EACLucifer wrote: ↑Tue Jun 06, 2023 4:44 pm
gosling wrote: ↑Tue Jun 06, 2023 2:33 pm
I'm confused. We've just had lots of events celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Dambusters Raid.
Is this another instance of "it's OK if we do it"?*
* rhetorical
Three key points. Firstly, what is and what is not acceptable conduct in war changes over time. It was once widely accepted that if a town did not surrender before
Murum aries attigit, the occupants would be killed or enslaved when it was overrun. In the second world war, area bombing of cities in an attempt to destroy war industry was widely practised, and indeed initiated by Nazi Germany. In the aftermath of that awful conflict, there were attempts to make conflict more humane, to better protect civilians. One of those changes was the introduction of the principle that works and installations containing dangerous forces should not be attacked.
Secondly, the goal of the Operation Chastise was to cripple German war industry by depriving it of water and electricity, war industry they were using to perpetrate a war of aggression against multiple nations, including the systematic use of genocide. The destruction of the Kakhovsky Dam does not meaningfully impact Ukraine's war industry, just floods both recently liberated and still occupied civilian areas, and risks desertifying some of the richest arable land in the world. Additionally, Russia is the aggressor nation in this case.
Thirdly, the fact that Operation Chastise caused disproportionate casualties among civilians and allied prisoners of war is widely noted, and quite possibly a factor in why the raid was not repeated. We can note the courage of those that took part in the raid, noting just how dangerous it was and how many it did not return, and note that their aim was to speed the defeat of Nazi Germany while acknowleding the impact on enslaved Poles and civilians, and that the war in which it took place was of a character we are seeking to ensure never occurs again.
Its a bit more complicated than that.
The Geneva Protocols didn't spring from thin air but were based upon centuries long traditions and practices which constituted the rules of how wars were fought. From medieval Europe onwards there norms about killing or harming non-combatants (consider the codes of chivalry and the rules about warfare advanced by the church). If you want to go back further you can look at the rules by which the Greek fought wars against each other. Certainly there were many caveats, and often the rules only applied to certain types of people (eg not to non-Christians).
By the late 19th these rules started to be codified as international law. Notably the 1907 Hague Convention (which was ratified by the UK)
sates that: "The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited."
The German bombing of UK urban areas during WW1 was condemned by the British government as being barbaric. More relevant, during the late 1930s the German bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish civil war and the Japanese bombing of cities in China led to worldwide condemnation. The League of Nations (forerunner to the UN) passed a resolution which
stated that "The intentional bombing of civilian populations is illegal". By 1939 there was widespread condemnation by states including Britain of bombing of towns and cities.
But that doesn't mean that the UK's WW2 bombing was illegal. A key principle of the laws of war is proportionality. It is acceptable to kill civilians as long as the deaths are proportionate to achieving a military objective. It was argued at the time, and as you write, that bombing German towns and cities was necessary in order to degrade Germany's armed forces - such as that railways or factories were military targets. I have sympathy with that argument, though it doesn't necessarily follow that because bombing was justified in general that every example was justified.
