The search for international agreement on the bombing threat raised numerous difficulties, as had all efforts to reach international agreement on the laws of war in the half-century since the 1874 Brussels Conference first tried to define them. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 explicitly prohibited the use of bombing from the air, and Convention IV in 1907 spelt out that this prohibition extended to attacks on civilians or the destruction of civilian property by aerial bombardment. Although the convention had the force of international law, not all of those states present at The Hague subsequently ratified its provisions, including Germany and France.41 During the Great War these prohibitions were regularly violated in the bombing undertaken by both sides. At the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1922, which successfully limited naval armaments, agreement was reached to establish a committee of international jurists to draw up definite rules of engagement for air warfare. The Commission met at The Hague between December 1922 and February 1923 and drew up what became known as The Hague Rules for Air Warfare. No state ratified the rules, but they were widely understood to define what was regarded as acceptable practice in future air war and they were used as a reference point in subsequent discussions of the legal implications of civilian bombing. Bombing was governed by two principal articles: Article 22 outlawed any bombing deliberately intended to destroy civilian property or kill non-combatants; Article 24 restricted bombing only to known and identifiable military objectives and, most significantly, only permitted bombing of those objectives ‘in the immediate vicinity of the operation of the land forces’. In this case bombing could be lawfully conducted, even when the military objective was close to habitation.42
The international effort to limit the air threat continued for at least the decade that followed the drafting of The Hague Rules. In June 1925 at Geneva the major powers agreed to a Protocol outlawing the use (though not the possession) of poisonous chemical or bacteriological weapons. The instrument came into force in 1928 but was ratified slowly by the states that might be affected by its provisions: Germany confirmed adherence in April 1929, Britain in April 1930, the United States only in 1975. The Protocol did not prevent continuing anxiety about the use of gas warfare, which many men had experienced at first hand in the trenches of the First World War. The persistent mistrust of the stated political intention not to use chemical or germ warfare highlighted a major problem in the attempt to create a legal framework to outlaw bombing, and indeed during the subsequent World War it was mutual deterrence rather than law that inhibited their use. The most important initiative to control the deployment of military aircraft came with the Geneva Disarmament Conference which convened in February 1932. All the major states that took part expressed a willingness to explore a number of distinct possibilities, including the international control of civil aviation, the abolition of bomber aircraft and the creation of an international air police force. The most comprehensive proposal, the French ‘Tardieu Plan’, presented to the conference in a revised version in November 1932 contained all three: a European Air Transport Union to oversee all civil air transport; the complete abolition of all bomber aircraft; and an ‘organically international air force’ run by the League of Nations to enforce its regulations with ‘immediate intervention’.43
This and all other plans failed to produce any agreement on limiting the air threat. The French and British air forces remained opposed to any suggestion that offensive military aircraft should be abolished, while the loss of sovereignty implied by an international air police force could not be reconciled with fears for national security. The only delegation to support the abolition of all military aircraft was Spain; the only country to endorse the complete abolition of aerial bombing was the Netherlands.44 In July 1932 a resolution from the Czech Foreign Minister, Edouard Beneš, that ‘air attack against the civilian population shall be absolutely prohibited’, was approved, but its significance was much reduced by the failure to reach any agreement restricting the bombing aircraft that might carry it out. In March 1933 a fresh proposal was made by the British delegation, outlawing air bombardment and limiting the number of military aircraft on a sliding scale from 500 for the major powers (though none for Germany, which was still disarmed under the terms of the Versailles Settlement) down to just 25 each for Portugal and Finland.45 The new proposal carried an important rider that bombing could still be carried out ‘for police purposes in certain outlying regions’. Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia at once tabled an amendment to add ‘outside Europe’, from fear perhaps that they might be regarded as outlying regions. But the rider was in effect an oblique reference to the British policy of using bombing as a cheap and efficient means to police the Empire and it suggested to other delegates that there would be one rule for Britain, another for the rest. The project finally collapsed, not to be revived during the brief surviving life of the conference.46
The idea of internationalizing aviation or creating an international air force or outlawing bombing did not disappear in 1933 for all its evident contradictions. For the following five years politicians and the wider public supported calls to restrict the air threat by agreement. In Britain, the Labour politician Philip Noel-Baker and the Liberal peer Lord David Davies campaigned vigorously for the idea of an air police force (H. G. Wells’s 1933 fantasy, The Shape of Things to Come, ends optimistically with a benign world ‘Air Dictatorship’ based implausibly in the Iraqi city of Basra). Noel-Baker argued for a League of Nations air force to enforce peace, but ended up with the paradoxical argument that in the event of a state launching a bombing attack, the League should be able to use gas and high explosive ‘to bombard his cities until he stopped’.47 This paradox highlighted the central problems of trust and compliance in all attempts to internationalize aviation or control bombing in the absence of secure forms of verification. Restrictions on bombing never became a national political priority for any major state after the failure at Geneva, except in the curious case of Hitler’s appeal to Britain and France to consider outlawing bombing, which he included in a more comprehensive ‘Peace Plan’ presented to them on 31 March 1936 in the wake of the remilitarization of the Rhineland two weeks before.
From among the thirty-two separate articles included in Hitler’s plan, Article 26 recommended convening a conference for the express purpose of bringing air warfare into ‘the moral and humane atmosphere of the protection afforded to non-combatants or the wounded by the Geneva Convention’. Hitler proposed that priority should be given to outlawing by agreement the use of gas, poisonous or incendiary bombs, and to prohibiting air bombardment of any kind in localities further from the fighting front than the range of medium-heavy artillery.48 It is hard to judge the extent to which Hitler’s proposal should be regarded as a serious attempt to limit the damage to be done by bombing, though he returned to the theme several times. During the historic meeting with Neville Chamberlain in his apartment on 30 September shortly after signing the Munich Agreement, Hitler once again explained that he personally found the idea of bombing women and children repellent. But as he had presented his Peace Plan of March 1936 just a year after the declaration of German rearmament in April 1935 and a matter of weeks after German troops had re-entered the Rhineland, the Western powers were not inclined to regard his overture as anything more than a gesture, and no reply was given, though a distrustful British Foreign Office did inquire why germ warfare was not included on Hitler’s list.49 The last time an international effort was made to define the rules governing bombing came on 30 September 1938, the same day as Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler in Munich, when the League of Nations Assembly at Geneva passed unanimously a British resolution confirming the main provisions of The Hague Rules drawn up fifteen years before.50 Although the resolution was not legally binding, it was regarded as if it represented collective legal opinion.
The international initiatives did little to allay the widespread popular anxiety about bombing and the next war. In 1934 the British League of Nations Union orga
nized a national ballot on issues of peace and security, and the third question on the ballot – the abolition of military aircraft – won 9 million votes, a reflection of the extent to which the democratic nature of the bombing threat was well understood by the wider public.51 The fear of bombing was nourished throughout the 1930s by news of bombing atrocities, first in China during the opening conflict with the Japanese army in 1931–2, then in 1935–6 with news that Italian aircraft in the war with Ethiopia had violated the 1925 Geneva agreement by dropping gas bombs on Ethiopian forces and civilians. The Italian case differed from the campaigns of colonial pacification carried out regularly by British and French aircraft against tribal enclaves and villages (which never got the same level of publicity), because it was an aggressive war waged against an independent sovereign state and a fellow member of the League of Nations. It was also the first time, as one journalist put it, that a ‘White Power’ had used gas from the air in defiance of international law.52 Italy had ratified the Geneva Protocol in 1928, Ethiopia in October 1935. The dropping of mustard gas bombs began in December 1935 after Mussolini had personally approved it in a telegram to the Italian commander, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, on 27 October. There were 103 attacks using mustard gas or phosgene bombs between 22 December 1935 and 29 March 1936, shortly before the Ethiopian surrender. Italy kept large stocks of gas bombs in East Africa and used them in regular pacification operations throughout 1936 and 1937.53
Among those who brought news of Italian gas bombing to Britain was the South African journalist, George Steer. By coincidence he was also the journalist who alerted the British public to what came to be regarded as the worst pre-war bombing atrocity, the German-Italian bombing of the ancient Basque town of Guernica (Gernika) on 26 April 1937. No single event played as large a part in confirming for the European public that the bombing of cities and civilians was now to be an established part of modern warfare. The raid took place as Spanish nationalist armies commanded by General Francisco Franco advanced into north-east Spain during the civil war campaign against the Spanish Second Republic, the consequence of a failed military coup in July 1936. Guernica was certainly not the first Spanish city to be bombed during the Civil War – much international attention was also paid to the bombing of Barcelona and Madrid – and the nationalists, supported by German and Italian air contingents sent to Spain, were not the only side to carry out bombing. Nor were the circumstances of the raid clear. Orders to the German air units, commanded by Wolfram von Richthofen, stated that the raid was supposed to target communications and enemy forces. Franco’s propaganda asserted that Communists had burned down the town to discredit the enemy.54 Nevertheless the destruction of Guernica, in Europe rather than the colonies or distant China, served as a lightning conductor for the accumulated anxieties of European populations.
The bombing was announced the following day in Paris and Manchester, thanks to a Reuters reporter who was with Steer in nearby Bilbao when the attack occurred; it was this initial report that prompted Pablo Picasso to paint his homage to Guernica as his contribution to the Spanish pavilion in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. But it was Steer’s sombre and detailed dispatch, published with some hesitancy by The Times on 28 April (and with less hesitancy by The New York Times), that attracted most attention.55 Steer emphasized the innocence of Guernica and of its victims, and much of the subsequent propaganda generated by the anti-Franco (and anti-fascist) lobbies in the democracies played on the ordinariness of the damaged town. A British cinema newsreel broadcast the voiceover, ‘these were homes like yours’; a pamphlet on an earlier bombing by nationalist aircraft had carried the headlines ‘Children Like Ours! Mothers Like Ours! Wives Like Ours!’56 Steer had already witnessed the bombing of the Basque town of Durango some weeks before (and had regarded this as ‘the most terrible bombardment of a population in the history of the world’), but he chose to highlight Guernica because it was the old Basque capital, with a famous oak tree in its main square around which the Basque people traditionally expressed their democratic consent to their governors. Some 1,400 of the population of 6,000 were reported to be dead, though the true figure is now thought to be around 240.57 Widespread protests against the bombing led the League of Nations on 29 May 1937 to condemn the practice in the Spanish Civil War and to demand the withdrawal of non-Spanish forces from the conflict. Eventually, at the end of March 1938 Chamberlain was persuaded to make a House of Commons statement deploring ‘the direct and deliberate bombing of non-combatants’ in Spain as an illegal act.58
The failure to reach international agreement coupled with continued popular anxiety about bombing convinced European governments to look for other means to secure their civilian populations against the consequences of bomb attack. The state’s interest in protecting urban populations was evidently affected by the pervasive imagery of social breakdown and political collapse that accompanied almost all descriptions of future war. In a speech to the House of Commons on 10 November 1932, the deputy prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had warned that any town in reach of an aerodrome would be bombed within five minutes of the start of any war: ‘the question is whose morale will be shattered quickest by preliminary bombing’. The speech is better remembered for his subsequent remark that ‘The bomber will always get through’, but Baldwin’s chief concern was to find some way once again to exempt civilians ‘from the worst perils of war’.59 This meant finding an effective form of civilian air-raid protection. Most major states had begun to think about civil defence programmes in the 1920s. The British government established a Committee on Air Raid Precautions as early as May 1924 chaired by the permanent under-secretary at the Home Office (and the future head of wartime civil defence), Sir John Anderson. The committee concluded early on that the air menace was so great that protection would amount to essential ‘palliatives’. Anderson himself accepted the reality that in a future total war ‘the distinction between combatants and non-combatants would largely disappear’.60 For years before the outbreak of war in 1939, the common assumption among those who planned civil defence, in Britain and elsewhere, was the unavoidability of war waged against civilians.
Most active civil defence preparations, however, dated from the breakdown of the disarmament conference and the growing international crisis spurred by the after-effects of the world economic crisis, Japanese aggression in China, German demands for treaty revision and American isolation. The failure to sustain any collective forms of security exposed all European states to the possibility of war. Because of the prevailing image of a war fought from the start by aircraft deployed swiftly and ruthlessly to knock an enemy out, civil defence became by the mid-1930s an urgent priority. The German Air Protection Law (Luftschutzgesetz) dated from 1935; an Italian inter-ministerial commission for civil defence was set up in 1930, the first civil defence legislation followed in 1932 and 1933; the British Home Office established an Air Raid Precautions department in 1935, followed by a comprehensive Air Raid Precautions law in December 1937; in France the major civil defence law dated from April 1935, in Poland from September 1934, in Switzerland (where a ‘purple cross’ association was established to oversee civil defence thinking and planning) from August 1934, in Hungary from July 1935; and so on.61
The details of civil defence organization and policies in the major states are covered in more detail in the chapters that follow. Here it is worth observing that they differed in scale and emphasis and in the extent to which the objective of even partial protection could be supplied in the few remaining years of peace. Most governments failed by the outbreak of war to do enough. One of the limiting factors was the substantial cost implied by effective civil defence measures. Many of these costs were defrayed by the central state through insisting that local authorities, who more closely represented the communities under threat, should bear much of the expense, but this resulted in uneven provision from city to city. In Britain it was calculated that the cost of providing deep (and therefore effective) shelter for the whole urban com
munity, in a country more heavily urbanized than any other European state, was somewhere between £300 million and £400 million, more than the whole military budget for 1938, and beyond what any British government was prepared to pay.62 In Germany, also heavily urbanized, the state agreed to subsidize the costs of civil defence only in major cities graded Air Defence I, chiefly in the industrial western provinces. In Italy the costs proved prohibitive after the expense of wars in Ethiopia and Spain; by 1939 there were public air-raid shelter places for only 72,000 out of a population of 44 million. In France the cost of deep shelters for Paris was calculated at 46 billion francs, half the military budget for 1939; French spending on civil defence in 1939 equalled just 0.9 per cent of the defence budget.63
Since not everything necessary to provide protection could be paid for, states opted for particular strategies to try to minimize the potential social damage. Evacuation was one way of ensuring the possible survival of large fractions of the urban community. In France, where there was profound concern throughout the interwar years about the problems for security posed by a sharply declining rate of population growth, the social body was to be preserved by moving women and children out of the city in an organized way as soon as war began, since they were the biological investment for the future. Extensive provision was made for evacuation in the late 1930s, and the delay in sending an ultimatum to Berlin following the German attack on Poland was excused by the need to transport the vulnerable population out of Paris in anticipation of a sudden, annihilating air attack.64 In Germany, where pro-natalist priorities were equally evident, the Hitler government opted to avoid mass evacuations, first by encouraging local communities to establish ‘self-protection’ through rigorous civil defence training and the creation of private cellar and basement shelters, and second by reliance on an extensive military anti-air defence of guns, searchlights and radar. By making the population stay put, it was hoped that Germany’s war economy would suffer less disruption; but it also met the ideological requirement to demonstrate family and community solidarity in the face of the aerial threat.65 In Britain, limited evacuation was organized in the late 1930s, but greater emphasis was put on preparations for gas warfare, since fear of gas bombing remained at the forefront of British interwar anxieties about the bombing war. Gas masks were produced for the entire population, and decontamination squads organized earlier and trained more thoroughly than other civil defenders. In Germany masks were issued only to the population most likely to be under threat, in France they were issued late and in insufficient numbers, while in Italy masks had to be bought at considerable expense, and were poorly distributed. In the Soviet Union, where the gas mask was a symbol of a nationwide anti-air organization, Osoviakhim, supplies never exceeded more than 10 per cent of the population.66
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