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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E, JAN&FEBRUARY 2002
six planes to perform police actions in Morocco in 1912, the
pilots chose large targets — villages, markets, grazing herds —
otherwise their bombs would miss. And when the Spaniards
began bombing “their” part of Morocco the next year, they used
German cartouche bombs, filled with explosives and steel balls,
bombs that were specially made not to focus their effect but to
spread it to as many living targets as possible.
At the end of the First World War, Great Britain had the
world’s only independent air force and a fleet of 3,300 planes,
which had played an almost negligible role in the outcome of
the war Now the entire military was to be reduced to peacetime
levels. Each branch of service would have to prove its indispen-
sibility.lt was easier for the two traditional branches; both agreed
that the air force ought to be disbanded. Winston Churchill was
assigned the task of wielding the axe for the government At that
point the commander in chief of the air force, Sir Hugh Trench-
ard, bet everything on one card: The Mad Mullah of Somaliland.
Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, called “The Mad
Mullah” by his enemies, had long been a thorn in the British
lion's paw. Countless punitive expeditions had failed to punish
him. Now the general staff wanted to engage two divisions for
twelve months in a major offensive against the mullah. In addi
tion, millions would be required to build the roads, railroads and
military bases necessary to occupy the country.
Trenchard proposed to fix the mullah from the air, with
twelve airplanes and a maximum of 250 men. Squadron 221,
which soon would bomb Tsaritsyn — later named Stalingrad —
on behalf of the British empire, was first sent to Somaliland.
Mohammed had never seen an airplane, much less
a bomb. He gave no evidence of fear. He did what he usually
did when he had unexpected visitors: he dressed in his finest
clothes and presented himself surrounded by his most respected
counselors in front of his house under a white canopy that was
used on ceremonial occasions. There he awaited the arrival of
the foreign emissaries.
The first bomb almost put an end to the war. It killed
Mohammed’s counselors, and he himself had his clothes singed
by the explosion. The next bombardment killed his sister and
several of his immediate family members. Then for two days the
British bombers attacked Mohammed and his family while they
fled through the desert like hunted animals. Finally they were
forced to give up
Total time required: a week instead of a year. Total cost:
£77,000. Churchill persuaded the government to maintain the air
force out of purely economic considerations. Then he offered
the RAF £6 million to take over from the army control of the Iraq
operation which had cost £18 million thus far.
Like other colonial powers, the British had already been
bombing restless natives in their territories for several years. It
began with the Pathans on India’s northwestern border in 1915.
It didn’t help much just to destroy their villages. But if their
irrigation ditches were bombed, their water supply would be
emptied and the topsoil washed away from the terraces. Then
they got the message.
The British bombed revolutionaries in Egypt and the
rebellious Sultan of Darfur in 1916. In 1917 bombers put down
an uprising in Mashud, on India’s border with Afghanistan.
During the third Afghan war in 1919, Dacca, Jahalabad and
Kabul were bombed by a British squadron chief named Arthur
Harris. In his memoirs he writes that the war was won by a single
strike with a one-kiloton bomb on the Afghani king’s palace.
Harris would spend the rest of his life trying to repeat that strike.
The same year, the Egyptians demanded independence,
and the RAF sent in three squadrons of bombers to control the
rebellious masses. In 1920 the city of Enzeli in Iran was bombed
in an attempt to create a British puppet state, and in Trans-
Jordan the British put down an uprising with bombs that killed
200.
This kind of thing was already routine. But in Iraq
the assignment was different. It was called “control without
occupation." The RAF and its bombers were assigned to replace
completely fifty-one battalions of soldiers, which was what the
army needed to control a country that, during the First World
War, had freed itself from centuries of Turkish rule and now
refused to accept the British as their new masters.
TAPIO TAPIOVAARA, ‘AIR RAID' (1937)
In principle, the inhabitants were supposed to be warned
before a raid. In principle, houses, animals, and soldiers were
supposed to be targets, and not the elderly, women, or children.
In practice, these things did not always go that way The first
report from Baghdad describes an air raid that caused wild
confusion among the natives and their families. “Many of them
jumped into a lake, making a good target for the machine guns ’’
“What are the rules for this kind of cricket?” asked the
newly appointed chief for India’s Northwest Province, Sir John
Maffrey. The air force headquarters for India answered that
international law did not apply “against savage tribes who do
not conform to codes of civilized warfare.’’ Warning ought to
be given before an attack (so that people could take cover),
but on the other hand, the attack should be a surprise (since
that would increase the death toll). Loss of life was, after all,
what made the greatest impact on morale
Women held little value for the natives, reported head
quarters, but instead were considered “a piece of property some
where between a rifle and a cow.” So killing their women could
not be justly compared with similar losses among European
civilians.
A 1922 RAF memorandum lists a series of available
means of terror: timed bombs; phosphorous bombs; “crow's
feet,” which maimed humans and livestock; whistling arrows;
crude oil used to pollute drinking water; and “liquid fire," a fore
runner to napalm
The British were not the only ones to bomb their colon
ies into submission. The Spaniards were even more brutal in
HUMAN COSTS & CONSEQUENCES
BY KATE O’NEAL
Pulling together multiple accounts from a wide range
of sources, University of New Hampshire Professor Marc. W.
Herold has determined that 4,000 Afghan civilians died directly
from U.S. bombing runs, many of which hit villages scattered
throughout the countryside. His figures do not include those
maimed or whose deaths occurred later as a result of the
bombings, nor do they include the millions now starving and
freezing to death
Professor Herold says, “People have to know that there
is a human cost to war and that this is a war with thousands of
casualties. These were poor people to begin with, and on top
of that they had absolutely nothing to do with the events of
September 11."
In his research, Herold discovered only rare or buried
accounts of ongoing Afghan civilian deaths in the U.S. media,
even though these appeared prominently and repeatedly in
British, Canadian, French, Asian, Middle Eastern and Australian
news sources, and in United Nations and humanitarian relief
agency reports. This is, unfortunately, not surprising
Proving the observation of George Orwell that “unpop
ular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark,
without any need for an official ban " On October 11, the
Pentagon purchased exclusive rights to all satellite images from
Space Imaging, the U.S. company that produces accurate
pictures that would allow independent media to survey bomb
damage.
Since the inhumane policies of our government go
largely unreported in the corporate-owned U.S. mass media,
Americans are developing a false sense of innocence about
what is being done in our name. In a new book called 9/11,
world-renowned political theorists Noam Chomsky notes that
i the United States is regarded in much of the world as a leading
terrorist state due to its killing of several million civilians during
the past few decades
In addition to the well-known case of Vietnam, Chomsky
also lists Laos, Cambodia. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala,
East Timor, Sudan, Iraq and Yugoslavia as places where the
U.S. government has been implicated. Unfortunately, this list
is only the tip of the iceberg
No well informed citizen asks the question, “Why do
they hate us?" No well informed citizen is unaware that our
government’s policies are creating more terrorists
In a recent visit to a hospital treating Afghan war
victims in the Pakistani border town of Quetta, journalist Robert
Fisk encountered a man named Mahmat who had been asleep
in his home when a bomb from an American B-52 fell on his
village on Kazikarez. “The plane flies so high that we cannot
hear it and the mud roof fell on them," Mahmet said, referring
to his wife Rukia and their six children He told Fisk that Rukia.
who lay in the next room, did not yet know that her children were
dead.
What was particularly disturbing to Fisk was the vision
of desperate rage that he saw in Mahmat's eyes. “I could see
something terrible: he and the angry cousin beside him and
the uncle and the wife’s brother in the hospital attacking
Americans for the murders that they had inflicted on their
family..."
At a recent national forum on international relations,
Jim Garrison, president of the State of the World Forum,
remarked that “the only solution to hate is to stop the under
lying causes that produce it, working within the community
of nations to achieve goals that benefit the poor as well as
the rich, the south as well as the north, the developing nations
as well as those more advanced Achieving this, America will
fulfill the deepest yearnings of one of its founding fathers.
Benjamin Franklin, wrote that he believed the real destiny of
America would not be about power; it would be about light ”
And, I would hope, about building a more secure world
Kate O'Neal lives in Grays River, Washington Her
article, “The Silence of Friends" appeared in the December
2001 NOTE
Morocco. On June 29, 1924, twenty Spanish planes dropped
600 bombs on villages near Tetuan, causing large civilian
losses. The Moors responded to these “Christian methods of
warfare” by torturing and maiming Spanish prisoners of war.
By September the German consulate in Tetuan reported that the
Moroccan rebels were now being “punished in the heart of their
country." The airforce blew up houses, burned harvests, and
attacked villages with mustard gas.
And what happened to those who burned the villages
of the savages, massacring their women and children? What
did they learn? How could one keep the lawlessness of the wars
outside Europe from seeping into wars between Europeans?
One person who asked these questions early on was
James Anson Farrer In his classic Military Manners & Customs
(1885). he says that wars between peoples with different
standards of civilization do “more to barbarize the civilized than
civilize the barbarous population.” Farrer considers it a proven
fact that European wars became more lawless as a result of the
habits acquired by the troops on the other side of the Atlantic.
The ties of humanity had been cut by the differences in race
and religion There all inhibitions fell away. We see the same
phenomenon in Roman history. “The Roman annalists bear
witness to the deterioration that ensued both in their modes of
waging war and in the national character.””
The colonial wars have accustomed European military
men and politicians to see all warfare as a kind of punitive
expedition against rebels and criminals, writes Farrer. They
have learned to demand unconditional surrender under humili
ating terms, which unnecessarily embitters and prolongs the
conflicts. They have learned to burn cities and villages. Once
a commander has set fire to an African capital, might he have
learned to burn Paris or Berlin?
In the spring of 1912, Stockholm's Dagens Nyheter
published Gustaf Janson's tales of the Tripoli war, which came
out that fall as a book entitled The Pride of War. It enjoyed great
success internationally. Each chapter looks at the war from the
point of view of an individual — a Turkish peasant soldier, for
example, or an Italian infantryman. The last chapter describes
the rush of power that an aviator gets from his bombs, soaring
high above the desert, one of the elect, unassailable “The
empty earth beneath him, the empty sky above and he, the
solitary man, sailing between them! A feeling of power seizes
him He was flying through space to assert the superiority of
the white race Within his reach he had the proof, seven high-
explosive bombs To be able to sling them from the heavens
themselves — that was convincing and irrefutable "
It could not be denied that airplanes and bombs were
examples of progress in military technology. And technology
was civilization. Civilization brought with it the duty to expand
civilization By violent means, if necessary, even with war, if
the uncivilized offered resistance.
To bomb a funeral or a hospital, as Gustaf Janson’s
pilot did, was naturally against the rules of war But in their
analysis of the Tripoli war, legal experts found a defense even
for this type of action The civilizing mission of the technologi
cally superior Italians was of a higher order, they said, than
human laws and humanitarian values "When the highest
principles of civilization contradict the written laws of humanity,
the latter must give way — colonial law rests in its entirety
on this assumption," wrote a Dr Tambaro in Zeitschrift fiir
internationales Recht Nobody contradicted him
This article is exerpted from A History of Bombing,
published by The New Press, and is translated from the Swedish
by Linda Haverty Rugg
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