I've been reading Respectful Insolence for quite a while now, but I somehow missed Orac's post critiquing Richard Dawkins' comments on Arthur Harris and the bombing of civilians in the Second World War, and how the development of precision-guided munitions ("smart bombs") reflects a change in the moral zeitgeist since then. Fortunately, Jonathan Dresner pointed out it to me; unfortunately (and unusually), I think Orac is wrong. That's ok: he's got more important things to do with his time than studying the history of strategic bombing, such as surgery and medical research. But since he brought the subject up ...
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Air control
Air control in pictures
30 Sqn D.H.9A at 9700 ft over Peri Magurum.
A friend has alerted me to a thread on the Something Awful forums (thanks, Mike!) One of the users has access to a collection of photos taken by an RAF sergeant who served with 30 Squadron in the early 1920s, which unfortunately looks like it is going to be sold and broken up. But luckily scans of them of them are being posted first, and there are some fantastic pictures of Iraq, Palestine and Egypt, many taken from the air, including several of an air raid carried out against a Kurdish town -- air control in action! Naturally, I can't resist posting some of the best ones here, but there are plenty more on the original thread, including the Holy Land, the Suez Canal, dusky maidens, scorpions, a cross-Africa flight from Cairo to Nigeria, and the promise of more to come. I've had to shrink these to fit them onto the page, so click on them to see the full-size version.
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Interwar use of chemical weapons
Between the wars, it was a commonplace that poison gas would be used in the next war, would be used in large quantities, and would probably be used against civilians. This was a natural enough assumption; after all, it was used liberally enough in the Great War, and it was widely assumed that science would have discovered even more lethal gases.1 As for civilians, they were now in the front line, as the Zeppelins and Gothas had shown.
Of course, gas wasn't used in the Second World War,2 probably because of the fear of retaliation in kind, i.e., deterrence worked. This could not be assumed a priori, of course, particularly since it was in fact in use throughout the period 1919-39. The best known, and the most egregious, example was by the Italians in Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), in 1935-6. There were other instances too, but I don't think I've ever seen a comprehensive list (though this isn't bad).
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- This is leaving aside the argument of those like the chemist J. B. S. Haldane, that the statistics showed that gas warfare led to relatively fewer fatalities than shells and bullets, and so was therefore more humane than conventional war, as well as the argument that all likely gases useful for warfare had already been discovered. The German discovery of nerve gases, had this been publicly known, would have put the lie to these claims. [↩]
- There are some dubious claims to the contrary, such as that Germany used gas against Soviet troops in the Crimea in 1942. [↩]
21st century air control?
OK, I promise to stop doing that. This time, the answer seems to be: probably ...
Coming via Charlie's Diary is a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh on the new US exit strategy in Iraq, which reports that "A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower". As Charlie Stross notes, this brings to mind British air control policies, in which bombers were used to pacify and control Iraq in the 1920s (which is what L.E.O. Charlton was criticising). So is this the same thing, but with F/A-18s instead of DH.9s? Could be, because as James Corum has argued, in fact air control did not succeed by airpower alone. It was more like a combined operation, with British Army units often playing a large role. Similarly, the US Air Force won't be working alone, but in conjunction with Iraqi ground forces. Now, Corum also argues that air control was not as effective as is often claimed - for example, rebellious tribes learned to adapt to this strange new aerial weapon by developing air raid precautions: slit trenches and early warning systems. Maybe modern insurgents can adapt too. On the other hand, the modern air weapon is far more precise and powerful than anything available back then.
Update: please ignore the footnote: as pointed out in the comments, Hersh's figure is an order of magnitude too large.
21st century Charlton?
Well, not really. Still, it's an interesting parallel.
A RAF officer, Flight-Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, is being court-martialled for refusing to serve in Iraq. A doctor, he has already served two tours there; now he thinks that the war itself was illegal, in that it was not authorised by the United Nations. This is reminiscent of Air Commodore L.E.O. Charlton, who refused to serve in Iraq in the 1920s (he was the RAF's chief of staff there in 1923-4, much more senior than Kendall-Smith). Two differences spring to mind. Firstly, in Charlton's case, there was no official inquiry (and so no public controversy); however, his career was effectively over and he retired in 1928. Why an example is being made of Kendall-Smith is unclear, since the top brass are said not to want to make him a martyr. Secondly, Charlton's objection was moral, not legal -- he opposed the casual use of bombing against Iraqi civilians. Kendall-Smith's defence explicitly rejects any such argument; he denies being a conscientious objector. Naively, you might have expected the doctor to have moral qualms, and the career officer to be concerned about the legality of his orders!
Sources: The Times, Guardian, Oxford DNB.