Collateral Damage

Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II

Sahr Conway-Lanz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415978293
• eBook ISBN: 9781136771231
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

"Collateral damage" is a military term for the inadvertent casualties and destruction inflicted on civilians in the course of military operations. In Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II, Sahr Conway-Lanz chronicles the history of America's attempt to reconcile the ideal of sparing civilians with the reality that modern warfare results in the killing of innocent people. Drawing on policymakers' response to the issues raised by the atrocities of World War II and the use of the atomic bomb, as well as the ongoing debate by the American public and the media as the Korean War developed, Conway-Lanz provides a comprehensive examination of modern American discourse on the topic of civilian casualties and provides a fascinating look at the development of what is now commonly known as collateral damage.

1
Modern War and Mass Killing

On the night of March 9, 1945, more than 250 American B-29 bombers arrived over Tokyo. Each plane carried about six tons of bombs, most filled with a new chemical incendiary called napalm. Dropped in a precise pattern on the city, the fire bombs ignited the largest human-made conflagration ever used as a weapon in war. The bombs fell on a twelve-square-mile rectangle of one of the most densely built-up residential districts in the world, home to more than 1.2 million people. Strong winds whipped the scattered fires ignited by the bombs into a raging firestorm that engulfed entire neighborhoods. The city’s residents died by the thousands. When the firestorm subsided more than nine hours later, it had burned out almost sixteen square miles of Tokyo. The destruction was greater than that which the first atomic bombing would inflict on Hiroshima three months later. Tokyo police recorded 267,171 buildings destroyed, leaving more than one million people homeless. Japanese and American officials placed the casualty toll at 83,793 dead and 40,918 wounded. With many schoolchildren evacuated from the city and young men away serving in the military, women, babies, and older men were most of the victims.

The burning of Tokyo was part of a larger campaign of destruction against Japan and Germany in 1945 that the Allies used to help hasten the end of World War II. The British had conducted the first large-scale fire bombing against Hamburg in 1943, which destroyed much of the city and killed an estimated 44,000 people. In early 1945, American planes joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in showering Dresden with incendiary bombs that ignited another city-devouring firestorm. The incineration of Tokyo began a five month campaign conducted by the U.S. military to burn most of Japan’s major cities to the ground. The destruction reached a final climax in August 1945 when American bombers dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The incendiary campaign against Japan devastated 180 square miles of 67 cities, and the entire American strategic bombing effort killed more than 300,000 Japanese and injured an additional 400,000. Most of the victims were civilians.¹

Killing so many civilians and destroying so much in such a short time was unprecedented in warfare, and this capacity for massive destruction provoked growing concern about the violence of war as Americans became increasingly aware of what their armed forces had done. U.S. weapons, like never before, could inflict death and destruction over wide areas, but this capability made the violence difficult to control. Often times, the weapons did not allow for discrimination between their victims. In the war, American arms had killed women, children, the elderly—noncombatants posing little immediate threat to their attackers. Such harm violated the long-standing and widespread international norm of protecting the innocent from arbitrary injury in war. Western theologians and moralists have called this protection “noncombatant immunity” and the destructiveness of the Second World War proved to be one of the greatest challenges that the norm had ever faced.

The contradiction between new massively destructive methods of warfare and noncombatant immunity was made more acute in 1945 because the world had begun to learn the full extent of the killings carried out under the Nazi regime. With the revelations of Nazi genocide, peoples around the world had a fresh and horrific example of the slaughter of civilians. The Holocaust would emerge as the epitome of inhumane atrocity in the twentieth century. Some, including Americans, saw unsettling similarities between American methods of warfare in the bombing campaigns of 1945 and the German atrocities. Both killed the innocent arbitrarily. The victims were “innocent” in the sense that they posed little direct threat to their assailants and were “arbitrarily” killed in that the victims died because of their nationality, creed, or simple geographic location and not specifically because of any actions they had taken or hostilities they had held against their killers.

The contradiction between new methods of war and noncombatant immunity and the resemblance, even if vague, between American and Nazi actions proved unsettling to many Americans and others in the shadow of U.S. military power. These developments disturbed Americans’ perceptions of themselves as a humane people. They also jeopardized the United States’ international reputation as a humane nation, an image that American leaders hoped could help forge a coalition in the emerging Cold War. However, the dilemma was more than a question of American image and identity. Because of American international influence buttressed by its military might and possession of nuclear weapons, how the United States dealt with the contradiction had far-reaching implications for the world.

1.1 The Tradition of Noncombatant Immunity

In the twentieth century, noncombatant immunity had become a small part of what it meant to be humane. Protection from violence that one did not participate in had become a human right and sparing noncombatants in war had become a human responsibility. Violating this right had become a quintessential atrocity. The idea of noncombatant immunity has found purchase in so many diverse religions, cultural traditions, and ways of reasoning that one can call it an international normative value in the twentieth century and arguably much earlier. However, the idea has been a contested one and has taken various forms. One can see a basic form among ancient peoples and more recent small-scale societies. The custom of sparing the lives of women and children in order to enslave them or incorporate them into the conquerors’ families may have been motivated by self-interest, but it has saved many from death. Prohibitions against killing noncombatants developed early in many of the major religious traditions around the world. Ancient Hindu texts depicted war as a fight between equals and identified classes of people who should be spared including bystanders, who did not participate in combat, and those fleeing the battlefield.² Early rabbinical Jewish law placed limits on warfare to protect noncombatants and restrain general devastation such as allowing noncombatants to escape a besieged city and prohibiting the destruction of trees.³ Medieval Islamic jurists agreed that noncombatants who did not take part in fighting such as women, children, monks, the elderly, the blind, and the insane should not be harmed.⁴ Confucianism’s preference for avoiding excess in attaining military victory was reflected in a Manchu imperial decree of 1731 that threatened death to soldiers “who oppress the people, native or foreign, on a line of march, by forcing them to buy or sell, plundering, destroying buildings, or violating women.”⁵

Many Americans in 1945 found themselves inheritors of the European tradition of noncombatant immunity. The historian James Turner Johnson has traced this tradition to two sources in the Middle Ages, one Christian and the other secular. The Catholic church advocated a “Peace of God” to help limit the ravages of medieval warfare, especially those that harmed the church. The Peace of God urged that protection from war’s violence be given to people who had nothing to do with war-making, such as clerics, monks, friars, pilgrims, travelers, merchants, and peasants as well as their animals, goods, and lands. Secular customary practice and the chivalric code also limited the means of fighting. According to these conventions, war was a contest between equals, and the harming of those presumed helpless, such as women and children, was dishonorable.

By the sixteenth century, Christian theologians, most notably the Spaniards Francisco Victoria and Francisco Suarez, integrated these religious and secular customs into a more intricate doctrine of just war. Their writings addressed two distinct but interrelated questions: jus ad bellum or the requirements for the legitimate initiation of war, and jus in bello being the legitimate methods for war’s conduct. They drew on the writings of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and canon law to elaborate jus ad bellum while the medieval conventions on sparing the peaceable and helpless became an important element of jus in bello. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European scholars incorporated just war doctrine into the first systems of international law they created. In the legal thought of Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and Emmerich de Vattel, noncombatant immunity became a central principle of a secular exposition of jus in bello. Like the Peace of God, Grotius, Locke, and Vattel bestowed immunity on individuals based on their function during war. If individuals did not directly participate in the prosecution of the war, they did not deserve to be harmed by its violence. Locke and Vattel extended this reasoning to apply to physical structures such as churches and fine buildings that were not used in the war.⁶

The European version of noncombatant immunity and the other diverse sources of the norm shared a few simple ideas but left a number of central questions open to dispute. Noncombatant immunity in its simplest form was the notion that those not participating in the fighting of a war should and could be protected from the war’s violence. This simple idea begged the questions of who should be considered a participant in war, whether this protection should be abandoned in the face of conflicting values, and what responsibilities should belligerents have in keeping noncombatants alive beyond refraining from their purposeful slaughter. For instance, should those who manufacture the soldiers’ weapons or those who pay taxes that support a war effort be considered completely innocent of waging war? Should noncombatants be spared at the risk of soldiers’ lives or the risk of prolonging the fighting? Must soldiers avoid attacking segments of an enemy’s economy, like its food supplies, because these are necessary to prevent starvation among noncombatants?

Americans had debated questions like these before. Noncombatant immunity had a long tradition in North America. Back to the seventeenth century wars in New England between English settlers and Algonquian Indians, both sides appear to have held noncombatant immunity as an ideal. Some indications suggest that the Algonquian way of war included a general practice of avoiding indiscriminate killing. Likewise, the English struggled to reconcile their fighting with the ideas of jus in bello that the writings of Victoria and Grotius were elaborating at the time.⁷

Limiting harm to noncombatants, however, would give rise to controversy in later American wars. During the American Civil War, northerners clashed over the policy of “hard war” against the south. Harsh Union methods such as burning private property met with criticism in the north and became a national political issue in the 1864 presidential elections.⁸ The wars with Indians in the west after the Civil War also led to protest over what some white Americans saw as the Army’s indiscriminate use of force. Reformers, who hoped to change Indian policy, condemned the massacre of Indian men, women, and children, and attracted support in the press and Congress.⁹ Controversy over the treatment of noncombatants during the Philippine War resulted in a congressional investigation and the trial and punishment of American officers. A general, who reportedly had planned to burn the entire island of Samar, was convicted for his conduct during the later phase of the pacification campaign that the U.S. military conducted in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902 to suppress the independence movement there.¹⁰ Americans had long struggled with the problem of noncombatant immunity.

1.2 The Challenge of Total War

However, the last year of World War II marked a watershed in the history of noncombatant immunity in the United States and for the world. Americans confronted the question of whether they accepted the prospect that the violence of war would be unlimited, at least in the sense of being unrestrained by the customary distinction between combatant and noncombatant. Not only did the events of 1945 leave Americans facing the uncomfortable tension between their country’s participation in mass killing and simultaneous revulsion at Nazi atrocities, but three broader historical trends had helped to deepen the contradiction between massively destructive methods of warfare and the norm of noncombatant immunity. By 1945, older ideas about the mobilization of entire nations for war had combined with the mechanization of warfare to pose the greatest challenge noncombatant immunity had faced among Americans. These merging trends severely complicated the question of what were legitimate targets for war’s violence and provided rationales and opportunities for deciding that virtually all of an enemy’s society contributed in some way to the war effort and was open for destruction as a military target. Yet, as these trends were combining to threaten noncombatant immunity, a third development suggested the resilience of the norm. In the face of the changing character of warfare, governments began in the mid-nineteenth century to construct a body of international law that attempted to codify customary protections for civilians.

The idea of total war, the vision of entire nations at war, had long threatened to render noncombatant immunity obsolete, but this threat had been largely an abstract one until technology changed the way wars were fought in the twentieth century. Although a twentieth century expression, “total war” has become the common term encapsulating the earlier ideas of a nation in arms and people’s war that emerged from the American and European revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to these nationalistic doctrines, war was no longer the sole domain of military professionals and warrior elites. An entire people would fight for their nation. American and French revolutionaries held up the citizen soldier as an ideal and called for a nation in arms with universal military service for men. The related notion of a people’s war envisioned a similar program of popular mobilization. The popular uprising and prolonged guerrilla struggle in the face of Napoleon’s attempt to place his brother on the Spanish throne provided a vivid example of a people’s war, a mass movement from beneath which revolutionaries would continue to promote as a means to rid a people of an illegitimate regime.

These grandiose visions of mobilization left little room for the notion of innocent noncombatants uninvolved in the fight. Popular warfare cut through the traditional divisions of class, sex, and age that had separated soldiers from noncombatants. When the French Republic proclaimed the levee en masse to raise a citizen army against the revolution’s enemies, it declared that “every French person must stand ready to serve and support our armed forces.” A role in the war effort would be found for everyone, the revolutionary government believed. Young men would fight; husbands would forge weapons and transport supplies; wives and daughters would make tents and uniforms and care for the wounded; and old men would publicly exhort the Republic’s cause to boost morale.

Although these new ideas spread beyond the enthusiastic revolutionaries who promoted them and helped states to raise large armies in the nineteenth century, popular war remained largely a theoretical threat to civilians because of the way wars were then fought. The mobilization capacities of nineteenth century states were not great, and, as a result, much of the public in fact had little involvement with war efforts. Even when civilians made vital contributions to a war, militaries had few means to strike at an enemy’s civil society before the land and naval forces defending it had been defeated. Civilians might be vulnerable in a people’s war or if guerrilla warfare continued after an enemy’s forces had occupied their lands, but this type of fighting was comparatively rare. While ideas of popular warfare undercut the perceived innocence of civilians, war’s violence remained confined largely to soldiers. Most of the suffering that nineteenth century wars inflicted on civilians came from the much older threats of sieges, pillaging, and blockades.¹¹

The ideas of popular war became much more dangerous for noncombatants when a technological revolution in warfare began in the mid-nineteenth century, which culminated in the devastation of World War II. Over this period, the mechanization of warfare posed a dual threat to civilians. The growing importance of industry, transportation, and communications in warfare, and hence the workers that kept these complex systems running, reinforced the notion that many civilians were not uninvolved innocents. Factory-produced supplies and ammunition flowed more swiftly and reliably along railroad lines to larger armies making these soldiers more deadly. However, the mechanization of warfare also threatened civilians through the dramatic expansion in firepower it made possible. The weapons of war advanced phenomenally in their capabilities to kill and destroy over large areas. As firepower grew, the violence of war became radically more difficult to control. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, armies acquired new weapons that could fire more quickly and kill at greater distances and over larger areas. The machine gun was first widely used in the American Civil War. The Maxim gun, the standard machine gun of the British army in World War I, fired 500 rounds a minute, and in 1918, the German army introduced a machine gun that fired 1,000 rounds a minute. By World War I, innovations in artillery gave armies the capability to hurl massive barrages miles in front of them. The enormous German 420 mm mortar, nicknamed “Big Bertha,” could launch a shell over nine miles. The French 75 mm howitzer could fire fifteen rounds per minute to a range of five miles. In a single day in September 1917, the British fired off one million artillery shells.¹²

As technological and political change undermined noncombatant immunity, the custom demonstrated its resilience. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, a series of international conventions on the conduct of war gave formal legal sanction to aspects of the general custom of noncombatant immunity. In 1864, international delegates signed the first conventions on the treatment of the sick and wounded in war. The convention applied to members of armed forces, but it bestowed a neutral or noncombatant status on injured soldiers and those taking care of them and introduced the red cross as a symbol denoting immunity from attack. The Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 formulated a set of international rules of warfare including prohibitions against illegitimate means. Article 22 stated, “The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Modern War and Mass Killing
• 2. The “Revolt of the Admirals” and the Limits of Mass Destruction
• 3. The Hydrogen Bomb and the Limits of Noncombatant Immunity
• 4. A “Limited” War in Korea
• 5. Taming the Bomb
• 6. Korean Refugees and Warnings
• 7. The Thermonuclear Challenge
• 8. An Uneasy Reconciliation
• Select Bibliography
• Notes
• Index