The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

From among the thirty-two separate articles included in Hitler’s plan, Article 26 recommended convening a conference for the express purpose of bringing air warfare into ‘the moral and humane atmosphere of the protection afforded to non-combatants or the wounded by the Geneva Convention’. Hitler proposed that priority should be given to outlawing by agreement the use of gas, poisonous or incendiary bombs, and to prohibiting air bombardment of any kind in localities further from the fighting front than the range of medium-heavy artillery.⁴⁸ It is hard to judge the extent to which Hitler’s proposal should be regarded as a serious attempt to limit the damage to be done by bombing, though he returned to the theme several times. During the historic meeting with Neville Chamberlain in his apartment on 30 September shortly after signing the Munich Agreement, Hitler once again explained that he personally found the idea of bombing women and children repellent. But as he had presented his Peace Plan of March 1936 just a year after the declaration of German rearmament in April 1935 and a matter of weeks after German troops had re-entered the Rhineland, the Western powers were not inclined to regard his overture as anything more than a gesture, and no reply was given, though a distrustful British Foreign Office did inquire why germ warfare was not included on Hitler’s list.⁴⁹ The last time an international effort was made to define the rules governing bombing came on 30 September 1938, the same day as Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler in Munich, when the League of Nations Assembly at Geneva passed unanimously a British resolution confirming the main provisions of The Hague Rules drawn up fifteen years before.⁵⁰ Although the resolution was not legally binding, it was regarded as if it represented collective legal opinion.

The international initiatives did little to allay the widespread popular anxiety about bombing and the next war. In 1934 the British League of Nations Union organized a national ballot on issues of peace and security, and the third question on the ballot – the abolition of military aircraft – won 9 million votes, a reflection of the extent to which the democratic nature of the bombing threat was well understood by the wider public.⁵¹ The fear of bombing was nourished throughout the 1930s by news of bombing atrocities, first in China during the opening conflict with the Japanese army in 1931–2, then in 1935–6 with news that Italian aircraft in the war with Ethiopia had violated the 1925 Geneva agreement by dropping gas bombs on Ethiopian forces and civilians. The Italian case differed from the campaigns of colonial pacification carried out regularly by British and French aircraft against tribal enclaves and villages (which never got the same level of publicity), because it was an aggressive war waged against an independent sovereign state and a fellow member of the League of Nations. It was also the first time, as one journalist put it, that a ‘White Power’ had used gas from the air in defiance of international law.⁵² Italy had ratified the Geneva Protocol in 1928, Ethiopia in October 1935. The dropping of mustard gas bombs began in December 1935 after Mussolini had personally approved it in a telegram to the Italian commander, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, on 27 October. There were 103 attacks using mustard gas or phosgene bombs between 22 December 1935 and 29 March 1936, shortly before the Ethiopian surrender. Italy kept large stocks of gas bombs in East Africa and used them in regular pacification operations throughout 1936 and 1937.⁵³