Where the Arab and Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing …, they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village (vide attached photos of Kushan-Al-Ajaza) can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.

But that doesn’t mean that this sort of thing was still going on in 1938, particularly since it was by then standard procedure to issue warnings. Since writing this post, I’ve finally gotten around to reading David Omissi’s excellent Air Power and Colonial Control (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992). He does seem to suggest that ‘brutality’ was very rarely used over urban areas, though it was more common in rural areas. On p. 159, he mentions the Aden Protectorate specifically:

Air power seems to have been employed with particular restraint against the tribesmen of the Aden hinterland. This was partly because Aden was only under full-scale air control from 1928, after the most violent early phase of air policing was over. It was also a question of personality, for the men such as McClaughry and Portal who commanded at Aden in the 1930s, appear to have been less brutal than other senior air officers like Arthur Harris or Philip Game.

So, perhaps Aden is not quite reflective of the broader practice of air control, but at any rate the actions described by Baden-Powell and the Times most likely did not result in casualties. (Still — neither account shows any concern for the possibility of this happening …)

While I’m here, I should point out that a dar is more like a fort than a mere house, at least if I recall Omissi correctly.

The critical factor in the policing of the Aden Protectorate was always the recognition that there was no shame for an Arab to submit if he was obviously submitting to a superior force he was incapable of fighting. Accordingly, incidents such as this were treated as “firepower demonstrations”, which meant that on the previous day there would be a leaflet drop to announce that the District Officer would be coming to supervise the destruction of, in this case, the dar by the indestructible aeroplanes. The event would become a local holiday and Arabs from surrounding villages would ride in to join the celebrations. On schedule the aircraft would make a noisy low pass and then climb to release its bombs. No one got hurt and the message was understood.

We were still using this technique in the nineteen-sixties, and I dropped bombs on such demonstrations as late as 1962.