[A-List] From Guernica to Hiroshima: How America Reversed Its Policy on Bombing Civilians

[Leigh Meyers <leighcmeyers@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0609/S00270.htm

How USA Reversed Its Policy on Bombing Civilians
Wednesday, 20 September 2006, 12:31 pm
Opinion: Sherwood Ross
"From Guernica to Hiroshima: How America Reversed Its Policy on Bombing 
Civilians"

by Sherwood Ross

When Adolph Hitler's Luftwaffe destroyed the Spanish town of Guernica on 
April 26, 1937, the slaughter of civilians was broadly condemned in 
Great Britain and the United States. Winston Churchill, England's 
wartime Prime Minister, wrote in "The Gathering Storm,"(Houghton 
Mifflin), "Germany in particular used her air power to commit such 
experimental horrors as the bombing of the defenceless little township 
of Guernica." More than 1,650 people were killed and nearly 900 wounded 
in that assault by Hitler’s Condor squadron.

Arriving in Guernica, New York Times correspondent G.L. Steer reported, 
"The object of the bombardment seemingly was demoralization of the 
civilian population." Destroyed in this historic citadel of Basque 
culture, “not a military objective,” were all of the town's churches 
save one, as well as both of its hospitals. "The whole of it was a 
horrible sight, flaming from end to end" from a rain of high explosive 
bombs and incendiary projectiles, Steer wrote. So many buildings 
collapsed, "the streets were long heaps of red, impenetrable ruins" 
while farmhouses in the outskirts "burned like little candles in the hills."

Rising in Parliament, Lord Cecil of Chelwood said, "There is no 
precedent in the history of civilized nations for anything like the 
bombing of Guernica." The New York Times described the Viscount as the 
leader of "a chorus of protest in the House of Lords" over the atrocity. 
." In the House of Commons, Archibald Sinclair, the Liberal leader, 
aptly portrayed the bombing as "a deliberate effort to use air power as 
an instrument of terrorism."

Responding for his Majesty's government, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden 
said the nation "deeply deplores the bombardment of the civil population 
in the Spanish Civil War, wherever it may occur and whoever may be 
responsible.” Historian Robert Dallek observed in “Franklin D. Roosevelt 
And American Foreign Policy, 1932-45”(Oxford), “In the United States 
prominent Americans from all walks of life and a large portion of the 
press joined in a denunciation of ‘the monstrous crime of Guernica,’ 
while congressional leaders renewed their appeal for the application of 
the Neutrality Act to (embargo the sale of munitions) to Berlin and Rome.”

Guernica’s destruction was not unprecedented. Japan’s bombardment of 
Shanghai in 1932 – claiming thousands of civilian lives -- brought upon 
her a “literal avalanche of denunciation,” the New York Times observed. 
Admiral Kiochi Shiozawa’s attack ignored the First Article of the Hague 
Convention, adopted October 18, 1907, which forbade “The bombardment by 
naval forces of undefended ports, towns, villages, dwellings, or 
buildings.” The signatories – including the United States — also vowed 
not “to employ poison or poisoned weapons.” Earlier, on July 29, 1899, a 
Hague convention – ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1902 – prohibited “to 
kill or wound treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation 
or army.”

The Shanghai carnage caused Americans “to view the Japanese as 
‘butchers’ and ‘murderers,’” wrote Stella Dong in “Shanghai: the Rise 
and Fall of a Decadent City” (Perrenial). “The single most powerful 
image from the Shanghai fighting was the picture of a burned baby, arms 
outstretched, wailing on a stretch of deserted railway track, taken by 
Paramount News’s H.S. ‘Newsreel’ Wong. It outraged so many Americans 
that it contributed to the mushrooming of a campaign to pressure the 
United States government to instigate sanctions against Japan.”

Three years later, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s pilots rained 
mustard gas on Ethiopia. In his futile appeal to the League of Nations 
in June of 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie denounced the bombings as “a 
refinement of barbarism.” He recounted how “soldiers, women, children, 
cattle, rivers, lakes and pastures were drenched continually with this 
deadly rain. …In tens of thousands, the victims of the Italian mustard 
gas fell.”

In 1937, when the Japanese again bombed Shanghai, it was “viewed as an 
atrocity of the most appalling kind," historian David McCullough wrote 
in "Truman." Cordell Hull, FDR’s Secretary of State, wrote in his 
“Memoirs”(The Macmillan Co.), “The League of Nations Advisory Committee, 
in resolution adopted September 27, (1937) solemnly condemned the 
bombing of open towns in China by Japanese planes and declared that ‘no 
excuse can be made for such acts which have aroused horror and 
indignation throughout the world.’ In a statement the following day we 
at the State Department supported this finding and said we held ‘the 
view that any general bombing of an extensive area wherein there resides 
a large populace engaged in peaceful pursuits is unwarranted and 
contrary to principles of law and of humanity.’”

Two years later, in his September 1, 1939, appeal at the outbreak of 
World War II in Europe, President Roosevelt beseeched the belligerents 
to refrain from the “inhuman barbarism” of attacking civilian centers. 
In the recent past, he noted, such assaults had “resulted in the maiming 
and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children.” 
These bombings, the President said, had “sickened the hearts of every 
civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of 
humanity.” FDR, however, would soon authorize development of the nuclear 
weapon as well as germ warfare, and sanction terror bombing. Hull, who 
didn’t hesitate to condemn Japanese atrocities, later praised FDR “for 
making the tremendous decision to go the length of spending $2-billion 
in developing the atomic bomb.”

In response to FDR’s appeal, Hitler pledged he would confine his air arm 
to attacking military targets only. British Prime Minister Neville 
Chamberlain asserted, “Britain will never resort to the deliberate 
attack on women and children, and other civilians for the purpose of 
mere terrorism.” Shortly, both Berlin and London would scrap their pledges.
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