 Picasso's "Guernica" Terror bombing is a strategy of deliberately bombing civilian targets and strafing civilians in order to break the morale of the enemy and make the civilian population of the enemy panic.
Legal framework
The targeting for destruction of certain specific targets is a war crime and has been defined as such since Hague Convention of 1907 Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907 (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hague04.htm):Article 27 (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hague04.htm#art27)
- In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.
- It is the duty of the besieged to indicate the presence of such buildings or places by distinctive and visible signs, which shall be notified to the enemy beforehand.
It is possible that just as there is a separate Hague treaty covering naval bombardment that aerial bombardment was not specifically covered by any of the treaty which proceeded World War II. If the Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV) do cover areial bombardment then the following articles explain what was still permissible at the end of World War II:
- 25 The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.
- 26 The officer in command of an attacking force must, before commencing a bombardment, except in cases of assault, do all in his power to warn the authorities.
- 27 In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.
It was a bombardment of defended towns because countries had air defences. It was an arial assault so no warning need be given and All necessary steps as far as possible were taken. There were a number of legal argument against this view, but unlike Karl Donitz, who was tried and found guily of of waging "unrestricted submarine warfare" for which no one in the US Pacific submarine campaign was ever tried, (which is often cited as a case of Victors justice), as no Axis personnel were tried at the post-war Nuremberg Trials for participating in the decisions on, or execution of, "assault by aerial bombardment on defended enemy territory", there is no legal precedent available to indicate that these actions constituted a war crime.
- It needs informaion on Post World War II treaties
World War I
The first ever aerial bombardment of civilians was on January 19, 1915, in which two German Zeppelins dropped twenty four 50 kg high explosive bombs and ineffective 3 kg incendiaries on Greath Yarmouth, Sheringham, Kings Lynn and the surrounding villages. In all four people were killed, sixteen injured and monetary damage estimated at £7,740, although the public and media reaction were out of all proportion to the death toll.
There were a further nineteen raids in 1915, in which 37 tons of bombs were dropped, killing 181 people and injuring 455. Raids continued in 1916. London was accidentally bombed in May and in July the Kaiser allowed directed raids against urban centres. There were twenty-three airship raids in 1916 in which 125 tons of ordnance were dropped, killing 293 people and injuring 691. Gradually British air defences improved. In 1917 and 1918 there were only eleven Zeppelin raids against England, and the final raid occurred on August 5, 1918 which resulted in the death of KK Peter Strasser, commander of the German Naval Airship Department. By the end of the war fifty-one raids had been undertaken, in which 5,806 bombs were dropped, killing 557 people and injuring 1,358. It has been argued that the raids were effective far beyond material damage in diverting and hampering wartime production, and diverting twelve squadrons and over 10,000 men to air defences. The calculations which were preformed on the number of dead to the weight of bombs dropped would have a profound effect on the attitudes of the British authorities and population in the inter war years, because as bombers became larger it was fully expected that deaths from aerial bombardment would approach those anticipated in the Cold War from the use of nuclear weapons. The fear of aerial attack on such a scale was one of the fundamental driving forces of British appeasement in the 1930s.
Spanish Civil War
In the 1930s the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica during the Spanish Civil War. The bombing of Guernica being a foretaste of what was to follow, with the seminal painting of "Guernica" by the artist Picasso showing all the horror and terror of such attacks.
World War II
German airman strafing polish civilians on a road During the September Campaign terror bombing became official policy of the German air forces. The first city in Poland to severly dammaged by the German tactics was Wielun, many other Polish cities suffered the same fate including Frampol, Wielub and the capital Warsaw. Later the tactics was used against Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1940. The Luftwaffe carried out intensive bombing of cities in Britain, including London and Coventry, in a bombing campaign known in Britain as "the Blitz", from September 1940 through to May 1941.
In World War II the British RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF XXI Bomber Command both engaged in the aerial bombing of cities, which although they did not specifically targeting civilians, they did target civilian housing and other civilian infastructure which was known to cause a large loss of life among civilians. The primary objective of theses attacks was to damage the enemy's economic infrastructure to seriously weaken the enemy's ability to fight the war, in line with the doctrines of Total war. Coupled to the doctrine was the hope of senior Allied commanders and politicians in the early years of the war, that the morale of the Axis populations and governments could be so undermined by these that tactics, that they would sue for peace. However after the resilience of Londoners under the Blitz and the failures of Operation Gomorrah (the bombing of Hamburg) and the Battle of Berlin to break the morale of the Germans, this was realised to be unrealistic by all but the most ardent advocates of area bombardment like Arthur (Bomber) Harris.
 Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a policy not so much to terrorise the civilian Japanese, although this was an inevitable outcome of the use of such a terrible weapon, but to persuade the Japanese government that further resistance was futile. The use of such weapons was still not enough to persuade the Japanese Government to surrender unconditionally, and in the end it was the Allies who compromised to save further allied loss of life.
Aerial Bombardments Since World War II
Recent treaty obligations make the deliberate targeting of none combatants a war crime. Thanks to modern smart bombs there is no longer any need for modern air forces to use area bombing of areas known to contain large civilian populations. This was demonstrated in the use of smart munitions before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could speak of Shock and Awe bombings that would he hoped make Iraqis regime resign, without the need to destroy large areas of Baghdad to do it.
|
