atrocities

atrocities. Accusations of atrocity have long been a norm of warfare. Early in the First World War the British and American press resounded with tales of barbarities committed by invading Germans on civilians in Belgium; many of which turned out to have been mere fabrications, dreamed up by sensation-mongers. Reaction against these horror stories led to a great deal of scepticism next time round, sometimes with unfortunate results.

War is indeed an atrocious business. Admiral Jackie Fisher preached constantly, early in the century, that ‘The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.’ By the 1940s this doctrine had been generally enough accepted for the governments of great powers to agree quite readily to the mass extermination of civilians. In spite of the Hague Convention, both the German Army and RAF Bomber Command consciously made a target of civilian housing, which each repeatedly set on fire; not often making any attempt to make sure the houses were empty of people first (see also scorched earth policy). The Americans joined the British in bombing civilians; the Germans moved on from bombing civilians to systematically exterminating them in concentration camps. Such acts became routine measures of policy.

There is no need to linger on the fact that no written order by Hitler directing the wholesale massacre of Jews has ever emerged (see Final Solution): everybody in the business was aware that es war des Führers Wunsch, that was what the Leader wanted (see also secrecy).

The Germans showed in 1939 with their bombing of Warsaw, and in 1940 with their bombing of Rotterdam, that a nation's will to fight could soon be broken by air attack on civilians. Even though the rumoured 30,000 dead in Rotterdam turned out, on ultimate investigation, to number fewer than a thousand, the rumour did its work, and brought the Dutch to surrender. When in November 1940 the Luftwaffe attacked Coventry, doing severe damage to its aircraft factories as well as killing some 550 civilians, Göring coined a new German verb, coventrieren; so that when the Luftwaffe's attacks were revenged in a still more frightful form by the RAF and the USAAF, German protesters at the onslaught on, say, Dresden could be checked with the remark, Dresden war coventriert: though Dresden was very much harder hit, it was hit by Göring's methods.

When in August 1945 the Americans, with unquestioning British support, dropped two small nuclear weapons on Japan, the results were at once atrocious and satisfactory. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki instantly became proverbial, but the Japanese at once surrendered, and it has been claimed that as many as a million lives were saved by these two devastating blows (but see atomic bomb, 2).

Yet reflection on what the effects of bombing Barcelona had been during the Spanish Civil War—the attacks only stiffened Catalan resistance—might have led air staffs, and governments, to pause. There was no certainty that atrocity from the air would bring instant surrender: it might only make the opponent more angry. Similarly, the exaction of stiff reprisals for unexpected attacks on troops remote from the fighting front might cow the local population, or might stimulate them to more aggressive resistance. Reactions varied largely with time, place, and historic background.

In the USSR the historic background favoured strong government action. Concentration camps in northern Russia and Siberia (see GUlag) were already a part of the terror regime that ran that unhappy state, before the Nazis came to power; deaths from forced migration and other police perils in Stalin's USSR were probably as numerous as deaths from terror in Hitler's Germany, though exact figures are lacking. Both regimes depended on delation, or sneaking: a social atrocity that could have ghastly results.

In Asia, and in eastern and south-eastern Europe, war was generally more atrocious than in the comparatively sanitized African desert, or in Italy, or in north-west Europe. France still shudders at the memory of Oradour; yet in Poland and western Russia there was hardly an unburned village. In Greece, village-burning was a routine reprisal after any act of sabotage; a villager once remarked to an SOE saboteur that he hoped the damage done to the Germans would this time be serious enough to make the damage done to the village worthwhile.

The Japanese treatment of their prisoners-of-war is too well documented to need dwelling on (see Burma–Thailand railway, for example); that, according to one recent history of the Japanese Army ( M. and S. Harries, Soldiers of the Sun, London, 1991, p. 389), a number of Japanese soldiers, who had surrendered to an Australian unit, were marched into the jungle where they were massacred by revengeful Borneo tribesmen while the Australians looked on, is less well known.

Within this avalanche of nastiness, a few additional sharp fragments were to be found, which later ages recall with especial agony. Some individual, or small-group, activities are held to be extra atrocious: refusal to take prisoner men who have cast away their arms and held up their hands, who are shot instead (see, for example, Biscari andMalmédy); killing of women, children, old men in cold blood; killing of hostages. The Germans found precedent for the killing of hostages from their conduct in France during the war of 1870–1, and repeatedly adopted it as a police measure: they shot 41 Frenchmen at Nantes in October 1941 in reprisal for the killing of a German colonel, more than 300 Italians in 1944 in the Ardeatine Caves massacre; as late as March– April 1945, more than 250 Dutchmen for an unsuccessful (indeed accidental) ambush of a senior SS officer; more than 3,000 Yugoslavs in two days in October 1941 for a run of suburban attacks on their troops.

Sometimes atrocities were forced on the well-meaning: as witness a Yugoslav mother who had to strangle her new-born baby, lest its cries attract some passing Germans into a cave where she and several others were hiding. Much more usually, they derived from original sin. A lively literary sub-industry subsists on recounting atrocity stories, tending to make them more atrocious each time round, and indulging in fanciful explanations. The brute fact is that men tend to be brutes to other men.

M. R. D. Foot