A distinguished philosopher asks if
killing innocents is ever justifiable.
By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, April 9, 2006
Washington Post
In the summer of 1943, the Bomber Command of Britain's Royal Air Force
began what it chose to call Operation Gomorrah, "five major and several
minor" aerial attacks on the German city of Hamburg, "with the aim of
wiping Hamburg from the map of Europe." Most of the bombs it dropped
were incendiaries, "small bombs filled with highly flammable chemicals,
among them magnesium, phosphorus and petroleum jelly." The result was
"the first ever firestorm created by bombing, and it caused terrible
destruction and loss of life," almost entirely among civilians. At
least 45,000 human corpses were found in the ruins, and more than
30,000 buildings were destroyed. A.C. Grayling writes:
"In the cellars, otherwise unscathed people suffocated to death. Police
reports and eyewitness accounts later confirmed many of the horror
stories told 'of demented Hamburgers carrying bodies of deceased
relatives in their suitcases -- a man with the corpse of his wife and
daughter, a woman with the mummified body of her daughter, or other
women with the heads of their dead children.' "
At about this time, Winston Churchill watched "a film showing RAF
bombers in action over the Ruhr." According to one who was present,
Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too
far?" Quite to the contrary was the view of Bomber Command, in
particular its commander, Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, who "wanted
to make a tremendous show" (the words are his own) in Hamburg and got
what he wanted. But the question remains: Was the indiscriminate
bombing of civilians -- in Hamburg, in Dresden, in Tokyo, in Hiroshima,
in Nagasaki -- justifiable militarily, or was it "in whole or in part
morally wrong"?
This is the question addressed in Among the Dead Cities by Grayling, a
professor of philosophy at the University of London and one of
Britain's more prominent and outspoken public intellectuals. Almost
immediately one senses what his answer will be -- an unequivocal "Yes"
-- but he must be given full credit for reaching that conclusion only
after a careful, nuanced analysis that gives full credit to the views
and intentions of the bombers as well as making clear that the Allied
bombing, however terrible, was "nowhere near equivalent in scale of
moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, or the death and
destruction all over the world for which Nazi and Japanese aggression
was collectively responsible: a total of some twenty-five million dead,
according to responsible estimates," by contrast with the toll of
"about 800,000 civilian women, children and men" exacted by Allied
bombing.
Grayling's study focuses primarily on British bombing and especially on
Operation Gomorrah, "because it took place when the war was, although
running in the Allies' favour, by no means securely won." The bombing
of Hamburg, in other words, occurred at a time when the arguments for
bombing would seem strongest: It aimed to sap the power of a formidable
enemy, to reduce military and civilian morale, to weaken enemy
industry, and to divert "soldiers, guns and fighter planes away from
the battlefronts to protect the cities instead." By comparison with the
far better known attacks on Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
which occurred when the outcome of the war was known, the bombing of
Hamburg may -- emphasis on may -- have helped swing the war in the
Allies' favor and thus have served a desirable and justifiable end.
Grayling is at considerable pains to give the advocates of bombing
civilian targets their full say. He is fair to Harris, who "was not a
man of culture," but "balance requires that one remember that (in the
phrase much then employed) 'there was war on,' and he took himself to
be in command of a campaign that would not only defend his own country
from a dangerous aggressor, but would win the war to boot, and thereby
destroy the regime which had plunged the world into catastrophe."
Harris meant to destroy "one major city after another until the
population of Germany could take it no longer," and he "fervently
believed that bombing was a war-winning weapon."
On the European front, American policy, by contrast with British, was
to use precision bombing aimed as directly at military and industrial
targets as circumstances permitted. In the Far East, though, the United
States embraced saturation bombing of civilians with the same zeal that
Britain directed it at Germany, and with the same arguments. To this
day, most Americans apparently believe that the nuclear attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki drove Japan to surrender and saved uncountable
American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese
mainland. When, several years ago, a controversial exhibition at the
Air and Space Museum revived debate over this issue, I was one of many
who expressed in public the prevailing, and conventional, view.
Grayling has me thinking second thoughts, and others are likely to have
the same response. He argues that the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 --
of which Gen. Curtis LeMay said, "We scorched and boiled and baked to
death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 than went up in
vapour in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined" -- and the Soviet invasion
of Mongolia, as well as other influences, had Japan on the brink of
surrender and that the atomic attacks were far less crucial than is
commonly believed. If there was no military justification for the
bombings, then there cannot possibly be a moral one, and Grayling's
judgment that they were immoral seems to me exceedingly difficult to
refute.
It would be quite another matter had Grayling stacked the deck in his
favor, as has been done by too many American critics of aerial attacks
on civilians, in particular those who wrote the text for the Air and
Space Museum's deservedly infamous Enola Gay exhibition. The military
and moral arguments against the bombing of civilian targets are not so
airtight as their adherents believe, especially in circumstances --
Saddam Hussein's Iraq, for one -- in which regimes have deliberately
situated military and/or industrial targets in civilian areas. But
Grayling gives the benefit of the doubt to supporters of bombing
before, finally, coming down on the opposite side. He praises the
courage of the bombers' crews and readily acknowledges the sincerity
and patriotism of those who sent them on their missions. He emphasizes
that World War II was as close to a "just war" as humankind has
undergone.
But he also insists, correctly, that "acts of injustice can be
perpetrated in the course of a just war, and if the injustices
committed are themselves very great, their commission can threaten the
overall justice of the war in which they took place." St. Thomas
Aquinas argued that "on three conditions, war can be justified." These
are "first, that there is a just cause of war, second, that it is begun
on proper authority, and third, that it is waged with the right
intention, meaning that it aims at 'the advancement of good, or the
avoidance of evil.' " Obviously World War II satisfied all of these
conditions. But what about two others formulated by modern just-war
theorists: "that to be just a war must have a reasonable chance of
success, and that the means used to conduct it must be proportional to
the ends sought."
It is on this final condition that bombing of civilians comes a
cropper. Leave aside all the other objections to such bombing, moral
and otherwise -- and there are plenty of them -- the simple fact is
that it is disproportionately cruel, destructive and wanton. The ends
sought -- defeat of Germany and Japan -- were in sight before the
bombings of 1944 and 1945, and even the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 was
out of proportion to the gains it allegedly brought to the Allied
cause, if in fact there were any. The "horrific firestorm" it produced
may have been small compared to the atrocities of Auschwitz, but it was
horrific all the same. Grayling is right to insist that by
acknowledging that we do not "have clean hands ourselves," we would be
in a far stronger position to condemn "the people who plunged the world
into war and carried out gross crimes under its cover." As matters
stand now, we are at the very least open to the charge of hypocrisy.
·
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.