Why comtting atrocities is bad (was RE: A bomb: do the math)

In a previous post casita asked why its bad to kill civilians.

I sincerely hope this was a troll, but I will try to respond anyhow.

One can argue based on morality, effects on the efficiency of the military and purely egoistic reasons.

1. Morality

Deliberately targeting civilian non-combatants is in violation of any standard in Western civilisation for what's 'good' and very much within the standards for what's normally considered 'evil'. If you are Christian, Jewish or Moslem its a very basic rule within your religion, that 'you shall not kill', so taking a mans life unnecessarily (killing a civilian non-combatant might be convenient but very unlikely to be necessary) is against the will of God. If you are a US citizen you should believe that every man is born with certain inalienable rights - one of witch I believe is the right to life. So if you are a US citizen taking a life unnecessarily should be wrong, since it would be in violation of the ideological basis of your nation. According to the laws and regulations for most nations, targeting civilian non-combatants is illegal. So in most cases attacking civilians would make you a criminal, which I guess in most societies is considered bad. But ok - if your own personal values differ and you don't care what people who have these values think about you, then the morality argument might not hold for you.

2. Military effectiveness

A soldier can be subject to severe stress; witch can negatively influence his ability to perform his duties. Adhering to a strong set of norms ('code of honour', religious faith etc.) can strengthen the soldiers ability to withstand this stress. On the other hand breaking the norms by committing an atrocity, can cause more stress, since a very Important part of combat fatigue is loss of self-respect (it would take a psychopath or a person with aberrant norms, in order not to loose self-respect). Since committing an atrocity is a severe breach of discipline, confidence in soldiers committing them might be lost - what are they going to do next ? - Disobey orders, frag their officers, start killing each other, commit crimes against friendly civilians or simply run away when encountering the enemy ?

Who knows what a person who has lost self-control will do ? Honestly - if you have to go to war, what would you prefer to fight - ferocious animals, or thinking human beings in control of themselves ?

3. Egoistic reasons

Normally you would prefer that the enemy doesn't commit atrocities, and the only way to try to influence the enemy in this direction is by demonstrating proper behaviour yourself. The stress/self respect part mentioned above will also influence the individuals ability to live with himself after the conflict is over. If you should be captured or find yourself on the loosing side in the conflict you might be punished for any crimes you committed.

How many members of the allied bomber crews who flew missions against civilian targets in Germany would ever have got rid of the nightmares if they had been confronted with the conditions after one of the large firestorms - the roasted bodies in the cellars, the boiled bodies floating in the firefighting water reservoirs, the zombies etc. ?

To summarise: Do it for humanity, do it to be an efficient soldier in an efficient unit and finally do it for yourself.

In the case of the RAF many of the crews were all too aware of the effects of bombing on civilian area thanks to the Blitz - an experience which happily the inhabitants of Des Moines and Little Rock were spared. Few if any USAAF crews got to be in British industrial areas during the Blitz - which had largely ceased by the time they arrived in the UK in strength. As of 1942 UK civilian fatalaties in WW2 exceed those of the armed forces.

The French town I live in was set on fire by the Wehrmacht in 1940 and again in 1944. The soldiers hung around taking pictures - the woes of the locals did not seem to bother them unduly.

Nielsen omitted here external military codes i.e. conventional discipline, which make it a crime to shoot PoWs etc. Armies today have the benefit of 500 years nearly continuous experience in so imposing this discipline on recruits as to sustain 'self-control' as well. They do not believe personal codes before recruitment are by themselves enough.

This does not need to be a rhetorical question, because we have plenty of direct testimony that: 1. Some veterans e.g. bomber crew do report regrets, nightmares etc.; and some do not. Most also have just as much anxiety about the deaths or wounds suffered by their comrades as about those they caused. 2. The horribleness of individual casualties seems independent of the number of casualties in any single event. 3. 'Large firestorms' were rare and accidental, fewer than 6 in all theatres throughout WW2. They thus do not reflect typical causes of regrets, nightmares etc. in surviving aircrew.

For the British, obviously things would be more personal. But, many Canadians had been in Britain since 1939. And Americans became great friends of the British when they arrived. I am sure they were sympathetic. I think that Anglo-American friendship was, and is, very strong. The Americans certainly witnessed the Terror Rockets fired at London. When you see what they went through at Omaha Beach or the Bulge or the USAAF in the skies over Germany, it's very inspiring.

Whenever the BS about Bomber Command starts to get to me, I think of the many kindnesses my grandparents received from a small town in France. It really meant a lot to them. People were getting killed for helping airmen.

You mentioned a lot about the morality of attacking civilians. I have a question.

What is a civilian?

It seems to me that the line between soldier and civilian is not very clear unless you define 'civilian' very very narrowly and do not take into account what supports the soldiers and the leaders of the enemy nation. The United States called its factory workers Home Front Warriors. It is almost universally recognized that those providing the supplies to the soldiers are just as important to the war effort as the soldiers. And there is the question as to how you would have distinguished between civilians and soldiers with the weapons available in WWII.

In the last stages of WWII Adolf Hitler called up into the Volksturm males as young as 14 and as old as in their 60s and 70s. Were they really civilians or merely inactive reserves?

Is a worker in an armaments factory a 'civilian'? How about a farmer growing food for the armies? Is a seamstress making clothes for the military a civilian? Are young schools girls in Japan making the materials for the balloon bombs really civilians?

In war it is the enemy morale that you are really trying to change and thus make him change his mind about waging war. In extreme circumstances, such as those during WWII, civilians are legitimate targets. Since it was a WAR for survival, morality is not really applicable.

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For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!' But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot; ******************************************************* *************

The German terror rockets fired at the heart of London were hi-tech, for their day. They were designed and built by 'civilians'. I bet they could even be fired by civilian workers. Smash the hornets while still in their nest. Or as Gen LeMay put it, 'Why swat flies when you can hit the manure pile?'

Bombing a 14 year old school boy would have been tragic. But sending him out to put a bullet between the eyes of GI Joe was permitted. Or setting booby-traps. Was sniping an exclusively male undertaking?

Many in those categories were draft deferred as vital to the war effort. Was starving civilians by naval / submarine blockade acceptable? They tried to burn down the fields and forests. It's easier said than done.

If civilians could be de-housed, with deaths kept to a minimum, many left for quieter areas. This is well demonstrated by Essen. Many abandoned the smoke stacks. Relatively few were killed. That, in my opinion, is the objective. I would suggest that German enthusiasm to make war declined after bombing escalated in 1942. I would suggest that Germany learned to hate war by 1945. 'Far more than any other military action that preceded the actual occupation of Germany itself, these attacks left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war. It was a terrible lesson; conceivably that lesson, both in Germany and abroad, could be the most lasting single effect of the air war.' United States Strategic Bombing Survey. ETO.

Strategic bombing is the deliberate bypassing of battlefields to attack an enemies cities and factories

I don't think it was a troll. The fire bombing of Tokyo and Dresden and the dropping of the atomic bomb are examples of the United States very deliberately killing civilians. Asking if this makes good military sense or not is a very valid question.

BobG

Evolution is a fact. The theory of evolution explains the fact of evolution.

I think that may be a uniquely American view. It is notable through repetition. Where does it come from? Exclusively from the Civil War?

It may have been a war of survival for others although nations and the world are old and have nine lives like a cat. But it was not a war of survival for the United States. Yet it is predominantly Americans that subscribe to the position 'there were no civilians in WW II.' Strange, especially when one's own civilians remain safely out of harm's way. You may have put your finger on a raw nerve - an American nerve, that is.

The USSBS claims 305,000 German civilians died by Allied bombing of a population of 79,500,000. ( 1939 ) The USSBS claims 330,000 Japanese civilians died by Allied bombing of a population of 70,000,000. ( 1937 ) Some may quibble over the number of civilians killed. They are minimum counts, but nonetheless, I think that when the urban devastation of city after city over years of war in the hostile skies of The Third Reich is taken into consideration, that it is a good safety record. If nukes had been used on Germany, I think there are few ( yes, I know there will be some ) who would disagree that the number of German civilians killed would have been much higher.

Morale is not a matter of pure killing. It is an adaptation of Strategic Air Control. http://www.thehistorynet.com/reviews/bk_rafbomb.htm

Air Ministry Directorate of Bomber Operations. 19 Sept 1941.

'Fleets of areoplanes will attack the enemies great industrial and governing centres. All these attacks will be made against the civil population in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker.' Colonel JFC Fuller 1920

'Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham and half a dozen other great centres simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet St wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed. Would not the general will to resist vanish, and what use would be the still determined fractions of the nation, without organization and central direction?' Capt Basil Liddell Hart 'Paris, or the future of war.' 1925

'cities where millions of inhabitatants are dependant for heat and light, water and food, on centralised mechanical organs like great steel hearts and arteries that can be smashed in half an hour by a boy in a bomber.' Bernard Shaw.

'I think it is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.' Prime Minister Baldwin 10 Nov 1932.

'Why wait for for a bomber to leave Berlin at 4 o'clock and wipe out London at 8? Create a new winged army and smash the foreign hornets in their nests!'

1933.

'The armoury of the invincible knight of old held no such weapon as that which it wields. ..............submerge the morale and the will to war of the enemy people...... It's mystery is half it's power.'

'The moral effect of bombing stands to the material effect at 20 to 1' 'Boom' Trenchard, Father of the RAF 1919.

'To gain a lasting victory in war, the hostile nations power to make war must be destroyed. The factories.....even the farms.......Aircraft operating in the heart of an enemy country will accomplish this objective in an incredibly short period of time.' US Gen 'Billy' Mitchell.

I expanded it to cover atrocities in general.

I will not question the morals of the bomber crews, since they probably did'nt know exactly what they were targetting - but the policy makers and the commanders deliberately targetting civilians (f.ex. residential areas) don't seem very heroric to me.

Goering ? (ok he comitted suicide)

To me a hero is a person who knowingly and given a choice performs a dangerous task above the call of duty. Since they were only performing their assigned tasks in an environment, that couldn't be called especially dangerous I wouldn't call them heros - I won't judge them to be villains either, although I find the decision to drop the second bomb morally questionable, since the Japanese safely could be allowed a chance to surrender first.

I wont contest that you can have nightmares about what has been done to you, but you can also be driven to insanity by what you have done to others when your conscience catches up with you.

A bomber crew can probly sucesfully deny what they have done. A rifleman can often deny what he has done - perhaps the other guy is only slightly wounded or perhaps he just went down because he slipped in something. A sniper can't claim that he didn't harm the target, but maybe the guy is only wounded and can recover. A man who engages in close combat with his knife has no way to deny what he is doing when the other guys life is spilling out all over the place.

According to a veteran from the Iran-Iraq war I met a few years ago, the soldiers who had to engage in hand-to-hand close combat in his unit never got over it.