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Aviation History
1932
1932 - 0174.PDF
FLIGHT, FEBRUARY 26, 1932 bomb from the air is more of a menace to a civil population than it is to a military objective. Fortu nately, for the reasons given above, such a conclu sion would not be justified. Nevertheless, the use of aircraft at Shanghai has drawn additional attention to the attitude which may be, or ought to be, taken up towards bomber aircraft by the Disarmament Conference now sitting at Geneva. It may be recalled that Great Britain has made no specific suggestion as regards bomber air craft, beyond a general acceptance of the Draft Con vention as a basis for discussion. This Convention proposes to limit the number and the horse-power of the aircraft possessed by each nation, but makes no discrimination between bombers and other types. The French proposals contemplated a force of heavy bombers at the disposal of the League of Nations, and would limit the size of the bombers possessed by each nation. The American proposals agreed fairly closely with those of Great Britain, while Italy made drastic suggestions, which included the abolition of all bombers. This last proposal was hailed by pacifist idealists, but for the practical purpose of minimising the chance of war and limiting the horrors of war, it went too far to be of much real use. The wisest course for the League of Nations to follow is not to attempt to forbid too much. If too much is forbidden, that is to say if the agreed restric tions would deprive a belligerent of reasonable rights, the rules will certainly be violated the moment that blood gets hot. On the other hand, restrictions which are based on reason and common sense will probably be observed by all belligerents who retain any vestige of sanity. Certain international laws of war were recognised as ancient and well-established in the days of the Black Prince, and he, like his father, for all their talk about chivalry, was a ruthless believer in the policy of " striking at nerve centres." In other words, if Calais or some other town resisted them too stoutly, they were willing to hang the leading citizens or to let their soldiery loose in the town with permission to sack and slaughter at will. Cromwell did the same in Ireland. We should never think of doing such a thing now. Killing a woman or a child with the bayonet, when the slayer could see the horror and hear the shrieks, would never be tolerated for a moment. But the rulers of the civilised world are seriously considering whether it is permissible for the same sort of thing to be done by a combatant who is some distance up in the air and so is com fortably out of eyeshot and earshot of the outrage. Deliberate bombing of civilian areas should certainly be forbidden, and such a prohibition is so reason able that there should be no chance of its being disregarded in time of war. What it is unreasonable to forbid is the bombing of military objectives, and because it is unreason able, such a restriction would certainly be disre garded, and would therefore bring the whole body of international law as drawn up by the League into contempt. Munition factories are legitimate objectives, just as much as forts are, and it would be futile for the League to forbid aircraft to aim at them. If they are placed in crowded cities, acci dents will occur and some civilians will be killed by bombs which miss their aim. No one would dream of building an important fort in the midst of a London suburb. If that were done, it would be the builders who would be responsible for the casualties which would inevitably occur among the civilians living near it. Likewise the onus for evacuating the civilians from the neighbourhood of a munitions factory must rest on the Government of the country in which the factory stands. They cannot protect a factory by surrounding it with civilians and either forbidding or imploring the enemy not to attack it for fear he may hurt the civilians. Such a pro ceeding is equivalent to driving women in front of advancing infantry in the hope that a chivalrous enemy will not fire on them. Indian mobs have adopted those tactics lately, but they are not legiti mate warfare. It may sound paradoxical, but every advance in the accuracy of bombing, as of artillery fire, is to the advantage of the civilian population. If the League of Nations were to prohibit the possession of bomber aircraft in time of peace, that would not prevent civil machines from being used as night bombers in time of war. As day bombers they would be unable to defend themselves until modified to accommodate rear gunners, but they could be used at night, when darkness gives better protection than a gunner can give. They would, however, be very amateurish bombers. The crews would be quite untrained in the art of hitting a target from a moving platform. That always takes a lot of practice, and improvement depends partly on continuous practice and partly on the development of more accurate bomb sights and other instruments. The better the aim of the bomber, the fewer will be the civilians who will suffer. It might be said that we, as a nation, could better survive the violent deaths of a few hundred civilians than the complete destruction of, say, the Bank of England, which would not be an unreasonable objective for an enemy bomber; also that we could better spare 100 civilians than 100 soldiers. The object of the League should be, none the less, to protect the civilian rather than the vital interests of a belligerent nation. Even those who may sympathise with China in the present conflict would have preferred that the Japanese bombs should have damaged forts and killed soldiers rather than fall among the hapless civilians of Chapei. The League will be grasping the shadow, not the substance, if it attempts to prohibit all bombing from the air. Such a line of policy will not prevent bombing from taking place in time of war, but it will make the bombing less dangerous to the arsenals and more dangerous to the civilians. It will also encourage the combatants to think that all rules of the League are sentimental nonsense which can be disregarded by hard-headed soldiers. If they come to think that, they will certainly act on their thought. To restrict bombing to military objectives, and to educate the opinion of the world to see that such a restriction is reasonable, that is a line of advance which would be of real service to the world, and there is every reason to believe that such a rule would be more strictly obeyed in the next war than it was in the last. Yet even in the great war both sides always admitted the principle of the military objective, even though some airmen were criminally careless as to what was actually below when they pulled their bomb-levers. 166
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