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Overview
On November 1, 1911, over the North African oasis Tagiura, Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti leaned out of the cockpit of his primitive aircraft and, dropping a Haasen hand grenade, initiated one of the twentieth century’s most devastating military tactics: aerial bombing.
The bomb shatters history into hundreds of fragments scattered throughout time in this fascinating book from Sven Lindqvist, author of the acclaimed “Exterminate All the Brutes”. More than just a history, it is an overview and interrogation of the cultural and political dimensions—and the devastating effects—of war from above. Forming a labyrinth of events that illustrates the genocidal fantasies underlying so much conflict and the devastation wrought by aerial bombing, A History of Bombing links the total war of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War with centuries-past colonial warfare.
Mining such diverse topics as military history and strategy, the evolution of international law, turn-of-the-century science fiction, and the civilian experience during wartime, Lindqvist has produced a rich meditation on the past and the future of human conflict.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781565848160 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2003 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 451,999 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.56(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A History of Bombing
By Sven Lindqvist
W. W. Norton & Company
Copyright ©2003 Sven LindqvistAll right reserved.
ISBN: 1565848160
Excerpt
1 BANG, YOU'RE DEAD
"Bang, you're dead!" we said. "I got you!" we said. When we played, it was always war. A bunch of us together, one-on-one, or in solitary fantasies—always war, always death.
"Don't play like that," our parents said, "you could grow up that way." Some threat—there was no way we would rather be. We didn't need war toys. Any old stick became a weapon in our hands, and pinecones were bombs. I cannot recall taking a single piss during my childhood, whether outside or at home in the outhouse, when I didn't choose a target and bomb it. At five years of age I was already a seasoned bombardier.
"If everyone plays war," said my mother, "there will be war." And she was quite right—there was. > 166
2 IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE BOMB
In the beginning was the bomb. It consisted of a pipe, like a bamboo pipe of the type abundant in China, filled with an explosive, like gunpowder, which the Chinese had discovered as early as the ninth century. If one closed this pipe at both ends, it became a bomb.
When the pipe was opened at one end, it was blown forward by the explosion. The bomb then became a rocket. It soon developed into a two-stage rocket—a large rocket that rose into theair and released a shower of small rockets over the enemy. The Chinese used rockets of this type in their defense of Kaifeng in 1232. The rocket weapon spread via the Arabs and Indians to Europe around 1250—but it was forgotten again until the English rediscovered it at the beginning of the 19th century.
If the rocket was opened at the other end the bomb became a gun or a cannon. The explosion blew out whatever had been tamped into the pipe, like a bullet or another, smaller bomb, called a shell. Both the gun and the cannon had been fully developed in China by 1280, and they reached Europe thirty years later. > 24
3 THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE]BRK 1880-1910
Good morning! My name is Meister. Professor Meister. I will be lecturing today on the history of the future as depicted in Three Hundred Years Hence by William D. Hay. When this book came out in 1881, my time lay three hundred years ahead of the reader's. Today the society of United Man, in which I live, has drawn much closer to you. But my situation as narrator is essentially unchanged. I am speaking of your future, which for me is history. I know what is going to happen to you, since for me it has already happened. > 46
4 DEATH COMES FLYING
The first bomb dropped from an airplane exploded in an oasis outside Tripoli on November 1, 1911.
"The Italians have dropped bombs from an airplane," reported Dagens Nyheter the next day. "One of the aviators successfully released several bombs in the camp of the enemy, with good results."
It was Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti who leaned out of his delicate monoplane and dropped the bomb—a Danish Haasen hand grenade—on the North African oasis Tagiura, near Tripoli. Several moments later, he attacked the oasis Ain Zara. Four bombs in total, each weighing two kilos, were dropped during this first air attack. > 76
5 WHAT IS PERMISSIBLE IN WAR?
The laws of war have always answered two questions: When may one wage war? What is permissible in war?
And international law was always given two completely different answers to these questions, depending on who the enemy is. The laws of war protect enemies of the same race, class, and culture. The laws of war leave the foreign and the alien without protection.
When is one allowed to wage war against savages and barbarians? Answer: always. What is permissible in wars against savages and barbarians? Answer: anything. > 26
6 BOMBING THE SAVAGES
In an illustration in Jules Verne's The Flight of Engineer Roburs (1886), the airship glides majestically over Paris, the capital of Europe. Powerful searchlights shine on the waters of the Seine, over the quays, bridges, and façades. Astonished but unperturbed, the people gaze up into the sky, amazed at the unusual sight but without fear, without feeling the need to seek cover. In the next illustration the airship floats just as majestically and inaccessibly over Africa. But here it is not a matter merely of illumination. Here the engineer intervenes in the events on the ground. With the natural authority assumed by the civilized to police the savage, he stops a crime from taking place. The airship's weapons come into play, and death and destruction rain down on the black criminals, who, screaming in terror, try to escape the murderous fire. > 74
7 BOMBED INTO SAVAGERY
THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE (2)
Jeremy Tuft is an overprotected, middle-aged, middle-class man, helpless without his privileges. In Edward Shanks's novel of the future, People of the Ruins (1920), his London is bombed and gassed. When Jeremy miraculously comes to life in the ruins, he finds himself in a new Middle Ages. The English have become savages who live among the ruins of the 20th century, a civilization incomprehensible to them.
Shanks's novel employs a thoroughly modern theme. In 1920, British planes bombed the "Mad Mullah" in Somaliland, thus beginning the systematic bombardment of savages and barbarians in the interwar period, In precisely that same year, 1920, the first of a long series of novels was published in which England is bombed back to barbarism, and the English themselves become savages. > 109
8 THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS
The First World War killed ten million people and wounded twenty million. Was it a crime against humanity? Or was it quite all right, as long as the dead and wounded were young, armed men?
An unknown number of children and elderly died of hunger and disease as a consequence of the British naval blockade against Germany. Was that a crime against humanity? Or was it quite all right, since the English couldn't help the fact that the Germans sent the little food they had to the front, letting the children and elderly starve?
The slaughter at the front seemed meaningless even as it was going on. The war had dug in and gotten stuck, and the military looked desperately for a new, more mobile way to wage war. Aerial combat seemed to offer the most obvious solution; attacks against the civilian population would force rapid results and ultimate victories.
But "the colonial shortcut" was forbidden in Europe. Here it was a crime against humanity to save the lives of soldiers by bombing women, children, and old people. Human rights seemed to forbid what military necessity seemed to demand—a contradiction that has colored the entire 20th century. > 93
9 FROM CHECHAOUEN TO GUERNICA
Everyone in Chechaouen knows about Guernica. In Guernica no one has ever heard of Chechaouen. And yet they are sister cities. Two small cities, clinging to mountainsides, a few miles from the northern coasts of Spain and Morocco, respectively. Both of them are very old—Guernica was founded in 1366, and Chechaouen in 1471. Both are holy places—Guernica has the sacred oak of the Basque people, and Chechaouen has Moulay Abdessalam Ben Mchich's sacred grave. Both are capitals—Guernica for the Basques, and Chechaouen for the Jibala people. Both had populations of about 6,000 when they were bombed, Guernica in 1937 and Chechaouen in 1925. Both were bombed by legionnaires—Guernica by Germans serving under Franco, and Chechaouen by Americans under French command, serving the interests of the Spanish colonial power. Both had their turn to be "discovered" by a London Times correspondent—Guernica by George Steer, Chechaouen by Walter Harris, who wrote: > 119
10 THE SPLENDID DECISION
On May 10, 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister of England. On May 11, he gave the order to bomb Germany.
"It was a splendid decision," writes J. M. Spaight, expert on international law and Secretary of the British Air Ministry. Thanks to that decision, the English today can walk with their heads held high. When Churchill began to bomb Germany, he knew that the Germans did not want a bombing war. Their air force, unlike that of the British, was not made for heavy bombs. Churchill went on bombing, even though he knew that reprisals were unavoidable. He consciously sacrificed London and other English cities for the sake of freedom and civilization. "It was a splendid decision." > 178
11 HAMBURG, AUSCHWITZ, DRESDEN
During the summer of 1948 I lived with a working-class family in St. Albans, outside London. It was a cold summer, and when we sat and drank tea in the evenings we often lit the electric heater, which was made to look like a glowing heap of coal. Somehow my thoughts flew to the burned-out cities of Germany, and I told them how my trip through had struggled, hour after hour, to make its way through the blackened ruins of what once were the homes of human beings.
"We were bombing the military transports on the railways," my host family said. If some houses by the side of the railway were damaged it was unfortunate but unavoidable. "It was war, you know."
"This is not a question of 'a few houses,'" I said. "Hamburg was razed by British bombs. This was the third time I traveled through the city, and I have seen nothing but ruins."
"That must have been the Americans," said my host. "The British bombers never attacked civilians."
"I am sorry to contradict you, but it was the other way around. The Americans bombed the industries by day, and the British the residential areas by night. That was the general pattern, I'm afraid."
"I am not going to listen to any more German war propaganda in my house," my host said, cutting me short. "The British bombers attacked military targets, period." > 391
12 TOKYO
In the spring of 1941, a series of mysterious explosions occurred at a DuPont factory for the production of synthetic dyes. The Harvard chemist Louis Fieser was assigned to investigate the cause and he found, more or less by chance, that when burned, the fluid divinylacetylene converted into to a sticky goo with an unusually strong adhesive power. It occurred to him that such a liquid, if it were enclosed in a bomb, could be spread in the form of burning, sticky lumps that would cling to buildings and people and could be neither extinguished nor removed. > 197
13 THE DREAM OF A SUPERWEAPON
THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE (3)
On December 10, 1903 (a week before the first airplane left the ground), the Curies accepted the Nobel Prize for Physics. They had shown that radioactive material could release enormous amounts of energy.
The series of discoveries had unfolded at a dizzying speed. The radiation that Röntgen had discovered by chance in 1895 led Becquerel to the discovery of radioactivity in uranium the very next year, then to Thomson's discovery of the "planets" around the nucleus of the atom—the electrons—and finally in 1898 to Marie Curie's discovery of radium and polonium. And in 1903, the future Nobel laureate in physics Frederick Soddy was already giving a talk before the Royal Corps of Engineers on atomic power as the superweapon of the future. The idea of an atomic weapon seems not to have been particularly frightening since weapons in general were something used primarily in the colonies, and thus posed no threat to ordinary well-behaved European citizens. An imagination unworried by fear could play with the idea. > 69
14 HIROSHIMA
The Smithsonian Institution is the collective name of a group of museums that constitute the national memory of the United States. The most beloved of these is the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. About 8,000,000 people visit it each year, making it the world's most visited museum.
The only possible rival is the famous Shinto temple Yasukuni and its museum in Tokyo There, too, about 8,000,000 people come each year. And Yasukuni, too, serves as the memory of a nation—or more precisely, the Japanese nation's memory of its wars. > 371
15 LIVING WITH THE SUPERWEAPON
THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE (4)
"In Hiroshima, everything was over in a second. But the bomb itself is not over. It is still here, awaiting its next opportunity," says Faos Cheeror, an Eastern European refugee whom South African writer Horace Rose met in London, late in the summer of 1945.
"Truman says that atomic power is much too terrible to be unleashed in a lawless world."
"Truman said that after he had already unleashed it."
"He used the bomb to shorten the war and save lives."
"You belong to a nation of hypocrites, my friend," says Faos. "I am thinking of the victims of the bomb in all those future wars, the wars that have already begun in the dreams of maniacs."
In The Maniac's Dream, A Novel of the Atomic Bomb (1946) we are allowed a look into those dreams, and we see the atom bomb destroy New York and London. But actually it is not the Londoners the Maniac hates and reviles, but the blacks of his own country. They are subhuman apes, whose existence is justified only by their service to whites. To attribute human desires and feelings to them would be ridiculous. When they rise up against their oppressors, he doesn't hesitate for a moment to let the atom bomb destroy them.
"A land which had been brilliantly alive with colour, movement and activity was utterly and completely motionless, utterly and completely dumb." > 246
16 BOMBS AGAINST INDEPENDENCE
While everyone's attention was diverted by the superweapon and the necessity of avoiding total destruction, bombing took up its old role of securing European colonial power. The same old bombs were dropped, the same old villages burned. The wars were reported as "police actions" to "reinstate order" or fight "terrorists." Only slowly and reluctantly did Europe admit that these wars were wars and that the struggle concerned the right to independence. > 97
17 KOREA
On June 25, 1950, I found myself in the gallery at the United Nations Security Council. I was a year away from high-school graduation and was going to enter compulsory military service the following fall. I had received a scholarship to study "international relations." That was why I was sitting there listening as the Security Council decided to intervene in the Korean War.
What would Sweden's position be? Strong forces demanded that we should participate. I was constantly asked about it in New York. Suddenly international relations were no longer something that concerned only adults, way above my head. The demand was being made of me. It was I, personally, who would have to shoot and bomb. I, who at this point, at the beginning of the war, had scarcely heard of Korea.
I sat down in the U.N. library and tried to figure out why I should kill or be killed. > 267
18 MASSIVE RETALIATION
THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE (5)
On January 27, 1796, the young researcher Charles Cuvier gave his first public lecture at the Institute de France in Paris. Before a deeply shocked audience he proved that the species created by God were not eternal. They could, he said, "become extinct" in a kind of "revolution of the earth." And we, the new tribes that have taken their place, could ourselves be destroyed one day, and replaced by others. > 36
19 FLEXIBLE RETALIATION
MEIDIOUOZHUYI SHI QUAN SHIJIE RENMINDE ZUI XIONOEDE DIREN.
Those were the first words I had to learn when I was studying Chinese at Peking University in the winter of 1961. The phrase was terribly difficult, partially because I considered the statement false. "American imperialism is the most evil enemy of all the world's people." I found myself constantly protesting the Chinese government's distorted image of American policies.
"Throughout its history, the U.S. has defended the right of peoples to self-determination," I said. "That will be the case in Vietnam, as well."
"You underestimate the free press in America," I said. "The facts always come out, sooner or later. You can't overrule public opinion in a democracy. You won't get reelected that way."
"Only Congress can declare war," I explained to my Chinese hosts. Do you think that Congress, only ten years after Korea, will send its constituents and their children to die in a new Asian war? Never. It will never happen. There will be no war in Vietnam. > 322
20 SURGICAL PRECISION
Once upon a time there was a Frenchman, an American, and a German. The Frenchman wanted to prove that the world turns. The American wanted to fly to Mars in a spaceship. The German wanted to go to the North Pole in a submarine. Along with some other monomaniac dreamers, they created an instrument that could aim a rocket out into space and get it to deliver a dozen hydrogen bombs, each to its own separate address on the other side of the globe, more accurately than the postal service, faster than flight, and with the proverbial surgical precision. > 38
21 THE BOMB ON TRIAL
If the dum-dum bullet is forbidden by the rules of war on account of the unnecessary pain it causes (it has been and it continues to be), how can the hydrogen bomb be legal? If the rules of war forbid weapons that do not distinguish between noncombatants and combatants, how could weapons that spread uncontainable radioactivity over large areas be legal? How could military strategies that cold-bloodedly calculate tens or hundreds of millions of civilian victims be legal?
And if through the use of precise weapon systems one could reduce the number of victims in the first round to just a few million while holding the enemies' big cities hostage—would the weapons become more legal? If the "surgical" attacks then escalated to a general atomic war that destroyed all of humankind—could those who made the decisions declare with good conscience that they had, in any case, remained within the bounds of the law? > 239
22 NOTHING HUMAN
THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE (6)
"War," said the great military theoretician Karl von Clausewitz, "is nothing but a duel on a larger scale."
That was at the beginning of the 19th century. Today we are no longer dueling. That two grown men would believe their honor demanded that they meet at dawn in order to give one of them the opportunity to murder the other in a ceremonial ritual—the mere thought has become absurd, even ridiculous.
And war? Will it one day be equally absurd? > 367
To the reader who has come this far without entering one of the narratives I would say: now you have seen the beginning of them all.
Nothing can prevent you from continuing to read the book page after page as if it were a normal book. That will work, too.
But this is not a normal book. I am trying to give you a new kind of reading experience and therefore ask you to turn back. Choose one of the entrances and read on to the section in which that text is taken up again—for example, from entrance 1 to section 166.
23
762 It was Abu Hanifa, a leading legal expert of Persian origin, the founder of a school of law in Baghdad, who first forbade the killing of women, children, the elderly, the sick, monks, and other noncombatants. He also condemned rape and the killing of captives. We do not know much about him other than that he himself was captured after an attempted coup and died five years later in prison.
The moral sense to which Charlton appealed had been formulated in Iraq long before civilization reached the British Isles. As early as the 8th century, when Islam had conquered Asia Minor and north Africa and pushed into Europe from two directions—that is, at the peak of Islam's power—a legal expert in Baghdad attempted to make war more humane by setting forth rules that were not accepted in Europe until several centuries later.
Rules that were still not accepted, or in any case not practiced, when colored people were involved. > 113
24
1044 But in the beginning was the bomb. It began to be used in warfare around the same time that the chemical equation for gunpowder was first published, in 1044. The bombs were dropped from the tops of city walls or slung from catapults at the enemy.
The first technical description of a bomb, made in China during the 12th century, shows the bomb filled with thirty-odd thin slivers of porcelain, which were flung out in the explosion. Starting in 1412, there are descriptions of "fragmentation bombs" filled with iron shot or shards of porcelain inside a thin cast-iron shell, which blew to bits with the explosion. The jagged shards of metal were intended to "wound the skin and break the bones." Thus the first bombs were what we call antipersonnel bombs today, intended for battling so-called "soft targets?
25
1207 The first depiction of war to describe the use of bombs dates from 1207. It emphasizes what would later be called the "morale effect" or the "terror effect." When the bombs exploded, "the [enemy] wretches were terrified and quite lost their senses, men and horses running away as fast as they could ..." > 28
26
During the Middle Ages, a distinction was drawn between bellum hostile, war between Christian knights, and bellum romanum, war waged against outsiders, infidels, barbarians, or insurgent peasants. Bellum hostile was conducted according to chivalric code and followed strict rules. Bellum romanum was lawless war.
It was called "Roman" because the Roman Empire was held to have been especially merciless in war. The Romans killed or enslaved their captives, they plundered and destroyed their enemies' cities, they slaughtered entire populations without distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants.
"Roman war" was the medieval term for what the 20th century would call "total war."
27
1625 At the age of 36, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was captured after a military coup and condemned to life in prison and the loss of his entire fortune. After two years he managed to flee to France, where he eventually became Sweden's ambassador to France, once of the few non-Swedes ever to serve in such a capacity. During his time in prison and exile he wrote the work that forms the basis for the modern rules of war: Three Books about Law in War and Peace (1625).
While he was writing, the Thirty Years' War between Catholics and Protestants laid waste to Europe. Grotius coolly asserts what everyone already knew—that in this war, everything was allowed. No law protected anyone, even children and old people, from slaughter.
But, he continues, everyone also knows that there is much the law permits that nevertheless is wrong. First of all, anything that happens in an unjust war is naturally unjust. And even in a just war, "One must take care, so far as is possible, to prevent the death of innocent persons, even by accident." Children and the elderly should always be spared, and women as well, as long as they do not take the place of men as soldiers. Grotius created the vision of an international law that as yet did not exist. > 30
28
1670 For a long time the bomb was considered a primitive forerunner to the rocket or cannon. But the early theoreticians of flight realized that the bomb could be a terrible weapon if it could be thrown from the air.
In his Prodromo overo Saggio (The Aerial Ship) of 1670, Francesco Lana de Terzi already warned of airships that from an appropriate height could drop "artificial fire, bullets, and bombs" at "houses, castles, or cities," without placing themselves in the least danger. Defying his own warning, he himself tried to construct such an airship, built on the vacuum principle.
29
1710 In 1710 Gottfried Zeidler published Der fliegende Wandersmann (The Flying Wanderer). He dreamed of flight as a way to make travel easier and cheaper. Like storks and swallows, everyone would be able to take off for warmer lands when winter came. But he also realized the lack of security that flight would create. "No country, no city would ever be safe from attacks from above." > 32
30
1762 The Enlightenment expanded Grotius's vision of protection for civilian populations. Charles de Montesquieu in his The Spirit of Laws (1748) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762) maintained that war is a contest between states and not between individuals. The violence of war ought therefore to be aimed exclusively at the state and its military, not at the peaceful inhabitants of the country. The ideal would be for the people in warring countries to be able to go on living as before, leaving war to their respective ruler and his soldiers. This thesis goes on the assumption that the rulers are the type of despot that ruled the continent at that time, and not the government by the people that was developing in England. It also assumes a conflict involving the land armies of the continent, rather than Great Britain's most important weapons: the navy and trade blockades. The effects of a blockade could not be limited to the enemies' armed forces. Thus the English considered peaceful trade and unhampered production to be military goals.
There were horrifying exceptions to the 18th-century humanization of war. In particular, three types of opponents were excluded from the process: rebels, infidels, and savages. According to the English, the Irish belonged to all three categories. A number of scholars have pointed out the connection between the merciless methods used by the English to put down rebellion in Ireland and those used by English colonists against the natives of North America. French and English soldiers treated one another as equals when they fought over their American claims—but Indians could be put down by any means necessary.
31
The Puritans arrived in Ireland and America with the Bible in hand. The Bible backed them up. They simply acted in accordance with the commandments of the Lord as stated in the verses of chapter 7 of Deuteronomy:
1 When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves,
2 And when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them....
16 And you shall destroy all the peoples that the LORD your God will give over to you, your eye shall not pity them ...
24 And he will give their kings into your hand, and you shall make their name perish from under heaven; not a man shall be able to stand against you, until you have destroyed them.
From the beginning, genocide is inscribed in our culture's earliest and holiest texts. Read the Old Testament. Read the Iliad. Read the Aeneid. There are your instructions. > 35
32
1781 A French printer, Restif de la Bretonne, travelled far into the future in La découverte australe par un homme-volant (The Astral Discovery of a Flying Man, 1781). There he foresaw interplanetary rocket trips and fleets of bombers leaving "in the immense space of future time a trail of infamy, fear and horror."
33
1783 The year after that, the Montgolfier brothers in Avignon began to experiment with hot-air balloons. Ascents were first attempted with unmanned balloons, since no one knew what would happen to a human being who left the earth and rose into the unknown. The balloon was also tested with a duck and a sheep as passengers before the Montgolfier brothers took off in an unanchored balloon on November 21, 1783, and flew for twenty-five minutes.
Among the audience was a Prussian lieutenant engineer by the name of J. C. G. Heyne. He was impressed by the military possibilities of the balloon, and a few months later had already published the first book about flight as a weapon. The balloon could, he wrote, "rain down fire and destruction on whole towns with catastrophic results for the inhabitants." But since this threat would hover over all the countries at war, they would, Heyne believed, soon agree on rules that would prevent flying machines from being used for purposes of terror or mass destruction.
Balloons proved to be so vulnerable and difficult to steer that they lacked significant military value. A hundred years later, in 1899 at The Hague, the great powers could therefore agree to follow Heyne's recommendation and forbid bombardment from balloons. > 62
34
1784 As early as the Middle Ages, the Chinese loaded their bombs with sharp shards of porcelain or pieces of scrap iron that were thrown out in every direction upon explosion. The method was rediscovered in 1784 by Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel, who loaded a bomb with gunpowder and scrap iron. This was called a case shot or a "shrapnel bomb," and was the forerunner of the bombs designed especially to kill humans, which were used on such a large scale in Vietnam. > 88
35
1803 The conquest of the American continents became a model for European expansion in other regions suitable for white settlement—from Siberia in the north to Patagonia and Australia in the south.
This expansion served to relieve the pressure of population in Europe for a time. Thomas Malthus was among the first to realize this. In the second edition of his most important work, Principles of Population (1803), he writes that it is quite possible to solve Europe's food shortages temporarily by exterminating the native populations of other continents; but that it would be morally indefensible to repeat what was happening in America: "If the United States of America continue increasing, which they certainly will do, though not with the same rapidity as formerly, the Indians will be driven further and further back into the country, till the whole race is ultimately exterminated, and the territory is incapable of further extension."
Would the same thing happen in Asia and Africa? No, that must not be allowed to happen, wrote Malthus: "To exterminate the inhabitants of the greatest part of Asia and Africa is a thought that could not be admitted for a moment." > 45
36
1806 Cuvier's notion of extinction captured the imagination of his contemporaries." It was the French author Cousin de Grainville who wrote the first The Last Man (Le dernier homme, 1806), In his novel the sun grows pale, the earth ages, and human beings become more and more exhausted and used up. The last fertile man is taken by airship to Brazil to mate with the last fertile woman. But the final bell has already tolled for civilization. Its heart, Paris, has stopped. Everything collapses and turns into desert. The two lovers see the futility in bringing a child into a dying world and so the last human beings sadly refrain from a union with each other, God is involved. But there is no hint that humankind itself might have brought about its own demise.
37
1826 When Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote her The Last Man (1826), her husband Percy Shelley had drowned, her friend Byron was dead, and she herself was left alone. And in addition, all of Europe at the time lived in fear of the Bengali cholera, a deadly epidemic disease that came wandering slowly from the East and reached England in 1831. The general Romantic Weltschmerz of the period suddenly acquired a motivation.
Her novel takes place during the 2090s. People can travel wherever they like in balloons, poverty and disease have been eliminated, machines take care of every imaginable need, peace and prosperity reign everywhere. "The energies of man were before directed to the destruction of his species; they now aim at its liberation and preservation."
Suddenly this happy world is stricken with an epidemic that drives humanity back to violence, barbarism, and superstition. Science and politics are helpless in the face of nature's power. Slowly and painfully, humankind becomes extinct.
The alienation that usually characterizes the Romantic hero is taken a step farther than usual here—the very existence of humankind becomes problematic. But there is no hint that the plague has been intentionally set loose. No one is consciously trying to "annihilate his race." > 61
38
1852 The Frenchman was Léon Foucault (1819-1868), best known for his pendulum. But that was just one of many methods he tested to show that the world turns. In 1852 he invented the gyroscope—the name comes from the Greek gyros, ring, circle, rotation, and skopein, show. The gyroscope consists of a rapidly rotating top, suspended so that it can turn in any direction. In relation to the stars it maintains its original direction and therefore shows, like the pendulum, that the world is turning.
Foucault's experiment failed because friction caused the top to stop before the rotation of the earth became visible. But in the 1860s the gyroscope was outfitted with an electric motor. Now the top could spin forever. It turned out that its axis pointed north-south, like the needle in a magnetic compass. > 51
39
1854-1856 The air force could and did point to many models they might follow in the traditional service branches' practice of warfare. On July 13, 1854, the American navy bombarded and destroyed the undefended city of San Juan del Norte in Nicaragua. It was claimed that the American ambassador had been insulted and abused. The population was warned in advance. After several hours of firing, the American captain sent in a detachment of marines, who completed the destruction by setting fire to the city.
The British protested the bombardment of an undefended city, something "without precedent among civilized nations."
No, such behavior was no longer tolerated among civilized nations. But Nicaragua and China did not belong to that club.
Two years later the British navy burned down Canton in ten days of firing with no return fire from the Chinese. A large number of civilians were killed.
In the debate in the House of Commons afterward, one defense of the action was that only Chinese had been killed in the shelling. The idea that they, too, should come under the protection of international law was considered absurd. "Talk of applying the pedantic rules of international law to the Chinese!"
But the British government never maintained that the shelling of an undefended population was justified, instead they claimed that it had never occurred. The shelling had been aimed, they said, at the city wall, and it was only by mistake that adjacent buildings had been damaged. A pity that the whole city had burned. > 41
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1863 At the same time, the tradition of Grotius and Rousseau lived on and became valid law in the United States as General Order No. 100, which was passed on April 24, 1863. One of the essential paragraphs states: "The unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honour as much as the exigencies of war will admit."
The paragraph became a model piece of legislation. It formed the basis for the Geneva Convention in 1864, the Brussels Conference in 1874, and the Oxford Manual of Wars in 1880. Similar laws were passed in Germany in 1870, the Netherlands in 1871, France and Russia in 1877, Great Britain in 1883, and Spain in 1893.
And in practice?
In practice, the reservation expressed by "as much as the exigencies of war will admit" was the sticking point.
Just a year after the passing of General Order No. 100, the Union General Sherman burned the city of Atlanta, and that act touched off a trail of devastation through the southern states that spared neither persons, property, nor honor. "War is cruel and you cannot refine it," said Sherman.
And when the rebellious South was defeated, Sherman continued to use the same methods against the Indians. In practice the old exceptions were still in force: the rules of war give no quarter to rebels and savages. > 43
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1863 In August of 1863 it was time for another round. An Englishman had been murdered in Kagoshima, Japan, and the British navy arrived to claim damages. The shelling was aimed at the city's fortifications, but because of rough seas it was difficult to contain the effects of the fire to military targets.
"Over half of the town was in flames and entirely destroyed," wrote Admiral Kuper in his report. "The fire, which is still raging, affords reasonable grounds for believing that the entire town of Kagoshima is now a mass of ruins," he concludes.
In the House of Commons debate, Kuper received the full support of the government. Kuper would have acted unjustifiably, said a representative speaker, had he intentionally aimed his guns at civilians. But this was not the case. It would be absurd if military installations were to be rendered immune to acts of war simply by placing them so near to civilian structures that they could not be attacked without damaging civilian life and property.
That was the principle. The British Foreign Ministry added that there had to be a certain proportion between "loss of life and property of innocent persons" and "any military advantage likely to be secured by the operation." This sense of proportion seems to have been somewhat leas well developed in Kuper.
Continues...
Excerpted from A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist Copyright ©2003 by Sven Lindqvist. Excerpted by permission.
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