Paris

by Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart

A modern state is such a complex and interdependent fabric that it offers a target highly sensitive to a sudden and overwhelming blow from the air. We all know how great an upset in the daily life of the country is caused at the outset of a railway strike even. Business is disorganized by the delay of the mails and the tardy arrival of the staff, the shops are at a standstill without fresh supplies, the people feel lost without newspapers—rumours multiply, and the signs of panic and demoralization make their appearance. Perhaps an even more striking parallel may be found in the disruption of the whole life of Japan in the recent earthquake. An air attack of the intensity that is now possible would be likely to excel even this stroke in its disorganizing and demoralizing effect. Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham, and half a dozen other great centres simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed. Would not the general will to resist vanish, and what use would be the still determined fractions of the nation, without organization and central direction?

Victory in air war will lie with whichever side first gains the moral objective. If one side is so foolish as to waste time—more the supreme factor than ever before—in searching for the armed forces of the enemy, which are mobile and capable of concealment, then clearly the static civil centres of its own land will be paralysed first—and the issue will be decided long before the side which trusted in the “armed forces” objective has crossed the enemy’s frontiers.

If, on the other hand, the decisiveness of the moral objective be admitted, is it not the height of absurdity to base the military forces of a nation on infantry, which would—even if unopposed—take weeks to reach Essen or Berlin, for example, when aircraft could reach and destroy both in a matter of hours?

OBJECTIONS TO THE AIR-ATTACK

To this use of aircraft to gain the moral objective there are, however, two possible objections, one economic, the other ethical. The economic limitation is that by destroying the enemy factories and communications we may so cripple his commerce and industry as seriously to reduce his post-war value as a potential customer. There is a certain weight in this argument, for if one lesson stands out clearly from the last war it is that the commerce and prosperity of civilized nations are so closely interwoven and interdependent that the destruction of the enemy country’s economic wealth recoils on the head of the victor. The obvious reply, however, is that even the widespread damage of a decisive air attack would inflict less total damage and constitute less of a drain on the defeated country’s recuperative powers than a prolonged war of the existing type.

The ethical objection is based on the seeming brutality of an attack on the civilian population, and the harmful results to the aggressor of any outrage of the human feelings of the neutral peoples. The events of the last war have, however, in some measure acclimatised the world to the idea that in a war between nations the damage cannot be restricted merely to the paid gladiators. When, moreover, the truth is realized that a swift and sudden blow of this nature inflicts a total of injury far less than when spread over a number of years, the common sense of mankind will show that the ethical objection to this form of war is at least not greater than to the cannon-fodder wars of the past.

But self-interest as well as humane reasons demand that the warring nations should endeavour to gain their end of the moral subjugation of the enemy with the infliction of the least possible permanent injury to life and industry, for the enemy of today is the customer of the morrow, and the ally of the future. To inflict widespread death and destruction is to damage one’s own future prosperity, and, by sowing the seeds of revenge, to jeopardize one’s future security. Chemical science has provided mankind with a weapon which reduces the necessity for killing and achieves decisive effects with far less permanent injury than in the case of explosives. Gas may well prove the salvation of civilization from the otherwise inevitable collapse in case of another world war. Even with the lethal gases of the last war, the use of which was decried as barbarous by conventional sentiment, statistics show that the proportion of deaths to the numbers temporarily incapacitated was far less than with the accepted weapons, such as bullets and shells! Moreover, chemistry affords us non-lethal gases which can overcome the hostile resistance, and spread panic for a period long enough to reap the fruits of victory, but without the lasting evils of mass killing or destruction of property.

Yet we still find that, in defiance of reason and history, the governments are again striving by international legislation to prohibit the use of gas, and to confine the blows of aircraft to the traditional military objectives.

It is a strange reflection on the all-too-frequent lack of vision and common sense, that the opposition to the use of gas in war comes from an alliance between those unwonted bedfellows, the traditional militarist and the sentimental pacifist.