Victors' Justice by Montgomery Belgion

Author:Montgomery Belgion [Belgion, Montgomery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781365847783
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2017-03-24T23:00:00+00:00

IX

The last of the six kinds of ‘war crime’ dwelt upon by the international military tribunal was ‘destruction of cities, towns, and villages, and devastation not justified by military necessity’. The absence of military necessity was obviously a moot point. For hitherto it had been left to military commanders to decide at the time whether or not any destruction was necessary.

In the Indictment, former German leaders were accused, and at the Trial they were convicted, of responsibility for the destruction of ‘entire villages’. Was that destruction peculiar to Germans? Soldiers who served in British armoured formations have alleged that, as they advanced into Germany, they burned down some villages by firing tracer bullets into houses. An officer of British military government attached to the United States armies entered German territory near Aachen in the autumn of 1944, and almost the first sight that met his gaze was a village in flames. It had been set on fire by the Americans because, so he was told, American soldiers had been killed or wounded by shots that appeared to come from some of the houses. The villagers had not been consulted regarding military necessity.

Of course, the greater part of the destruction perpetrated by the victors in Germany took place before the country was invaded. A commission entirely free to be impartial might not consider that military necessity invariably dictated it. In the summer of 1940, the Pope appealed to all belligerents to refrain from the indiscriminate bombing of innocent civilians. He was not heeded. The reason advanced in Britain and the United States for disregarding the Pope’s appeal was that mass, indiscriminate bombing would help to shorten the war. Before the war began, it was assumed in Britain—as for instance in the manual of the Royal Air Force—that the offensive power of an air force was to be measured by its capacity for ‘direct attack on the enemy’s will to war’. If the words meant anything, they meant that in war the offensive from the air should be concentrated against enemy civilians—that is to say, non-combatants—so that they might be demoralized and in their panic lead their government to accept defeat. The theory had prominent advocates—Mitchell and Seversky in the United States, and especially Giulio Douhet. The latter’s book, The Command of the Air, attracted considerable attention, and in 1943 it appeared in an English translation. Its argument was as follows. Nowadays a nation’s fighting power depends on industrial production and civil morale. Let those two sources of energy be destroyed, and at once the fighting power will collapse. Therefore, in order to win a war, it was only necessary to gain command of the air and then to bomb factories and civilians till industrial production became impossible and morale was broken. In 1939 and 1940, the British high command half-heartedly adopted Douhet’s doctrine—adopted it, that is to say, too weakly to put it to the test, too strongly not to deprive the land forces of valuable support. The British maintained an

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