Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939-1945

J. Crossland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137399557
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137399571
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

James Crossland's work traces the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross' struggle to bring humanitarianism to the Second World War, by focusing on its tumultuous relationship with one of the conflict's key belligerents and masters of the blockade of the Third Reich, Great Britain.

Part I

1

Britain and the Red Cross, 1864–1929

A conference in the city of Calvin

The 8 August 1864 was an ostensibly momentous day for those gathered at the Hôtel de Ville, in the heart of Geneva’s old town. It was the final day of an international conference, attended by twenty-four beribboned representatives of sixteen European states, at which the First Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded Armies in the Field would be signed. The occasion was presided over by the conference’s proud instigators, the fledgling International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, the first incarnation of the organization that, in 1876, would be renamed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). For the founders of this Committee – five Swiss private citizens – the signing of the First Geneva Convention marked the end of an eighteen-month-long road of negotiations, the aim of which was to call together the heads of the most powerful states in Europe to sign a document that would outline regulations on how to care for wounded soldiers and protect those who tended them on the battlefield. Although the ICRC’s founders could lay claim to having these practices codified in such grandeur, the idea of establishing such a set of rules for states to abide by in times of conflict was not a radical one. Informal codes that regulated the practice of war had developed over the course of the preceeding centuries and, in the immediate decades prior to the signing of the First Geneva Convention, several quasi-formal codes were put into practice on American and European battlefields. Far from being a pioneer, the Committee’s attempts to regulate the practice of war dovetailed completely with the sentiments of an era that marked the ‘high tide’ of legal positivism.¹ The conference was, all the same, somewhat unique, if only for the fact that the man who gave birth to the idea of the summit was no political figure of authority or international standing but a struggling Swiss businessman and philanthropist by the name of Henry Dunant.

Raised in a conservative Genevan household, Dunant was, from the youngest age, a Samaritan. By his early 20s he was already highly active in the city’s many humanitarian circles and, prior to entering the agriculture business in the 1850s, he spent much of his time volunteering for the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), sacrificing his weekends to read to illiterate prisoners in Geneva’s jails. It was on a business trip across Lombardy, however, that Dunant experienced the true turning point of his career as a humanitarian. On 24 June 1859, he was startled to witness the Franco-Sardinian army clash with Austrian forces near the town of Solferino, a battle which he watched from atop a nearby hill. Reflecting on this experience in 1862, Dunant wrote not only of the ‘hand-to-hand struggle in all its horror and frightfulness’ of the Battle of Solferino proper but also of the disturbing aftermath of the Franco-Sardinian victory, which left a glut of wounded and dying. ‘Some, who had gaping wounds already beginning to show infection, were almost crazed with suffering. They begged to be put out of their misery, and writhed with faces distorted in the grip of the death-struggle.’² It was this wastage of life and indifference to the suffering of those who could have been saved in Solferino’s wake that moved Dunant to write A Memory of Solferino, a provocative account of the battle and its horrors in which he outlined his vision of how similar human catastrophes could be averted in future. This vision – which called for the establishment of neutral, voluntary societies to provide medical assistance to wounded on the battlefield – in turn inspired another Genevan: a high-minded, if at times cantankerous, lawyer named Gustav Moynier. A less emotional and more cynical character than Dunant, Moynier nevertheless saw the harmony between the former’s ideas for humanitarianism in war and his own civic-minded utilitarian views of philanthropy as the basis upon which to encourage moral progress in society. For if humanity could somehow be infused into the conduct of war then surely it could find its place in the gutters, backstreets and factories of European cities, areas of concern that Moynier had been working on for years via the Geneva Society for Public Welfare.³ Using Moynier’s contacts in that organization and the wider world of Swiss philanthropy, he and Dunant built up support for their cause, and before long they were joined by three others who had read Solferino with interest and were determined to act upon it. These were the French-born Swiss doctor Louis Appia, his colleague Théodore Maunoir and a retired General of the Swiss Army, Guillaume-Henri Dufor who, together with Dunant and Moynier, formed the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded in February 1863. With this ‘Committee of Five’ in place and in agreement, Dunant took to the road in order to urge Europe’s heads of state to gather in Geneva for a conference, at which the Committee’s vision would be presented with the aim of securing an international agreement to bring succour to the war wounded.⁴

His proposal was, in the main, well received, particularly by the German states and Emperor Napoleon III of France, who became one of Dunant’s most important early supporters. This response was not surprising. Since the sixteenth century the notion of applying chivalric values, hitherto reserved for nobles, to the treatment of common soldiers had gradually become adopted by most modern professional armies. In the years immediately prior to the founding of the ‘Committee of Five’, this concept of humane treatment for soldiers had become manifest in the work of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea and, as Dunant traversed Europe in 1863, in the United States, where President Lincoln applied the recommendations of lawyer Francis Lieber on the treatment of prisoners of war to the conduct of soldiers in the Union Army.⁵ Dunant’s initiative therefore, was very well timed to meet a favourable response.

In addition to the fifteen other states moved – or at least made curious – by Dunant’s request, Britain sent delegates to both the initial Geneva conference of October 1863 and the concluding conference of August 1864 at which the Geneva Convention was signed. Despite this, however, the British Government was among the most reluctant of participants in Dunant and Moynier’s enterprise. The delegate sent by Whitehall to the 1863 conference – Dr William Rutherford, Deputy Inspector of Hospitals attached to the War Office – was chosen at the last minute, spoke little French and was briefed that he was attending a sanitary conference, not, as he soon found out, a meeting of ‘a kind of international amateur society to assist the sick and wounded’. He was also given instructions to abstain from participation in the discussions, take notes on the views of others and report back. Nothing more, nothing less.⁶ This order to remain detached from proceedings turned out to be well advised. The other British attendee, Dr Twining, was present not on behalf of the Government but of the London Social Sciences Association, an extra-parliamentary think-thank that ‘melded the political, administrative and intellectual elites of mid-Victorian Britain and believed itself to be uniquely representative of the social concerns of the period’.⁷ Despite this liberal pedigree, Twining sparked one of the more controversial moments of the discussions by opining that the best way to address the problem of treating the wounded on the battlefield was with a mercy shooting that would avoid them dying ‘with a fevered brain and blasphemy on their lips’. Although there was laughter from some of those present, it remains unclear how serious this suggestion was.⁸ Whether joke or not, it was an inauspicious start for British relations with the Red Cross.

For the concluding conference of 1864 at least, Whitehall had prepared. At the request of Lord De Grey, the Secretary of War, both Rutherford and Sir Thomas Longmore, the Surgeon General, were given a brief by Britain’s doyen of battlefield succour, Florence Nightingale. Unfortunately for Dunant and Moynier, Nightingale was no fan of the ‘Geneva project’, which she regarded as noble in intent but ‘absurd’ in practice, emanating as it did from ‘a little state like Geneva, which never can see war’. Britain, by contrast, had already successfully blended the spirit of volunteerism into the practice of war and as a consequence boasted one of the most well-established military medical units in Europe – the Medical Staff Corps – which had been developed during the Crimean War before becoming a permanent service in 1856. With such a resource already at its disposal, the idea of non-British civilian volunteers running across battlefields to tend to wounded was viewed by Nightingale, Rutherford and Longmore as being an unnecessary complication to the practice of conducting modern, professional war which, to the parties concerned, had already been mastered by the forces of Queen Victoria. Longmore and Rutherford were not shy in putting forward this view. Upon their arrival at the Hôtel de Ville in August 1864, they presented Moynier with a copy of the Queen’s Regulations for the Management of British Army Hospitals, so as to educate their host in alternative forms of battlefield succour to those being proposed. The British position going into the conference was clear: in regards to medical assistance for soldiers ‘the whole procedure is military and under the direction of the general commanding the forces’.⁹ Britain’s armies had nothing to gain from neutral, voluntary humanitarianism.

It seems odd, given this clear position of opposition to Dunant and Moynier’s vision, that Longmore and Rutherford agreed in principle to the main points laid down in the Geneva Convention. These were that all ambulances, medical personnel and civilian volunteers who wore the emblem of a Red Cross on a white background would be granted neutrality on the battlefield; that through this neutrality the emblem would be recognized by belligerents as being sacrosanct; and that wounded and sick soldiers should be recovered, cared for and then repatriated as quickly as possible. The British delegates’ willingness to agree was no doubt encouraged by the fact that, like the representatives of several other states, neither Longmore nor Rutherford had been given authorization by their government to actually sign the Geneva Convention. As was the case with the initial talks the year before, the British wished to tread carefully. Their representatives were to take notes on who signed and what was agreed to, before reporting back. Therefore, when prompted to sign by Moynier, Longmore claimed he could do no such thing without a royal seal. This hesitancy was countered by General Dufour, who produced his penknife, cut a button from Longmore’s tunic and declared ‘there, your Excellency, you have the arms of Her Majesty’. Longmore, no doubt concealing the affront he would have felt at the dissection of his garment, played along with the stamping of the document, safe in the knowledge that without an official signature and ratification by his government the gesture was near meaningless.¹⁰ It was with a degree of caution and a sprinkling of farce, therefore, that Britain commenced its relations with Dunant and Moynier’s ‘international amateur society’.

Humanity begins at home: the development of the British Red Cross

The British Government ratified the Geneva Convention on 18 February 1865, five months after France and a little over a month after Prussia had done likewise.¹¹ Of the great powers present at the signing ceremony, Britain had waited the longest to ratify the Convention. Nevertheless it had done so despite the logical, if somewhat self-serving, objections that its representatives had raised at Geneva. These objections amounted to two simple questions that would hang over the Committee’s relations with Britain into the twentieth century and particularly at times when the latter went to war: what did the Government have to gain by entering into a principled agreement with the Committee? Why should an empire at the apex of its power, with a military well equipped to address concerns for its soldiers’ welfare, involve itself in a Swiss humanitarian exercise? One of the clearest reasons was that the British generally viewed the ‘Geneva project’ as both noble and, importantly, harmless. Writing to Longmore upon his return from Geneva, even Nightingale remarked that, despite her personal reservations over its substance, the Convention amounted ‘to nothing more than a declaration of humanity’ and so was worth ratifying as a gesture of British moral worth.¹² For their part, the Committee’s founders also recognized the appeal that their project’s blend of Christian morality and Enlightenment values would hold for most European states. Agreement to the Geneva Convention was presented as a solemn duty which, as General Dufour declared at the signing of the document, was ‘demanded by the present circumstances of civilisation and real Christian charity’.¹³

Arguably more important than this impulse to appear civilized and moral was the states’ practical sense of the cost and benefit of infusing humanity into the practice of war. Longmore, for one, was very mindful that, as a consequence of the communications revolution and the narrowing gap between the battlefield and the home front in modern warfare, information on the welfare of soldiers was now more freely available to their families than at any other time in history.¹⁴ In such changing circumstances, so Longmore believed, not only did medical responses to battlefield carnage have to improve but also state indifference to soldiers’ welfare could also no longer be tolerated. Open and codified cooperation with an international organization like the Committee, however amateur they viewed it, would give the British Government a means of showing the average Briton that it was acting in the best interests of those who fought and died on the nation’s behalf. This reason alone, in Longmore’s mind, justified the Government’s participation in the ‘Geneva project’.¹⁵

Beyond the signing and the ratification, the question of how this participation would change anything in Britain itself in regards to humanitarianism remained open. As Longmore was well aware, Dunant was passionate about a proposal he first raised in 1863 – that states party to the Convention ‘shall have a committee whose duty it shall be, in time of war and if need arise, to assist Army Medical Services by every means necessary in its power’. In other words, a National Red Cross Society. Fearful that such a demand would sour the opinions of conference attendees, Moynier had the matter removed from the agenda of the 1864 conference. The idea nonetheless continued to be promoted by Dunant in the years that followed.¹⁶ Despite the official British view of National Societies as superfluous to the work of the Medical Staff Corps, outside Whitehall this aspect of the ‘Geneva project’ had fertile ground in which to grow. In the decades prior to the signing of the Convention, many Britons, from the landed and middle classes in particular, had endeavoured to construct a national culture of humanitarianism and volunteerism. The London Social Sciences Association was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index