walloons, has blossomed forth into the national
consciousness of Belgium.
It is agreed that the Walloon-Fleming compound, under the
name of Belgians, “joined the European family of Nations” in 1850. There is
no agreement, however, as to precisely what is a nation in the special sense
it has come to mean in Europe. “Nationalism,” admits
Sir John Marriott, “is a singularly elusive term.” He proceeds to define it
as “the sentiment which binds together a body of people who have certain
things in common and not infrequently induces antagonism between one body of
persons so connected and another.” This antagonism, often violent and always
quite irrational, is generally its most outstanding characteristic.
Professor Alfred E. Zimmern insists that it is always “related to a definite
home country.” But this “home country” need have no natural boundaries, he
admits, and may indeed be inhabited by foreigners.
Although enjoying in essentials the same civilization and
professing the same religion, the peoples of Europe
have gradually lost their sense of unity inherited from the days of the
Roman Empire. This sense of unity, so strong in
China, has been replaced by “national
consciousness” linked with geographical areas. Once national consciousness
had developed in England,
France, and
elsewhere, civil wars ceased to be haphazard and disconnected happenings.
Defeats had to be avenged while victories inspired ambitions to achieve even
greater victories. In this way, whatever its result might be, each war paved
the way to the next.
Unlike their contemporaries in
India
and China,
the inhabitants of Europe were able to indulge in
civil wars with each other with relative impunity. In
China, any weakening of the central
government through internal disorder was inevitably followed by invasion by
the wild nomadic peoples ever waiting beyond the Great Wall for an
opportunity to attack. In India,
the penalty for continual civil war was a succession of invasions through
the Himalayan Passes by the warlike peoples of Central Asia,
each of which resulted in orgies of slaughter and rapine. It was not until
1945, however, that the inhabitants of Europe paid
the natural penalty for civil war. Only three times after the downfall of
the Roman Empire had Europe
been menaced by primary warfare on a grand scale. Each time, the danger was
averted, not so much through the efforts of Europeans themselves as by good
fortune.
The first occasion was at the close of the Dark Ages, when
Europe
was threatened by invasion and conquest by the Saracens.
Spain
was conquered and France
invaded, but the Saracens were repulsed at Poitiers
by Charles Martel, and, more as a result of dissensions among the Saracens
themselves than as a consequence of this setback, the danger passed.
The second occasion was in the middle of the thirteenth
century, at the very time when European medieval civilization had reached
its peak. This time, the danger came from the formidable military machine
that the great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan, had recently created out of
the wild horsemen of the Steppes and with which he had overthrown, in turn,
the great Empires of China and Persia.
After his death, his grandson, Batu, set forth in 1237 with a great army,
mainly composed of mounted archers, but supported by a corps of Chinese
engineers, equipped with portable catapults for hurling not only great
stones but masses of flaming naphtha, material for creating artificial smoke
screens, and probably, gunpowder for use in mines in siege work. Against
this highly-organized barbarian host, the peoples of Europe
could put in the field only feudal armies, individually brave but totally
without discipline. In addition, they were, as usual, divided amongst
themselves by a dozen petty civil wars, and, in particular, by the
long-drawn-out conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope which
had just reached a climax.
The great campaign of 1241-1242 is of particular interest at
the present time since it was fought over precisely the same area as the
recent campaign of 1944-1945 between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army,
was aimed at the same objectives, and came to rest approximately on a line
along which now runs the so-called “Iron Curtain” that marks the present
boundary between Europe and Asia. It provides also a classic example of
primary warfare, the issue at stake being whether the extremely complex
Christian medieval civilisation should be replaced by the simple nomadic
culture of an Asiatic khanate. Upon the one side were the clansmen of High
Asia, wonderful horsemen and splendid archers but otherwise illiterate
barbarians, and upon the other the civilization that had already produced
such men as Hildebrand and Innocent III, FRaederick II and
St. Louis, Dante and St. Francis of
Assisi, and from which the civilization of the Modern
World was destined to evolve.
The Mongol plan of campaign was Napoleonic in conception,
design and execution. First, the powerful Russian principalities were
crushed in one great battle and Kiev
was razed to the ground. Then, the chivalry of Germany and Poland under the
Duke of Silesia, including a strong contingent of the famous Teutonic
Knights under their Grand Master himself, was annihilated at Liegnitz,
chiefly through the scientific use of an artificial smoke screen throwing
the Christian chivalry into confusion. Breslau, which
held out so heroically seven hundred years later against the Red Army, was
taken and sacked. Next, another wing of the Mongol host overthrew a great
crusading army with a backbone of veteran Knights Templars under the King of
Hungary near Tokay on the Sayo
River. Like the Teutonic Knights, the Knights
Templars, mostly French, perished to a man on the field, but in vain. Buda
was stormed and sacked. City after city was captured and their inhabitants
methodically massacred. Advanced units of the invaders had reached Neustadt
on the Danube and had penetrated to the Adriatic within a day’s march of
Venice, when the death of the Great Khan in far off Karakoram on the edge of
the Gobi Desert caused the recall of the Mongol armies. Thus was European
civilization saved from destruction before the gravity of the peril had
become generally known. “There can be no doubt,” writes Harold Lamb, “that
the Mongols could have destroyed the Emperor FRaederick and his armies and
the French chivalry led by the hapless St. Louis might have fared no better.
The European monarchs had proved themselves incapable of acting together.
The Europeans had shown themselves helpless before the manoeuvring of the
Mongol cavalry divisions directed by a strategist like Subotai.”
It was indeed a fortunate miracle for the peoples of Europe,
that the death of the Great Khan caused the recall of the conquering Mongol
army which, in the space of two years, had not merely defeated but
annihilated three great European armies and had overrun nearly all Europe
east of the line now marked by the Iron Curtain.
It is noteworthy and, perhaps, significant that the foreign
policy of the medieval Mongols aimed at surrounding their dominions with a
zone of devastated and depopulated territory, broken up into helpless
satellite states, an aim which has become the most prominent feature of the
foreign policy of their successors, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
With this end always in view, the Mongols dealt with conquered populations
in accordance with an unwavering procedure. When a city was taken, whether
it was situated on the shores of the Yellow Sea or on the banks of the Oder,
the inhabitants were brought forth, tied together with ropes, and were then
divided into three groups, the men in one group, the women in another, and
the children in a third. Skilled craftsmen and attractive women were then
carefully selected for dispatch to Central Asia, there, if they survived the
frightful journey, to labour as slaves or serve as concubines. Lastly, the
remainder were forced to kneel with outstretched necks in rows down which
the Mongol soldiers proceeded, expeditiously slicing off with their long
sabres the bent heads which were then gathered in neat pyramids, not in a
spirit of vainglory, but to facilitate the work of the scribes whose duty it
was to supply the Great Khan with accurate statistics of the carnage.
It was this procedure, methodical, deliberate, and
businesslike, rather than the scale on which the Mongol massacres were
carried out, which filled contemporary Christians with speechless horror. In
medieval Christian Europe, wholesale homicide on an unlimited scale was
considered justifiable, in fact meritorious, if religious issues were
involved—witness the Albigensian Crusade above mentioned. Wholesale homicide
was also considered excusable, if committed on the lower orders by a
high-spirited prince in a temporary fit of irritation—witness the sack of
Limoges by the Black Prince, later to be mentioned. In other words, pious
zeal was held to justify anything, including every variety of gratuitous
cruelty, in which to do them justice, the Mongols seem rarely to have
indulged. Brutal actions, prima facie crimes, were also held to be
pardonable lapses in Christian Europe, if committed by persons of gentle
birth in a frenzy of blind emotion, or as Field Marshal Montgomery would
express it, when “seeing red.” But the coldblooded slaughterings of these
terrible pagans from High Asia were beyond the comprehension of the medieval
Christian. He could no more understand such passionless wickedness than he
could withstand the disciplined sweep of those slit-eyed Oriental horsemen
in their armour of lacquered leather, shooting with their deadly bows. Good
fortune and not his own exertions saved him, but not until all Europe
between the Volga and the Oder had been devastated with ruthless efficiency.
Not until seven centuries had elapsed was their fatal
passion for civil war again to bring the European peoples so close to the
brink of irreparable disaster. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
Europe was menaced by the Ottoman Turks, since their conquest of the
Byzantine Empire, in 1453, firmly established at Constantinople. The Turks
succeeded in conquering the whole of the Balkans, Greece and Hungary, and
twice besieged Vienna. The peoples of Europe were as hopelessly divided
against each other as ever; at moments of particular peril, the Sultans
generally found the Kings of France happy to render them assistance and
support so that the Emperor might be distracted from French aggression on
the Rhine. The Turks possessed a formidable army—thanks to the help of
Christian renegades, their artillery was the best in the world at the
time—but the resources of the Turkish Empire were never adequate for the
task of conquering Europe, although with but a slight variation of fortune
the area overrun and devastated by their armies might have been very much
greater. In fact, it probably would have been but for the strategic ability
and courage of John Sobieski, King of Poland, who turned back the Turkish
army at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
From one point of view, it is perhaps a pity that the
Sultans’ armies failed to penetrate deeper into Europe. The appearance of a
corps of janissaries at Magdeburg in 1631 might have served, as nothing else
would have done, to bring the frenzied and fratricidal Catholics and
Protestants to their senses.
Apart from these unrelated and isolated examples of primary
warfare most of the wars which have been waged in Europe since the Dark Ages
must be classified as secondary wars. Under this general heading must be
grouped the innumerable petty local wars such as that in the fifteenth
century in the West of England between Lord Bonville and the Earl of Devon,
or that in the North of England between the Percies and the Nevilles, and
such a great civil war as that of the Roses; the struggles of the Guelphs
and Ghibellines in Italy, and the various civil wars of religion from the
Albigensian Crusade to the Thirty Years War. In the same group must be
included such so-called nationalist wars as the Hundred Years War (according
to Professor Trevelyan “the first European war that can be called National”)
which arose from the resolve of the half-French Kings of England to assert
their claim to the throne of France. Except for the numbers engaged, the
amount of bloodshed, and the extent of the devastation and suffering caused,
there is no real distinction between this long-drawn-out feud between Edward
III and his successors with their cousins, the Kings of France, and the
local broils of the Nevilles and the Percies. Both, for example, are utterly
distinct from the wars of the kings of Castile, undertaken to drive the
Moors out of Spain, or the ceaseless campaigns of the Teutonic Knights to
defend the Eastern frontiers of Christendom from the Slavonic heathen.
After the Thirty Years War ended in 1648, religion ceased in
Europe to be a reason—one is tempted to write a pretext—for civil war. In
many respects, this great struggle is remarkable, apart from the special
barbarity with which it was waged by both sides. Long before its outbreak in
1618, it was widely felt that a great political explosion was imminent. It
began inconspicuously in Bohemia, so inconspicuously that it was not at
first realized that the expected upheaval had at last begun. Once started,
the original issues were quickly forgotten. In the history books, the Thirty
Years War is labelled a war of religion, a war between the Roman Catholics
and the Protestants. Yet, the so-called Protestant cause derived its main
inspiration and support from the leading Catholic Power, France, then ruled
by that great Prince of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Richelieu; throughout,
the two chief Catholic potentates in Europe, the Pope and the Emperor, were
at bitter enmity and most of the fighting was done by godless mercenaries
drawn from every country in Europe. The result achieved, after thirty years’
fighting, during which some fifteen million people perished by violence,
starvation or disease, was an agreement that the belief of each individual
concerning the eternal truths upon which his or her salvation depended
should be decided by the predilections or whims of the prince whose subject
he or she should happen to be—a very commonsensical practical solution, but
one difficult to justify by any system of theology. The best that can be
said for the Thirty Years War is that is ended more or less in a status
quo settlement, so that Europe was spared the orgy of revenge which
would have inevitably followed a complete triumph by either side.
Far more important than the actual terms of settlement was
the fact that this futile and murderous struggle brought about the tacit
conclusion that, thenceforth, religious differences must never again serve
as a reason for civil war. This conclusion did not, indeed, prevent civil
wars continuing to break out, but it profoundly altered their character. In
the Thirty Years War had finally perished that sense of European unity,
inherited from the days of the Roman Empire, which had persisted throughout
the Middle Ages. Europe had by now become permanently broken up into a
number of more or less self-contained national territorial entities,
sovereign and irresponsible. The old practice of electing a ruler from the
supposedly ablest members of a governing family had died out: even the
imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire had become, in fact if not in
theory, subject to the lien of the House of Hapsburg. The various crowns of
Europe passed by heredity and with them the right to rule various
territories, the title to many of these being subject to dispute. Since no
court or means of arbitration existed to settle such disputes, the only
means of settlement was by war. By a curious reasoning process, it was
universally agreed that the prince who went to war and won had established
his hereditary right while the prince who proved not strong enough to retain
the territory in question thereby lost his right to inherit it. Thus, when
the Prussian Army proved stronger than the Austrian Army, FRaederick the
Great was held to have established his right to Silesia; when the British
Fleet proved stronger than the French Fleet, Britain’s claims to Cape Breton
or St. Vincent were considered to have been placed on a proper legal
footing.
Although “national consciousness” was developing gradually
all over Europe, in general the inhabitants of disputed territories still
took but a languid interest as to which prince had inherited or achieved by
conquest the right to govern them. Thus, the German population of Alsace
soon settled down contentedly under Louis XIV, and the inhabitants of
Silesia seemed to have raised no objection to transferring their allegiance
from the House of Hapsburg to the House of Hohenzollern.
A ruler who disturbed the peace of Europe by asserting by
force of arms some real or imaginary claim incurred thereby no general
odium. Shakespeare expresses the public attitude very clearly when he makes
Hamlet soliloquize concerning the war started by the Norwegian prince “to
gain a little patch of ground” from Poland not worth five ducats a year. Far
from condemning Fortinbras as a public nuisance, a warmonger, a
Kriegshetzer, Hamlet meditates complacently that he is:
“A delicate and tender
prince
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff’d,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell.”
Until very recently, a unique importance was attached to the
civil wars of Europe. It was agreed that even those European civil wars, the
causes of which were more than usually inadequate and that most signally
failed to achieve lasting results of any kind, were nevertheless momentous
and glorious in a way no wars between Asiatic peoples or between American
states could possibly be. At the end of each, everyone was certain that its
glorious memory would go down the ages undimmed to eternity—and, in fact,
the glorious memory of each endured undimmed until the outbreak of the next.
Looking back, it is now possible to realize these civil wars of Europe were
important for only two reasons. Firstly, they led naturally and inevitably
to the present plight of Europe. Secondly, during the last two centuries of
their course, they gave rise to an entirely novel method of warfare which
has come to be known as “civilized warfare.”
Now that disaster, to a greater or lesser extent, has
overtaken all the peoples of Europe, there is no longer any interest in the
details of these civil wars. So naturally did each follow its predecessor
that they hardly merit individual study. Probably a new nomenclature will
ultimately be adopted to indicate their essential unity. From the Dark Ages
down to the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, civil war in Europe was
continuous, local wars and private feuds never ceasing and large scale
political explosions, such as the Hundred Years War and the Hussite War,
taking place from time to time. After 1648, minor warfare gradually ceased,
but a series of general upheavals began, each separated from the other by
several decades of uneasy tranquility.
First came the series of wars waged to frustrate the
ambition of Louis XIV to dominate Europe. These may be grouped together as
European Civil War No. 1. There followed the War of the Austrian
Succession—European Civil War No. 2. The Seven Years War may be labelled as
European Civil War No. 3, and the War of 1775-83, in which Great Britain
survived an attack by a European coalition but lost her American Colonies,
European Civil War No. 4. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were
European Civil Wars Nos. 5a and 5b, respectively. The Crimean War, although
it did not involve all Europe, may be counted as European Civil War No. 6,
because it had the important result of bringing to an end the military
supremacy which the Czars had achieved in 1815. The group of wars between
1864 and 1871, which established the German Empire as the leading European
Military Power, may be labelled European Civil War No. 7. If the Balkan Wars
of 1877 and 1912 be dismissed as minor European conflicts with Asia,
represented by the decadent Turkish Empire, Europe may be said to have
enjoyed peace for the unprecedented spell of 43 years after the
establishment of the German Empire in 1871.
The adoption by historians of a nomenclature such as this
would be no startling innovation. It would express what was once the
universally recognized distinction between primary warfare, that is to say,
warfare between rival civilizations, and warfare between peoples sharing a
common civilization, that is to say, in essence, civil warfare. Throughout
the Middle Ages, the essential unity of Christendom was acknowledged without
question. The feuds of the Hohenstaufen, Valois, Plantagenet, and other
princely houses were never seen out of proportion: they aroused interest and
excitement which, however, rarely prevented a feudal army from disbanding
when the fixed period of military service due from each vassal to his lord
had expired. Such conflicts were internal affairs, never to be confused in
importance with the primary duty of defending the borders of Europe from the
attacks of the enemies of Christendom.
At the present time, it appears to many to be a minor
outcome of the 1939-1945 War that the old university city of Königsberg, the
former capital of East Prussia, and the birthplace and home of that great
European thinker Immanuel Kant, should have become the submarine base and
arsenal of Kaliningrad. But, to his contemporaries, the most creditable
episode in the life of Henry of Bolingbroke, afterwards King Henry IV of
England, was the term he served in 1390 as a volunteer with the Teutonic
Knights defending East Prussia from the Lithuanian and Polish heathen.
At best, warfare between Christians was considered a regrettable happening,
attributed by theologians to man’s fallen nature. Such warfare the Popes and
Church Councils did their best to discourage, restrict and humanize.
Regulations, seldom observed it is true, were laid down from time to time
for the conduct of the civil wars of Christendom. Thus, in 1139, the Lateran
Council denounced the newly-invented crossbow as a weapon “hateful to God
and unfit for Christians.” But this prohibition only extended to the killing
of fellow Christians. The Council expressly permitted the use of the
crossbow for the killing of infidels, a meritorious work in which even
weapons “hateful to God” were permissible.
Faint traces of this outlook are perceptible even at the
present day and account for the fact that the hanging of Field Marshal
Keitel appears to be a more regrettable event than the hanging of General
Yamashita, and the bombing of the refugees at Dresden more repugnant than
the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Popularly, and even officially, the war of 1914-1918 has
come to be known as the First World War. This is a plain misnomer. It began
as a European civil war in no essential way different from any of its
predecessors. On the one side were the peoples of Central Europe and on the
other side the chief Atlantic Powers, Great Britain and France, allied to
the Russian Empire. It remained a civil war although two non-European Powers
joined in: the Japanese Empire at the beginning in order to seize the
opportunity to acquire without resistance the German overseas possessions in
the Pacific, and the United States at the end mainly for the purpose of
safeguarding the huge loans which she had made to Great Britain and France
to buy munitions. The participation of Japan remained throughout strictly
limited, while as soon as the interests of the Wall Street financiers had
been secured by victory, the American public turned violently against all
intervention in European affairs, disowned President Wilson and all his
works, and insisted on the passing of neutrality legislation expressly
designed to prevent the United States from again being drawn into another
European civil war.
The so-called First World War should, therefore, be
classified as European Civil War No. 8. The war which broke out in 1939,
after a precarious interval of twenty-one years, was really only a
continuation of the struggle which it was believed had ended on the 11th of
November, 1918. It is submitted, therefore, that the war 1914-l9l8 should be
labelled European Civil War No. 8a, and the war 1939-1940 European Civil War
No. 8b.
It is the war 1940-1945 which really merits the title of the
First World War since during it, for the first time in history, continents
came into conflict rather than mere countries. On the one side were arrayed
the British Empire, North America and the great Eurasian Power, first
established in the Middle Ages by the Mongol Conqueror, Genghis Khan, and
recently re-established by Lenin under the name of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. On the other side was arrayed the greater part of
Europe led by the Third Reich, joined, in 1941, by the Japanese Empire.
The war of 1940-1945 was not conducted in accordance with
the code of warfare subject to which for the preceding two centuries
Europeans had been accustomed to wage war upon each other. Neither the
Americans nor the Eurasians of the Soviet Union had any regard for what
Europeans of past generations had been pleased to consider permissible in
warfare. Throughout, they fought in accordance with their own views on this
subject. Further, when the end at last came, there was no select gathering
of European statesmen such as had met together after every European civil
war to decide with dignity and decorum the form the latest peace settlement
should take in accordance with (in Europe) long recognized principles. For
the first time in history, the peoples of Europe found themselves saved the
trouble of coming to decisions concerning their own affairs since everything
of importance had already been decided for them in Washington and Moscow.
This book is not concerned with the woes of the present
generation of Europeans. The existing situation is merely the natural
consequence of reckless indulgence in civil war. The penalty came near to
being claimed when the Saracens overran Spain and invaded France in the
eighth century. The danger was yet more acute in the thirteenth century,
when the Mongols conquered all Europe up to a line now marked by the “Iron
Curtain.” Finally, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
Turkish Sultans were a serious menace to European civilization; their armies
twice penetrated to Vienna and their fleets commanded the Mediterranean. All
these dangers passed away, but in 1939 Nemesis was heedlessly mocked once
too often.
The civil wars of Europe are of interest here because,
during their final phase, there was gradually established a code subject to
which it was tacitly agreed Christian neighbours should wage war upon each
other. The code won general acceptance in Europe about the beginning of the
eighteenth century—that is to say, little more than two hundred years before
1939, the date of the outbreak of Europe’s latest and possibly last civil
war.
The fundamental principle of this code was that
hostilities between civilized peoples must be limited to the armed forces
actually engaged. In other words, it drew a distinction between
combatants and non-combatants by laying down that the sole business of the
combatants is to fight each other and, consequently, that non-combatants
must be excluded from the scope of military operations.
The credit for formulating the code based on this
fundamental principle cannot be attributed to any one statesman or political
thinker or, in fact, to any one nation in particular. With surprising
rapidity, we find that it had become tacitly accepted by the nations of
Western and Central Europe in the conduct of their wars with each other
around the beginning of the eighteenth century. Warfare conducted according
to this code became known as “civilized warfare.” Its acceptance never
extended beyond Europe or countries not under European influence, but for
two hundred years it was acknowledged by all the European States. In the
main it was complied with and, when infringed, was paid the tribute of
indignant denials. After holding sway for two centuries, it was repudiated
more swiftly and more mysteriously than it had been accepted.
Here, then, are two facts requiring explanation. How was it
that the European nations so quickly and easily at last came to a belated
decision to accept a code limiting the brutalities of warfare, after having
for so many centuries practised warfare in its most primitive and
unrestrained shape? And how was it that the European nations, after having
practised warfare in accordance with this code for two hundred years and
having scorned all peoples who refused to acknowledge it as self-confessed
barbarians, reverted, in the space of a decade, without apparent hesitation
or misgiving, to what was, in the opinion of Captain Liddell Hart “the most
uncivilized method of warfare the world has known since the Mongol
devastations.”
Chapter 4 — Civilized Warfare (The First Phase)
As above remarked, the introduction of Christianity and its
acceptance by the peoples of Europe did not have that immediate influence on
the conduct of war which, theoretically, one would expect. It was not,
indeed, until the rise of chivalry many centuries after the peoples of
Europe had become Christian that any amelioration in the conduct of war
became perceptible.
The origins of chivalry may be traced back to those dark
times when Europe was being ravaged by various barbarian invaders after the
collapse of the Roman military system. Originally, the orthodox attitude of
the devout Christian to the horrors taking place around him was to withdraw
from the world and pray, since it was agreed the Last Day was near at hand
and Christ himself has forbidden resistance to evil. When, however, it
appeared that the Last Day was being unaccountably delayed, while prayer
seemed to have surprisingly little influence on the doings of the Huns,
Magyars, Saracens, and Vikings who were devastating Europe, the idea
naturally dawned of opposing the onslaught of these invaders which was
inspired only by a love of fighting or a desire for loot by a resistance
inspired by an unselfish resolve to defend the suffering Christian faithful.
There thus gradually arose the ideal of the Christian Warrior. Naturally and
logically, the duty to defend weak and helpless Christians from infidel
oppressors gradually became extended to include a duty to defend the weak
and helpless generally from oppression. “Chivalry had two outstanding
marks,” says Professor R. B. Mowat, “two things that were as its essence: it
was Christian and it was military.”
Chivalry, as it ultimately developed, became a collective
term embracing a code of conduct, manners, and etiquette, a system of ethics
and a distinctive “Weltanschauung” (philosophy of life) as the Germans call
it. For our purpose, its principal importance is that, when the code of
chivalry was adopted as the code of the military caste in all the European
states, it provided a common bond between them. Whatever his nationality,
the European knight professed the code of the Christian warrior. With his
reputation as such to maintain, a European knight could not afford to use
the capture of a prisoner of the same class as himself as an opportunity to
indulge his resentment against a helpless enemy either in the manner of an
Assyrian King, by flaying or impalement, or, in the present-day manner, by a
mock-trial followed by hanging. Sadism could no longer freely masquerade as
moral indignation, as in the brave days of Samuel the Prophet: a prisoner
whatever his nationality, so long as he was a member of the European ruling
class, had to be treated when a prisoner with honour and courtesy.
From nursery days, everyone is familiar with Froissart’s
account of the capture of King John of France by the Black Prince at
Poitiers, in 1356. To-day, the story seems so wildly incredible that it
reads more like a fairy story for children than an event of sober history.
Having described with characteristic gusto the details of the fighting,
Froissart tells us the Black Prince made inquiries of those about him,
asking whether anything was known of the fate of the King of France, and was
informed that he must either be slain or captured “since he had maintained
his place in the forefront of the battle.” The Prince, therefore, sent the
Earl of Warwick and Lord Cobham to discover the truth, and at last they
found the King of France surrounded by a crowd of warriors angrily disputing
which one had actually captured him. “The two barons, dismounting, advanced
to the royal prisoner with reverence and conducted him in a peaceable manner
to the Prince of Wales.” Thus brought to the Prince, the latter “made a low
obeisance to him and ordered wine and spices to be brought which, as a mark
of his great affection, he presented to the King himself.” After being
treated with every honour and consideration, the King was brought in due
course to England where “mounted on a white horse richly caparisoned he rode
through the streets of London with the Prince of Wales on a little black
palfrey by his side. The Palace of the Savoy was first appropriated to his
use; but soon after his arrival he was moved to Windsor Castle, where he was
treated with the greatest possible attention and hunting, hawking, and other
amusements were provided for him.”
One can well imagine how King Asshurbanipal would have
piously evoked, “Asshur, Belit and Ishtar, the great gods, my lords” at such
sinful weakness. An Iroquois war chief would have deplored in picturesque
language the folly of letting slip such an opportunity for time-honoured
recreation at the torture-stake, while a modern editor would certainly
declaim volcanically in headline English: “Black Prince Goes Soft:
War-Criminal Escapes Trial.”
Such criticisms, however, inflict a grave injustice on the
memory of the Black Prince who can be taken in all respects as fairly
representing the chivalrous ideal. To another member of the European
military caste, he was ever a model of unfailing generosity and courtesy.
But he was never soft: those not of gentle blood could expect little
indulgence at his hands. When he lost his temper, which he did not
infrequently, the consequences were terrible. In 1370, for example, after he
had worked his will in a fit of temper on Limoges, the unfortunate city must
have looked as if “strong formations of our Bomber Command” had recently
visited it.
To summarize, it can be said that the general acceptance of
the ideals of chivalry had considerable influence on the conduct of warfare
in the Middle Ages, although this influence was generally restricted in
practice to dealings of the ruling classes with each other. At the least, it
made impossible such demonstrations of primitive crudity as that, for
example, of Sapor I, King of Persia, who having taken prisoner the gallant
but thick-headed Roman Emperor, Valerian, used his unfortunate captive as a
portable footstool to assist him in mounting his horse. Chivalry, as a code
of behaviour and courtesy, survived the Middle Ages and even persisted
during the Wars of Religion, as witness Velasquez’s famous picture “The
Surrender at Breda.”
Some may, perhaps, be unable to repress a cynical doubt
whether any human being ever succeeded in appearing quite as gracious and
courtly as Velasquez has represented the Spanish Commander-in-Chief, Ambrose
Spinola, as appearing on that celebrated occasion in 1625. Spinola was a
fervent patriot and a devout Catholic, and, in his eyes, the Dutch Governor
of Breda and his officers were obstinate heretics and national enemies. At
this moment of triumph, which was to prove to be the final episode of a
ferocious war that had lasted an entire generation and had been waged with
almost unparalleled brutality by both sides, could Spinola have really
greeted his defeated enemies with such amiability and courtly grace?
The point is quite without significance. Admittedly,
Velasquez was not an eye-witness: he painted the scene twenty years later on
instructions. Very possibly, he idealized the bearing of Spinola. What is
significant is that this picture proves how the Spanish Government preferred
that this triumph of Spanish arms should be remembered by posterity.
Clearly, neither Spinola nor the Spanish Government were obsessed with dread
lest their memory should be stained by the charge of having pampered a
defeated enemy. Velasquez’s picture proves conclusively how Spinola liked to
imagine he appeared on this memorable occasion. It may not portray exactly
what occurred, but it certainly portrays what contemporary opinion
considered should have occurred. In the same way, some of the happenings
proudly described in the Press and on the radio at the downfall of the Third
Reich in 1945 may not have occurred exactly as described, or may have been
offset to some extent by individual acts of courtesy and chivalry, report of
which was deliberately suppressed. Here again, these descriptions have a
significance quite independent of their veracity or accuracy; they prove
what the British and American leaders of opinion and their publics desired
to believe was taking place.
Unfortunately it has become increasingly difficult as the
years pass by to adopt the charitable view that most of the accounts of the
ill-treatment of prisoners of war by their captors in 1945 described at the
time with gusto, were baseless fictions by self-slanderers. Alas, numerous
photographs exist which make the truth clear beyond dispute that the victors
at the end of the Second World War, far from striving to win with grace like
Ambrose Spinola, if they did not consciously model their behaviour on the
Persian monarch, Sapor I, seem often to have regarded victory as an
opportunity to force their captives to act with them a sort of burlesque, a
variation of the children’s game “Robbers and Cops”. One of the most
frequently reproduced of these photographs shows a British soldier strutting
along behind an elderly man in a great coat walking with bowed head, at
whose back this warrior is pointing a sub-machine gun, presumably loaded.
From the captions attached we learn that this photograph shows Field Marshal
von Blaskowitz, the German C-in-C in Holland, after his surrender at
Appeldoorn, being marched to captivity—a captivity which was to last until
the Field Marshal in despair took his own life shortly afterwards in a
French prison.
It can hardly be denied that the effect of Velasquez’s
masterpiece would have been marred if he had shown the Governor of Breda
being prodded into Spinola’s presence by a Spanish soldier with a halbert:
likewise the well-known picture of Lord Nelson at the battle of Cape St.
Vincent receiving the swords of the captain and officers of the San Josef,
would not have been improved if the artist had had the bad taste to portray
one of Nelson’s tars brandishing a cutlass over the heads of the vanquished
Spaniards.
Chivalry may be described as the product of Christian
idealism. Or it may be described as the product of belated common sense.
What has become known as “civilized warfare” arose quite independently. At
long last the fact dawned on the human understanding that it would be for
the benefit of all in the long run if vindictive passions were restrained
and if warfare could be conducted according to tacit rules, so that the
sufferings, loss and damage inevitable in warfare might be reduced so far as
possible. At times no doubt the stronger side in a war might feel aggrieved
at having to overcome the weaker side by slow and costly methods, because an
obviously swift and easy method had been debarred as uncivilized: at times a
victor might feel frustrated of the full enjoyment of victory by being
precluded from dealing with complete freedom with a prostrate enemy. But it
was realized that such acts of self-restraint contributed to the
establishment of a general security shared by all, since no European state
was so supremely strong that its people could feel indifferent to the
possibilities which a change of fortune or a shift of the balance of power
might bring about.
Civilized warfare, as waged in Europe for some two hundred
years down to the present generation, cannot be dated earlier than the
beginning of the eighteenth century, but a somewhat similar form of warfare
had arisen in Italy in the fifteenth century and flourished for a short
time. In one of his essays Macaulay describes at length how this came about.
In brief, the rich burghers and merchants of medieval Italy were too busy
making money and enjoying life to undertake the hardships and dangers of
soldiering themselves. So they adopted the practice of hiring mercenaries to
do their fighting for them, and, being thrifty, business-like folk, they
dismissed these mercenaries immediately after their services could be safely
dispensed with. Wars were, therefore, fought by armies hired for each
campaign. Writing in the security of Victorian England, Macaulay pours scorn
on the result. “War,” he says, “completely changed its character. It became
left to the conduct of men who neither loved whom they defended nor hated
those whom they opposed. Every man came into the field impressed with the
knowledge that, in a few days, he might be taking the pay of the power
against which he was then employed. The strongest interest and the strongest
feelings concurred to mitigate the hostility of those who had lately been
brothers in arms and who might soon be brethren in arms once more. Their
common profession was a bond of union. Hence it was that operations, languid
and indecisive beyond any recorded in history, marches and countermarches,
bloodless capitulations and equally bloodless combats make up the military
history of Italy for nearly two centuries.”
To the reflective reader to-day, this result seems wholly
excellent. For the first time, soldiering became a reasonable and
comparatively harmless profession.
The generals of that period manoeuvred against each other, often with
consummate skill, but when one had won the advantage, his opponent generally
either retreated or surrendered. It was a recognized rule that a town could
only be sacked if it offered resistance: immunity could always be purchased
by paying a ransom fixed according to its importance. As a natural
consequence, no town ever resisted, it being obvious that a government too
weak to defend its citizens had forfeited their allegiance. Civilians had
little to fear from the dangers of war which were the concern only of
professional soldiers. The latter, however, continued to run considerable
risks since, although deaths by weapons of war were happily rare, yet
complete ignorance of the rudiments of camp sanitation often brought
disaster. An army which was compelled to remain stationary for any length of
time ran the risk of being decimated by plague.
This relatively satisfactory state of military affairs was
brought to an abrupt end by the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France,
in 1494. Thereafter, Italy became the prey of armies of foreign invaders,
French, Germans, Swiss, and Spaniards, who recognized no rules of warfare of
any kind. Thereafter, a succession of wars raged throughout the Peninsula,
waged with the most primitive ferocity and resulting in enormous loss of
life and causing irreparable damage.
For roughly two hundred years (1500 to 1700) unrestricted
civil wars continued to rage throughout Europe, on occasion attaining new
levels of barbarity and ferocity, as during the revolt of the Netherlands
against Philip of Spain or during the Thirty Years War in Germany. The
evolution of civilized warfare was roughly concurrent with the long reign of
Louis XIV of France; at least, no traces of it can be detected at the
beginning of his reign in 1643, and it appears fully established at his
death in 1715. No credit for this development, however, can be attributed to
Louis personally. On the contrary, one of the most deliberate and least
excusable barbarities in European history was perpetrated by his armies as
late as 1689 when the Palatinate was systematically devastated in order to
create an Odlandsgürtel (waste-land-zone) along the French frontier.
“Brûlez bien le Palatinat” (“Burn the Palatinate thoroughly”), ordered his
Minister of War, Louvois, and, from the old imperial city of Spryer on the
upper Rhine as far north as the Moselle, a thickly populated area 100 miles
long and 50 miles wide was first pillaged and then laid waste with fire and
sword.
But already a great and mysterious change had come over
public opinion: a new spirit was abroad. Forty years before, any of the
generals of the Thirty Years War would have carried out the work of
devastation according to orders as lightheartedly as a modern air marshal
but, in 1689, the French general ordered to loot and destroy Heidelberg
reported to Louvois, “I must represent to His Majesty the bad effect which
such a desolation may make upon the world in respect of his glory and
reputation.”
Condemnation of the devastation of the Palatinate was,
indeed, general and the indignation it aroused contributed not a little to
the ultimate frustration of Louis’ ambition to dominate Europe with his
armies. Yet, strange to say, it was largely the domination achieved by
France over European civilization—in art, literature, dress, manners and
thought—which indirectly brought about the acceptance of new standards in
warfare.
Fundamentally, this development probably originated as a
reaction to the Thirty Years War, popularly regarded as a war of religion.
It was as if men said, “We have seen the consequences of religious
enthusiasm: to fanatical zeal we owe the massacres of Magdeburg and Drogheda
and Central Europe being depopulated by a third. It is trying to be saints
which has led us to commit all these horrors. Let us, as an alternative, now
strive to be gentlemen!”
Having experienced in the seventeenth century the
consequences of religious ardour and unreflective credulity, mankind in the
eighteenth century inclined naturally towards restraint, moderation, and
doubt. The eighteenth century styled itself the Age of Reason. Poise,
balance, and urbanity were the qualities most admired. The new code of
polite manners forbade a gentleman from becoming unduly excited about
anything. Even in religion, extreme fervour was condemned: “enthusiasm”
became a term of reproach as John Wesley was later to discover.
Muddled thinking was despised: clarity was preferred to profundity. A
limitless capacity to believe without a reason and to hate without a cause
was not then, as at present, prized as an essential quality of the good
citizen. Above all things, a gentleman was required to maintain his sense of
proportion. From this, it followed naturally that wars ceased to be waged
for vague undefined objects in a frenzy of emotion, regardless of whether
the suffering and loss occasioned were grotesquely out of proportion to any
benefit that could possibly result. The wars of the eighteenth century were
fought for limited objects—for example, a border province or a colonial
possession—and they were fought with limited means, that is to say, the
means employed to wage them were limited in accordance with a for long
unwritten but generally recognized code. Warfare conducted in accordance
with this code has come to be known as civilized warfare.
As stated in the last chapter, this code was based on one
simple principle, namely that warfare should be the concern only of the
armed combatants engaged. From this follows the corollary that
non-combatants should be left entirely outside the scope of military
operations.
From the acceptance of this principle, all later
developments followed naturally and logically. If non-combatants must be
treated as outside the scope of military operations, it necessarily followed
that an enemy civilian did not forfeit his rights as a human being merely
because the armed forces of his country were unable to defend him. So long
as he took no part in the hostilities, he became entitled to claim from the
enemy combatant forces protection for his life and property. If he suffered
as a consequence of hostilities, it must be only indirectly owing to
regrettable and unavoidable mischance—for example, as when the inhabitants
of a town are killed by missiles fired to compel its garrison to surrender.
The sufferings of civilians must never be made a means by which the course
of hostilities can be influenced—for example, when, in accordance with the
common practice of barbarous warfare, a country is deliberately laid waste
to induce its rulers to surrender.
Other and important developments following from the
acceptance of the above principle are, first, that a combatant who
surrenders, by so doing ceases to be a combatant and re-acquires the status
of a non-combatant, subject only to a liability to be detained by his
captors during the continuance of hostilities. Secondly, a combatant who has
become incapacitated through wounds or disease ceases to be a combatant and
acquires certain privileges—privileges which were accorded by civilized
states long before they were formulated and formally recognized at the
Geneva Convention.
In regard to prisoners of war, in 1785, in a treaty between
the United States and Prussia, the principle was first expressed and
formally confirmed that a prisoner of war should be treated by his captors
as a person under military discipline transferred by his capture from the
command of his own countrymen to the command of his captors. This treaty
expressly provided that the captor should treat prisoners of war as troops
transferred to his command. It follows from the acceptance of this principle
that (to quote Article 27 of the Brussels Declaration of 1865 which formally
confirmed what had long been the established practice): “A prisoner of war
shall be subject to the rules and regulations in force in the captor’s
army.” Article 45 of the Geneva Convention re-affirms the principle in
practically the same words. “Rules and regulations” includes, of course, all
regulations in force in the captor’s army relating to trials by
court-martial. In short, a captor is bound in all cases to give a prisoner
of war a fair trial, the definition of “a fair trial” being what the captor
himself considers a fair trial for his own personnel.
In passing, it may be noted that this principle was the
principle which, beyond all others, was most flagrantly violated by the
war-crimes trials which began in 1945.
Obviously, the principle that non-combatants must be left
outside the scope of operations was capable of different interpretations.
Admittedly, a commander was justified in refusing to permit the presence of
civilians to impede his operations against the enemy armed forces;
consequently, a town could be bombarded regardless of the safety of the
inhabitants in order to prepare an attack upon its garrison. On the other
hand, it was admittedly barbarous to bombard a town outside the theatre of
war, in the hope that the suffering of the inhabitants would affect the
morale of the enemy combatant forces. In every case, the test was what was
the real intention behind the act in question. Inevitably, occasions arose
when genuine differences of opinion could exist. But the code was
safeguarded by the knowledge that violation, even if profitable at the
moment, would bring ultimate retribution and the weakening of the general
security enjoyed by all.
So long as the civil wars of Europe remained the private
business of Europeans, evasions of the code supported by pettifogging
pretexts were rare. Repeatedly, the question arose whether future security
should be sacrificed to immediate advantage. What triumphed on each occasion
was not sentimental humanitarianism, as an ancient Assyrian war lord or a
present-day air marshal would contend, but farsighted realism. It was not
until 1940 that this question was answered with an emphatic affirmative.
The inhabitants of Great Britain have long been convinced
that not the least of the many virtues which raise them above their
neighbours on the European mainland is an inborn devotion to “playing the
game.” Waging war by terrorizing the enemy civilian population is equivalent
to hitting below the belt in boxing. It is, therefore, remarkable that the
only persistent refusal to comply with the new code of civilized warfare
should have come from the British Admiralty. Long after civilized methods
had been accepted in land warfare, in sea warfare the British insisted upon
using their naval superiority to bring pressure on an enemy by bombarding
coastal towns. Beginning with Dieppe, virtually destroyed in 1694 by a
ruthless bombardment, few French ports escaped attack by British fleets
during the next hundred years, although no large scale invasion in any case
followed. In the war of 1812-1814, the coasts of America were similarly
ravaged and several important towns, notably Washington and Baltimore,
burned by landing parties, the openly expressed intention being to instil
into the American people “a will to peace.” Again, in the Crimean War,
British fleets in pursuance of the same policy bombarded Russian ports not
only on the Black Sea, as ancillary to the military operations going on
round Sevastopol, but on the Baltic and White Seas.
The official justification for these acts, which in land
warfare would have been regarded as incontestably barbarous, was that Great
Britain, lacking the military resources to fight on land great continental
states like France or Russia, could only carry on a war by coastal raids.
Britain’s war aims were strictly limited and, once the enemy had been
sufficiently inconvenienced, a frame of mind was created which resulted in a
peace being negotiated on reasonable terms.
The underlying reason, however, for the refusal of Great
Britain to conform with the code of civilized warfare adopted on the
Continent was that, so long as the British Navy commanded the sea, the
British people had no reason to fear a reversion of warfare to the methods
of primitive times. If defeated in a war, a continental people faced the
prospect of being dealt with in accordance with the standards then
prevailing. To a continental people, therefore, it was a matter of vital
concern whether these standards were civilized or barbarous. The people of
Britain on the other hand, enjoyed the comforting knowledge that, so long as
the British Navy ruled the waves, defeat at the worst would only mean a
withdrawal for the time being from the Continent. In fact, until the
conquest of the air, Great Britain could hardly be regarded politically as a
part of Europe; as a consequence of her sea supremacy, she enjoyed the
position of a sixth continent. So happily situated, there was lacking any
urgent reason to sacrifice the convenience of the moment to ensure security.
Few episodes in the life of Queen Victoria are better known
than the story of how she cut short Mr. Balfour when he was describing to
her the dismay caused by the initial reverses sustained by British arms at
the commencement of the South African War. “Please understand,” said the
Queen, “there is no one depressed in this house. We are not interested in
the possibilities of defeat: they do not exist.”
The story is generally quoted as an example of the
indomitable spirit of the old lady, or as an example of British tenacity in
adversity, or as an example of British arrogance. But the Queen was being
neither brave, boastful, nor arrogant. She was merely reminding the cabinet
minister of a plain political fact which had existed from the time Great
Britain had achieved naval supremacy. Until the time, some fifteen years
later, when mankind won final mastery of the air, the possibilities of
defeat for Great Britain, in the sense these possibilities existed for every
other European state, simply did not exist.
Other European nations less happily situated resolutely
resisted the temptation to revert to primitive methods of war, a temptation
at times almost irresistible. For example, in the long and doubtful
struggle, known as the Seven Years War, a swift and easy triumph was offered
by such a reversion. On the one side in this war was Prussia, a small state
exposed to attack from every direction across its straggling artificial
frontiers. On the other side, were ranged the three great military powers,
France, Austria and Russia. In accordance with the accepted principle of
civilized warfare that hostilities must be directed solely against the
combatant forces of the enemy, the armies of the Allies crossed the Prussian
frontier and, relying on great numerical superiority, offered battle in turn
to the Prussian army moving swiftly from one threatened point to another.
Taking advantage of interior lines and the fact that his enemies neglected
to act together, FRaederick the Great managed to achieve a succession of
brilliant victories and wonderful recoveries until, after seven years,
war-weariness at last put an end to the unequal struggle.
From the start, however, it must have been obvious to the
able leaders of the Allied armies, the Austrian Generals Daun and Loudon and
the Russian General Soltikov, that FRaederick the Great could be easily
overcome without a single major battle with the Prussian army. The Allies
were possessed of numerous and highly trained forces of light cavalry. All
that was necessary to bring about FRaederick’s speedy downfall was to pour
across the open and exposed frontiers of Prussia small units of Hungarian
hussars and Russian Cossacks with instructions to destroy everything which
could be destroyed by means of a torch or a charge of gunpowder. The
Prussian army would have been helpless in the face of such tactics, designed
to turn Prussia into a desert. Without supplies of food and material for the
manufacture of munitions and the whole country overrun, except for the
ground actually occupied by the Prussian army, no other course would have
been open to FRaederick but submission within the space not of seven years
but of seven months.
The advantages of such tactics were as apparent in 1756 as
they were to be in 1940. The drawbacks were equally apparent. On both
occasions, the question was whether a swift and easy triumph would be too
dearly purchased at the price of creating a precedent which, once created,
would inevitably be followed in later wars with the result that mankind
would live again under the shadow of a possible outbreak of primitive
warfare, with all the horrors this entails.
In 1756, when the memories of the Thirty Years War and
devastation of the Palatinate were still comparatively fresh, it was decided
this price was too great. In 1940, after civil war in Europe had been
conducted by civilized methods for over two hundred years, the contrary
decision was arrived at. When, in the fullness of time, the penalty of this
latter decision can be assessed from experience, it will be possible to
express an opinion whether greater wisdom and foresight was displayed in
1940 than in 1756.
In the Middle Ages, the code of chivalry had been readily
accepted throughout Europe because the ruling classes in all countries
accepted the teaching of the Catholic Church and acknowledged the spiritual
supremacy of the Pope. Except politically, Europe was a single unit, subject
to the same movements and developments. In the same way, in the eighteenth
century the new code governing the conduct of warfare was readily accepted
because the ruling classes in the leading European countries had become
linked by a similar outlook—by similar tastes, manners and
standards—originating at the Court of Louis XIV. Edward Gibbon, the
historian, thus speaks of “universal politeness” radiating from France. No
other European nation could attempt to challenge the leadership of the
French—the Germans at the time were backward, disunited, and impoverished as
a consequence of the Thirty Years War, the English were insular in outlook
and divided against each other by political and religious differences, the
Spaniards were hidebound and decadent, the Italians degenerate, and the
Russians barbarous. Although the French political dominion over Europe was
brief—the French fleet was virtually destroyed at Cape La Hogue and the
French army suffered a series of crushing disasters, being driven headlong
out of Germany at Blenheim, out of Italy at Turin, and out of the
Netherlands at Ramilles—the ruling classes of Europe continued to model
themselves in all but military matters on French standards of taste and
conduct. A member of the European ruling class, whatever his nationality,
prided himself first and foremost on possessing the outlook and manners of a
European gentleman—which in practice meant the outlook and manners of a
French gentleman. As such, he acknowledged an obligation to treat those whom
he regarded as his social equals, irrespective of their nationality, as
gentlemen and expected to be so treated by them in return. In Germany, and
still more in Russia, members of the ruling class felt themselves far more
closely bound to the ruling classes of the other European countries than to
their own countrymen who were their social inferiors. FRaederick the Great,
for example, prided himself far more on his capacity to write French verses
and on the fact that he was welcomed on an equal footing in intellectual
circles in Paris than for his military achievements. The fact that one of
the most brilliant of these—his victory at Rossbach—was won over a French
army in no way disturbed on either side the friendship which existed between
himself and a number of leading French poets, philosophers, mathematicians
and scientists. Macaulay speaks disparagingly of FRaederick’s contemporary
Horace Walpole as “the most Frenchified Englishman of the 18th century,” and
complains that even his literary style was “deeply tainted with Gallisms.”
The interest which Walpole took in “the fashions and scandals of Versailles”
particularly arouses Macaulay’s indignation. In all this, however, Walpole
was only characteristic of his time. His social equals in Germany habitually
spoke French, using German only to give directions to underlings. In Russia,
a veneer of French culture completely separated the ruling class from the
bulk of the population.
From this it naturally followed that the officers of the
various European armies, when they came in contact, should treat each other
with elaborate courtesies in accordance with the manners of the time. A
capitulation, especially, was an occasion for an exchange of courtesies.
Thus, as early as 1708, when the citadel of Lille was surrendered by Marshal
Bouffiers after a terrible and costly siege, not only was the French army
permitted to withdraw with the honours of war, but the gallant Marshal,
before being allowed to return to France, was entertained at a dinner given
in his honour by his conquerors, the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene.
Already, therefore, a stage had been reached in the conduct of civil warfare
in Europe as far removed, on the one hand, from King Sapor mounting his
horse from the back of a captive emperor as, on the other hand, from Field
Marshal Keitel being handed over to a hangman and then buried, rather
shamefacedly, in a nameless grave. A sense of unity, irrespective of
nationality, created by a common pride in the profession of arms, made
exhibitions of barbarous primitive emotion unthinkable. Far from seizing an
opportunity to inflict vengeance for a defeat, it became a point of honour
to pay generous recognition to the courage and skill of an enemy in
adversity. FRaederick the Great’s plan of campaign in 1762 was completely
disarranged by the unexpectedly obstinate resistance of the minor fortress
of Schweidnitz, due to the skill of a French engineer named Gribeauval
serving in the Austrian army who, we are told, “understood countermining
like no other.” The siege cost the Prussians the lives of 3,000 men and
occasioned FRaederick himself the greatest personal hardship. But when the
fortress at last surrendered, FRaederick’s first act was to invite Gribeauval
to dinner in order to compliment him on the superiority which he had shown
to the Prussian engineers.
“No terms are too good for you!” was Admiral Keith’s reply,
in 1800, when Marshal Massena at last indicated his willingness to surrender
Genoa after having held the city against over whelming odds until complete
exhaustion of his supplies made further resistance impossible. It seems to
have occurred to no one that this defence, which largely contributed to the
final outcome of the campaign, deserved personal retribution. Marshal
Davout, indeed, in 1814, was threatened with a trial after his surrender of
Hamburg for having “rendered the name of French man odious” by his brutal
treatment of the inhabitants during the siege. This threat, however—which
was never seriously pressed—came from his own countrymen and political
enemies, the French Royalists. Had this trial taken place, the court would,
of course, have been French. Whatever may have been his deserts and in
spite, no doubt, of the views of the inhabitants of Hamburg, Davout received
nothing but courtesy from his foreign enemies.
The story is well known of how, at the opening of the battle
of Fontenoy in 1745, the French officers greeted their advancing enemies
with the polite invitation, “Gentlemen of the English Guards, fire first!”
In the same strain is the story of how Captain Savage of the Hercules,
at the battle of the Iles des Saintes, stood upon his quarter deck, solemnly
raising his cocked hat as each French ship drew abreast to deliver her
broadside. These stories and many similar may be fictions, but at least they
prove what public opinion at home desired to believe took place on the
battlefield. Even if acts of courtesy took place in war to-day, the report
of them would be suppressed for fear of outraging public opinion.
Perhaps the most significant of these stories is that of
James Wolfe, afterwards the conqueror of Canada. When serving as a Major in
the army of the Duke of Cumberland in 1746, Wolfe was ordered at the battle
of Culloden by his superior officer, none other than the commander-in-chief
himself, to pistol a wounded Highlander on the ground. He could refrain only
at the peril of his military career to which he was wholeheartedly devoted.
Wolfe, nonetheless, indignantly refused, with the remark that he was a
soldier and not an executioner!
Some may suspect this story originated as a piece of
Jacobite propaganda, but it was at once widely accepted and repeated, not as
a tribute to the invincible repugnance rightly felt by His Royal Highness,
the Duke of Cumberland, for (as we should say) pampering the enemy, but as
demonstrating how firmly James Wolfe maintained his high standard of
professional honour. It is hard to believe that the sentiments which
animated James Wolfe and most of his European contemporaries in 1746 could
have died out entirely by 1940. At the latter date, of course, the spiritual
descendants of the Duke of Cumberland abounded in all the belligerent armies
and, in particular, in the air forces. It would be interesting to learn
whether they were often embarrassed by the scruples of the spiritual
descendants of James Wolfe? If so, by what means were such scruples, so
prejudicial to good order and discipline, overcome? In the Mongol invasion
of 1241, enormities were perpetrated by barbarous nomads of High Asia, and
in the Thirty Years War by godless mercenaries; in the War of 1940-1945,
enormities were frequently committed by young gentlemen of sheltered
upbringing and blameless character. That incidents prejudicial to good order
and discipline of the kind associated with the name of James Wolfe have now
become seemingly so rare speaks volumes for the efforts of the emotional
engineers working behind the scenes. The attitude towards James Wolfe’s
conduct held by his contemporaries contrasts strangely with the present-day
view that it merely indicates that his reactions had not been scientifically
conditioned by effective propaganda before he set forth for the campaign.
The obedience demanded from a professional soldier in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was by no means unqualified, so far as
officers were concerned. The respective roles of the soldier and the
politician were then clearly distinguished. The definition of war as “an
extension of policy by force” later formulated by Clausewitz, had already
won general acceptance, and policy was admittedly the sole concern of the
politicians. A gentleman who had accepted a commission in the army or navy
was, consequently, held in honour bound to take part in any war upon which
the executive government might decide to embark. He could not pick and
choose: the rights and wrongs of a war were not his concern. As Macaulay put
it, “A man who belongs to the army only in time of peace—who appears at
reviews in Hyde Park, escorts his Sovereign with the utmost valour and
fidelity to and from the House of Lords and retires as soon as he thinks it
likely that he may be ordered on an expedition—is justly thought to have
disgraced himself.” James Wolfe, of course, no more concerned himself with
the ethics of the various campaigns in which he took part than did in our
own day Lord Roberts, when he planned and directed in 1900 the operations to
bring about the subjugation of the Boer Republics, or did Admiral Raeder,
when he planned and directed the occupation of Norway in 1940. It was
without the least sense of personal guilt that Sir Charles Napier reported
cheerfully to his government in 1843 the successful conclusion of a war of
naked, unashamed aggression against the Ameers of Scinde with the single
word “Peccavi”—“I have Scinde.”
On the other hand, the manner of conducting a war, whether
just or unjust, was recognized to be the sole concern of the professional
soldiers conducting it. A soldier did not feel himself bound to commit
promiscuous homicide as and when directed—like a modern blockbuster or
underworld gunman. So long as warfare in Europe continued to be warfare
between Europeans, it was conducted in accordance with a recognized code, in
the interpretation of which no civilian interference was tolerated.
How jealously the exclusive right to interpret this code was
guarded may be illustrated by one episode from the career of General Charles
George Gordon. In 1863, he had been lent to the Chinese Imperial Government
to direct the repression of the Tai-Ping Rebellion and, having captured
Soo-chow, had accepted the surrender of a number of rebel leaders. To his
horror, these were promptly beheaded by the Chinese civil authorities. It is
recorded that General Gordon, beside himself with rage, went in search of
the mandarin whom he considered responsible, revolver in hand, declaring
that his own professional honour and reputation had been indelibly stained
by the execution of his prisoners of war.
It need hardly be remarked that latitude to exercise private
judgment was only conceded to officers. Among the rank and file what may,
for convenience, be labelled the Light Brigade spirit, prevailed. The
attitude of the gallant Six Hundred which so aroused Lord Tennyson’s
admiration arose from the fact that the least disposition to ask the reason
why was discouraged by tricing the would-be inquirer to the triangle and
flogging him into insensibility. The same spirit prevailed in the ranks of
all the European armies and was the product of the same simple but effective
treatment.
Of more practical importance than the code of good manners
which it imposed on the combatants was the security given to civilian life
and property by the introduction of civilized methods of warfare. Not only
was the massacre of civilians no longer left to the judgment of individual
commanders, but pillage, a recognized practice in the seventeenth century,
was gradually replaced by requisitions for which payment was made. “The
Austrian armies,” writes Captain Liddell Hart, “were particularly
restrained, even to the point of handicapping their own operations by
extreme scrupulousness in abstaining from any demands on the civilian
population.”
In the Prussian Army, the regulations against looting were so strict that,
after the disaster at Jena in 1806, it is recorded that the retreating
Prussians endured without fires the bitter cold of an October night in
central Europe rather than seize civilian stores of wood which lay to hand
but for which they were unable to pay.
Civilized warfare reached its furthest extension during the
last half of the eighteenth century. The principles and practice of
civilized warfare were worked out by a number of writers during this period
and, in particular, by the Swiss jurist, Emeric de Vattel, in 1758, in his
famous work The Law of Nations, or the Principles of Natural Law as
Applied to the Administration of National Affairs and of Sovereigns. At
the time he wrote, much of what he said must have seemed platitudinous to a
degree, but to us it has come to appear grimly prophetic. Not only does
Vattel point out that, if barbarous methods of warfare are adopted, the
enemy will do likewise, so that the only ultimate result will be to add to
the horrors of war; not only does he argue that “harsh, disgraceful and
unendurable peace terms” will only be fulfilled as long as the defeated
enemy lacks the means to repudiate them; Vattel actually condemns the use by
rulers at war of “offensive expressions indicating sentiments of hatred,
animosity and bitterness” since such expressions must ultimately stand in
the way of a settlement on reasonable terms.
At a first glance, this would appear a condemnation of the
whole system of modern war propaganda. But, of course, Vattel had no means
of conceiving even dimly one of those imposing collections of fabrications
and calumnies which it has now become the first business of nations at war
to concoct and broadcast concerning each other. Probably, he merely had in
mind one of those witty but ill-advised jibes which FRaederick of Prussia was
in the habit of circulating against his brother monarchs, and which, later,
he so often had cause to regret as being unnecessary impediments in the way
of negotiations for a new understanding.
Vattel would have been astonished to learn how exasperating
a later generation of Europeans would find his book. In justice to him, it
should be said that from his style it is clear that he was under no illusion
that he was propounding anything original or profound. When his
contemporary, Hogarth, drew the “Idle and Industrious Apprentices” series,
he did not imagine that they illustrated a new discovery that thrift and
diligence (aided by marriage to the only daughter of one’s employer) are
more likely to lead to prosperity than indolence and improvidence! In the
same way, Vattel realized that he was only stating what everyone who
troubled to think about the subject knew as well as himself. His modest
ambition, when he took his pen in hand, was to set forth a number of
recognized truisms more clearly and concisely than they had ever been set
forth by anyone else previously.
It is only when read in the light of the developments which
the future held in store, that Vattel’s book seems so ominously prophetic.
But in no passage is there indicated any apprehension of such developments.
On the contrary, the great progress which had been made towards establishing
a code of civilized warfare not only filled him with complacency, but
clearly inspired in him the hope that this progress would lead finally to
the abolition of civil warfare in Europe altogether. Civil warfare being the
prized prerogative of the European kings, it would have been dangerous for
most of Vattel’s contemporaries to have expressed the opinion that warfare
in any form was barbarous. But as a Swiss subject, Vattel was able to deal
with the question frankly. He is prepared to admit that war may at times
serve the useful purpose of settling disputes between nations. Nevertheless,
he points out that war can only serve this purpose if, in the first place,
it be conducted by methods which do not leave behind a legacy of hatred and
bitterness, and, in the second place, if the victors be not so carried away
by their success as to impose by violence harsh and unreasonable terms,
since this inevitably prepares the way for another war.
Vattel’s complacency may be found exasperating by many
readers to-day, but it cannot be said to have been unjustified by the
circumstances of the time when he wrote. The progress made by European
civilization during the preceding hundred years had been truly amazing.
Already, the times of the Thirty Years War seemed remote when soldier and
bandit were practically synonyms and every civilian knew that good fortune
alone protected him from being overtaken by horrors and indignities of every
imaginable kind. The fate of Magdeburg might have been the fate of any
European city in 1631. True, civil warfare still continued to burst forth at
intervals in Europe, but, like the practice of duelling, it had become so
circumscribed by rules that its worst consequences were eliminated or
reduced to a minimum. The possibility that civil warfare might entail the
penalty of invasion and conquest by a non-European power seemed to have
passed away for ever. The Turkish Empire now only gave cause for alarm lest
its dissolution might disturb the European balance of power; the formerly
semi-Asiatic state of Muscovy appeared successfully to have adopted European
civilization—the court of Catherine the Great was to all outward appearances
a reproduction of Versailles; the recent exploits of the English and French
in India seemed to indicate that a wise Providence had ordained a special
law of nature by which the smallest number of European troops was superior
to an Oriental army however numerous; and across the Atlantic, there seemed
no reason to doubt that the European colonists in America would always
follow submissively European precept and example in all things—did not such
men as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin comply in all respects with
the highest European standards in conduct and outlook?
To such an eminently reasonable representative of the Age of
Reason as Emeric de Vattel, it would barely have occurred as a conceivable
possibility that the inhabitants of Europe, having once adopted the
standards of civilized warfare, would ever again revert to the standards of
the Thirty Years War which permitted any enormity to civilian life and
property while still maintaining a sort of rough code of professional
etiquette between the opposing leaders. A reversion to the even more
barbarous standards of a far more remote time, when the primary objective of
warfare was to attack the enemy civilian population and when captured enemy
generals would be slaughtered as such by their captors, would have seemed to
him utterly inconceivable. When Vattel wrote, the nations of Europe had
achieved such pre-eminent military supremacy that non-European nations
seemed only to count in world affairs as subjects for exploitation by
Europeans. The occasions when European civilization was threatened with
destruction by invaders from Central Asia, who had penetrated unchecked to
the Oder and the Adriatic, were so far past as to have become unreal and
mythical. Russia, Europeanized by Peter the Great, had been accepted as a
member of the European family of nations, and had spread her sway across
Asia to the Pacific Ocean. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the
most perverse pessimist could not have foreseen that the Europeanized Russia
of Peter was doomed to vanish utterly and to be replaced by the long
dissolved Eurasian Empire founded by Genghis Khan, resurrected in a new but
even more formidable shape, not only non-European in origin, outlook and
organization, but avowedly hostile to traditional European civilization.
No such nightmares disturbed reasonable men in the Age of
Reason. The rising tide of complacency in that happy period reached its
high-watermark in the passage written in 1770 by the Comte de Guibert quoted
in the introduction to this book.
“Save in combat,” declares the Comte proudly, “no blood is
shed: prisoners are respected.” In short, a temporary mid-way position had
been reached between Gilgal and its Prophet sharpening his knife, on the one
hand, and Nuremberg with its collection of foreign hangmen, on the other.
“Towns are no more destroyed,” continues the Comte, “the
countryside is no more ravaged.” Again, the contrast is striking between, on
the one hand, Magdeburg in 1631, with Tilly’s soldiers rushing through the
streets, hacking down men, women and children in a frenzy of slaughter, and,
on the other hand, Dresden, that night in 1945, when an enemy air fleet
arrived over the city “at the timely moment” when it was crowded with
refugee women and children.
“Conquered peoples,” concludes the Comte, “are only obliged
to pay some sort of contributions which are often less than the taxes which
they pay to their own sovereign.”
For countless generations, the civilian population of Europe
had patiently borne the consequences when “some delicate and tender prince
whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d” decided to battle with some
equally delicate and tender prince across the frontier, occasionally at the
risk of his own skin, but invariably of theirs. For the first time, the
result of such wars could be awaited with indifference. The actual fighting
would be done by long-service professional soldiers recruited from the dregs
of the population—the scum of the earth as the Duke of Wellington frankly
described them—guaranteed from acting otherwise than as machines by a
ferocious discipline enforced by repeated flogging, led by officers who
under no circumstances would forget they were gentlemen first and officers
afterwards. If one’s prince managed to win, one could applaud his glorious
triumph loyally, even if one derived no benefit therefrom. If he lost, there
was no occasion for despair. Even a change of rulers would make little
practical difference to the average citizen, who generally transferred his
allegiance in such circumstances without perceptible emotional disturbance.
If the Age of Reason did not endure long enough to bring
about the abolition of civil warfare in Europe, it at least bestowed for a
few decades upon the civilian population of Europe a very passable
substitute for peace.
We have now described the manner in which warfare lost much
of its barbarism and took on civilized traits. In the following chapters
will be traced the steps by which it degenerated into the brutalities of the
Second World War in which the imagined atrocities alleged by hate-propaganda
during the First World War were enacted in grim fact. Three main steps in
this process may be noted, each following naturally from the one preceding
it.
This political chain reaction was set in motion by the
French Revolution. Deprived of the services of the professional army
officered by aristocrats of the Monarchy, the revolutionary government had
recourse to a levée en masse of the population. The people of the
countries overrun by the French armies, after their own professional armies
had been shattered, achieved liberation by means of similar armies of
conscripted civilians. The European wars waged between 1792 and 1815 were
the first of the Peoples’ Wars, so called because they were fought between
peoples in arms and not as hitherto by professional armies maintained in
peacetime by the rulers to enforce their wishes.
At first appeals to simple patriotism proved sufficient to
inspire conscripted civilians with military ardour. Later the discovery was
made that conscripted civilians fought better if they had been induced to
hate the enemy against whom they were fighting. So gradually was evolved and
perfected the modern science of emotional engineering, the purpose of which
is to convince the average citizen that the citizens of the state against
which it has been decided to wage war were monsters of depravity, barbarous,
perfidious and cruel, with whom any thought of peace was impossible, to
overcome whom no personal sacrifice would be too great.
Inevitably warfare conducted in an artificially inspired
frenzy of fear and hatred changed its character. Thus began the period of
so-called Total War to use the term adopted to describe hostilities waged
regardless of the Rules of Civilized Warfare. Naturally the average civilian
serving as a soldier, knowing nothing and caring less of military
traditions, and having been taught that it was his patriotic duty to believe
that the enemy was committing atrocities of every description, felt himself
free to act as he had been assured the enemy was acting. Hate propaganda
always lays the greatest stress on the contention that the enemy is solely
responsible for the outbreak of hostilities in order to generate in the mind
of every individual soldier a personal grievance against the enemy for
having wantonly forced him to leave home and endure the hardships and
dangers of a campaign.
The act which may be cited as marking the end of the age of
civilized warfare and the beginning of the age of Total War was the
acceptance of the Lindemann Plan on the 30th March 1942.
The last stage of the chain reaction was the adoption of
war-crimes trials as a method of disposing of captured leaders of the
vanquished side which inevitably must make the future conduct of warfare
more ruthless than ever. Now that every general knows that in the event of
defeat he will assuredly be done to death by the victors if he falls into
their hands, he can hardly be expected to hesitate to order the commission
of any enormity which seems to him to offer some hope of staving off defeat.
In the next chapter will be considered the characteristics
of Peoples’ Wars, the first stage of the chain reaction which initiated the
gradual rebarbarization of warfare.
Chapter 5 — Civilized Warfare (The Second Phase)
With the outbreak of the French Revolution civil warfare in
Europe entered upon a new phase.
The epoch of Kings’ Wars ended that happy interlude when
wars were undertaken by kings against kings with small professional armies
for objects which their subjects were neither expected to approve nor to
understand. Then began the epoch of Peoples’ Wars, that is to say wars
which, if rarely undertaken from any genuine regard for the peoples’
benefit, were waged by an increasingly large proportion of the adult male
population.
The introduction of Peoples’ Wars produced two marked
changes in the character of warfare: 1. the appearance of huge hastily
collected armies, raised by conscription, thus making wars much more savage
and lethal; and 2. the rise of the science of propaganda or “emotional
engineering” needed to induce these conscripted armies to fight with
enthusiasm and with the hearty support of the populace at home.
The best treatment of the first phase or result of this
change is presented by the eminent American expert on warfare, Mr. Hoffman
Nickerson, in his book, The Armed Horde.
The loss of life, even as early as the wars of the French Revolution and
Napoleon, vastly exceeded those of any previous wars, at least so far as
those killed on the field of battle are concerned. Only 5,000 English had
been killed during the whole year 1704, during which the decisive battle of
Blenheim had been fought. By the time of Dumouriez and Napoleon, wars had
become mass-murder on the battlefield. Napoleon was especially prodigal of
men in battle. He lost about 40,000 in the Battle of Borodino alone.
Moreover, disease in these mass-armies, with little provision for sanitation
and medical treatment, killed even more than gunfire. While, at first, the
rules of civilized warfare were continued in Peoples’ Wars, there is no
doubt that this new type of war contributed greatly to the increase of
unrestrained savagery and mortality in warfare. One reason for the increase
of ferocity was the necessary parallel development of propaganda.
Kings’ Wars were fought by small armies of professional
soldiers obeying orders: Peoples’ Wars were fought by huge armies of
conscripted civilians who, in order to fight with enthusiasm, had to be led
to imagine that they knew for what they were fighting. The production,
quickly and effectively, of a war psychosis thus became an imperative
necessity. To meet this need the modern science of emotional engineering,
as Aldous Huxley has labelled it, was gradually evolved.
In the Kings’ Wars of the eighteenth century, the man in the
street was not required to fight and he was preserved from suffering therein
more than a minimum of loss and inconvenience. There was no occasion,
therefore, to trouble him with explanations of the reasons for such wars. In
the Peoples’ Wars, which began in 1792 and have lasted to the present day,
the man in the street was compelled to do the fighting and it became,
therefore, no longer impudent presumption on his part to inquire the reason.
As a consequence, it became necessary to work out a technique by which
plausible reasons could be found on short notice to meet any contingency,
or, as an alternative, a technique by which a condition of public hysteria
could be created in which any reason would be accepted as plausible. Thus
was evolved the science of emotional engineering. To wage war, it had become
necessary to generate hatred. Fear begets hatred. If the reasoning powers of
the man in the street could be paralysed by a sufficiently vivid portrayal
of a real or imaginary danger, not only would his natural but inconvenient
curiosity as to his rulers’ doings be stifled but he would fight the better
in a state of blind hatred. It soon became recognized that neither
professional military pride nor an intelligent conviction of the justice of
a cause was sufficient inspiration. Every man must “see red,” as Field
Marshal Montgomery frankly told his troops before they landed on the
Normandy beaches on “D-Day.” Carnot’s levée en masse, in 1793, and
the Dresden holocaust of 1945 are linked together by a series of
developments, each following naturally and logically from the other.
During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792-1815) the
standards of European civil warfare suffered a marked decline. The citizen
soldiers of the new French Republic who invaded the Rhinelands, Belgium, and
Italy were inspired by official proclamations about the prospect of riches
as well as glory: in exchange for the blessings of liberty, the armies of
France shamelessly plundered the countries which they overran. On the other
hand, it must be admitted that a wide gulf exists between the looting of
churches and art galleries, as during Napoleon’s campaign in Italy, in 1796,
and the systematic dismantling of factories, leaving a highly skilled
industrial population dependent on them to starve in accordance with the
Potsdam Agreement of a century and a half later. Stealing pictures and
statues for the adornment of the victors’ art galleries is one thing, but
the stealing of essential machinery in order to impoverish the vanquished is
quite another.
After the restoration of order and discipline under the
Napoleonic Empire, a marked return set in towards the high standards of the
eighteenth century. Lapses, however, were not infrequent. Thus, in 1806,
after the victory of Jena, the city of Lübeck
was pillaged by the pursuing French troops; in 1808, Cordova was ruthlessly
sacked by Dupont’s army. On the other side, the most outstanding lapse was
the celebrated sack of Badajoz in 1812, described with shame by an
eye-witness, Sir William Napier. But from the perspective of nearly 150
years, something can be said in extenuation of the orgy of robbery, rape,
and murder with which Wellington’s troops sullied the laurels they had won
in one of the most heroic and costly assaults in the annals of the British
Army. The outrages were limited to the rank and file, were committed in hot
blood by troops who had just sustained terrific losses, and stern repression
swiftly followed. It is absurd to compare this comparatively isolated
incident with either the habitual pillage and homicide in which European
armies had been wont to indulge during the Thirty Years War, or with the
systematic and wholesale plundering of Germany after the Second World War
which in extent and thoroughness stands without a parallel in history since
it included in every part of Germany the official looting of public property
and the equipment of factories in accordance with the Morganthau Plan and
the appropriation of portable private property of every description by
individual members of the occupying forces: in the eastern provinces the
inhabitants who escaped with their lives considered themselves fortunate,
everything they possessed being appropriated with the express approval of
the Potsdam Conference.
In Napoleonic times, the nearest parallel to such doings is
to be found in the campaigns of the French armies in Spain. Even in these,
however, depredations seem to have been generally limited to churches and
monasteries; civilians, except in exceptional circumstances, were rarely
molested. The primitive theory that, on defeat, all the property of the
vanquished is vested automatically in the victors had not yet been
re-affirmed.
What is most important about any war is the peace which it
brings about. From this point of view, the wars of 1792-1815 maintained the
highest standards. The moderation of the victors in 1815 appears to modern
eyes simply superhuman. In accordance with Vattel’s argument that only a
peace based on reason and justice could be lasting, France was neither
penalised nor humiliated. Not only was no French territory annexed, but
France was left in possession of the German territory on the left bank of
the Rhine which had been conquered by Louis XIV. No restrictions were
imposed on the French army or navy, and the indemnity demanded was paid
without difficulty within a decade.
The shooting of Marshal Ney after Waterloo is considered by
many as a blot on the memory of the Duke of Wellington, and it has even been
suggested that it will even bear some comparison with the doing to death of
various enemy commanders in 1946. This suggestion is, of course, too absurd
to consider, but in justice to the Duke of Wellington it should be
remembered that Marshal Ney was shot by the Bourbon Government after a
conviction by a French Court on a charge of treason against Louis XVIII—of
which he was undeniably guilty. The most that can justly be said against the
Duke of Wellington is that he did not bestir himself—as much as his admirers
could with—to save a gallant opponent from the spite of his political
enemies by interfering with the course of French justice.
Throughout the nineteenth century civil wars in Europe
continued to be waged in accordance with the rules of civilized warfare
without any noteworthy lapses. European Civil War No. 6, otherwise known as
the Crimean War, may be taken as representative of European warfare during
this period in its least harmful aspect. Characteristically, at its
commencement, there was general bewilderment as to the aims for which it was
to be fought: once fairly started, however, this difficulty was quickly
remedied by declaring that “the continuance of the war was essential to the
vindication of the national honour.” In the peace treaty which concluded it,
there is not a single reference to the question of the Holy Places in
Palestine, the ostensible cause of the war. On the other hand, during its
course each side had abundant opportunity to display the greatest courage
and self-sacrifice: in fact, one episode, the Charge of the Light Brigade,
has become symbolic of unreasoning heroism. The scope of the hostilities was
strictly limited, damage to civilian life and property was negligible, and
the casualties among the combatants, amounting to about a quarter of a
million lives, was well below the average. No noteworthy or enduring
political results were achieved and, consequently, European civilization as
a whole sustained no serious setback. No legacy of bitterness was left
behind: the terms of peace, if read carefully, merely indicate that Russia
had had the worst of the fighting. In the Crimea itself, “a spirit of amity
and relief prevailed when a salute of 101 guns denoted the end of the war.
Reviews and races took the place of battles, the troops of the allies and
the Russians mingled in friendly intercourse—or at least in the common
delight of cheerful inebriation.”
It must, however, be again stressed that the rules governing
civil warfare in Europe were held to have little or no application to
warfare between Europeans and non-Europeans outside Europe. Thus, Canton was
savagely bombarded by a British fleet in 1841: the famous Summer Palace in
Peking was deliberately sacked and burned by a Franco-British army in 1860;
and, in 1863, the Japanese city of Kagoshima was ruthlessly destroyed by a
fleet under Admiral Kuper as the readiest means of extorting trade
concessions from the Japanese. In the Indian Mutiny, all restraints were
quickly forgotten in a blaze of moral indignation and racial hatred. Colonel
Neill hanged his prisoners wholesale; John Lawrence ceremoniously blew his
captives from the mouths of cannons; and John Nicholson, while practising
both methods of disposal on the widest scale, was so oppressed by their
inadequacy that he urged “the flaying alive, impalement or burning” of the
mutineers and quoted the Old Testament copiously in support of inflicting on
them “the most excruciating tortures.”
In passing, it should be noted that there was abundant
precedent for the doing to death of a number of distinguished Japanese
prisoners of war after the overthrow of the Japanese Empire with the aid of
the atom bomb in 1945. The mock-trial in 329 B.C. of Bessos the Persian
governor, who attempted to maintain the Persian resistance to the Macedonian
invaders, affords perhaps the earliest precedent. Having undergone various
tortures as a pre-conviction punishment, Bessos was condemned to a formal
trial, Alexander the Great himself assuming the role of prosecutor. After
delivering an eloquent speech demanding conviction, Alexander then assumed
the role of judge, convicted the unfortunate Oriental and sentenced him to
death by torture.
Throughout the ages which have passed since the days of Bessos down to the
present day, Europeans have always in practice refused to admit that any
rules which might exist governing European civil wars had any application to
Asiatics. The hanging, therefore, of a number of Japanese generals and
admirals in 1946, was not so revolutionary a departure from recognized
practice as was the doing to death, during the same year, of professional
European soldiers at Nuremberg.
In Asia, methods of warfare have remained completely
unchanged throughout the ages. In Africa, the native races have remained
entirely uninfluenced by European rules and conventions, as the French from
experience in Algeria, the British in the Sudan, and the Italians in
Abyssinia, can eloquently testify. Only in South Africa, in the wars between
the Dutch settlers and the British Empire, have European traditions in the
main been followed although Captain Liddell Hart considers that the plan
adopted by Lord Kitchener, in 1900, “of laying waste the countryside,
burning the Boers’ farms and removing the women and children to
concentration camps in which some 25,000 died may be regarded as the
inauguration of total warfare.”
Reluctantly granting this and admitting that similar charges could have been
brought against Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener for their treatment of the
Boer partisans as those brought forty-five years later against Field Marshal
Kesselring for his treatment of Italian irregulars and banditti, it must be
conceded that the peace terms imposed on the Boers at Vereeniging complied
in most respects with the requirements laid down by Emeric de Vattel in 1758
for a just and, therefore, lasting settlement. The subsequent careers of
General Botha and General Smuts may be cited as conclusive proof of the
wisdom of the great Swiss jurist’s contentions.
In spite also of virulent hate propaganda, quite in the
modern style, which raged in the British Press against the Boers, and in the
Press of the rest of the world against Great Britain, the struggle itself
was conducted on the whole in accordance with European traditions. In fact,
some of the episodes of this war have come to appear well nigh unbelievable.
Thus when on March 6, 1902,
Lord Methuen was defeated and captured at Tweebosch, his captor, De la Rey,
at once sent him in the charge of his chief medical officer to the nearest
British post since, owing to lack of medical supplies, he was unable to
provide the attention which the British general’s wound seemed to need.
However useful Lord Methuen might have been to the Boers as a hostage, the
health of a prisoner of war was too sacred to imperil by retaining him in
captivity. The idea of making this capture an opportunity to avenge the
deaths of Scheepers, Lotter, and other Boer partisan leaders, recently
executed by the British, does not seem even to have occurred to De la Rey’s
ingenuous mind.
In America, methods of warfare have varied roughly in
accordance with the extent of European influence. In South America, with its
large Indian and half-caste population, this influence has been weakest and,
as a consequence, warfare has been little influenced by restraints. Thus, in
the great war waged in 1865 against Paraguay by the Argentine, Uruguay, and
Brazil, no pretence was long maintained of distinguishing between combatants
and the civil population—the essential characteristic of civilized warfare
as it had evolved in Europe—with the result that, after five years of
desperate conflict, two-thirds of the inhabitants of Paraguay had perished.
In North America, European influence had always been
predominant and one would therefore expect to find warfare conducted there
more or less in accordance with European standards. The facts, however, do
not confirm this reasonable expectation. Thus, the crowning episode of the
war of 1812-14 between Britain and the United States was when a British
column of some 4,000 men was landed in Chesapeake Bay, marched inland to
Washington and there burnt the Capitol, the White House and various other
public buildings.
It is difficult to reconcile this exploit with the European code, or many
similar British raids on the American coasts and the American raids across
the Canadian border, in all of which the destruction of enemy property was
the sole aim. Compare, for example, General Haddick’s raid on Berlin during
the Seven Years War when the Austrians carefully refrained from all violence
to persons and property and withdrew after collecting a ransom from the City
Council so moderate that FRaederick was able to reimburse it at once out of
his own private funds.
Inasmuch as the settlers in the English colonies in America
and who later became citizens of the United States had experienced little
contact with European civilized warfare as it had developed during the 18th
century, but had undergone long experience of primary warfare against the
American Indians, it is not strange that the first serious departure from
the European code by a people of European descent should have taken place in
the United States.
Most of the wars in which the white settlers in North
America had been involved before 1861 were with the Red Indians and these
may be cited as classic examples on a small scale of harsh and rudimentary
primary warfare. No unqualified interludes were provided by the wars waged
by the British and French settlers in America with each other as colonial
militia fighting loyally in the service of the King of England and the King
of France respectively, alongside the professional troops of these monarchs.
Neither side scrupled to enlist the Red Indians who continued as auxiliaries
of their European allies to wage war in the manner of their remote
ancestors. Lapses into barbaric practices were consequently frequent. The
only true exception to be found is the War of Independence which was
conducted in accordance with European standards. The Mexican War of 1845 was
a brief and relatively trivial conflict between the United States and a
people on a much lower mechanical and military level. Thus the inhabitants
of the United States at the middle of the 19th century had had no experience
nor any tradition of a major war conducted according to the European code
which required that hostilities be limited to the military forces and that
non-combatants and private property be respected. But they had a long
background of experience and tradition of primary warfare in a most savage
form.
Hence, it is not surprising that the first great historic
break with European practice should have taken place in the sanguinary
American Civil War (or “The War Between the States”, as the Southerners
still prefer to designate it). The military precedents in the United States
were nearly all in the pattern of primary warfare. Even President Lincoln
himself had fought briefly in his youth against the Red Indians and he
exerted a dominant influence on Northern military policy and strategy.
It was the Northern or Federal armies which produced this
historic reversion to primary or total warfare. The North had endured much
more bellicose contact with the Red Indians and was much less influenced by
Europe than the South. The latter was culturally a European colony until
after the Civil War, Southern children were educated in Europe, and the
Southern aristocracy travelled widely in Europe. Southern professional
soldiers were very familiar with European military ideals. General Robert E.
Lee, the military leader of the South, was the perfect example of Southern
military chivalry in complete accord with the European ideals of civilized
warfare. It is for this reason that Professor T. Harry Williams accurately
calls Lee “the last of the great old-fashioned generals.” His
“old-fashioned” trait was his fidelity to the European code of civilized
warfare. While General John H. Morgan and other Southern raiders reverted to
primary warfare in their attacks on the countryside, Lee was generally able
to keep the Southern strategy in harmony with the European code.
There has been a traditional habit of saddling the
responsibility for the Northern departure from civilized warfare on General
William Tecumseh Sherman who conducted the famous march through Georgia from
Atlanta to the sea, and continued it along the Atlantic seaboard. This is
quite unjust. Sherman only executed the most dramatic and devastating
example of the strategy which was laid down by President Lincoln himself and
was followed faithfully by General Ulysses S. Grant as commander-in-chief of
the Northern armies. That Lincoln determined the basic lines of Northern
military strategy has been well established in such books as Collin R.
Ballard’s The Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln and T. Harry
Williams’ Lincoln and His Generals. Grant only efficiently applied
Lincoln’s military policy in the field. Professor Williams calls Grant “the
first of the great moderns.” He goes on to say that the “modernity of
Grant’s mind was most apparent in his grasp of the concept that war was
becoming total and that the destruction of the enemy’s economic resources
was as effective and legitimate a form of warfare as the destruction of his
armies.” Hence, it is apparent that Sherman was only carrying out
effectively the military policy which Lincoln and Grant had adopted. The
exploit upon which his fame rests opened a new epoch in modern warfare.
In the Spring of 1864, General Sherman was in command of the
Tennessee sector far from the northern theatre of war in Virginia.
Unexpectedly taking the offensive, he pushed forward and captured Atlanta,
one of the most important industrial centres of the South upon which the
Confederates greatly relied for supplies of all kinds. According to the
accepted rules of civilized warfare in this exposed position two simple
alternatives lay before him, either to retreat to his base before he was cut
off or to prepare to withstand a siege in Atlanta. Sherman, however, saw no
reason why he should be fettered by rules which it had pleased the European
nations to adopt in their wars with each other. His first act was to expel
the inhabitants of Atlanta from their homes. His second was systematically
to destroy the factories and mills of the city so that they could never
again serve the enemy. His third was to abandon the devastated city and to
push on to the Atlantic coast across Georgia, laying waste the country as he
went. “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it,” he
wrote to headquarters. “I can make this march and make Georgia howl!”
Some of the richest lands of the South were devastated.
Having captured and looted Savannah, Sherman turned northwards along the
Atlantic coast to Charleston. He made no secret of his intentions: “I
sincerely believe,” he wrote General Halleck in Washington, “the whole
United States would rejoice to have my army turned loose on South Carolina,
to devastate that state in the manner we have done in Georgia.” To which
Halleck replied with admiring approval and the expression of a hope that
“should you capture Charleston, by some accident the place may be
destroyed.” To this, Sherman responded with charming simplicity that the
division assigned to occupy Charleston had a reputation “of doing their work
pretty well.” “The truth is,” he added, “the whole army is burning with
insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina.”
To do him justice, Sherman was no simple-minded barbarian
carried away by the heat of the moment; nor was he vindictive against a
people who practised Negro slavery. Before the Civil War he had criticized
the extremists on both sides of the slavery question. On the eve of the War
he wrote his brother that: “I recoil from a war when the Negro is the only
question.” Sherman was capable of formulating his principles and defending
them on logical grounds. With regard to the destruction of Atlanta he wrote
to General Halleck, “if the people raise a howl against my barbarity and
cruelty, I will answer war is war. If the enemy wants peace, they and their
relatives must stop the war.” In answer to the protest of the Mayor of
Atlanta, Sherman said: “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.
War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”
The crisp argument that war is war, which Sherman propounds
with the pride of a discoverer, as justification for the destruction of
Atlanta, is of extreme antiquity. On the Assyrian bas-reliefs the complaint
often occurs, made more in sorrow than in anger, that the inhabitants of
this or that city had “hardened their hearts” when threatened by an Assyrian
army. Peace could so easily have been purchased by prompt surrender followed
by payment of tribute consisting of all they possessed. Instead, it is
recorded sorrowfully, they decided to resist and naturally suffered the
consequences. The following passage from King Asshurbanipal’s annals
illustrates what these consequences normally were: “The wells of drinking
water I dried up: for a journey of a month and twenty-five days the
districts of Elam I laid waste: destruction, servitude and drought I poured
over them. The passage of men, the treading of oxen and sheep and the
springing up of good trees I burnt off the fields.”
In short, probably quite as justifiably as General Sherman,
King Asshurbanipal could claim that his warriors had a reputation for doing
their work pretty well.
But the discovery which Sherman may have regarded as
original in 1864, was of immemorial antiquity even in the days of King
Asshurbanipal. The procedure which he advocated is neatly set forth in the
Book of Deuteronomy. The ancient Hebrews invading Canaan were directed “when
they came nigh to a city to fight against it, to proclaim peace unto it.”
(Ch. 20. v. 10.) If the offer of peace were accepted, the inhabitants were
to be made slaves but not otherwise maltreated. But if they were so
presumptuous as to refuse peace and “to make war on thee” (i.e., defend
themselves), “thou shalt smite the males thereof with the edge of the sword
but the women and little ones and the cattle and all that is in the city
even all the spoil thereof, thou shalt take unto thyself.”
Here is set out concisely the exact purport of Sir Arthur
Harris’ verbose broadcast to the German people on
July 28, 1942, except, of course, the gallant Air Marshal
naturally refrained from informing his hearers that slavery would be the
price of accepting his offer of peace, while, as a herald of unrestricted
bombing, he could not, like the ancient Hebrews of the 12th century B.C.,
profess any intention to discriminate between the adult male population and
“the women and little ones.”
Though the Northern military policy of Lincoln, Grant and
Sherman marked the first great example of the reversion to primary or total
warfare and set a precedent for the “Splendid Decision” of the British on
May 11, 1940, it provided no precedent or example for the
liquidation of conquered enemy leaders by massacre, mock-trials, or
war-crimes trials which followed the Second World War. In this respect,
Lincoln and Grant followed faithfully in the chivalrous European tradition,
a procedure best exemplified by Grant’s treatment of Lee after the Southern
forces had surrendered at Appomattox.
The story of Grant’s famous meeting with Lee to discuss the
terms upon which the Southern Army would surrender reads to‑day like a
fairytale fit to be placed alongside Froissart’s story of the capture of the
French King by the Black Prince at Poitiers. The terms were expressly framed
to provide for the termination of hostilities with as little humiliation for
the vanquished as possible. In brief, they stipulated that the Southern Army
should simply disband and each man return to his home, the officers giving
their parole for themselves and their men and retaining their side arms and
horses. Characteristically, Lee requested only that all ranks be permitted
to retain their horses and, equally characteristically, Grant made this
concession without haggling. Later, when the politicians at Washington began
to scream wildly against the “pampering” of a defeated enemy and to demand
that Lee should be tried for treason, Grant pointed out that the Southern
Army had surrendered on definite terms and that, so long as these terms were
observed, Lee could not be tried for treason. “Good faith as well as true
policy dictate that we should observe the conditions of the convention,”
Grant wrote scathingly to those who demanded a legalized lynching of
Southern military leaders.
The Federal methods of total warfare and the arguments which
were used to justify them aroused curiously little interest at the time in
Europe. Naturally, supercilious eyebrows were raised in professional circles
in Aldershot, Potsdam, and Longchamps. But, after all, they reasoned, what
better could be expected of colonials led by militia officers whose only
training had been wars with Red Indians. Von Moltke dismissed the American
Civil War as “a colossal conflict between two armed mobs chasing each other
around in a wilderness.” No lesson was to be learnt by European professional
soldiers from such disorderly proceedings, least of all the hoary truth that
one way of winning a war was to terrorize the enemy civilian population. In
the fullness of time, this hoary truth was to be impressed upon Europeans,
not by observing a distant campaign between armed mobs on the far side of
the Atlantic, but by personal experience.
Fortunately for their peace of mind, no vision of the future
was vouchsafed to the military panjandrums of Europe. To them, the
possibility would have seemed grotesque that within a few decades the
descendants of the “armed mobs” fighting under Grant and Lee in Virginia
should have the presumption to intervene decisively in a European civil war.
Even if Eisenhower’s men could hardly be dismissed, like their ancestors, as
an armed mob, yet, by European professional standards of the 1860’s, they
would have been classed less as soldiers than as specialists in the use of
various new mass-produced instruments for taking human life. Their whole
outlook on warfare—which was precisely that of General Sherman—would have
been considered in the 1860’s as the exact opposite of all that was meant by
the word soldierly.
General Sherman’s views on war were shared and applied by
his dashing colleague, General Philip H. Sheridan, one of whose claims to
fame was his merciless devastation of the Shenandoah Valley in the campaign
of 1864. In 1870, General Sheridan visited Europe and, as the guest of
German Headquarters, was a favoured eye-witness of the memorable campaign in
France in that year—for the night after the battle of Gravelotte he shared
the bare boards of an abandoned house within range of the forts round Metz
with Count Bismarck and the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, and he was one of the
distinguished gathering on the Hill of Cheveuge which witnessed General
Reille hand to King Wilhelm the letter from Napoleon III announcing the
surrender of the French Army encircled in Sedan. The fighting capacity of
the German troops and the skill of their leaders filled General Sheridan
with boundless admiration but their lack of enterprise in allowing
themselves to be cramped and hampered by the rules of civilized warfare then
prevailing in Europe, aroused his contemptuous amusement. Having by a swift
and unbroken series of victories destroyed or captured the bulk of the
French regular forces, the Germans were experiencing great difficulty in
defending the communications of their armies blockading Paris from the raids
of irregulars working behind the German lines and from the attacks of the
new French armies being gathered in the provinces for the relief of the
capital. “You know how to hit an enemy as no other army does,” Sheridan
remarked to Bismarck, “but you have not learnt how to annihilate him. One
must see more smoke of burning villages, otherwise you will not finish off
the French.”
Bismarck did not, of course, need to have it pointed out to
him that France could be quickly brought to her knees by sending forth
punitive expeditions to lay waste the countryside. To sully the glory of
their victories over the French armies by a barbarous campaign against the
French civilian population did not appeal to the German leaders. The smoke
of burning villages seemed to Europeans of that generation more in keeping
with fighting Red Indians in the Wild West than with orderly warfare between
civilized European nations. In spite of Sheridan’s doubts, they remained
confident that the war could be won by civilized methods of warfare in
accordance with European traditions. This confidence proved fully justified.
The war was at length crowned by a victorious but negotiated peace and
Europe enjoyed a respite from civil war which lasted for forty-three years.
An interesting sidelight on the thought and manners of those
ethically inconceivably remote days of the Franco-Prussian War is given by a
long out-of-print and forgotten book, Im Grossen Hauptquartier 1870-71,
which recently came by chance into the present writer’s possession.
Published in 1910 as filial tribute by the author’s daughter, this book
consists of the collected articles contributed to a long defunct Berlin
paper by its special war correspondent, Hermann Salingré.
From a literary point of view little merit can be claimed
for these articles. In them Salingré shows himself to have been a
simple-minded man, unassuming, diffident, and prosaic. No one can be
imagined further removed than he from that flamboyant militarism which
characterized so conspicuously many of the next generation of Germans and
French. While rejoicing naively in the succession of German victories, he
neither glorifies nor idealizes a soldier’s life. On the contrary, he dwells
continually on the deprivations of the men compelled by the call of duty to
leave their homes in Germany to undertake a few months campaigning in
France. In fact, his lamentations over the cruel fate of the troops,
prevented by the unexpectedly prolonged resistance of Paris from rejoining
their dear ones for Christmas, strikes a modern reader as little short of
comic in their extravagance. Accepting without question or argument that his
country was entirely in the fight, he expresses no bitterness against the
French, presumably, in his view, entirely in the wrong. The sight of damaged
property merely fills him with thankfulness to God that his country had been
spared the horrors of war. While repeating all the stock chestnuts of war
reporting of the kind which no doubt delighted Assyrian readers in cuneiform
characters and certainly delighted the British public in 1945—for example,
that while the enemy was tenacious in fighting at long range, he could not
withstand attack at close quarters with the bayonet—he regales his readers
with no enemy atrocity stories.
The supreme moment of Salingré’s experiences was after the
surrender of Sedan when he was privileged to witness from a distance of
twenty paces the meeting of the Emperor Napoleon III with Count Bismarck at
Donchery. His reflections on this epoch-making occasion were as ever
platitudinous, but he describes vividly enough the sight of this “once so
powerful man” waiting patiently, seated on a peasant’s chair outside the
cottage of a Belgian weaver named Fournaise, the arrival of his conqueror.
He naively comments that he found the Emperor’s appearance very different
from what he had been led to expect by the German comic papers. His natural
jubilation, he tells us, was quickly replaced by “a sad, heartrending
impression” at so complete a downfall. Upon the Emperor happening to glance
in his direction he felt that one could not “tread so unfortunate a man
deeper in the mud”—“I respectfully removed my hat and experienced a thrill
of satisfaction when I saw that the Emperor had noted my greeting and
thanked me.”
Salingré was an entirely conventional and commonplace
individual. He was not only a typical German but a typical journalist of his
generation. Herein lies the whole significance of this incident. In no
circumstances would his natural diffidence have allowed him either to rise
far above or sink much below the accepted standards of his time. Even if one
can imagine a present-day war correspondent being moved to such an act, it
is impossible to imagine him reporting it and still less his editor
accepting and printing it. One trembles to think of the fate of anyone who
had committed such an act of courtesy to Field Marshal Keitel during the
proceedings at Nuremberg! Whether he would have been instantly committed for
contempt of court turns, of course, on the knotty legal point whether it is
possible to commit contempt of court to a court sitting without
jurisdiction. Probably one of the non-European jailors posted menacingly at
the back of each prisoner would have settled the matter summarily by a blow
with his club. At the least, immediate expulsion from occupied territory
would have resulted, followed by instant dismissal on the culprit’s return
to Fleet Street.
Judged by what is the only valid test, the battle of Sedan
must be assigned a unique position among European battles. War is not a
sporting event in which victory is an end in itself: it can only be
justified as a means by which an equitable and lasting peace is achieved. A
century before, the Swiss jurist, Emeric de Vattel, had convincingly argued
that only an equitable peace could be lasting and that an equitable peace
must conform to certain specified principles. Although it contravened
several of the most vital of these principles, the peace which followed
Moltke’s triumph at Sedan endured for no less than forty-three years.
Relieved from the waste and destruction of civil war for a period longer
than any in the history of Europe, civilization throughout Europe made
enormous strides between 1871 and 1914. Within a few decades of its close,
this period began to appear in public memory as a remote and semi-mythical
epoch of universal contentment and security, of unbroken tranquility and
prosperity. Prosperity, in fact, seemed to flow naturally from peace. Never
before had the rich been so rich and never before had there been such
opportunities to enjoy riches. With only colonial wars and few social
services to be paid for, taxation was incredibly light. As wealth increased,
the standard of living rose: new discoveries and improvements brought
comforts and luxuries within the reach of ever widening circles of the
population. In most European countries, measures of social reform improved
to a greater or less extent the lot of those who depended on their daily
earnings. A belief in inevitable and unending progress became universal:
there was a general feeling of security. It appeared incredible that
European supremacy would ever be challenged: the rest of the world seemed
created by a kindly Providence for exploitation by one or other of the
European Powers. There was the best reason for thinking this happy state of
affairs would continue indefinitely, since it was utterly impossible to
conceive any issue arising between the European Powers important enough to
tempt any sane statesman to run the risk of a general disaster by plunging
Europe into another civil war.
It rarely happens that even the victors in a modern war
derive any lasting benefit from their victory, and any examples of mankind
in general benefiting from warfare are rare indeed. The fact that the
peoples of Europe benefited by the German victory over France in 1870 was
assuredly not due to any strain of altruism in the German character, still
less that it was one of the aims of Bismarck’s policy to confer benefits on
mankind. Bismarck’s altruism was a by-product of his realism and his
nationalism. Fundamentally, his aims were as selfish as those of any later
statesman. But his selfishness was intelligent selfishness. He was no lover
of peace in the abstract: he had no more moral scruples against resorting to
war, if policy required it, than had Franklin D. Roosevelt. Down to 1870,
his aims could only be achieved by war, while, thereafter, his aims could
only be achieved by peace. Having saved the German people by three
victorious wars from that condition of disunity and political impotence
which for centuries had made their country a battle field for their
neighbours, Bismarck realized that a long period of peace was essential for
recovery and development. If Germany’s neighbours began to fight each other,
Germany was certain to become involved. Therefore, he devoted himself, from
the downfall of France in 1870 to his dismissal by the young Kaiser Wilhelm
in 1890, to making Europe safe for Germany. This he achieved by negotiating
a series of defensive alliances and treaties designed to preserve the peace
of Europe. As Esme Cecil Wingfield-Stratford puts it:
“Bismarck had gone about his task of establishing German
unity with a skill and finesse never surpassed, if ever equalled, in the
records of diplomacy. So far as the world could be made safe for peace and
for Germany he made it so. He was no philanthropist. He had no scruples, and
no ideals beyond that of a simple loyalty to his country. He was never more
sincere than when he described Germany as a saturated Power. Now that all
was German from the Vosges to the Vistula, he had no sentimental dreams of
expansion, even in the colonial field.”
One of the indirect consequences which followed from
Bismarck’s peace policy was that Europe became for nearly half a century
little short of an Utopia for its ruling classes, and particularly for its
royalties. The kings and princes of Europe whose grandfathers had lived in
dread of the guillotine and whose grandsons were mostly destined to die
violent deaths or become forgotten exiles, enjoyed unparalleled security,
prestige and esteem. In public, they were regarded with awe and reverence
when they went forth to attend each other’s weddings and funerals, to review
their own or each other’s troops and navies, or to pay state visits on each
other. In private, there was frequent bickering among them and occasionally
antipathies such as that between Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Edward, Prince
of Wales, and her grandson, the young German Kaiser, but, publicly, the most
cordial sentiments were always expressed. The European royal families were
all more or less nearly related by blood or marriage to each other and to
that strong-minded old lady who resided in Windsor Castle and who exercised
over them a matriarchal influence which few ventured to defy.
Happy were kings in those days and happy the subjects whom
kings delighted to honour. It might well be thought that the ruling classes
in the leading European states, for whom the various royalties acted as
leaders or figureheads, would at least refrain from conduct which would
endanger this, for them, ideal state of affairs. Had only the ruling classes
of Germany, Austria, and Russia held together in mutual self-protection, the
established order might have continued indefinitely. The Haves had nothing
to fear from an uprising of the Have-nots: a dozen Lenins could have
achieved nothing more than the stirring up of local disturbances, easily
suppressed. So long as peace was preserved, the Haves were secure. The Haves
in all the states of Europe were thus linked by one paramount interest, the
preservation of peace. As all effective political power was vested in the
Haves, it is hard to imagine how peace could have rested on a securer
foundation.
In fact, however, the peace of Europe rested on nothing more
substantial than the political life of one old man. So long as Bismarck
remained Chancellor, the German Empire served as a mighty makeweight for a
stable equilibrium. Once he had gone, his successors were free to join with
zest in that time-honoured game of European diplomacy which in the past had
always been the prelude to the outbreak of European civil warfare. The other
great Powers joined with equal zest in the game. In the circumstances then
existing, this was not a difficult game in which to take part.
Europe was covered by a network of alliances, treaties,
secret agreements, guarantees, ententes, and understandings and there was
ready to hand a profusion of unsatisfied claims, concessions, spheres of
influence, grievances, and prescriptive rights. It was an easy matter,
therefore, to find, for example, an ambiguous clause in a treaty and then,
having secretly purchased in advance the support of neighbouring Powers by
promises of concessions, to put forward a claim, based on a novel
interpretation of this clause, against some other Power, either a weaker
Power or a Power distracted at the moment by some similar activity. If the
diplomatist in charge played his cards so well that this other Power felt
compelled to give way, he was held to have scored a diplomatic triumph and
his grateful sovereign would reward him with titles and honours. On the
other hand, if he played his cards so badly that the other Power felt itself
strong enough to reject his claim, his country was held to have received a
diplomatic rebuff. In that case, he would probably be dismissed, and his
successor would be entrusted with the task of vindicating the national
dignity, it being an inflexible rule of the game that the losing side must
take immediate steps to avenge a diplomatic rebuff, a rule which ensured
that the game went on ad infinitum.
Seen in retrospect, the issues at stake in the periodic
crises which distracted Europe after Bismarck’s dismissal seem indescribably
trivial. For example, the outstanding diplomatic triumph of the epoch
1870-1914 was when Austria, in 1908, succeeded, by a masterpiece of sharp
practice, in scoring off against Russia by formally annexing the former
Turkish province of Bosnia, a province she had administered with the consent
of all the Powers, entirely as she saw fit, for upwards of thirty years.
This achievement, from which Austria derived no practical benefit and from
which no one suffered any material harm, imperilled the whole structure of
capitalist civilization in Europe and proved to be an important step towards
the final catastrophe six years later.
The behaviour of the ruling caste in Europe during the first
years of the twentieth century can only be compared with that of the
inhabitants of a beautiful and comfortable house who persist in descending
into the basement in which a store of gun powder is kept for the purpose of
letting off fireworks. The fact could not be disguised that there was an
acute danger of war every time a crisis occurred. It was, indeed, one of the
inflexible rules of the diplomatic game that if the parties involved in a
crisis muddled themselves into a position so that neither side could
withdraw “with honour” there was no alternative open to them but to go to
war. Reliance seems to have been placed on the assumption that when another
war came it would be a strictly limited war similar to those of the
eighteenth century—after the generals had fought a few battles, the
diplomatists would again resume control and negotiate a settlement by which
existing treaties would be varied slightly in favour of the side which on
the whole had had the best of the fighting. No one seems to have realized
that conditions had changed markedly since the eighteenth century or
suspected that new and potent forces would be released on the outbreak of
war.
The power of one of these new forces, namely the power of
the Press, should at least have been foreseen, since in peace time it had
already developed a disastrous influence over international relations. By
the rules of the diplomatic game, double-dealing and sharp-practice were
permissible within certain ill-defined limits. If these limits were
exceeded, a formal “sharp note of protest” was sent to the offending party.
Such notes, couched in stereotyped diplomatic language, gave no offence. It
was a recognized move in the game to profess indignation on occasion at the
doings of the other side. But to the Press these protests possessed news
value: they served as a means of arousing public interest, and, if well
handled, of increasing sales. The offending Power was, therefore, roundly
denounced for trickery and perfidy, and, needless to say, its Press retorted
in the same strain. The language employed, although moderate compared with
the language now habitually employed by the Press on such occasions, served
to accustom the publics of the various European countries to regard certain
groups of foreigners as gallant allies and certain groups of foreigners as
treacherous enemies. Wingfield-Stratford puts the matter in a nutshell where
he writes:
“A disease was infecting the whole of civilization, causing
the international temperature to rise to a fever heat, with danger of
ultimate collapse. The whole system by which the world was governed was
hopelessly, fatally, out of date. With civilization becoming every year more
international, with the world drawing together into a single economic unit,
the last resort of human wisdom was to set up an uncontrolled anarchy of
nations and nationalisms, and to employ all the resources of science to make
that anarchy more deadly. Hatred was now engendered by scientific
mass-suggestion, commerce was choked by scientific tariffs, “backward
peoples” were bled white by scientific exploitation, and the ultimately
inevitable suicide of war would be rendered scientifically complete. Even
the best that Bismarck could do, by the diplomatic finesse of which he was
master, was to maintain an unstable equilibrium, and the worst that Wilhelm
II could do, by an almost incredible series of diplomatic blunders, was to
hasten the catastrophe that was bound to come sooner or later, and would be
worse later than sooner.”
Outwardly, in 1914, no great change had taken place in the
structure of civilization during the respite of forty-three years which
followed Sedan. This is the best apology which can be made for the men who
so lightheartedly embarked on war in that memorable year. At the outset of
the First World War, all the belligerents were actuated by strictly limited
objects and all probably quite honestly intended to achieve them by limited
means. The Allies were paying a quite undeserved compliment to his
intelligence when they attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm vast Machiavellian
schemes of world conquest; comparable was the intricate plot to encircle
Germany which the Germans attributed to their enemies. All parties blundered
helplessly into war with minds singularly innocent of ideas, good or bad.
All, to a greater or lesser extent, had been striking attitudes in shining
armour until a situation had arisen in which hallowed tradition and national
honour could only be preserved by war.
No other explanation is tenable on the facts except on the
assumption that a sudden wave of insanity swept the governments of Europe.
Mr. Wingfield-Stratford’s final conclusion indeed seems to be that the utter
irresponsibility of the European ruling classes in the decade preceding 1914
was tinged by actual madness. Writing in 1933 he declares:
“I am aware that a plain, unvarnished account of the years
immediately preceding the War reads rather like the chronicle of a vast
lunatic asylum.… If a number of prosperous gentlemen were to start cutting
each others’ throats, and wrecking all the luxurious furniture of their
common abode, we might fairly assume that when, ten minutes before, they had
sat politely glaring at each other and fingering their knives, they were not
quite right in the head.”
After the passage of another thirty years it is hardly
possible to say more with any confidence than that we shall fully understand
the root causes of the First World War when we know exactly why the Gadarene
Swine rushed down a steep place into the sea. St. Mark tells us that the
whole herd perished and so in that case this was the end of the matter. But
if any members of the herd had been swimmers and so had escaped drowning, we
may be sure that an acrimonious controversy would have started among the
survivors as to which particular pig was mainly responsible for leading that
fatal headlong rush down the steep place into the sea.
In 1914, life on this planet had become exceedingly pleasant
for the ruling classes. For those who already had much, more was being given
abundantly, the amenities of life were being constantly increased, and
absolute security was assured, providing only that the ruling classes would
refrain from suicidal civil war. Conquest from without was out of the
question—even Kaiser Wilhelm knew in his heart that he was talking
melodramatic nonsense when he made the flesh of his contemporaries creep by
warnings of the Yellow Peril. Revolution from within could easily have been
repressed—even in Czarist Russia only a disastrous foreign war could
seriously imperil the security of the established order. The two main
immediate causes of the First World War—the Russian desire for the Straits
leading out of the Black Sea and the French desire for the return of Alsace
Lorraine—could surely have been handled by diplomacy. Britain and Sir Edward
Grey were the main obstacles to awarding Russia the Straits, and Germany was
willing to discuss the extension of considerable autonomy to
Alsace-Lorraine.
From all conceivable external dangers the established order
was, indeed, absolutely secure. Danger came from within. As early as 1900,
certain symptoms might have been detected by acute observers which suggested
that, in the next European civil war, the belligerents might not be
disinclined to hearken to tempting counsel of the kind that General Sheridan
had offered Bismarck in 1870. A new spirit was abroad or, perhaps to put it
more correctly, an old spirit dating from the times of King Sennacherib was
showing signs of reviving. One of the earliest spokesmen of the new age
which lay ahead was the young German emperor, Wilhelm II, whose true
spiritual home, it can now be seen, was not, as he imagined, at the Round
Table of King Arthur in the remote past, but at the Yalta Conference half a
century later.
By most of his contemporaries Wilhelm was regarded as an
ill-balanced neurotic, obsessed with his own perfections and the unqualified
wickedness of anyone who opposed him. As a consequence, his most outrageous
assertions caused nothing more than embarrassment at home and amusement
abroad. Even his appeal to his troops embarking at Bremerhaven to take part
in the Boxer Campaign that they should emulate the doings of King Attila and
his Huns, aroused no general apprehensions as to what the future might hold
in store. It was felt that such sentiments could at any rate have no
possible application to warfare between European nations. Had not the
existing standards of European civilization endured for two centuries and
survived even so severe a test as the Napoleonic Wars? When another test
came, everyone, including Queen Victoria’s grandson, could be trusted to act
like gentlemen.
Another symptom which might have given ground for reflection
came from across the Atlantic where President Theodore Roosevelt was
carrying out his “policy of the big stick” with characteristic vigour.
Although by many, including his fellow-countryman, Henry James, the
President might be dismissed as “a mere monstrous embodiment of
unprecedented resounding noise”, the small states of Latin America found it
perilous not to treat him seriously. When Colombia failed to come to terms
with him in regard to the building of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama,
a mysterious revolution immediately broke out in the canal zone, the
Colombian Government was peremptorily forbidden to send troops to restore
order and a treaty providing for the building of the canal on terms most
favourable to the United States was promptly concluded with the
newly-established provisional government of Panama. No more workmanlike job
can be attributed to Hitler or Stalin. It is significant that Theodore
Roosevelt’s brusque rejection of the German demands at the time of the
Venezuelan crisis of 1902 won for him the lasting respect and admiration of
Kaiser Wilhelm. Although unlike in many ways, the two men were linked by a
fellow-feeling arising from the lack of appreciative understanding which
they both found in their contemporaries.
Perhaps, however, the dawning spirit of the days which were
to come most clearly revealed itself in Admiral Lord Fisher who, with the
possible exception of Lord Haldane, was probably the ablest of the men who
surrounded King Edward VII. Speaking to
the journalist, W. T. Stead, in 1900, Admiral Fisher declared:
“I am not for war, I am for peace. If you rub it in, both
at home and abroad, that you are ready for instant war with every unit of
your strength in the front line, and intend to be first in, and hit your
enemy in the belly, and kick him when he is down, and boil your prisoners in
oil if you take any, and torture his women and children, then people will
keep clear of you.”
Of course, no one in 1900 was prepared to believe that any
civilized man could really hold such an opinion, still less that within half
a century this opinion would become a commonplace. For this reason only, the
expression of such sentiments did the speaker no harm professionally or
socially: they were dismissed as mere examples of quarterdeck humour. The
Admiral’s favourite maxim, “Hit first, hit hard and hit anywhere” was
considered rather stirring but without any particular significance. Writing,
in 1912, to Lord Esher, Lord Fisher defended his views by insisting that
“It’s quite silly not to make war damnable to the whole mass of your enemy’s
population. When war comes, might is right, and the Admiralty will know what
to do.”
It not, of course, known at the time that Admiral Fisher had
no hesitation it urging that his views should be carried into practice. When
it became clear that the naval building programme commenced by Admiral
Tirpitz was becoming a menace to British naval supremacy, Admiral Fisher
begged for permission to end summarily the armament race by taking his
battleships over to Kiel and sinking the German High Seas Fleet in harbour.
This proposed operation he picturesquely termed “Copenhagening the lot”—a
reference to the British attack on Denmark in 1807, an episode which might
have provided the framers of the London Agreement of 1945 with a classic
example of an aggressive war. It well illustrates how dominant the
nineteenth century code still remained that Edward VII
was neither shocked nor angry at the Admiral’s proposal but merely dismissed
it with a brief, “Fisher, you’re mad!”
In retrospect however it is hard to accept King Edward’s
view that the opinions Admiral Fisher expressed were intended by him merely
to startle and shock his hearers. In the Age of Security, talk of “boiling
your enemies in oil and torturing his women and children” seemed like the
stories to amuse children which adults tell them about man-eating ogres and
fire-breathing dragons. Admiral Fisher died in 1920 leaving a memory
unsullied by any of the atrocities which he professed to justify in theory.
As an alternative to King Edward’s view that this was merely flamboyant talk
not to be taken seriously, it may be suggested that Admiral Fisher during
the First World War may have restrained his natural instincts by an enormous
exercise of will power. It should however be pointed out that whatever his
natural instincts may have been, they were circumscribed by the fact that
the weapons of war in his time were relatively limited in range and in
destructive power. It is perhaps fortunate for his reputation and for the
enemies of his country that he did not have at his command a fleet of
long-range bombers, still less the means to despatch a salvo of rockets
armed with atomic war-heads. His remarks to W. T. Stead in 1900 quoted above
would have served Professor Lindemann admirably for use as a sort of
preamble to the infamous plan which he laid before the British Cabinet in
1942, a preamble which would certainly have appealed to the literary-minded
Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
Admiral Fisher expressed in words the spirit of the times to
come: his contemporary, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the perfect example of
the Strong Silent Man idealised by the poet Rudyard Kipling, said little but
expressed that spirit by deeds. Although it was his strange fate to be
selected in 1914 to serve as the figurehead for a crusade against
Imperialism and Militarism, Lord Kitchener’s whole life was devoted to
extending and strengthening the British Empire by warfare and he earned a
well-deserved reputation of being a ruthless soldier. His conquest of the
Sudan in 1898 made him the idol of the British public. The campaign began
with his victory of Atbara after which he made a triumphal march through the
town of Berber (to quote his most recent and not unsympathetic biographer,
Sir Charles Magnus), “Kitchener rode in front on a white horse while behind
him the defeated Dervish general, Emir Mahmoud, dragging chains riveted to
his ankles and wearing a halter round his neck, was made to walk and
sometimes to run by his guards who lashed him with whips when he stumbled.”
When Kitchener soon after captured Khartoum, he had the Tomb of the Madhi
blown up and the body of the Madhi thrown into the Nile. The Madhi’s skull
he retained as a trophy and was only dissuaded from having it exhibited in
the museum of the College of Surgeons in London by the strongly expressed
disapproval of Queen Victoria herself.
Such exploits were indeed rather a reversion to the military
practices of the ancient Assyrians than a foretaste of the military
practices of the times to come. But the proposal which Kitchener put forward
in 1901 to solve the problem of the Dutch-speaking majority in South Africa
was identical with the proposal which Stalin was to put forward at Yalta in
1945 to solve the problem of the German inhabitants of Silesia and
Pomerania. His policy of farm-burning and concentration camps having failed
to break the objection of the Boers to their country being annexed by the
British Empire, Kitchener proposed that the whole Boer population should be
deported from South Africa and settled in various remote parts of the world
such as Sumatra, Borneo, the Fiji Islands and Madagascar, their property
being confiscated without compensation. He attributed the rejection of this
plan by the British Government to that sentimental weakness so
characteristic, in his opinion, of all civilians. There can be no doubt that
if he had been given permission, Kitchener would have carried out his plan
ruthlessly and efficiently.
Lord Kitchener was a professional soldier. He acted always
in what he considered were the interests of the British Empire without
troubling himself to find explanations or excuses, a task he left to the
politicians whom, like all civilians, he heartily despised. He was
contemptuously indifferent to public opinion. Only subconsciously was he
influenced by the spirit of the age. His contemporary, Admiral Fisher, on
the other hand, understood exactly the spirit of the age and expressed
openly what so many at the time were thinking but were ashamed to admit.
In one respect only may Admiral Fisher be regarded as
old-fashioned in his outlook. Although he foresaw the principles upon which
the wars of the future would be fought, he had no conception of the enormous
power which would come to be wielded by scientific propaganda. He never
realized that, to achieve victory under contemporary conditions, a well
selected and maintained moral pose was not less indispensable than the
skilful use of unfettered violence. Thus, when in 1917, Germany adopted
unrestricted submarine warfare, Lord Fisher had no patience with the frantic
outcry which followed. Being from the German point of view a necessary step
towards winning the war, no other justification seemed to him to be needed
by the German Government, and he flatly declined to join in the chorus of
denunciation. As his proposal “to Copenhagen the lot”, proves, Lord Fisher
had no scruples about starting a war which he considered desirable. There is
no reason to think that moral or humanitarian scruples would have restrained
him during a war from applying his maxim: “Hit first, hit hard and hit
anywhere.” On the other hand, after a war had been won it is hard to believe
that he would have countenanced a brother admiral being hypocritically
condemned to life imprisonment for doing just what he himself would not have
hesitated to have done.
The decisive role destined to be played by propaganda in
warfare was, however, a development which no one, not even Lord Fisher,
could reasonably be expected to have foreseen. Once hostilities had started,
two factors left out of account by everyone operated to bring about a quite
unexpected result. In the first place, after a respite of forty-three years
Europeans had become unaccustomed to war; consequently, the sufferings and
loss inseparable from war, even when waged in accordance with the strictest
rules, aroused quite genuine horror. In the second place, there had long
been growing unnoticed the power of the popular Press to which the gory
details of any war, however petty, served as a welcome change from accounts
of crimes, accidents, and earthquakes. A major war was an opportunity for
sensational embellishment not to be missed. Reacting each upon the other,
these factors created a frame of mind which was quickly turned to account by
the belligerent governments—and in particular by the British Government—at
first seriously embarrassed by the problem of supplying the
man-in-the-street with a plausible explanation of what the war was about.
The answer to this problem lay ready to hand: “The enemy is committing
atrocities: to commit atrocities is uncivilized: we are fighting the enemy:
therefore we are fighting to save civilization!”
But when hostilities first commenced in August 1914 there
was no need for any of the belligerent governments involved to seek for any
such far-fetched explanation of the reasons for which the war was being
fought.
In Germany, most people from the Kaiser downwards welcomed
the war as an opportunity to prove that they had inherited the martial
virtues displayed by their ancestors at Leipzig and Sedan: in France, the
war was regarded as a heaven-sent opportunity to resume the war of 1870 and
with the aid of powerful allies to regain Alsace-Lorraine: in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire the outstanding characteristic of the Edwardian Age,
frivolity, was more strongly marked than anywhere else in Europe, the ruling
classes still lived mentally in the eighteenth century when periodic
outbreaks of warfare were regarded as unavoidable incidents of normal
political life: the aged Emperor and his advisers resignedly took their part
in the war of 1914, probably without much hope that the outcome would be any
more successful than that of any of the other wars of his long reign, but
without apprehension that the outcome would in this case lead to complete
disaster.
In Russia, hostility to Germany was widespread among the
illiterate masses for no other reason than that so many members of the hated
bureaucracy were of German extraction. That this hostility was also strong
in court circles is certainly hard to explain since the Romanovs had
generally chosen their consorts from one or other of the German princely
families, and there was much German blood also in the Russian aristocracy.
It happened, however, that Czar Alexander III had departed from the usual
practice by marrying Princess Dagmar of Denmark, a sister of Princess
Alexandra who had married the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward
VII. For both these beautiful, but feather-brained women,
history had remained stationary since 1864. The family feud between the
Danish royal family and the House of Hohenzollern generated in that year
through the incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein with Prussia remained for
them the central event of European politics. The antipathy of Edward
VII for his German relations constantly fanned into flame
by the prejudices of his frivolous wife was a minor factor in bringing about
the situation which culminated in the First World War. Her sister as the
Empress Marie of Russia, contributed her minor part in the same direction,
first by the influence she exercised over her husband; Alexander III, and
later over her son, Nicholas II.
In Great Britain there was at first little difficulty in
obtaining acceptance of the explanation that British treaty obligations to
Belgium compelled her to enter the war in defence of Belgian neutrality. To
the British man-in-the-street the role of Knight-errant going to the rescue
of a small nation attacked by a ruthless aggressor seemed both honourable
and profitable. It was honourable because Britain was entering the war in
fulfilment of her plighted word: it promised to be profitable because while
Germany was vainly striving to halt the irresistible advance of “the Russian
steam-roller” (the popular name at the time for the Czar’s countless
hordes), her colonial possessions scattered throughout the world would lie
exposed to easy occupation by Great Britain with her unchallengeable command
of the sea. To a generation brought up on the poems of Rudyard Kipling, this
was indeed a stirring prospect: “Wider still and wider should the bounds of
the British Empire be set!” To the great industrialists of Britain the war
offered a chance to eliminate (for many years at any rate) a dangerous trade
rival. But the most spontaneous and wholehearted of all in their enthusiasm
for the war were the clergy of the Church of England. Ever since the middle
years of the nineteenth century when the dogmas and beliefs of Christianity
had been challenged by Science, the influence of organised religion had been
rapidly declining. From the moment war was declared, the pulpits of the
country became in effect recruiting platforms. In the forefront of the drive
to attract volunteers for the victorious march to Berlin was the boyishly
romantic Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, the idol of the
most exclusive society drawing-rooms, who declared: “This is the greatest
fight ever made for the Christian Religion: the choice lies between the
Nailed Hands and the Mailed Fist.” For his services to recruiting, the
Bishop received a special letter of thanks from the War Office. It was
perhaps a little unfortunate that a similar letter of thanks for his ardent
recruiting activities was also sent to Horatio Bottomley, a notorious
company promoter, who after the war received a well-deserved sentence of
penal servitude for swindling ex-servicemen of their savings.
The Knight-errant explanation of the nature of the war had
the great merit of simplicity and it did not conflict too glaringly with the
known facts. For the first six months it served excellently to explain the
participation of Britain in the struggle. But by the Spring of 1915 it had
become inadequate. By that time expectations of a swift and spectacular
triumph had everywhere been disappointed. The German advance had been held
on the Marne, the French had failed to conquer Alsace, the picked troops of
the Czar had received a crushing defeat at Tannenberg and the Austrians had
suffered disaster at Lemberg and in Serbia. To many, peace by agreement
began to seem attractive. The appeals of the Pope for the opening of peace
negotiations at last began to find hearers. What was referred to in Britain
as the danger of a separate peace began to cast a shadow over many minds
besides those of Horatio Bottomley and Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram.
It thus became no longer a question of putting forward a
plausible explanation of why Britain had entered the war. It became urgently
necessary to explain why Britain should refuse to consider making peace. The
possibility had to be faced that the Germans would become so disheartened by
lack of success that they would offer to evacuate Belgium and pay full
compensation for all the damage which they had done. If Britain was fighting
merely as a Knight-errant in defence of “brave little Belgium”, how could
she reject such an offer? If the wrongs of Belgium were rectified, what
reason could she have to continue to fight?
Although trivial in comparison with the wholesale slaughter
which was to follow, the British casualties during the first six months of
the struggle had far exceeded those in any war since the Crimean Campaign.
Was all this shedding of precious blood, it was indignantly asked, to lead
merely to a restoration of the old faulty political system which had led to
disaster in the previous August. Of course, thanks to the labours of a group
of professional historians who had fabricated “the Wicked Kaiser Myth”, no
one doubted entire responsibility for this disaster rested upon one
supremely evil man but the enforced abdication of Wilhelm II seemed an
inadequate result for a national effort on so gigantic a scale. Only by
breaking completely with the past and by creating an entirely new social
order which would endure for all time, could justification be found for this
terrible sacrifice of life and expenditure of wealth. To achieve this aim,
the war must be continued regardless of losses, without a thought of
compromise.
Assertions by well-meaning clerics that the war was a
struggle between Good and Evil were based on religious conceptions which had
become meaningless to the average man-in-the-street. The problem was solved
by dealing with it from an entirely different angle of approach:—
Belgium was indisputably a little country; the British
Empire, allied to the Russian Empire, was fighting for Belgium and also for
Serbia; another little country. Therefore, the British and Russian Empires
were fighting for the liberty of little countries. Now, all over the world
were little countries which did not enjoy liberty. Their inhabitants were
clearly as much entitled to liberty as the Belgians and Serbs. There were,
for example, those parts of Poland so fortunate as to have escaped
annexation by Russia by being annexed by Prussia or by Austria. The
inhabitants of these parts of Poland were entitled to be liberated from
their Prussian and Austrian rulers. Similarly the Czech majority in Bohemia
must be liberated from the oppression of the Hapsburg Emperors and given the
right to oppress the German and Slovak minorities in that province. As
Turkey had allied herself to Germany her Arab subjects had clearly become
eligible for liberation. In all the German colonial possessions in Africa
and the Far East were various tribes of savages who must be deemed to be
yearning for liberation from German rule. Justice demanded that their claims
should not be overlooked, particularly as all of them would need a long
period of education to render them fit for freedom during which time their
self-appointed tutors would be in a position to exploit the labours of the
expelled German colonizers. A Knight-errant could not of course demand
payment for his services but there could be no objection if his altruism
should turn out to be profitable to him. Similarly, if a crippling indemnity
was extorted from Germany when victory was achieved, this should not be
regarded as an expression of greed but merely as a wise precautionary
measure designed to prevent Germany again becoming strong enough to endanger
her peace-loving neighbours.
In this way finally emerged the political dogma that every
people in the world was entitled as of right to self-government. In default
of any other available definition, self-government was defined as the rule
of the majority in each self-governing country. The Kaiser had been
violently denounced as an autocrat and gradually the Allies found themselves
committed to upholding, in words at least, the cause of democracy. Autocracy
was held to be responsible for bringing about the war and all its attendant
evils and it was natural, therefore, to attribute to democracy all the
virtues which autocracy was held so obviously to lack.
The view generally accepted by historians is that during the
early part of the First World War there took place a complete transformation
of outlook unparalleled in the previous history of mankind. Democracy in one
form or another was accepted as the only proper form of government and
militarism and aggression were condemned in any form. It was agreed that it
was plainly contrary to justice that Germans or Turks should rule over any
other peoples and from this a general principle could be deduced which might
be possible of extension with proper safeguards until in theory at any rate
it had general application.
There is no reason for surprise that this transformation of
outlook took place without articulate opposition in France where any novel
political views, however absurd or repugnant, were acceptable providing
acceptance would facilitate the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. Similarly in
Russia, to the ruling class any theoretical views were acceptable provided
they would help the Czar to carry out far-reaching annexations and in
particular to occupy Constantinople and to establish a great naval base on
the shores of the Mediterranean. But it is truly astonishing that in Great
Britain this transformation of outlook took place so swiftly without the
least apparent opposition. Down to the outbreak of war on the 4th August,
1914, the favourite boast of the British public had been that Britain ruled
an empire over which the sun never set: no one doubted that “the lesser
breeds without the law,” as Kipling called them, had been created by
Providence to be ruled by Britons. The ready acceptance of democracy as the
only defensible form of government was equally remarkable. In Great Britain
had long flourished a caste system only less elaborate and irrational than
that which flourished among the contemporary Hindus. Society was divided and
subdivided into innumerable classes, each regarding the one above it with
awe and envy and despising heartily the one below it. Yet the proposition
was accepted without demur that to spread democracy throughout the world was
a cause for which a man ought to be willing gladly to lay down his life.
There was no opposition, or at least no articulate opposition, when Lloyd
George finally proclaimed that in essence Great Britain was fighting to make
the world safe for democracy. With regard to the somewhat earlier claim that
the war was being fought to ensure the liberty of small nations, it may be
said that acceptance was only general because the implications of this
policy were not realized. Everyone was agreed that the Arabs and the Czechs
and the various negro tribes under German rule were entitled to
self-government: it did not at the time occur to anyone that if this were
true the subject peoples of the British Empire must possess a similar right.
Inevitably much misunderstanding and confusion resulted. Most confused of
all were the Irish who jumped to the conclusion that their right to freedom
from British rule, for which they had struggled in vain for centuries, had
at last been admitted. Sternly admonished not to obstruct a crusade for the
liberty of small nations by putting forward selfish claims, the Irish broke
into revolt. The ruthless crushing of the Easter Rebellion proved beyond
question that in practice the methods and outlook of British Imperialism
remained quite uninfluenced by the acceptance in theory of any new political
conceptions.
In fact, it may be maintained that no real transformation in
outlook of any kind took place in Great Britain during the First World War.
The outbreak of war quickly generated a frenzy of self-righteousness and
pugnacity in which thought of any kind was impossible. The British public
learnt and repeated parrot-wise a succession of political slogans because
the politicians assured them that these would embarrass the Germans and so
pave the way for ultimate victory. If these slogans achieved this purpose,
their meaning was of no importance. When at last peace came and the frenzy
gradually ceased, the British public discovered that it had been committed
to an entirely novel political outlook which was in every way the opposite
to the outlook of the Kipling age. Seen in this new light the ideals which
had inspired the founders of the British Empire seemed obsolete and even
discreditable conceptions inherited from a remote past.
Outwardly, indeed, the British Empire emerged from the First
World War greater in extent and more powerful than ever.
“We have got most of the things we set out to get,” declared
Mr. Lloyd George in a rare moment of candour. “The German Navy has been
handed over, the German merchant shipping has been handed over, and the
German colonies have been given up. One of our chief trade competitors has
been most seriously crippled and our Allies are about to become Germany’s
biggest creditors. This is no small achievement!”
In fact, however, the British Empire had received a mortal
blow. No longer could the possession of an empire be regarded as a subject
for pride. The ideals proclaimed during the war for the purpose of bringing
about the downfall of the German Empire could not be reconciled with the
existence of any empire. As far as Great Britain was concerned the history
of the next fifty years may be summarised by saying that it consisted of the
story of the gradual dissolution of the British Empire as the natural and
inevitable consequence of the acceptance of these ideals. In 1960 Mr. Harold
Macmillan caused a sensation by a speech in which he declared, “the wind of
change” was blowing through Africa, but it had been blowing with destructive
force throughout Europe and Asia ever since the First World War. Only the
empire of the Czars, newly labelled a proletarian dictatorship, survived the
storm. The successors of the Czars, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Kosygin,
all cheerfully adopted in turn democracy, anti-militarism,
self-determination and the other catchwords of the First World War as useful
slogans for the embarrassment of their opponents, in short for the simple
purpose for which these slogans had originally been designed. Whereas the
British Government felt compelled to attach a meaning to these slogans, and
only acted in defiance of them with reluctance and shame, the Soviet
Government used them only as a standard by which could be denounced the
conduct of their opponents, a standard having not the least application to
their own conduct. In consequence the Soviet Government was able
wholeheartedly to repress the revolts of subject peoples, to carry out
mass-deportations and to wage a series of aggressive wars with the result
that the empire of the Czars, far from breaking up, gradually evolved into a
communist empire far stronger than its imperial predecessor had ever been.
The British Empire, on the other hand, simply crumbled to pieces, the spirit
which had created it being no longer in existence to inspire its defence.
Men like John Nicholson or Lord Kitchener never doubted for
an instant the right of the British Empire to subjugate and rule weaker
peoples or their own plain duty to crush ruthlessly any attempt by them at
revolt. In exactly the same spirit when the Soviet generals dealt with the
heroic attempt of the Hungarian people in 1956 to free themselves from the
Russian yoke, a doubt never crossed their minds as to the justification of
repressing ruthlessly a little people venturing to oppose the will of a
Communist dictatorship. But from the Sinn Fein revolt in Ireland in 1919 to
the terrorist campaign of EOKA in Cyprus in 1955, the efforts of the armed
forces of the British Empire were paralysed by the subconscious conviction
that their opponents had right on their side. In 1848 General Cavaignac
declared that a social order which permits its principles to be examined and
rejected is already lost. The British Empire was doomed during the First
World War when to obtain a temporary political advantage it expressly
repudiated the principles upon which its existence depended.
Seen in perspective it is now clear that the First World War
was an unqualified disaster for the White Race. The first and greatest
sufferers were the German people who after passing through a decade of
humiliation and acute economic distress entered a decade of feverish
activity and reckless political ambitions culminating in 1945 in a far
greater and more complete disaster than that of 1918. The Nazi regime of
Adolf Hitler was in essence a natural reaction to the flagrant injustice and
hypocrisy of the Versailles Treaty.
Sooner or later all the peoples of Europe were destined to
suffer from the consequences of the First World War. The military, moral and
economic supremacy of Europe over Asia and Africa was lost for ever. The
Yellow Race and Black Race no longer regarded the White Race as a distinct
kind of superior being, invincible on the battlefield and guided by higher
moral standards than those of coloured peoples. After 1945 the intelligence
of the White Man was assessed by reference to his indulgence in two suicidal
world wars for no rational purpose and in which victors and vanquished were
obviously both bound to be losers: the White Man’s claim to be guided by
higher moral standards was judged by reference to the abominable atrocities
which White peoples had committed on each other during two world wars. To an
impartial observer whether an Asiatic or an African it was clear from the
joint testimony of both sides that the White peoples had behaved to each
other with ruthless cruelty and reckless perfidy and it was hard for
onlookers to say which group of antagonists was the worst.
Only in regard to the gigantic scale on which it was fought
did the First World War surpass all previous conflicts. No leader of genius
arose on either side to direct the fighting. Huge masses of men, mostly
hurriedly trained civilians, were blindly hurled against each other
supported by an unprecedented expenditure of ammunition. Naturally the loss
of life resulting from the employment of such tactics was on a scale
hitherto unimaginable. On the first day of the great Somme Offensive in
1916, the casualties of the British alone amounted to 60,000. After four
months of continual and furious fighting both sides were utterly exhausted
but no noteworthy advantage had been gained. Sir Douglas Haig complacently
reported that the powers of resistance of the German Army must have been
substantially reduced by such a slaughter, and set about preparing for a
similar mass-offensive next year. It is estimated that during the Somme
Offensive, three million men, the flower of the young manhood of the three
leading European races, took part and over a million of them became
casualties.
It can hardly be said that the First World War led to any
fundamental developments in the art of war. The recently invented aeroplane
was rapidly improved in order to serve as a weapon of war; the invention of
the tank restored to the attacking side the advantage it had enjoyed over
the defence before the introduction of quick-firing weapons and barbed wire.
Surgery made great advances; those injured by the new scientific methods of
destruction were patched up by new scientific methods of treatment. Only in
one respect did the First World War initiate an entirely novel development
and this was a political and not a military development. Until 1914 wars had
been fought to secure some specific and limited aim. War propaganda had
consisted of little more than vague assertions of the essential justice of
this aim and haphazard abuse of the leaders of the enemy state. Although
officially encouraged and inspired, it entirely lacked official planning and
direction. It was intended merely to intensify normal patriotic feeling. The
actual fighting was of course done by professional soldiers who obeyed their
orders and needed no propaganda fictions to stimulate their zeal. But in
1914 an entirely novel situation arose. It was not only necessary to work
out a plausible explanation of Britain’s participation in the war. It was
imperative to develop a technique of presenting this explanation so
skilfully and convincingly that nation-wide enthusiasm for the war would be
generated.
In due course the Fourteen Points were propounded to an
admiring world. The method of presentation adopted was an entirely new
departure in international politics but the principles upon which this
presentation was based had long been partially understood. For many years
before 1914, a mass of empirical knowledge concerning the reactions of the
human mind to certain astutely applied stimuli had been gradually
accumulating and had been frequently turned to account for personal gain by
various gifted individuals. As long before as the time of Charles II, Titus
Oates had achieved results which in their way have never been surpassed. No
emotional engineer of modern times can be compared with that French woman of
genius, Madame Therese Humbert, who, at the end of the nineteenth century,
for nearly twenty years kept the most astute bankers and financiers of Paris
under her spell to her own great profit and their great loss. The celebrated
Tichborne case of 1872 and the equally remarkable Druce case of 1907, the
two most celebrated English fraud cases, both promoted by publicity,
demonstrated how limitless is the credulity of the general public and what
an imposing structure can be erected from a scientific blending of distorted
facts and skilful fabrications.
It was not, however, until 1914, that it was realized that what could be
achieved by Orton the Wagga Wagga butcher and by Druce the Melbourne
carpenter for their own personal advantage could be achieved on a far wider
scale for the national good by persons of the highest integrity employed by
the State and with all the resources of the State behind them. As so
frequently happens in contemporary life, the haphazard lessons learned by
private enterprise were adapted, systematized, and developed by the
community. In this instance, at least, nationalization was triumphantly
vindicated by the decisive results achieved.
It was the opinion of two such dissimilar observers as Lord
Northcliffe and Adolf Hitler that the war of 1914-1918 was won by the war
propaganda of the Allies. On the one hand, the peoples of the Allies were
inspired in their war efforts by loud professions of genuine, if vague,
ideals. On the other hand, the German people were never clear for what
exactly they were fighting. When hostilities were progressing favourably
they were told their reward would be the annexation of some foreign
territory; when hostilities took an unfavourable turn, they were told that
they were fighting for their existence—although their enemies were pledged
to conclude a peace to which no reasonable objection could be made.
By winning the war, Allied propaganda can be said to have
fully justified itself and yet it entailed serious drawbacks, the full
effects of which were not experienced until afterwards. Obviously, this
propaganda campaign violated two of the principles upon which Emeric de
Vattel had been most insistent. In the first place, as we have seen, he had
laid down that “all offensive expressions indicating sentiments of hatred,
animosity and bitterness” must be avoided so that the way to a negotiated
settlement might not be closed. Secondly, he had insisted that war aims must
be limited and specific and should “not be mixed up with Justice and Right
nor any of the great passions which move a people.”
In support of these contentions, Vattel had, in brief,
argued that the only justification for any war is that it will lead to a
lasting peace. Now a lasting peace can only arise from a freely negotiated
settlement. Emotion in any form is an impediment to negotiation.
Offensive expressions and appeals to abstractions arouse emotion.
Therefore, offensive expressions and appeals to abstractions must be avoided
in warfare.
The war of 1914-1918 may be said to have been won by copious
and adroit use of offensive expressions and appeals to abstractions. In
accordance with Vattel’s argument, it did not lead to a lasting peace.
Further, Vattel contended that a harsh dictated peace must inevitably rouse
a determination in the defeated side to reverse it. Adolf Hitler can best be
interpreted as the incarnation of this determination.
During the course of the struggle, one final opportunity was
vouchsafed the peoples of Europe by indulgent destiny to escape the natural
penalty of disunity and disorder. In European Civil War No. 8a, the
belligerents proved so equally matched that after three years of desperate
conflict no decisive advantage had been gained. Truculent self-confidence
had been everywhere abashed; the German Army had achieved no second Sedan at
the Marne and no second Trafalgar had been achieved by the British Navy at
Jutland; far from reconquering Alsace, the French Army had failed to protect
Northern France from enemy occupation; the Russian Army and the Austrian
Army had each sustained a series of humiliating defeats; and the Italian
Army had recently demonstrated at Caporetto how far and how fast
panic-stricken human beings can run. In every country and among all classes,
realization had come that war was no longer the polite orderly sport of
kings as it had been in the eighteenth century, but had become a tedious,
costly, and murderous business; in every country and among all classes
war-weariness and disillusionment had become predominant. To those who
objected that three years of frantic endeavour and terrible slaughter must
not be wasted, it could be answered that the best and, in fact, the only
justification of so much toil and bloodshed would be not some petty
territorial annexations or frontier adjustments but an enduring peace,
securely based on the realization by all concerned that in a present-day war
no one benefits. Had peace been concluded in 1917, for several generations
at least the militarists and armament manufacturers would have striven in
vain to banish the memory of such an experience.
The golden opportunity to establish a lasting settlement
must have been obvious to many at the time. It was left, however, to the
Marquess of Lansdowne alone to draw public attention to it. Representing not
merely sane public opinion in Great Britain or even sane contemporary
opinion in Europe, but voicing the protest against futile squabbling which
had been so often expressed by isolated European thinkers since the dawn of
the Middle Ages, on
November 27, 1917, Lord Lansdowne wrote a letter to The Times
urging that negotiations for peace should be commenced. “The prolongation of
this war will spell ruin for the civilized world,” he wrote. “If the war is
to be brought to a close in time to avoid a world-catastrophe, it will be
because on both sides the peoples realize that it has already lasted too
long.”
In attempting to influence a public suffering from acute
paranoia by an appeal to reason, Lord Lansdowne displayed the highest moral
courage. He also displayed keen political foresight, although we may not be
able to credit him with vision of all that was at stake. If a peace without
victors and without vanquished had been concluded in 1917, it would have
been a peace primarily the work of and, consequently, there would have been
no occasion to pay humble homage to President Wilson and his gospel of
“self-determination” which inevitably entailed an early dissolution of the
British Empire; Germany’s Unknown Soldier would have remained merely one of
the obscure millions who had fought in the front line for their fatherland;
the return of Alsace by Germany to France would have removed the principal
subject for ill-feeling between the two chief European states; the ruling
classes in Russia would have quickly regained the upper hand; Russia would
have remained a member of the European family of nations and Lenin’s attempt
to restore the Eurasian Empire of Genghis Khan in the shape of a militant
communist commonwealth would have been stifled at its inception; and
unthinkable would have remained such features of contemporary life as the
indiscriminate killing of civilians by terror attacks from the air, the mass
deportations of populations numbering millions, the official looting of
private property, the systematic sabotage of enemy industries, and the
consignment of prisoners of war to the gallows or to slavery of
indeterminate duration. Perhaps of even greater interest to many in the
future will be the fact that Asia would have remained a vast but remote area
beyond the Urals and not, by swallowing half Europe, have extended to the
banks of the Oder within four flying hours of London. No date in human
history suggests more pregnant might-have-beens than the date of Lord
Lansdowne’s letter.
But habits engrained during a thousand years are not easily
overcome. The editor of The Times, before falling into a swoon,
consigned the letter, albeit it was the letter of a peer and an ex-cabinet
minister, to his wastepaper basket. The editor of The Daily Telegraph
was, however, made of sterner stuff: greatly daring, he published the
letter. Before writing it, Lord Lansdowne had disclosed his intention to a
number of prominent statesmen—including Mr. Balfour, Lord Hardinge and the
American, Colonel House—who had whispered approval of his views. But when
the storm broke, these gentlemen preserved a discreet silence. The British
Government expressed horror at the mere suggestion that the objects of the
war should be disclosed; the emotional engineers were given their orders
and, in a few days, Lord Lansdowne was the most unpopular man in the
country. Thereafter, those who continued to fight for European sanity were
fighting a battle finally lost.
In retrospect, the decline in the standards of warfare
during the war of 1914-1918 appears less than might have been expected under
all the circumstances. There was a marked but not a headlong decline. In
essence, this conflict remained a European civil war and the traditions of
European civil warfare which had then existed for two centuries were, on the
whole, maintained. This is best seen by contrasting the behaviour of the
troops who entered Germany in 1918 with that of those who invaded the
country in 1945. Cut off by four years’ service at the front from the home
population, the troops of Foch and Haig had acquired, to a great extent, the
outlook of professional soldiers. In contact with facts, they were little
influenced by the fictions of propaganda, and sympathy and respect had grown
up between them and their opponents as between men facing the same dangers,
enduring the same hardships, and performing the same duties. Their
discipline, when they entered enemy territory in 1918, was not undermined by
official exhortations to refrain at all costs from “pampering” the enemy.
Looting of civilian property by soldiers was still a major military crime—as
it remained until it was announced, that after hostilities enemy civilian
property would be officially looted. They had not before them the example of
the troops of non-European Powers, indifferent to the rules of European
civil warfare, nor of the gangs of auxiliaries from the underworld of
countries recently under German occupation, bent on paying off old scores.
Their leaders were men of strong character—it is recorded that, soon after
the Armistice, General Plumer informed Whitehall that he must decline to
remain responsible for discipline in Cologne if his troops continued to be
followed by bands of starving children for whom no provision had been made
by the politicians. With complete disregard for the feelings of
propaganda-befuddled civilian opinion at home, General Plumer did not
disguise his sympathy with the attitude of his men.
Admittedly, episodes of this kind were not frequent. The
reception accorded to the German peace delegates at Compiègne was without
precedent in the long annals of European civil war for its chilly severity.
Marshal Foch was an unamiable personality, cold, precise, and stern. His
attitude throughout was harsh and unbending. But he never forgot that he was
a professional European soldier, familiar since youth with the rules and
etiquette of the European civil war game. After the Armistice, a noisy
clamour was raised in civilian circles that a number of distinguished
professional soldiers, including Marshal von Hindenburg, should be
penalized. The usual complete unanimity between the military and the
civilian outlook was, of course, preserved: But the clamour mysteriously
subsided and died away. One can but suspect that a heavy foot or feet was or
were put down by a person or persons unknown.
There were during the struggle few deliberate breaches of
the: the fighting was limited to the uniformed
armed forces of the combatants, prisoners and wounded were treated with
humanity, the rights of enemy civilians in occupied territory were preserved
and enemy civilian property was not wantonly destroyed. There were no
organised campaigns of murder and sabotage behind the enemy lines carried
out by armed civilians and consequently no savage reprisals by the security
forces. The Germans temporarily terrorized Paris by firing a few shells into
the city by use of an improvised long range cannon, but the damage to life
and property was slight. Much damage was, of course, done to French and
Belgian cities as a result of artillery bombardment during the advance of
the German armies westward but this occurred only in connection with direct
military operations, as was sanctioned by the European code of civilized
warfare. The main onslaught upon civilian life was a product of the British
blockade of Germany, which was continued for nearly a year after the
Armistice and led to the starvation of nearly a million German
non-combatants. On the whole, however, the old European code of civilized
warfare dominated military strategy and operations during the conflict.
Few would now have the hardihood to deny that the peace
settlement of Versailles in 1919 was a complete and tragic failure. It
failed completely for precisely the reason so lucidly set forth and
explained by Vattel 150 years before. Its failure was tragic because the
principles upon which it was professedly based justified the highest hopes.
Admittedly, it is impossible to reconcile the terms of the Treaty with the
Fourteen Points in accordance with which the Allied pledge was given at the
time of the Armistice. But we are not, therefore, compelled to accept the
view, so passionately urged by Adolf Hitler, that the Treaty of Versailles
was merely the culmination of a gigantic swindle intended from the start.
The Fourteen Points were not a collection of dishonest verbiage like the
Atlantic Charter. Certainly they were used later for propaganda to beguile
the German people, but they were not designed for this purpose by their
author, President Wilson.
It is a curious fact that the Versailles Treaty actually
came to grief upon the very point on which it followed most strictly
orthodox practice. For centuries, it had been the accepted principle of
European civil warfare that the vanquished side should pay to the victors
the cost of the war. The same principle is adopted in the legal systems of
all countries in litigation between individuals. Costs follow the event. The
man who goes to law and fails must pay the cost of the proceedings. With
equal reason the country which goes to war and is defeated should be called
upon to pay the cost of hostilities.
So long as warfare was waged on a small scale and was
comparatively inexpensive, this principle was so obviously reasonable that
the payment of war indemnities gave rise to little difficulty or
ill-feeling. In litigation, a taxing master sees to it that the successful
side does not give free rein to its imagination when drawing its bill of
costs. In warfare, indeed, there has never been an international taxing
master. Still, the war indemnities demanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries do not seem to have been extortionate. It was once the custom to
denounce the indemnity demanded by Bismarck after the defeat of France in
1870 as severe. To our eyes it seems moderate in the extreme. Surely, this
is proved by the fact that France was able to pay the whole sum demanded
within five years and, within ten years of Sedan, was once again a rich and
prosperous state and one of the three great military powers of Europe.
By 1919, however, warfare had become so fabulously costly
that, even if the expenses of the Allies had been assessed by a fair-minded
tribunal, the sum payable would have been utterly beyond the capacity of the
vanquished to pay and, further, if by some miracle it had been paid, the
entire economic structure of the world would have been upset. Payment in
full—although everyone admitted this to be impossible—was insisted on. Of
course, promiscuous looting of public and private property, as provided by
the Potsdam Agreement of 1945, would have been unthinkable to the mind of
President Wilson who had formerly been a professor of jurisprudence. Not one
single penny must be taken from Germany, he repeatedly insisted: all that
could be required of Germany was that she should comply with the principle
that costs follow the event. That compliance would mean the payment of
vastly more than the total wealth of Germany must not be allowed to disturb
this well-established legal principle.
The result was a succession of futile conferences, each
conference leading to a settlement of the “reparations problem” which
everyone knew to be impossible. The only result was that war-time bitterness
was repeatedly aggravated and perpetuated. At long last, the Allies grew
weary of insisting upon performance of the impossible, and tacit
cancellation of one section of the treaty naturally encouraged the Germans
to go on to repudiate the balance.
For a brief spell, round about 1925, it seemed possible
that, once again, Europe would escape the natural penalty for indulging in
civil war. The United States had ostentatiously repudiated further interest
in European affairs. Few believed that Lenin’s successors would succeed in
keeping together the Soviet State which he had created out of the ruins of
the Empire of the Czars. At Locarno, M. Briand, Herr Stresemann, and Sir
Austen Chamberlain met together and cordially agreed henceforth to work
together for the common good. The lamps which, in 1914, Sir Edward Grey had
watched being extinguished one by one were to be re-lit, contrary to his
lugubrious prediction, and the prosperity and happiness of the Edwardian Age
was to return.
But habits dating back a dozen centuries are not so easily
shaken off. In Europe, in the past, political differences had always led
ultimately as a matter of course to civil war. Never before had there
existed in Europe so many and so acute political differences. As
Vattel in the Age of Reason had pointed out, a
treaty imposed by force can only be maintained by force. The Treaty of
Versailles had imposed harsh dictated peace terms upon the vanquished,
thereby inevitably arousing in them a determination to reverse its
decisions, regardless of the risks involved. Between 1933 and 1938, Adolf
Hitler, the incarnation of this determination, by threats of force set aside
one by one the main provisions of the Versailles Treaty. Throughout this
time the Soviet Union continued to consolidate into a great military Power,
with all the far-reaching territorial ambitions of the Czars combined with
the political and economic ambitions of Karl Marx. Between Western Europe
and the Soviet Union lay the newly re-created state of Poland. To Germany,
in particular, Poland served as an invaluable buffer state.
Self-preservation linked Poland with Germany, since the Polish ruling
classes depended for their existence on being able to keep Communism in
check. But among the major absurdities of the Versailles Treaty had been the
creation of the so-called Polish Corridor. To rectify this wrong, of much
greater emotional than practical importance, Hitler was prepared to
sacrifice the protection of this buffer state. For their part, the Polish
ruling classes were prepared to defend the Corridor by force, although the
price of victory would inevitably entail the ultimate absorption of Poland
by the Soviet Union and their own ruthless liquidation.
The preservation of peace was so obviously of paramount
importance to both the German and Polish Governments that each, quite
naturally, became convinced that the other must be bluffing. Accordingly, in
September, 1939, the first steps were taken which were finally to lead
Hitler to suicide in the ruins of the burning Reich Chancellery and the
Polish ruling classes to that systematic extermination which was destined to
begin less than a year later in the Katyn forest.
Undeniably in 1939 by risking another world war leading the
possible complete destruction of all he had achieved over relatively so
small an issue as the liberation of Danzig, Hitler displayed a lack of any
sense of proportion well justifying the odium in which his memory is now
held by mankind in general and by his countrymen in particular. He acted,
however, strictly in accordance with one of the most firmly established
principles of traditional European diplomacy, which, as we have seen, laid
down that if a statesman muddled himself into a position from which
withdrawal was impossible, he was bound to resort to war to preserve his
country’s honour. It has been argued that this principle in 1939 had become
obsolete because the conscience of mankind had ceased to recognise warfare
as a means of settling international disputes. With regard to what was then
and is now the current attitude to warfare, it is hardly possible merely to
appeal to higher authority than that of the leading contemporary champion of
non-violence and conciliation, the disciple of the saintly Ghandi, the late
Pandit Nehru. In 1961 Pandit Nehru, finding himself unable verbally to
coerce the Portuguese Government to cede to India the port of Goa, a
Portuguese possession on the Malabar Coast for four hundred and fifty years,
ordered his troops to occupy Goa by force. The two cases are exactly
parallel except that in 1939 Hitler had an undeniable moral claim to Danzig,
and Pandit Nehru in 1961 had no claim at all to Goa, moral or otherwise. At
a Press conference held shortly after the resistance of the tiny Portuguese
garrison had been overcome, Pandit Nehru justified his action by declaring
blandly, “The use of force was of course open to us according to suitability
and opportunity.”
According to this weighty authority, therefore, Hitler’s
offence in 1939 was not that he ordered his troops to occupy Danzig by
force, but that he did so at a moment lacking suitability and opportunity.
In the final analysis the outbreak of war in 1939 will be
found to be the last and culminating episode of a political chain reaction
which had been set in motion in August 1914. Between these dates each
successive development followed naturally and inevitably from the one before
it.
The Treaty of Versailles, almost from the date it was
signed, was condemned by many as a compound of injustice, perfidy and
stupidity: the statesmen responsible for it have been derided as
self-satisfied charlatans who, for motives of greed and spite, betrayed the
hopes of mankind for a just and lasting peace settlement.
Few can now be found to defend the Treaty of Versailles. On
the other hand, it was exactly the peace settlement which might have been
expected to result from the spontaneous irrational frenzy of pugnacity which
led to the outbreak in 1914 of a war which was continued for four years in
an equally irrational frenzy of obstinacy. To us it may seem clear that the
poet Rupert Brooke was in urgent need of expert psychiatric treatment when
he wrote in 1914, “Now God be thanked who has matched us with this hour!”
but all over Europe hundreds of thousands of young men were expressing the
same thankfulness although few of them had any clearer idea than Rupert
Brooke what the war was about.
Surely if all this blind, hysterical activity had led to the
conclusion of a sane, balanced and just peace settlement it could only have
been because a sudden and miraculous change of heart took place in 1919. No
such miracle, however, took place. The struggle which was long known as the
Great War led inevitably to the Treaty of Versailles.
Equally inevitably the Treaty of Versailles led to a period
of growing tension as the vanquished, gradually recovering their strength,
began to agitate for the redress of their wrongs. If, between the Treaty of
Locarno in 1925 and the assumption of power by Hitler in 1933, the victors
could have brought themselves to make reasonable concessions, it is possible
that the Treaty of Versailles might have been replaced by a lasting peace
settlement. But this again could only have come about through a belated
change of heart in the victorious countries. Such a development would have
been so entirely contrary to the natural trend of events as to have required
some supernatural intervention. No such intervention took place.
It followed naturally as part of the political chain
reaction that frustration brought militant nationalism to power in Germany.
Thereafter the chain reaction proceeded with ever increasing speed. Not one
of Hitler’s demands taken alone seemed worth going to war about. One
propaganda delusion after another concerning the so-called Great War had had
to be abandoned, but the belief was still held with pathetic insistence that
a struggle lasting four years and costing ten million lives had at least
banished warfare for ever from the world. Few were ready to demonstrate that
this belief was also a delusion by resorting to war over an issue which in
itself was not of vital importance to the victorious Powers.
Once the process had started, the shackles imposed on
Germany by the Treaty of Versailles were broken one by one in rapid
succession. But this process could not go on indefinitely: as Shakespeare
says, even time must have a stop. Hitler gave a classic example of
“brinkmanship”, but his success made it inevitable that ultimately his
opponents would adopt the same dangerous policy. The last phase of the chain
reaction occurred in 1939 when Hitler ordered his troops to cross the border
of the Polish Corridor.
No difficulty arose in 1939 about finding a convincing war
aim such as had arisen in 1914. The necessity for preserving the integrity
of Poland was not a war aim likely to arouse much enthusiasm in either
Britain or France, but this explanation for the outbreak of war was quickly
superseded by attributing to Hitler precisely the same plans for world
conquest which had been attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm. To make plausible this
charge against the latter elaborate fictions had had to be invented, but in
the case of Hitler it was only necessary to stress the undeniable fact that
he had repeatedly disturbed the status quo by unilateral action.
So closely interlocked are the First and Second World Wars
that it seems likely that future historians will regard them as merely
episodes of the same struggle. The interval of twenty-one years between them
will be dismissed as a period of feverish but futile activity during which
it proved to be impossible to control the irrational passions which had been
released in 1914. If this view be ultimately accepted, the Armistice signed
on November 11th, 1918, which at the time seemed an epoch-making event in
the history of mankind will be regarded as a mere truce which allowed the
victors to despoil the vanquished to their heart’s content for a limited
time: when the German troops crossed the border of the Polish Corridor in
1939 they were merely resuming a struggle which exhaustion had brought to a
halt in November 1918.
The immediate outcome of this resumption of hostilities was
the first break in the political chain reaction which had started in 1914.
When Great Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, professedly
to preserve the integrity of Poland, they did so confidently believing that
the task before them would be swiftly and easily accomplished. Facts and
figures were produced in abundance proving that Germany lacked money and
supplies of essential war materials; the Reichswehr was said not only to lack
equipment and training, but a fighting spirit. The German people were said
to be groaning beneath the tyranny of the Nazi regime and to be waiting
impatiently for a favourable opportunity to revolt. The slightest set-back
would provide such an opportunity by shattering Hitler’s prestige for ever.
On the face of it, was it possible to believe that the hastily trained and
unwilling conscripts of the Third Reich could defeat the combined armies of
Great Britain and France, a task which had been beyond the strength of the
magnificent Imperial Army of the Kaiser? We now know that several of the
ablest of Hitler’s military advisers shared this doubt. In British and
French military circles there seems to have been no doubts at all as to the
outcome. No serious fighting was to be apprehended; it was merely a question
of putting the clock back to the 11th November, 1918.
This indeed would have been the only outcome which would
have been consistent with the political chain reaction which had begun in
1914. Contrary, however, to all expectation, the issue was not simply
decided by such factors as more numerous and better weapons, superior
organization and vastly greater resources. These factors were outweighed by
a factor which had been overlooked, although perhaps Napoleon’s oft-quoted
dictum should have provided a warning. The outcome proved that a decision by
politicians to resort to war to preserve an admittedly unsatisfactory
status quo does not produce a fighting spirit equal to that generated by
a blind fanatical determination to avenge at all costs past defeats and
humiliations.
Chapter 6 — The Splendid Decision
The war which began in September, 1939, and ended in June
1940, was in all essentials a typical European civil war. Of absorbing
interest to students of strategy and tactics, it offers no exceptional
features of any kind except that the point at issue was rather more
frivolous than usual; its duration was unprecedentedly brief; and it caused
comparatively little loss of life and damage—in the Battle of France the
Germans lost 27,074 killed and 129,418 wounded and missing, in all therefore
some 150,000 casualties. In 1914 the Kaiser’s armies had overrun Northern
France and Belgium at the cost of 638,000 casualties, including 85,000
killed. The total casualties of both sides in the great Somme offensive in
1916 reached nearly 1,000,000 men: on the first day of this offensive Sir
Douglas Haig sacrificed over 60,000 men.
Because the Battle of France ended so quickly—the actual
fighting lasted only two months—a war psychosis had no time to develop.
Before the emotional engineers could work up their respective publics into a
frenzy of hatred, it was all over. The decision of 1918 had been reversed,
the French Army had surrendered and the B.E.F. had withdrawn, minus its
tanks, artillery, stores and equipment, across the Channel.
Intoxicated by the speed and completeness of their triumph,
the victors were in no mood to set about paying off old scores. Clemenceau’s
deliberate humiliation of the German delegates at Versailles, the
garrisoning of German towns with negro warriors, and M. Tirard’s campaign to
annex the Rhinelands by violence and intrigue were forgotten. With his
highly developed sense of historical fitness, Hitler indeed insisted that
the famous railway coach in the Forest of Compiègne, in which Marshal Foch
had dictated terms of surrender so harshly some 22 years before, should be
the scene of the surrender of the Army which Foch had then led to victory.
All the forms of military etiquette, however, were again punctiliously
observed. Marshal Pétain was treated with the respect which his record as a
soldier deserved. In spite of the boasted modernity of their outlook, it
does not seem to have occurred, even to the most extreme of the Nazis that
Pétain’s heroic defence of Verdun in 1916 justified his condemnation as a
war criminal. Not until five years later, and then at the hands of his own
countrymen, was the gallant old Marshal to experience what Dante called “the
horrid art of justice”.
It is, of course, the unchallengeable right of every
sovereign state to deal with its own citizens according to its own ideas of
justice. The administration of justice in France is the exclusive concern of
Frenchmen. Still, the spectacle of the Hero of Verdun (alias the Prisoner of
Yeu), the man who saved France and the cause of the Allies when the French
army mutinied after the failure of the offensive on the Chemin des Dames,
and the general whose strategy defeated Ludendorff in 1918, dying at the age
of 95 after enduring six years of rigorous imprisonment on a bleak little
island off the Atlantic coast, is a matter of general interest. It is not
open to question that Marshal Pétain took command in France in 1940 entirely
from a soldierly sense of duty, and in a completely constitutional manner.
It is equally unquestionable that he did his best to serve France in
hopeless circumstances. When disaster came, he considered it his duty to
remain at the helm of state. In 1919, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, like
Marshal Pétain a soldier of the old school, had come to the same decision
and won thereby universal respect. Both acted in accordance with the ancient
tradition that the captain should be the last to leave a sinking ship. This
traditional role has often been contrasted with the behaviour of rats who,
according to a popular belief of equal antiquity, will leave a ship which
they know by instinct is about to sink. It is curious that these traditions
seem never before to have been combined in a single legend of a captain
going down with his ship and later surviving to be traduced and reviled by
those who judged it more prudent or less unpleasant to make a timely
departure.
The role played by Marshal Foch, in 1918, was played in 1940
by the Chef des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, General-Oberst Wilhelm Keitel,
shortly afterwards promoted to Field Marshal. An unknown captain in the
Artillery commanding a battery in 1914 but shortly transferred to the
General Staff, Keitel had progressed steadily and inconspicuously
thenceforth from one staff appointment to another until, while still
practically unknown outside military circles, he had reached the front rank
of his profession. At that historic spot in the Forest of Compiègne on
June 22, 1940, Keitel crowned his military career by accepting
the surrender of the beaten French Army, thereby securing an assured place
in the annals of modern warfare alongside Grant, Moltke, and Foch.
For the leading role which he played in the Forest of
Compiègne in 1940, the name of Field Marshal Keitel will live in history.
For this reason only, if for no other, it has become a subject for regret
that destiny had reserved for him a grim sequel, a sequel which was enacted
some six years later on a scaffold at Nuremberg, in accordance with a
decision reached shortly before the end of the war by the heads of state
attending the Yalta Conference. From all accounts it would seem that Keitel
was neither a strong personality nor a gifted soldier like his colleagues,
Field Marshal von Runstedt or Field Marshal von Manstein. He was widely
despised in German military circles as Hitler’s “Yes-man” on the General
Staff and there is no doubt he gave his formal approval to a number of
crimes against humanity committed on the Eastern Front. His defence to the
charges later brought against him, he himself summarised in a single
sentence, “The struggle against the Red Army was not a knightly combat (ein
ritterlicher Krieg): at stake was the entire way of life of one side or the
other.” It is a matter for speculation what his fate would have been if he
had been tried by an impartial court. Still at least it cannot be said that
his death by hanging was an example of judicial murder like the hanging of
General Yamashita, the gallant conqueror of Singapore.
Whatever view be taken of Keitel’s fate, it certainly marked
a turning point in history. Unsuspected by him and by his contemporaries in
1940 Nemesis was about to overtake the nations of Europe after so many
centuries of indulgence with impunity in civil strife. The old standards,
the old restraints, the old decencies, with so much else, were destined to
disappear. Being done to death upon being taken prisoner was not included
among the legitimate risks of soldiering at the time Keitel joined the army
in 1901—unless, of course, one served against savages like the Dervishes or
the Abyssinians. By, suffering death as a prisoner of war, Keitel achieved a
far wider historical significance than he had achieved during his career. If
and when the art of war becomes obsolete, his military achievements will be
of interest only to antiquarians: his death by violence when a prisoner of
war at Nuremberg in 1946 will be remembered as an event marking an important
deviation in the development of human civilization.
As remarked above, the war of 1939-40 had, in itself, no
outstanding characteristics. From outside, however, its course was dominated
by an entirely new factor. Across the eastern frontier of Poland had arisen
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a gigantic quasi-Asiatic
totalitarian military power with unlimited natural resources and a rapidly
developing industrial system, “profoundly” (to quote General J. F. C.
Fuller) “anti-Occidental in outlook.”
With this military colossus watching and waiting so near,
civil war was no longer a domestic concern to be conducted at leisure, a
mere matter of adjusting some frontiers and paying off a few old scores.
Even the briefest civil war entailed serious consequences. Immediately
hostilities had started, the U.S.S.R. set about realizing far-reaching plans
for expansion at the expense of Europe. First, about one-third of Poland was
annexed with bland indifference to the fact that Great Britain and France
professed to be fighting to preserve the integrity of Poland. Then Finland,
“sublime in the jaws of peril”, to quote Mr. Churchill, was attacked and
subdued. Next, Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania were overrun and the leading
members of the bourgeois classes liquidated or deported to the interior of
Russia. With the collapse of France and the withdrawal of the British across
the Channel, two urgent problems arose for the consideration of all
Europeans—first, whether domination of Europe by the Soviet Union was too
heavy a price to pay for the continuance of the civil war, and secondly, if
this price was not too heavy, by what means was the war to be continued.
Germany with a navy negligible in size could not send an army across the sea
to invade Great Britain; single-handed Great Britain could never hope to
invade Europe with an army strong enough to avoid its being immediately
attacked and overwhelmed.
To put the problem in a nutshell: the essential rule of
civilized warfare laid down that hostilities must be limited to the
combatant forces. But, as from June 25th, 1940, the combatant forces were
separated by the sea. How in such circumstances could hostilities be
continued?
Hitler’s solution of this problem was an offer to negotiate
peace. We need not consider whether this offer was sincere, since any other
course from his point of view, would have been madness. He had achieved all
and much more than all he had set out to achieve and Germany lay under the
shadow of the Red Army.
Nor need we consider what terms he would have been willing to offer since
his proposal was not even accorded a reply. In their speeches to the House
of Commons justifying the silent rejection of Hitler’s peace offer both the
Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax,
followed the precedent set by the British Government during the First World
War, and gave no indication of any basis upon which a peaceful settlement
could be discussed.
But a sulky silence by Hitler’s opponents offered no
solution to the problem as to how hostilities were to be continued and the
war prevented from stagnating until boredom should overcome public opinion.
Half a century before, the only means available would have been to launch a
series of tip-and-run naval raids on the coasts of Europe. Now, however, the
conquest of the air had provided a new method by which not only could
boredom be combatted but a war psychosis created. The indiscriminate
dropping of bombs at night on enemy centres of population would be bound,
sooner or later, to call forth reprisals of a similar nature, and the
resulting slaughter of innocent civilians could not fail to inflame warlike
passions on both sides.
Certainly it is hard to imagine any other course of action
which would have produced the result desired. The only drawback to this
course was that the Luftwaffe at the moment was numerically much superior to
the R.A.F. Hitler was threatening that, if the British air attacks on the
German civil population continued, he would drop ten bombs on Britain for
every bomb dropped on Germany. Consequently, the trials of the British
civilian population would temporarily, at least, be severe if this policy
were persisted in.
It is one of the greatest triumphs of modern emotional
engineering that, in spite of the plain facts of the case which could never
be disguised or even materially distorted, the British public, throughout
the Blitz Period (1940-1941), remained convinced that the entire
responsibility for the sufferings it was undergoing rested on the German
leaders. Faith is prized by theologians as one of the three cardinal virtues
and accepting the definition that “faith is believing what one knows isn’t
so”, it can truly be said that never before had this cardinal virtue been
displayed so steadfastly by so many for so long. The practical value of this
steadfast faith for the war effort can hardly be exaggerated: the Blitz was
unanimously accepted as proof positive of the innate wickedness of the Nazi
regime and, as such, endured as something inescapable. General recognition
of the fact that it could be brought to an end at any moment might well have
had a decisive influence on the public attitude. Too high praise cannot,
therefore, be lavished on the British emotional engineers for the infinite
skill with which the public mind was conditioned prior to and during a
period of unparalleled strain.
It was not until April, 1944, by which time the Luftwaffe
had become paralysed from lack of petrol and the issue of the struggle was
no longer in doubt, that the strict taboo on all mention of the facts was
lifted in favour of Mr. J. M. Spaight, C.B., C.B.E., former Principal
Secretary of the Air Ministry, who was permitted to publish a book entitled
Bombing Vindicated. The title in itself came as a surprise, since few
until then had any idea that any vindication for bombing was needed. In this
book the man in the street learned for the first time that he had made an
heroic decision on
May 11, 1940. The
man-in-the-street had, of course, no recollection of having made any
decision, heroic or otherwise, on this particular date; in fact, he could
not recall having made a decision of any kind for a very long time, since in
a democracy decisions are not made by such as he, but by international
financiers, Press barons, permanent officials and even, occasionally, by
Cabinet Ministers. No wonder the man in the street was perplexed.
Mr. Spaight, C.B., C.B.E., resolved this perplexity in the
following lyrical passage:
“Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of
propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the
strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision
of May 11th, 1940, the publicity which it deserved. That, surely, was a
mistake. It was a splendid decision. It was as heroic, as self-sacrificing,
as Russia’s decision to adopt her policy of ‘scorched earth’. It gave
Coventry and Birmingham, Sheffield and Southampton, the right to look Kiev
and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol, in the face. Our Soviet Allies would
have been less critical of our inactivity in 1942 if they had understood
what we had done.”
In passing, the comment must be made that Mr. Spaight in
this passage does much less than justice to the services rendered to him and
his colleagues of the Air Ministry by the emotional engineers of the
Ministry of Information. Without their aid, this splendid decision might
well have led to disastrous consequences; it was entirely thanks to what he
is pleased to term “propagandist distortion” that the inhabitants of
Coventry, for example, continued to imagine that their sufferings were due
to the innate villainy of Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision,
splendid or otherwise, of the British War Cabinet was the decisive factor in
the case. Had this suspicion existed, their reaction might have been
somewhat different. Is it fair for the famous surgeon to sneer at the
contribution of the humble anaesthetist which alone renders possible his own
delicate operations? Without previous conditioning by the emotional engineer
would the activities of the “block-buster” have been tolerated by public
opinion?
Contemporary publications on the war may be scanned in vain
for a clue why the date
May 11, 1940, is in any way memorable. A very close search will,
however, bring to light the fact, at the time obscured by far more
sensational news, that on the night of May 11th, “eighteen Whitley bombers
attacked railway installations in Western Germany.” Naturally this
announcement when made aroused little interest since it was only claimed
these installations had been attacked; it was not suggested that they
suffered any injury thereby.
The full significance of this announcement, first disclosed
nearly four years afterwards by Mr. Spaight, only appears after further
investigation and reflection. Western Germany in May 1940 was, of course, as
much outside the area of military operations as Patagonia. Up to this date,
only places within the area of military operations or such definitely
military objectives as the German air base on Sylt or the British air base
on the Orkneys had been attacked. This raid on the night of
May 11, 1940, although in itself trivial, was an epoch-marking
event since it was the first deliberate breach of the fundamental rule of
civilized warfare that hostilities must only be waged against the enemy
combatant forces.
In default of any further details it must be left to the
imagination to picture the eighteen bombers setting forth on the night of
May 11th from their base with instructions to drop their bombs when they
found themselves over Western Germany in the hope that some of them might
land on railway installations. To achieve this modest purpose they would
have to cross the battlefront, extending from the North Sea to Switzerland,
which had suddenly blazed into frantic activity as the German armies hurled
themselves to the attack from the Zuider Zee to the Maginot Line in
Lorraine. As nothing to the contrary has been recorded, it may be assumed
that the eighteen bombers all returned safely and that some of their bombs
damaged something somewhere. To the crews of these bombers it must have
seemed strange to fly over a battlefield where a life and death struggle was
taking place and then on over country crowded with columns of enemy troops
pouring forward to the attack, in order to reach the peaceful countryside of
Westphalia on the off-chance that some of their bombs dropped there would
land on railway installations. The value of their contribution to the great
battle in which the fate of France was being decided must indeed have seemed
to them obscure. Yet without realising it they were turning a major page of
history. Their flight marked the end of an epoch which had lasted for two
and one-half centuries.
How many times during this long period must Mars have sadly
reflected on the words of King Draco the Great in Anatole France’s
Penguin Island: “War without fire is like tripe without mustard: it is
an insipid thing.” What use the great conquerors of the past could have made
of these new-fangled flying machines. They themselves had achieved much
certainly, but how sadly they had been hampered by the limited powers of
destruction at their disposal. We may picture the shadowy figures of the
great conquerors in the days when war had really been war as admiring and
envious spectators of the doings of those eighteen bombers on that memorable
May night: against a background of prosaic twentieth century railway
installations we can imagine the grim forms of Asshurnazirpal and
Sennacherib stroking their square-cut, curled and scented beards with
dignified approval; the squat figure of Attila, the King of the Huns; the
awe-inspiring shape of the great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan, and the
forms of his successors, Hulagu, whose destruction of the irrigation system
of the Euphrates Valley was so thorough that what for thousands of years had
been one of the most prosperous parts of the earth became a desert, the
mighty Tamerlane, and a score of others. To these men, at least, the
limitless possibilities of this new method of achieving an ancient purpose
would have been clear.
These possibilities, however, were at the time realized by
few. It was not until much later that it became necessary to find
justification for such horrors as took place on that night when the most
densely populated parts of Hamburg became a roaring furnace in which
thousands of men, women and children were throwing themselves into the
canals to escape the frightful heat. The stock apology then put forward was
that it was only a reprisal for the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam.
Mr. Spaight dismisses this argument with the contempt it deserves. “When
Warsaw and Rotterdam were bombed,” he points out, “German armies were at
their gates. The air bombardment was an operation of the tactical
offensive.”
Captain Liddell Hart accepts the same view. “Bombing did not take place,” he
writes, “until the German troops were fighting their way into these cities
and thus conformed to the old rules of siege bombardment.”
“Bombing Vindicated” is a remarkable book: in fact, an
amazing book having regard to the date when it was written.
Mr. Spaight is not content merely to admit that upon Britain rests the
responsibility for starting the practice of bombing civilian populations,
but insists that to Britain must be awarded the entire credit for conceiving
and carrying into effect this practice. He derides (p. 149) the suggestion
rather half-heartedly put forward at the time by the Ministry of Information
that “the whole majestic process had been set in operation” because an
unidentified plane had dropped some bombs on a wood near Canterbury. Nor
will he admit the splendid decision of May 11, 1940, “was unpremeditated”.
On the contrary, he insists hotly (p. 38), that this decision can be traced
“to a brainwave which came to British experts in 1936,” when the Bomber
Command was organized—“The whole raison d’être of Bomber Command,” he tells
us (p. 60), “was to bomb Germany should she be our enemy”. Further, he says
it was obvious that Hitler realized that this was Britain’s intention in the
event of war, and that he was, in consequence, genuinely anxious to reach
with Britain an agreement “confining the action of aircraft to the battle
zones”. Finally, he agrees that Hitler only undertook the bombing of the
British civilian population reluctantly three months after the R.A.F. had
commenced bombing the German civilian population, and expresses the opinion
(p. 47) that after it had started Hitler would have been willing at any time
to have stopped the slaughter—“Hitler assuredly did not want the mutual
bombing to go on.” The reader will find the facts of the case set out with
frank jubilation by Mr. Spaight in the above-mentioned book, and with the
objective detachment of a veteran historian by Captain Liddell Hart in his
Revolution in Warfare. They are repeated by Air Marshal Sir Arthur
Harris in his book, Bomber Offensive (1947) by that time much tinged
by a marked petulance arising from the dawning realization of the
far-reaching consequences of the precedent created by “the splendid decision
of May 11, 1940”. And truly it is a disturbing precedent for the inhabitants
of a small, densely populated island, now that all the military might, air
prowess, and boundless resources of Asia have become no further distant than
the Oder.
Air Marshal Harris joins with Mr. Spaight in pouring
contempt on the shortsightedness of professional soldiers throughout the
world, and in particular in Germany, for not perceiving in the years before
1939 that the heavy bomber would be a far more effective weapon against
civilians than against combatant forces. The issue for what purpose an air
force should be designed to serve was hotly debated in Britain immediately
after the First World War. Germany had been disarmed but France had emerged
from the struggle with the largest air force in the world and was bitterly
aggrieved at British opposition to her plans for annexation in the Middle
East. The question was, what type of plane would Britain need in the event
of another war? The professional soldiers in the War Office naturally took
the traditional view; the chiefs of the newly created air force, unhampered
by tradition, took an entirely novel view. In 1923 Air Marshal Sir Hugh
Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, exactly summarized the point at issue
when he wrote, “The Army policy was to defeat the enemy army; our policy was
to defeat the enemy nation.”
Far from planning a Blitz, Air Marshal Harris declares that
Germany lost the war because, when compelled in September 1940 to carry out
the Blitz, she found that the generals who dominated the Luftwaffe and
regarded the bomber as merely a form of long-range artillery for use in
battle, had neglected to equip the Luftwaffe with heavily armed bomber
planes designed for a Blitz. “The Germans,” writes Air Marshal Harris, “had
allowed their soldiers to dictate the whole policy of the Luftwaffe which
was designed expressly to assist the army in rapid offensives.… Much too
late in the day they saw the advantage of a strategic bombing force … the
outcome was the German Army had to be deprived of air cover and air support
on every front to provide some defence for Germany against independent
strategic action in the air.”
Mr. Spaight puts the matter in a nutshell when he writes (p.
144): “In Germany and in France the air arm never cut adrift from the land
arm: it was tethered to the Army in these countries. In Britain it was free
to roam.” To this it may be replied that orthodox military opinion holds
that it is the duty of a soldier to fight and not to roam. “For Germany,”
Mr. Spaight continues, “the bomber was artillery for stationary troops dug
fast into the Maginot Line; for Britain, it was an offensive weapon designed
to attack the economic resources of the enemy deep within his country.”
It is important to note that the “splendid decision of
May 11, 1940” was put into effect “General Gamelin
notwithstanding”. “The French General Staff,” remarks Mr. Spaight sadly (p.
70), “had all along a conception of air warfare broadly similar to that of
the German General Staff and divergent from that of the British Air Staff.
They viewed with the greatest misgivings any plan by which bombers were to
be used for attacks on German industry, and did not hesitate to say so. In
their considered opinion the main, indeed the only, use to which a bombing
force should be put was to extend the range of artillery supporting armies
in the field.”
From every point of view Air Marshal Harris’ book, Bomber
Offensive, is a much less illuminating work than Mr. Spaight’s
Bombing Vindicated. Writing in the same spirit, his tone is much more
subdued. Substantially, however, he is in complete agreement with Mr.
Spaight. He also attributes the failure of the Blitz to the shortsightedness
of the Luftwaffe chiefs in not providing themselves in peace time with
long-distance bomber planes designed for attacks on an enemy civilian
population, an omission, he declares, which lost Germany the war. Had the
Germans been able to persist in their attacks, he writes, London would
unquestionably have suffered the terrible fate which over took Hamburg two
years later. But in September 1940 the Germans found themselves “with almost
unarmed bombers … so that in the Battle of Britain the destruction of the
German bomber squadrons was very similar to shooting cows in a field.”
Only with regard to the justification of attacks from the
air on civilians can the Air Marshal be said to go one better than the
Principal Air Secretary. When reproached for the inhumanity of this form of
warfare, he tells us complacently, it is his practice to confound his
critics by quoting to them a British Government White Paper which estimates
that the blockade of Europe by the British Navy between 1914 and 1918
“caused nearly 800,000 deaths, mainly women and children,” while, on the
other hand, indiscriminate bombing by the R.A.F. between 1940 and 1945
probably did not in his opinion kill more than 300,000. He assures us that
this retort invariably left his critics dumfounded and abashed.
Certainly this is a novel line of argument which, if it ever
secured acceptance in criminal law, would lead to strange consequences. For
example, a person accused of a single murder could by this argument claim
acquittal on the ground that there have been cases of persons guilty of
wholesale murder.
In passing it may be noted that the Air Marshal’s estimate
of the civilian casualties resulting from the British air offensive against
Germany is far below the figure now generally accepted. At the Manstein
Trial in Hamburg in 1949 the figure of 250,000 was put forward as the
probable total of casualties from one air raid, that on Dresden on the night
of February 13th, 1945. While declaring that the casualties in this raid
will probably always remain a subject for speculation, General Hans Rumpf,
after a careful examination and analysis of all the available evidence,
comes to the conclusion that in Germany between 1940 and 1945 some 600,000
were killed and 800,000 were wounded in air attacks—see his Das war
der Bombenkrieg, (Gerhard Stalling Verlag,
Oldenburg, 1961, page 114).
Messrs. Spaight and Harris speak with the authority of a
Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry and of an Air Marshal respectively.
The facts which they set forth are not open to question by persons who lack
the expert and inside knowledge which they possess. Yet some may find it
hard to credit their interpretation of these facts. According to their joint
testimony, prior to 1939 the General Staffs of Great Britain, Germany and
France were composed entirely of elderly professional soldiers whose brains,
rendered senile by routine and red tape, were in capable of grasping so
obvious a fact that if bombs were showered from the air upon an enemy
power’s chief centres of population, its war effort would be affected. Only
in the British Air Ministry, and then only thanks to a memorable
“brain-wave” in 1936, did this fact dawn, with the result that for three
years before the outbreak of war Britain alone was planning accordingly. As
a result of the opposition of the French General Staff, it was not until
May 11, 1940, that the Bomber Command was permitted to fulfil the
purpose for which it was built. Thereafter it was free “to roam”—with
consequences with which we are all familiar.
It may seem presumptuous but, it is submitted, there is an
alternative interpretation which has escaped the attention of Messrs.
Spaight and Harris. The men who had risen to the leadership of the General
Staffs of Great Britain, Germany and France may not have been congenital
idiots unable to perceive the obvious; they may have fully realized the
effect which could be produced by bombing an enemy civilian population and
yet have deliberately ruled out the adoption of this policy as contrary to
the first principle of civilized warfare. In taking up such an attitude they
would only have been following the example of the statesmen of all the
nations of Europe for the preceding two hundred years. Frequently tempted to
depart from it to gain manifest but temporary advantage, European statesmen
since the time of Louis XIV had consistently maintained the principle that
hostilities must be confined to the combatant forces of the belligerents.
They did so because they realized that civilization is a fragile structure,
inevitably subjected to severe strain even by a war limited by strict
rules—by mere “fooling with war” as Mr. Spaight calls it. The exclusion of
non-combatants from the scope of hostilities is the fundamental distinction
between civilized and barbarous warfare. All other restraints had followed
naturally from acceptance of this first principle. If it were abandoned, all
else would quickly disappear. Subconsciously, at any rate, it may have been
realized by them how thin and fragile was the partition separating civilized
man from the passions of the jungle: how civilization itself might not
survive the release of the dark forces which would be set free by warfare
waged in the manner of primitive times. Victory would then indeed be barren.
At all events, rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, the
fundamental principle of civilized warfare was repudiated on May 11,
1940—according to Mr. Spaight, as a result of a “brain-wave” in the British
Air Ministry in 1936—and, with the keystone removed, the whole structure of
civilized warfare as it had been gradually built tip in Europe during the
preceding two centuries collapsed in ruins. The assumption became general
that a war waged by barbarous methods must inevitably end in a barbarous
peace. Faced with this appalling prospect, each side felt any act was
justified, provided only that it served even remotely to stave off defeat.
As the war proceeded and the prospects darkened, this became more and more
openly the German attitude. The entry of the United States and the Soviet
Union accelerated the head long decline of civilized warfare, since, as
non-European powers, neither felt in any way bound to observe the rules of
civil war adopted by the European aborigines. In happier days, Europeans had
cheerfully disregarded their own rules in warfare outside Europe with
non-Europeans; now, for the first time in Europe, Europeans found these
rules disregarded by non-Europeans. The entry of the Soviet Union into the
war, of course, completely transformed its original character. In a marginal
note which was fatuously brought up against him at Nuremberg, Field Marshal
Keitel drew attention to the obvious fact that the struggle with the Red
Army was not “ein ritterlicher Krieg”—“Hier
handelt es sich um
die Vernichtung einer Weltanschauung.” (“This is no knightly combat: it
involves the destruction of the whole life philosophy of one side or the
other.”) It is characteristic of primary wars that they are never
“ritterlich” (knightly) or at most only superficially. The campaigns on the
Eastern Front were primary warfare in its grimmest aspect.
The above outline of the facts relating to the Bombing
Campaign during the Second World War summarises all that was known on this
subject in 1953 when the first edition of Advance to Barbarism (from
which these paragraphs are reproduced) was published. After what Mr. Spaight
had disclosed in 1944 it was impossible for anyone, however credulous, to
accept the repeated and solemn assertions of His Majesty’s Ministers in
Parliament that the bombing of Germany was being carried out with strict
regard to the dictates of humanity in accordance with the rules of civilized
warfare. But only those who had actually taken part in this bombing campaign
or those having had access to official documents knew exactly what had taken
place. Serious students of the subject indeed had no doubt that
“unrestricted” or “indiscriminate” bombing (these terms were regarded as
synonyms) had been deliberately adopted as a means of winning the war. The
full truth was not disclosed until 1961: it far surpassed the worst
suspicions of those who at the time condemned what Mr. Spaight has called
“the splendid Decision” as a relapse into barbarism.
As stressed earlier in these pages the essential principle, of
The Rules of Civilized Warfare was that military operations should be
restricted to overcoming the uniformed armed forces of the enemy, and on no
account should the enemy civilian population be attacked or molested.
As we have seen, the main difficulty which arose from the
start with regard to the application of this simple principle was in
connection with siege operations. Everyone was agreed that places on a
battlefield held by enemy troops could be attacked without regard to the
lives of civilians living in them, and besieged towns could be bombarded in
order to force their garrisons to surrender. Differences of opinion soon
arose whether it was justifiable to use a defended town itself, as distinct
from its fortifications, as a target for bombardment, as Copenhagen was used
by the British Navy in 1807, or Strasburg was used by the German Army in
1870. But it was generally agreed that this was justifiable provided that
the town in question was within the theatre of military operations, that it
was defended and that it contained military objectives. In theory the
projectiles were aimed at these military objectives even if the chance of
hitting them was small and it was certain that those which missed would kill
innocent civilians. Casualties so caused were dismissed as deeply
regrettable happenings unavoidable in warfare.
Such were the recognized conditions of warfare from the
beginning of the 18th century down to and including the First World War. A
commander who ordered his men to destroy a hospital or a school in
preference to a fort or a barracks would have been regarded not only as a
sadistic monster, but as a fool. A belated echo of this point of view was
expressed by Air Marshal Harris in his notorious broadcast to the German
people on the 28th July, 1942, when he said, “Obviously we prefer to hit
factories, shipyards and railways. But those people who work in these plants
live close to them. Therefore we hit your homes and you.” Until shortly
before this contention would have seemed such obvious common sense that it
would have carried instant conviction with everyone. Of course, at the time
it was spoken Air Marshal Harris knew that he was expressing the attitude of
a bygone age. Four months previously, the British Government had accepted
the Lindemann Plan by which the killing of civilians was made a military
objective which henceforth was to be given, to use the official jargon of
the time, “top priority”.
Although throughout the First World War the were observed in so far as attacks were always directed
against recognized military objectives, yet these attacks were delivered
with an ever increasing disregard for the safety of civilian life. The
outstanding example of this disregard was the Zeppelin Air Offensive against
Great Britain in 1915-17. Examining this offensive Sir Charles Webster and
Dr. Noble Frankland, the joint authors of the officially published work
The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939-45 (H.M. Stationery
Office, London, 1961), admit frankly these raids were all aimed at military
objectives, but comment soberly, “The Zeppelin commanders often did not know
where they were and their bombs were dropped largely at random. They did on
occasion, more by luck than management, cause some damage.” (Page 34.)
It is no subject for surprise that the civilian casualties
resulting were relatively slight. What is surprising is that military
objectives were so frequently hit. Thus, for example, on the night of June
17th, 1917, the Fish Market at Ramsgate in which were stored mines swept up
by the mine-sweeping flotilla operating from Ramsgate was hit by a bomb and
widespread damage was caused: another bomb from a Zeppelin made a direct hit
on a crowded naval dormitory at Chatham Barracks causing great loss of life.
Such results were made possible by the slow speed at which the airships flew
and the low altitude at which they were able to fly owing to the ineffective
anti-aircraft fire of the time. But far more, such results were due to luck,
if luck be the right word. The Kaiser and his advisers were like children
with a new toy. They were justifiably proud of the Zeppelin Airship, the
product of Count Zeppelin’s inventive genius. There were undeniably numerous
military objectives in Britain, the destruction of which would serve a
military purpose. So they ordered the Zeppelin commanders to fly over
Britain and destroy with bombs these military objectives. They callously
ignored the fact that not one bomb in a hundred, dropped at night by crews
with no experience of bombing and using primitive instruments, was likely to
hit a military objective and that bombs that missed would endanger civilian
life. The Zeppelin commanders no doubt did their best to carry out their
orders. When they returned they reported, no doubt in good faith, that they
had achieved the missions assigned to them. Their will to believe being
strong, the Kaiser and his advisers accepted these reports as true.
Similarly, for eighteen months after the “Splendid Decision” to bomb
industrial targets in Germany had been taken, Winston Churchill and his
advisers were kept happy by the reports of the R.A.F. pilots announcing in
perfect good faith the destruction of the targets assigned to them. Aerial
photography had by that time, however, been brought to a high state of
perfection. All doubts on the subject were laid to rest by the
Bensusan-Butt Report dated the 18th August, 1941. The British Cabinet were horrified to
learn that aerial photographs taken of the targets described as having been
completely demolished disclosed that most of them showed no signs of damage;
of all the aircraft credited with having bombed their targets, only
one-third had, in fact, bombed within five miles of them.
Until April 1961 everyone believed that what was called “the
strategic air offensive” against Germany which started in May 1940 was an
offensive carried out in a spirit similar to that of the Zeppelin offensive
of 1915-17 against Britain. Both offensives were directed against military
objectives with the same callous disregard for the lives of the civilian
population. The fact that the British offensive was carried out on a vastly
greater scale and owing to the enormously improved aircraft and bombs
employed incomparably greater destruction was caused, made no essential
distinction between them. It was maintained that because the R.A.F., like
the Zeppelins, directed their bombs against specified targets, the use of
the term “indiscriminate bombing” was a slanderous misnomer. Some
maintained, however, that the official use of the term “saturation bombing”
to describe the dropping of enormous quantities of bombs on a selected area
justified the use of the word “indiscriminate” with regard to R.A.F.
bombing. Within this selected area, often of considerable extent, such
bombing was certainly both indiscriminate and unrestricted.
One essential distinction, however, existed between these
air offensives. When the British air offensive was launched against Germany
in May 1940 Winston Churchill and his advisers extended the definition of
“military objectives” which had been accepted for two and a half centuries,
to include factories, oil plants, public buildings and any structure which
contributed or was of use, if only indirectly, to the war effort of the
enemy.
This extension was the essence of “the Splendid Decision”
which filled Mr. Spaight with such pride. Many maintained that this
extension rendered the definition of “military objectives” meaningless,
since there was not a city, town or village in the industrial areas of
Western Europe which did not possess a building of some kind which came
within this definition—a railway station, a post office, a police station, a
bridge or an electrical power plant. The existence of any of these in a
place rendered that place with all its inhabitants liable to be obliterated
by bombs. Thus, accepting the definition which included all public buildings
as military objectives, if a bomb was aimed at a village which contained for
example a police station, missed its mark and killed people in that village,
no breach of the would take place, because it had
long been agreed that when a missile which had been aimed at a military
objective caused civilian casualties, such casualties could be attributed to
a regrettable, but in no way blameworthy, accident.
Not unreasonably, it is submitted, many people maintained
that bombing carried out in accordance with this novel definition of
military objectives was, in fact, unrestricted bombing. No part of the enemy
civilian population was excluded from the scope of the military operations,
and therefore the were in practice, although not
expressly, repudiated. Apologists for the Air Offensive argued that as the
definition of “military objectives” had always been somewhat vague and
elastic, the British Government was entitled to amend the current definition
as it pleased, and anyway there had been no express repudiation of the.
All arguments concerning the British bombing of Germany
during the Second World War were brought abruptly to an end in April 1961 by
a single paragraph in a little book with the uninspiring title Science
and Government.
The author was Sir Charles Snow, scientist and novelist. His purpose in
writing it was to assess the respective achievements of two rival
physicists, Professor Lindemann and Dr. Henry Tizard. The book was primarily
concerned to show that when the opinions of these two men conflicted, Dr.
Tizard always proved to be right and Professor Lindemann always wrong. To do
this he was compelled to disclose the truth concerning one of the principal
issues which arose between them.
This paragraph will be found quoted verbatim on page 18 in
the Introduction to this book. In a nutshell Sir Charles Snow disclosed that
early in 1942—the exact date, it now appears, was March 30th, 1942—Professor
Lindemann submitted a Minute to the War Cabinet in which he urged that
bombing henceforth should be directed against German working-class houses in
preference to military objectives, which were much too difficult to hit. He
claimed that given a total concentration of effort on the production of
aircraft suitable for this work, 50% of all the houses in the cities and
towns in Germany with over 50,000 inhabitants would be destroyed. Sir
Charles declared that the Lindemann Plan to initiate terror bombing against
Germany was adopted by the British Government “and put into action with
every effort the country could make.”
It was everywhere expected that these assertions of Sir
Charles Snow would at once be rebutted by categorical and emphatic denials.
No attempt at denial was made, however. Lord Birkenhead indeed hurriedly
produced a biography of Professor Lindemann in which he rebutted at length
and with indignation the popular belief that Lindemann was a Jew, a point of
no relevance or interest to anyone, but he had nothing to say with regard to
the suggestion that Lindemann was a war criminal responsible for a ghastly
crime against humanity. In October, 1961, six months after the publication
of Sir Charles Snow’s book, the full truth was disclosed in the above
mentioned official publication, The Strategic Air Offensive against
Germany (H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1961).
It has thus now become possible to trace in detail the
development of air bombing during the Second World War.
This development took place in three clearly marked stages,
during the first of which starting with the outbreak of war on the 3rd
September 1939 and lasting until the 11th May 1940, the air forces of both
sides attacked only military objectives strictly in accordance with the.
The second stage began on the 11th May, 1940, when the
R.A.F. launched its first attack on industrial areas in Germany, the British
Government having adopted a new definition of military objectives so that
this term included any building which in any way contributed, directly or
indirectly, to the war effort of the enemy. The R.A.F. attacked “military
objectives” as so defined in accordance with the orders of the War Cabinet,
but very soon the Air Staff chiefs began to permit themselves greater and
greater latitude in carrying out their orders. Thus, as early as the 16th
December, 1940, a moonlight raid by 134 planes took place on Mannheim,
described in the above mentioned official British history of the air
offensive as “the first ‘area’ attack of the war.” The object of this
attack, as Air Chief Marshal Peirse later explained, was “to concentrate the
maximum amount of damage in the centre of the town.” As early as this
therefore, all pretence of attacking military, industrial or in fact any
particular targets was in practice abandoned.
The British air offensive launched on the 11th May 1940
against industrial objectives in Germany continued without retaliation for
nearly four months. During May and June the Luftwaffe was fully occupied
taking part in the campaign in France. After the surrender of France on the
22nd June, for a month Hitler clung to the delusion that the struggle could
be brought to an end by a negotiated peace. Realising at last this hope was
vain, Hitler launched a massive air attack on Britain in order to win
command of the air preparatory to an invasion. This was a purely military
operation, carried out mainly in daylight, against airfields, docks and
shipping. The Battle of Britain ended with a defeat for Germany as decisive
as the Battle of Stalingrad. It was not until September that the Luftwaffe
was ordered to cease its costly efforts to win command of the air over the
English Channel, and to launch a reprisal air offensive against Britain
exactly similar to the British air offensive against Germany which had been
going on ever since May 11th. On the 6th September London was subjected to a
mass attack by 270 bombers, the greatest concentration of air power
collected up to that time, and great damage and many casualties were caused.
Thereafter every night favourable for bombing the chief industrial cities of
Britain suffered the same fate. Until the following Spring when the
Luftwaffe was withdrawn to take part in the invasion of Russia, the two air
offensives continued concurrently. The British air offensive during this
period must be set down as a failure to the extent that it achieved nothing
towards crippling the war production of Germany but as a success to the
extent that it prevented the war stagnating and it generated a frenzied war
psychosis. The German air offensive, on the other hand, must be dismissed as
a complete failure since it did not achieve its only purpose, namely, to
induce the British Government to discontinue the air offensive against
Germany.
Throughout this period the British public believed without
question that the British air offensive against Germany was a reprisal for
the attacks of the Luftwaffe on Britain which, it was said, began with the
dropping of bombs by an unidentified plane on a wood near Canterbury. A
faint echo of this belief will be found in the official history of the air
offensive where it is stated that the destructive raid on Coventry on the
14th November, 1940, decided the chiefs of Bomber Command to launch the
attack on the centre of Mannheim above mentioned. Indisputably, of course,
both Coventry and Mannheim possessed “military objectives” according to the
new definition of this term adopted by the British Government in the
previous May.
In passing it may be observed that the question which air
offensive was a reprisal for which has now long ceased to be a subject for
dispute. As early as 1953 H.M. Stationery Office published the first volume
of a work The Royal Air Force, 1939-1945 entitled The Fight at
Odds, a book described as “officially commissioned and based throughout
on official documents which had been read and approved by the Air Ministry
Historical Branch.” The author, Mr. Dennis Richards, states plainly that the
destruction of oil plants and factories was only a secondary purpose of the
British air attacks on Germany which began in May 1940. The primary purpose
of these raids was to goad the Germans into undertaking reprisal raids of a
similar character on Britain. Such raids would arouse intense indignation in
Britain against Germany and so create a war psychosis without which it is
impossible to carry on a modern war. Mr. Dennis Richards writes:—
“If the Royal Air Force raided the Ruhr, destroying oil
plants with its most accurately placed bombs and urban property
with those that went astray, the outcry for retaliation against Britain
might prove too strong for the German generals to resist. Indeed, Hitler
himself would probably head the clamour. The attack on the Ruhr, in other
words, was an informal invitation to the Luftwaffe to bomb London.”
(Page 122).
This passage, of course, merely confirmed what Mr. Spaight
had so incautiously disclosed in 1944 in his by then forgotten book
Bombing Vindicated. The popular belief that Hitler started unrestricted
bombing still persisted and is, in fact, widely held even at the present
day.
The third and last phase of the British air offensive
against Germany began in March 1942 with the adoption of the Lindemann Plan
by the British War Cabinet, and continued with undiminished ferocity until
the end of the war in May, 1945. The bombing during this period was not, as
the Germans complained, indiscriminate. On the contrary, it was concentrated
on working-class houses because, as Professor Lindemann maintained, a higher
percentage of bloodshed per ton of explosives dropped could be expected from
bombing houses built close together, rather than by bombing higher class
houses surrounded by gardens. Neither was it unrestricted bombing, except,
of course, in the sense that it was not restricted to military objectives as
originally defined by the, which in practice had
been found difficult to hit and therefore wasteful of bombs. The bombing
during this period was simple terror bombing designed to shatter the morale
of the civilian population and so to generate an inclination to surrender.
The adoption of the Lindemann Plan produced no startlingly
obvious changes in bombing tactics perceptible even to the German civilian
population. Ever since the first “area” bombing, the above mentioned raid on
Mannheim in December 1940, the British air chiefs on their own initiative
had been carrying out their orders to reduce German industrial production by
an easier method than by dropping bombs through the roofs of factories. They
argued that the desired result would be more readily achieved if the homes
of the workers in the factories were destroyed: if the workers were kept
busy arranging for the burial of their wives and children, output might
reasonably be expected to fall. Thus the adoption of the Lindemann Plan
merely gave express government sanction to tactics which had long been
adopted with semi-official approval.
The Lindemann Plan was first carried into effect on the 28th
March, 1942, when
Lübeck was attacked by 234 aircraft of Bomber Command.
This beautiful old Hanseatic port had no military or special industrial
importance but was chosen because, as Air Marshal Harris subsequently
described it, the city was “built more like a firelighter than a human
habitation.” The focus of the attack was the Altstadt composed of medieval
houses with narrow, tortuous streets; some 30,000 people lived in an area of
two square kilometres. Photographic reconnaissance showed the raid had been
“a first class success.” From 45% to 50% of the city was totally destroyed,
together with the Cathedral and the Market Hall.
During the last seven years full particulars with copious
official statistics have been published concerning the subsequent course of
the great Air Offensive. The grisly story can be read elsewhere. Here it
will be sufficient to say that one “first class success” followed another.
The climax of the offensive was reached on the night of February 13th, 1945,
when a mass raid by several thousand heavy bombers was directed against
Dresden. The result of this air raid was indisputably a first class success,
far surpassing all previous first class successes. Naturally there was
jubilation at Supreme Allied Headquarters in Paris which approved a despatch
from the Associated Press correspondent announcing that “Allied war chiefs
have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of
German population centres as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.…
The all-out air war on Germany became obvious with the unprecedented assault
on the refugee-crowded Saxon capital two weeks ago.” The text of this
sensational announcement will be found quoted more fully earlier in this
book. (See page 20.)
Almost at once, however, it was realised that if the
decision to adopt ruthless terror bombing was held up for public
glorification, the question would be asked, When had this decision been
reached? Remembering that this was not, as stated, “a long-awaited
decision”, but a decision taken nearly three years before, which had been
repeatedly and solemnly denied by Ministers of the Crown in Parliament,
Commander Brabner, Under Secretary of State for Air, was instructed to
repeat these denials and to assure the House of Commons that the statement
approved by the Supreme Allied Headquarters in Paris was incorrect.
Officially no crime against humanity had been committed. A stringent taboo
prevented the publication of details and the matter was quickly forgotten by
the public. Indisputably, the destruction of Dresden was not only an
outstanding event of the Second World War but an outstanding event of
European history, an event which was the culmination of that fatal addiction
to civil war in which the nations of Europe had been indulging for
centuries. Those at the time who desired information concerning the
destruction of Dresden naturally consulted the monumental work in four
volumes of Sir Winston Churchill which purported to give a complete record
of the events of the Second World War, and found what they sought on page
470 of Volume IV, Triumph and Tragedy. They had however to be content
with twenty-two words—“Throughout January and February 1945 our bombers
continued to attack, and we made a heavy raid in the latter month on
Dresden.” Sir Winston has nothing further to say on the subject.
The following account of the bombing of Dresden was first
published in 1953 in the American edition of the present book.
For ten years, until the publication of a book entirely devoted to this
subject and based on British official records (The Destruction of Dresden
by David Living, Kimber, London, 1963), it remained the only account in
the English language of the Schreckensnacht of February 13th, 1945. It was
mainly based on Der Tod von Dresden by Axel Rodenberger (Das grüne
Blatt, Dortmund, 1951) the first German writer to collect all the then
available facts concerning this holocaust. No material facts have come to
light since 1951 which make revision necessary of what the present author
wrote in 1953.
Reverting to the authoritative work of Air Marshal Harris,
Bomber Offensive, it is noteworthy that even the gallant Air
Marshal’s hardihood falters in regard to the mass bombing by some two
thousand heavy bombing planes of Dresden on the night of February 13th,
1945, when the normal population of “this large and splendid city” was
swollen by a horde of terrified women and children from the eastern
provinces of Germany in flight from the most dreadful fate which had ever
confronted a large European population since the Mongol invasion of 1241. In
February, 1945, the war had, of course, long ceased to be a military
operation and had become merely the breaking of the desperate but hopeless
resistance of a defeated people, the leaders of which faced death and the
remainder slavery. Selecting his words with obvious care, the Air Marshal
writes, “I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time
considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself.”
It will be noted that the Air Marshal pointedly refrains
from endorsing the opinion of these important people. He leaves it open to
speculation whether this was due to a modest shrinking from associating
himself with so much importance or whether, after reflecting on the facts
and circumstances, to sheer horror. It is further to be noted that he
attributes this opinion to these important people as held by them only “at
the time”, from which it may be deduced that he cannot bring himself to
believe that any sane person could still hold such an opinion. Finally, it
will be noted that he loyally refrains from disclosing the identity of these
important people.
An examination of the situation existing at the time of this
great mass air raid will provide an explanation of the Air Marshal’s studied
reticence. In February, 1945, the war had been won and no military purpose
remained to be served by indiscriminate bombing. From the East, the Russian
hordes were advancing steadily and irresistibly. In the centre, they had
reached the Oder on a wide front on each side of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, only
50 miles east of Berlin; on the right wing, the greater part of East Prussia
which for seven hundred years had served as an advanced bastion of Europe
against Asia, had been subdued; on the left wing, Lower Silesia had been
overrun, although the capital, Breslau, closely surrounded, continued to
offer a resistance as heroic as this city had offered the Mongol hordes of
Batu almost exactly seven hundred years before. In the West, the armies of
General Eisenhower were advancing on a wide front to the Rhine. The
surviving German armies in the field continued to resist, not from any
lingering hope that defeat could be averted but because their enemies’
insistence on unconditional surrender made it seem preferable to a people
brought up for generations on the tradition of FRaederick the Great to go
down fighting to the last. The publication of the infamous Morgenthau Plan
had left it in no doubt what were the conqueror intentions whether Germany
surrendered at once or a final stand was made. The only military problem
remaining in February, 1945 (if such it can be called) was the question
along what line running North and South across Germany the invaders of
Germany from the West would meet the invaders of Germany from the East. In
fact, the campaign which had commenced on the Normandy beaches in the
previous summer had become a mere race with the Soviet hordes, a race in
which anything which the Germans could do to retard the progress of the
latter, although of no practical benefit to themselves, would be of enormous
political value to the Western Powers. Nevertheless, the British and
Americans decided to launch a mass air attack on Dresden: then about 70
miles behind the scanty German forces resisting desperately the Russian
advance across Lower Silesia.
Very little authoritative information has been available
until very recently concerning this mass air raid. In the earliest books
which dealt with the last stage of the war, the course usually adopted was
to refer airily to the bombing of Dresden as the last of a long series of
mass air raids in which it happened that an exceptionally large number of
people were killed. As a result of this general reticence little could be
added for a long time to the following reference to this air raid published
in The Times three days after it had taken place:
“Dresden, which had been pounded on Tuesday night by 800 of
the 1,400 heavies sent out by the R.A.F. and was the main object of 1,350
Fortresses and Liberators on the following day, yesterday received its third
heavy attack in thirty-six hours. It was the principal target for more than
1,100 United States 8th Army Air Force bombers.”