Gavin Essay
Thesis:
War is hell. Armies struggle to kill enemy soldiers before they are killed themselves. Air forces support them by dropping bombs on the enemy. But they also drop bombs on civilian targets that are not part of the fight. An act that cannot be justified.
Body Paragraph 1
Some people claim that bombing civilian targets is justifiable because they believe that using overwhelming force to make the enemy surrender will end the war faster and fewer people will be killed as a result. This logic was used to justify horrific acts on civilian targets during WWII. Cutis Lemay, general of the US Air Force, ordered the fire-bombing of Tokyo that killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people which is considered one of the most destructive acts of war in history. (Britannica) He defended this order by saying, “‘War is a mean, nasty business, and you’re going to kill a lot of people. No way of getting around it. I think that any moral commander tries to minimize this to the extent possible, and to me the best way of minimizing it is getting it over as quick as possible.’” (Gladwell 179) However, war is only as mean and nasty as the generals who give the orders. Lemay could have made different choices. The choice to use atomic bombs on the civilian towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII has bee defended in a similar way. In 2015 the Center for a New American Security justified the act saying, “The essential reason is that such attacks appeared to a reasonable observer—and still seem so today, although this is subject to argument—to be materially contributing to hastening the end of a total war against an opponent that had initiated the conflict and was giving every indication that it would fight bitterly—let us say fanatically—to the very end, and so to be doing so at a lower cost in Allied lives.” (Colby) It’s important to remember that the thousands of civilians who died in order to save the lives of soldiers by ending the war faster were non-combatants. It’s not a grey area. They weren’t trying to kill an enemy, they were trying to live their lives.
Body Paragraph 2
There are some grey areas to the bombing of civilian targets, however. Mostly those are the civilian targets that the enemy is using to support their war effort. As Katharine Fortin, associate professor of international law at Utrecht University says in an article by Stephanie Van den Berg for Reuters, “The military must consider whether the damage and loss incurred by civilians in such attacks are excessive compared to the concrete and direct military advantage.” (Van den Berg) This seems reasonable, but Fortin muddies the waters when she later says, in regard to Russia bombing Ukraine, “In this instance, the incidental loss of life and injury to civilians that can be expected seems very large given that power outages are making it impossible for surgeons to carry on their work, affecting people’s access to healthcare, and creating conditions in which vulnerable people are dying due to the cold or hunger.” (Van den Berg) Those vulnerable people were innocent civilians. They were made vulnerable to dying by cold and hunger by Russia’s bombings.
Body Paragraph 3
Bombing civilian targets during times of war is unjustifiable because the civilians are not part of the war. They are just innocently living their lives. Indeed, the soldiers know that those orders are wrong. “The Eighth Air Force was being directed to bomb a church on a Sunday at midday, as people were coming out of Mass. At the preflight briefing, the airmen had been in shock. This wasn’t what they had signed on to do. It wasn’t what the Eighth Air Force stood for. One navigator—who had been raised in a strict Methodist household—went up to the commanding officer and said he couldn’t do it.” (Gladwell 109) The whole world knows that attacks on civilian targets are wrong, and it was made part of international law after WWII. “Before 1949, the Geneva Conventions had protected wounded, sick, shipwrecked, and captured combatants. The so-called “civilians’ convention” recognized the changing nature of warfare and established legal protections for anyone not belonging to armed forces or armed groups. These protections also applied to civilians’ property.” (Red Cross) That “changing nature of warfare” is the risk of targeting civilian populations with atomic/nuclear weapons for a third time. Thankfully, the world saw how terrifying that danger is, and it hasn’t happened.
Conclusion
It is tempting for militaries to bomb civilian targets during warfare. Doing so might damage their enemy’s ability to wage war, or scare them into surrender through overwhelming force. But those motivations don’t justify doing it. Through the Geneva Convention, the world has agreed that killing innocent civilians is both wrong, and illegal according to international law.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/event/Bombing-of-Tokyo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_Colby#Second_Trump_administration
https://www.britannica.com/event/atomic-bombings-of-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki/The-bombing-of-Nagasaki