I was recently in Dresden, Germany, the former capital of the Kingdom of Saxony. It was a fine medieval town until we bombed the crap out of it in a famous raid in February 1945. When I first visited in 1990, it had been cleaned up but the East German government hadn’t gotten around to rebuilding very much of the 1600 acres of the city center that had been destroyed during the War. Since German reunification, pretty much everything has been restored and done so in fine style; making it a nice stop for a couple of days if you’re in central Germany. But this is not a travelogue.
The firebombing of Dresden was almost immediately controversial and led to some limitations on the scope of Allied Air Forces during the final months of WWII. There was debate as to the military value of the city, the targeting of the city center (as compared with the train network or munitions factories), and the appropriateness of attacking civilian areas at a time when the war was almost over (indeed, at the time of the raids, the Red Army was only about 100 kilometers away). I have used this incident in my history classes as a counterweight to oversimplifying WWII as a fight between good and evil.
I don’t propose to rehash the specifics of the Dresden debate here. Rather, I’ve been considering the general problem of military attacks on civilians. There have been (too) many such incidents over the history of warfare and they received increasing attention as the international peace movement gained traction starting in the mid-19C and running for about a century. In parallel with the increasing destructiveness of war in an industrial age, there were continuing efforts to limit what seemed to be the most morally egregious actions. This led, among other steps, to the creation of the Red Cross in 1864, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the League of Nations in 1919, the UN in 1945, and culminating in the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
This parallelism is, of course, quite ironic: the bourgeoning of “civilized” conscience was tied to the huge increase in destructive military power: industrial-scale warfare, atom,oic.biological, and chemical weapons; the twin faces of modernity, to be sure.
Another ironic parallel is the status of civilians of war in a democratic age. Now all these laws of war and diplomatic conventions make no distinction between subjects of monarchies/empires or dictatorships on the one hand and citizens of democracies on the other. And yet, there is an important arguable difference. In theory, at least, democracies go to war with the sanction/support of their electorate (no, I won’t list all the exceptions here!). So, in a sense, these “civilian” populations are responsible for the war. Why then, one might ask, should they be exempt from its impacts? There are important differences between “offensive” wars and “defensive” in this regard; even if they’re sometimes hard to distinguish.
To the same point is the well-documented historical development of “total war,” i.e. the comprehensive, broad, and full commitment of a nation, its population and resources, to a military effort. We can date both the democratization of politics and the totalization of war to the Great French Revolution of the late 18C. We in the US haven’t had such a fulsome war in over 80 years, but the recognized and enthusiastic support of the “civilian” population for the war efforts in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII are well documented. Most European countries have similar stories and many “civil wars” or wars of independence are fought by “guerillas” or “partisans”, not “regular” soldiers.
As a result, there is a certain plausibility to the argument that civilian targets are legitimate and that the distinction between civilian and military is blurry, both in principle and on the ground.
So much for theory. Let’s think about two recent situations where civilians have been subject to military action: Israel/Palestine and Russia/Ukraine. (There are many more current conflicts which we could throw into the pot (as Iranians could attest)).
Israel has been an exemplar of total war for almost all of its existence; over half the adult population has had military training. It is a democracy and so it’s electorate at least nominally has endorsed its military activities. Arab residents of Gaza and the West Bank can’t be said to live in democracies, but they, too have mobilized “civilian” populations and buildings for their war to secure their independence from Israel. None of these facts is offered to justify the attitudes and actions of either side, merely to highlight the complexity of the situation and the difficulty in using simple labels and lines to consider what has gone on.
Russia is a democracy at only the most superficial level and there is no sense in which its invasions of Ukraine over the past 12 years has been endorsed by its population. So what are we to think of Ukrainian drones striking targets hundreds of kilometers from the front? (besides being amazed at their technology). The Ukrainians seem to have done a pretty good job of precision targeting of military targets but have also included a set of energy infrastructure targets which seem mostly aimed at general economic disruption and altering the morale/psyche of Russia’s nominal electorate.
The Russians, on the other hand, seem to have blasted everything in sight, with no consideration of a civilian/military distinction in their Ukrainian targets. Additionally, the offensive/defensive nature of this conflict (i.e., who started it) seems much more clear cut than in the Israeli/Palestinian situation. Overall, it’s hard to find many factors or ambiguities which the Russians could invoke in justifying their actions.
I have of course only scratched the surface in looking at factors, variations, and history of this topic. Nor do I hope to come to any conclusions either as to historical events or current conflicts. Future historians will undoubtedly take their shots at these issues. But we need to remember that history is often written by the “winners.” Despite Dresden, there were no Allied Air Force Generals in the dock in Nuremberg.
The firebombing of Dresden was almost immediately controversial and led to some limitations on the scope of Allied Air Forces during the final months of WWII. There was debate as to the military value of the city, the targeting of the city center (as compared with the train network or munitions factories), and the appropriateness of attacking civilian areas at a time when the war was almost over (indeed, at the time of the raids, the Red Army was only about 100 kilometers away). I have used this incident in my history classes as a counterweight to oversimplifying WWII as a fight between good and evil.
I don’t propose to rehash the specifics of the Dresden debate here. Rather, I’ve been considering the general problem of military attacks on civilians. There have been (too) many such incidents over the history of warfare and they received increasing attention as the international peace movement gained traction starting in the mid-19C and running for about a century. In parallel with the increasing destructiveness of war in an industrial age, there were continuing efforts to limit what seemed to be the most morally egregious actions. This led, among other steps, to the creation of the Red Cross in 1864, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the League of Nations in 1919, the UN in 1945, and culminating in the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
This parallelism is, of course, quite ironic: the bourgeoning of “civilized” conscience was tied to the huge increase in destructive military power: industrial-scale warfare, atom,oic.biological, and chemical weapons; the twin faces of modernity, to be sure.
Another ironic parallel is the status of civilians of war in a democratic age. Now all these laws of war and diplomatic conventions make no distinction between subjects of monarchies/empires or dictatorships on the one hand and citizens of democracies on the other. And yet, there is an important arguable difference. In theory, at least, democracies go to war with the sanction/support of their electorate (no, I won’t list all the exceptions here!). So, in a sense, these “civilian” populations are responsible for the war. Why then, one might ask, should they be exempt from its impacts? There are important differences between “offensive” wars and “defensive” in this regard; even if they’re sometimes hard to distinguish.
To the same point is the well-documented historical development of “total war,” i.e. the comprehensive, broad, and full commitment of a nation, its population and resources, to a military effort. We can date both the democratization of politics and the totalization of war to the Great French Revolution of the late 18C. We in the US haven’t had such a fulsome war in over 80 years, but the recognized and enthusiastic support of the “civilian” population for the war efforts in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII are well documented. Most European countries have similar stories and many “civil wars” or wars of independence are fought by “guerillas” or “partisans”, not “regular” soldiers.
As a result, there is a certain plausibility to the argument that civilian targets are legitimate and that the distinction between civilian and military is blurry, both in principle and on the ground.
So much for theory. Let’s think about two recent situations where civilians have been subject to military action: Israel/Palestine and Russia/Ukraine. (There are many more current conflicts which we could throw into the pot (as Iranians could attest)).
Israel has been an exemplar of total war for almost all of its existence; over half the adult population has had military training. It is a democracy and so it’s electorate at least nominally has endorsed its military activities. Arab residents of Gaza and the West Bank can’t be said to live in democracies, but they, too have mobilized “civilian” populations and buildings for their war to secure their independence from Israel. None of these facts is offered to justify the attitudes and actions of either side, merely to highlight the complexity of the situation and the difficulty in using simple labels and lines to consider what has gone on.
Russia is a democracy at only the most superficial level and there is no sense in which its invasions of Ukraine over the past 12 years has been endorsed by its population. So what are we to think of Ukrainian drones striking targets hundreds of kilometers from the front? (besides being amazed at their technology). The Ukrainians seem to have done a pretty good job of precision targeting of military targets but have also included a set of energy infrastructure targets which seem mostly aimed at general economic disruption and altering the morale/psyche of Russia’s nominal electorate.
The Russians, on the other hand, seem to have blasted everything in sight, with no consideration of a civilian/military distinction in their Ukrainian targets. Additionally, the offensive/defensive nature of this conflict (i.e., who started it) seems much more clear cut than in the Israeli/Palestinian situation. Overall, it’s hard to find many factors or ambiguities which the Russians could invoke in justifying their actions.
I have of course only scratched the surface in looking at factors, variations, and history of this topic. Nor do I hope to come to any conclusions either as to historical events or current conflicts. Future historians will undoubtedly take their shots at these issues. But we need to remember that history is often written by the “winners.” Despite Dresden, there were no Allied Air Force Generals in the dock in Nuremberg.
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