A Higher Form of Killing (43 page)

Estimating the number of casualties caused by gas in the First World War is a difficult and imprecise art for various reasons. Many bodies were never recovered. Post mortems were infrequent and there were often several contributory causes of death. Statistics were even harder to acquire on the eastern front than in the west. Available figures suggest that perhaps 1.3 million men were wounded by gas and that gas caused perhaps 1 percent to 4 percent of the nine to ten million deaths in the war. Fatal British and British Empire gas casualties may have been less than twenty thousand, some 80 percent of which were due to mustard gas during the last seventeen months of the war.

Statistics, however, understate the actual impact of gas warfare, as American general Amos Fries described, in debilitating troops as well as in psychologically damaging them. The latter was a key aim of Haber’s original proposal and one he believed had been achieved; he wrote, after the war, that gas’s “psychological effect on humans and the sensations they create vary a thousand-fold. Every change of sensation in the nose and mouth disturbs the mind, making it imagine an unknown effect and saps the soldier’s moral resistance.” The psychological revulsion felt at the use of gas was compounded in the public mind because, just as would be the case with nuclear radiation, victims might not even know they were afflicted, since some gases were relatively odorless, and might not feel unwell for some time before suffering effects like lung disease, which persisted and worsened over the rest of their often shortened lives.

Another historian has produced calculations on the British army which show the effectiveness of gas units in terms of casualties inflicted compared to those received:

•        British infantry suffered one casualty (wounded or dead) for every 0.5 it caused;

•        British artillery suffered one casualty (wounded or dead) for every 10 it caused;

•        The British Special Gas Brigade suffered one casualty (wounded or dead) for every 40 it caused.

In 1925 at Geneva, an intergovernmental conference agreed to a protocol banning both chemical and bacteriological weapons including all poisonous gases. The protocol, however, required ratification by national governments. Most states including Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and the USSR ratified but usually only after adding a rider that if another nation used such weapons they would be free to respond in kind. None saw the treaty as prohibiting them from research or from building up substantial stocks of gas to be used if attacked. The potential effect of biological weapons had been shown by the Spanish influenza pandemic raging at the end of the First World War which killed up to thirty million people worldwide. At the time of the armistice the flu was killing seven thousand people a week in Britain. Among those who died was William Leefe Robinson who had shot down the German airship over Cuffley. Half a million Americans died, a greater number than killed in battle in both world wars, the Korean War, Vietnam, and subsequent conflicts up till now put together.

The U.S. Senate had previously failed to ratify the treaty establishing the League of Nations—the body Woodrow Wilson, Sir Edward Grey, and Colonel House had championed to ensure peace after the war. When the Geneva protocol on chemical and biological weapons was put to the isolationist Senate there were again many objections, including that gas was more “humane” than “the old horrors of battle.” To avoid the humiliation of another rejection, the State Department withdrew the ratification proposal. Not until 1970 was it submitted again to the Senate and not until 1975 did the United States formally ratify the protocol. Japan followed the U.S. example and also did not ratify it until after the Second World War.

The bombing of civilian targets remained outlawed, although at the end of the First World War British officials had opposed the trial as war criminals of German pilots who had bombed civilian areas, since “to do so would be placing a noose around the necks of our airmen in future wars.” Indeed, in 1919 the British bombed Kabul, and the emir of Afghanistan complained, “It is a matter for great regret that the throwing of bombs by Zeppelins on London was denounced as a most savage act, and the bombardment of places of worship . . . was considered a most abominable operation while now we see with our own eyes that such operations are a habit which is prevalent among civilised people of the West.”

Also at around this time, British planes bombed hill villages in Kurdish and other areas of Iraq to put down a rebellion against King Faisal, the Arab ruler the British government had installed at the end of the war. There is some evidence that bombs containing gas may have been used. Churchill, then secretary of state for war, had written at the time, “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” A few years later both Spanish and French forces used gas to subdue rebellions in their Moroccan colonies.

Enemy submarines had sunk some thirteen million tons of Allied and neutral shipping in the First World War and in its immediate aftermath the inhumanity of U-boat torpedoing of merchant shipping without warning was so vivid from the
Lusitania
sinking and elsewhere that the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921–22 attempted to ban the use of the submarine completely. The French government, who saw the submarine as a cheap way of retaining naval power, objected and the proposal was dropped. However, the conference reconfirmed the validity of the old Cruiser Rules requiring stop and search of merchant shipping and prohibiting unrestricted submarine warfare. These rules were reaffirmed by subsequent conferences in 1930, 1935, and 1936. Adherents included Britain, the United States, France, and Germany—the latter in 1936.

Thus to all intents and purposes the legal position on submarines, poison gas, and bombing remained the same as it had before the First World War. However, the 1930s saw the strength of these prohibitions challenged. In 1936, the Italians used mustard gas, sprayed from aircraft or dropped in bomb form, in their conquest of Abyssinia. Emperor Haile Selassie told the League of Nations, “Special sprayers were installed on board Italian aircraft so they could vaporise over vast areas of territory a fine, death-dealing rain. Groups of nine, fifteen or eighteen aircraft followed one another so that the fog ensuing from them formed a continuous sheet . . . Soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers and lakes were drenched continually . . . These fearful tactics succeeded. The deadly rain that fell made all of whom it touched fly shrieking with pain. In tens of thousands the victims of Italian mustard gas fell.” In that same year, 1936, Japan used gas in its invasion of China as well as the bombing of civilian targets and continued to do so in that country until Japan’s 1945 surrender.

Worried that Germany, like Italy, might use gas in any future conflict despite having ratified the Geneva protocol, Britain and France began to build up their own stocks of gas to retaliate if required. They also began to consider countermeasures. By 1938 the British authorities had issued thirty million gas masks to the public including cot respirators for babies. Their greatest fear was that gas would be released by attacking bombers. The supremacy and destructive power of the bomber had again been shown a year earlier in April 1937 when German and Italian planes, flying on behalf of Franco’s nationalists in the Spanish civil war, had destroyed the Basque city of Guernica in three hours during its weekly market, killing more than sixteen hundred people. The attack on Guernica led the British archbishop of Canterbury to coin the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” to describe their bombs.

The memory of the First World War German blitz on London and the panic caused, combined with the speed of aircraft development in the 1920s, led to a belief that bombers would always be able to penetrate defenses to devastating effect. British prime minister Stanley Baldwin gave expression to this view in 1932, writing, “The man in the street [must] realise there is no power on earth that can protect him from bombing, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through.”

Such was the fear of the effects of mass bombing and gas bombing in particular that when the Second World War broke out in September 1939, in Britain everyone was ordered to carry their gas mask with them at all times and children were evacuated from London away from any new blitz. A British government document estimated that in the first three weeks of a German bombing offensive on London a quarter of a million of the city’s inhabitants would die, three to four million would flee to the countryside, and one million would become psychiatric cases while 50 percent of the city would be destroyed. Among other preparations the British Ministry of Health issued one million additional blank death certificates to local authorities.

Bombing—whether purportedly restricted to military targets or extended to civilian areas—was indeed used extensively by both sides in the Second World War. London suffered another blitz and later both Britain and the United States used mass area bombing to destroy Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, combining conventional explosives and incendiaries to generate firestorms of the type first planned by German commanders for London in the First World War.
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The Allied commanders justified such bombing by the exculpation—used by Haber of gas—that it was no worse than other methods of warfare and that it would shorten the war and save many Allied lives. Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, the head of Britain’s bomber force, wrote that “bombing proved a comparatively humane method. For one thing it saved the flower of the youth of this country and of our allies being mown down by the military in the field, as it was in Flanders in the war of 1914–18.”

When the Second World War turned into a “physicists’ war” ( the First World War having been known as a “chemists’ war”), nuclear bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A prime justification by commanders of the A-bombings was again the saving of a quarter of a million Allied lives likely to have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese mainland. The U.S. targeting committee, however, also agreed “that psychological factors in the target’s selection were of great importance. Two aspects of this are, (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognised when publicity on it is released.” Potential as well as actual enemies, including the USSR, were put on notice as to the new weapon’s potency.

Bombing continued to be a part of all conflicts after the Second World War. Authorities claim with lesser and greater degrees of justification to be avoiding civilian targets, something which became easier with the development of more sophisticated guidance systems. Nevertheless, errors continue to be made and collateral damage accepted as an inevitable consequence of the preference, perhaps particularly prevalent among Western governments, to deploy air power rather than expose their own ground troops to greater hazards.

On the opening day of the Second World War for Britain, September 3, 1939, Winston Churchill, returned from the wilderness, was once again appointed First Lord of the British Admiralty. On that same day and in direct contravention of the 1936 treaty, a German submarine north of Ireland sank without warning the British liner
Athenia
with some fourteen hundred people aboard. Over one hundred were killed including twenty-eight citizens of the neutral United States. Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels at once accused Churchill of having had a bomb detonated on board by wireless signal because he wished to create a new
Lusitania
for his own political advantage.

Subsequently, both sides resorted to unrestricted submarine warfare. On the day of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the commander in chief of the U.S. Asiatic fleet dispatched a message to his commanders in the Pacific: “
EXECUTE AGAINST JAPAN UNRESTRICTED AIR AND SUBMARINE WARFARE
.” Before the convoy system was introduced, in April 1917 the British First Sea Lord Admiral Jellicoe told an American admiral that unless the rate at which German U-boats were destroying British shipping was reduced Germany would win the war. A quarter of a century later in the Battle of the Atlantic the German submarines were successful even against convoyed Allied merchant shipping, leading Churchill to comment after the war that the only thing that ever really frightened him was the U-boat peril. In 1942 the U-boats sank eight million tons of Allied shipping while Allied shipyards could only build seven million. It took improvements in underwater detection of submarines, increased air cover provided by longer range and carrier-based aircraft, as well as the availability of greater numbers of naval escort vessels to bring victory to the Allies over the German U-boats.

After the Second World War, submarines became an increasingly important part of the navies of all nations, being designed not only for attacks on enemy shipping but also for the launch of nuclear ballistic rockets. The only ship destroyed by a submarine torpedo in the last half century was the Argentine heavy cruiser
Belgrano
, sunk by the British nuclear-powered submarine HMS
Conqueror
without warning in the 1982 Falklands War. More than 250 of its crew died. As the
Belgrano
was a naval ship the British action was legitimate even under the disregarded but never repealed or replaced Cruiser Rules. Nevertheless, in Britain and elsewhere the severe loss of life promoted much debate about the morality of the torpedoing, particularly as some alleged that the
Belgrano
was heading away rather than toward the Falklands. The submarine’s captain claimed—as had others before him—that in the context of the war the torpedoing had saved lives.