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APPEASEMENT AND THE NEW PHILOSOPHY OF WAR?

Carroll Quigley noted the link between the ideas of Trenchard/Douhet and the 1930s policy of appeasement:

“Acceptance of Douhetism by civilian leaders in France and England was one of the key factors in appeasement and especially in the Munich surrender of September 1938… the Chamberlain government reflected these ideas and prepared the way to Munich by issuing 35 million gas masks to city dwellers… in spite of the erroneous ideas of Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill, and the rest, the war opened and continued for months with no city bombing at all, for the simple reason that the Germans had no intentions, no plans, and no equipment for strategic bombing. The British, who had the intentions but still lacked the plans and equipment, also held back.” (Tragedy And Hope – A History Of The World In Our Time, pp. 799-800.)

This is the relationship between the policy of “appeasement” and terror bombing – a means by which the British believed they could win wars by terrorising the enemy’s civilian populations into submission and avoiding suffering military casualties on the scale of the Great War.

I am sure readers can see the relevance of this for today.

Appeasement is a dirty word these days. Bombing is very much the order of the day, from the White House to Westminster.

A spokesman for the BBC on Radio 4, when criticised for its minimal coverage of the recent massacre of 80 Syrian soldiers by US/UK bombing, which destabilised the Russian/US ceasefire plan, said that the BBC is not neutral. It is always on the side of “Democracy against authoritarian dictatorships”. Presumably this not only means that the BBC is always on the British side against those whom the British State marks out as an enemy, it also means that if Democracy slaughters civilians whilst governments which do not conform to the democratic standards set by the State which is secure in its island, defend themselves, the aggressors are always right, since they represent Democracy! So Democracy is with the Angels no matter how despicably it behaves in the world and the rest are the Devils. And accidents, as Hugh Trenchard said, will happen!

It should be understood that England, prior to the Great War, had always fought its wars using others – the Irish, mercenaries and foreign countries. The intention of the Liberal Imperialist coterie in 1914 was to fight the Great War in a similar fashion – albeit with a 100,000 strong expedition force to aid France and Russia’s encirclement of Germany. But the Great War did not turn out as planned. It was not over by Christmas because Germany was able to resist the armies of France and Russia and England had to commit much more of her population to the war to crush her. A negotiated peace was impossible since the fight had been declared to be one of Good against Evil and there was no settling or Pact to be had with the Devil. Conscription had to be introduced in England and it took years to break down the German defences at a very high cost – this time borne by the English middle class as well.

The English Middle Class War and the high level of respectable casualties (as opposed to Irish “scum of the earth” as Wellington called his men) had a serious effect on the British will to wage this kind of war again. And it was determined that it should be avoided, if at all possible. This was one part to the Appeasement policy of the 1930’s (the other part was the hope that Hitler could be encouraged to attack the Soviet Union to finish off the main enemy of Britain, or at least bleed each other dry). So what went hand in hand with the Appeasement policy was the terror bombing policy – a means to wage war against an enemy civilian population without committing large numbers of English manhood to the fields that had took so much of its blood in the Great War. And so the British World War was a pathetic thing. After some fighting for about a month in France the British Army scuttled off from Dunkirk to shelter on its island for the next 4 years until the US had joined the World War and the Russians had began advancing on Berlin.

Fifty million died in Britain’s Second World War on Germany and less than half a million of them were British! That statistic just about sums up the contribution of England to the fighting against Hitler. The British War largely consisted of terrorist/commando raids, prisoner of war escapes, defence of its trade by the Royal Navy and bombing.

Know-alls from Dublin have lately condemned the Provisional IRA for its “ungentlemanly warfare”. Where did this army learn about warfare as young boys but from the saturation of British war movies and the “ungentlemanly warfare” depicted on their TV screens.

Carroll Quigley makes the following comments on the British Appeasers and advocates of Douhet’s theories:

“The military advocates of such air bombardment concentrated their attention on what was called strategic bombing, that is, on the construction of long-range bombing planes for use against industrial targets and other civilian objectives and on very fast fighter planes for defence against such bombers. They generally belittled the effectiveness of anti-aircraft artillery and were generally warm advocates of an air force separately organised and commanded and not under direct control of army or naval commanders. These advocates were very influential in Britain and in the United States.

"The upholders of strategic bombing received little encouragement in Germany, in Russia, or even in France, because of the dominant position held by traditional army officers in all three of these countries. In France, all kinds of air power was generally neglected, while in the other two countries strategic bombing against civilian objectives was completely subordinated in favour of tactical bombing of military objectives immediately on the fighting front. Such tactical bombing demanded planes of a more flexible character, with shorter range than strategic bombers and less speed than defensive fighters, and under the close control of the local commanders of the ground forces so that their bombing efforts could be directed, like a kind of mobile and long range artillery, at those points of resistance, of supply, or of reserves which would help the ground offensive most effectively. Such dive-bombers or Stukas played a major role in the early German victories of 1939 to 41. Here, again, this superiority was based on quality and method of usage and not on numbers.” (Tragedy And Hope – A History Of The World In Our Time, p.665.)

The English, who based their plans for war on Germany on the destruction of German cities and the killing of their inhabitants, believed that Germany had similar plans for London. And they repeated the view that “the bomber will always get through” so that they could convince the general public that facilitating Hitler – in the hope he would go east against Soviet Russia – was a sound idea.

But the British worry about bombing was entirely self-induced. It was manufactured entirely by Trenchard and the RAF who signalled it would devastate German cities and their civilian populations given half a chance. If that was the case who could expect Mr. Hitler, a volatile chap, to turn the other cheek?

But whilst the British banked on aerial bombing of civilian populations to save its soldiers from trench warfare the Germans developed, within the confines of the Versailles restrictions on its military forces, the theory of fast mobile warfare supported from the skies – Blitzkrieg. And Hitler had no intention of attacking British cities until Churchill brought on the blitz by dropping bombs on Berlin in a series of provocative raids aimed at diverting Hitler from military targets. The Germans had not, unlike the British, constructed a long-range bomber fleet of 4-enginened machines designed to slaughter civilians. The Luftwaffe was built to support military objectives in conjunction with the German Army.

Britain was ill equipped to deal with the German Blitzkrieg strategy. It had decided a land war could not be won without years of costly static land warfare. And its War Office and military planners had decided the way to avoid the killing of Great War proportions was to directly attack the enemy at his weakest point, its civilians, so that such a conflict could be shortened and British military casualties would be fewer as a result.

If warfare could be made humane in any way the German method was humane warfare. At the opening of conflict in 1939/40 Nazi Germany decided that if it were forced into a new European War it would fight a fast, decisive conflict, whilst democratic, 'appeasing' England would rely on terrorism from the air and sea. The German Army, even under Nazi direction, practiced Blitzkrieg using air power in support of distinct military objectives. And they achieved what they could not do in 4 years in 1914-8 by routing the Anglo-French armies in 4 weeks – with fantastically minimal casualties on both sides.

The traditional aim of European armies was to destroy the enemy combatants will to fight through the physical destruction of those on the enemy side who could defend themselves. And that is how the Nazis fought the Anglo-French forces. It was the Democracies who aimed to slaughter civilians by the million.

If war is defined as a conflict between two bodies equipped to fight and terrorism is military action against people who are not equipped to fight, it must be conceded that Britain was the pioneer of terrorism in the 20th century and the British State was the original state sponsor of terrorism. And Uncle Sam has learnt well from his Anglo-Saxon cousin, Bomber Bull, from whom he received his torch – to go about the world, bombing in the name of Democracy.