Once this fact of war is understood, all of our long-cherished rationalizations for violence are quickly exposed as mere enervating chimeras. As goes the venerable Patrokolos, so goes the tradition of "Just Warfare."

The failure of the tradition is not that it is abstractly or theoretically false, but that it ignores what actually happens when humans engage in violence. Philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil had a clearer view of the human animal. In "The Iliad, Poem of Might," her celebrated essay written at the onset of World War II, she saw that an excessive use of violence is almost never a political ideal, yet its temptation almost always proves irresistible--against all reason or moral restraint.

"A moderate use of might, by which man may escape being caught in the machinery of its vicious cycle, would demand a more than human virtue, one no less rare than a constant dignity in weakness," she wrote. As a consequence, "war wipes out every conception of a goal, even all thoughts concerning the goals of war."2 Such a moral and spiritual void will, of course, be filled by politicians, militarists, and theologians with symbols and myths, but Weil understood that there is ultimately only one impulse strong enough to sustain wars among nations: the insatiable demand for power at any cost.

These insights are, I realize, difficult to grasp within the present national echo chamber of war enthusiasm. But for anyone interested in the truth, they can be easily tested against the weight of history. Let us consider how prophetic Weil’s thoughts about force proved in a war that most people agree was fought for a just cause if ever there was one.3

On September 11, 1944, Allied forces conducted a bombing raid on the city of Darmstadt, Germany. The incendiary bombs used in the attack came together in a conflagration so intense it created a firestorm nearly one mile high. At its center, the temperature was approximately 2000° F, and it sucked the oxygen out of the air with the force of a hurricane. People hiding in underground shelters died primarily from suffocation. People fleeing through the streets found that the surfaces of the roads had melted, creating a trap of molten asphalt that stuck to their feet and then hands as they tried to break free. They died screaming on their hands and knees, the fire turning them into so many human candles. Almost twelve thousand noncombatants were killed that night in Darmstadt alone.

Yet Darmstadt was only one city among many in a relentless Allied campaign. Anne-Lies Schmidt described the aftermath of a similar attack on Hamburg, code named "Operation Gomorrah," more than one year before:

Women and children were so charred as to be unrecognizable; those that had died through lack of oxygen were half charred and recognizable. Their brains tumbled from their burst temples and their insides from the soft parts under their ribs. How terribly must these people have died. The smallest children lay like fried eels on the pavement. Even in death they showed signs of how they must have suffered-their hands and arms stretched out as if to protect themselves from the pitiless heat.4

That single raid on Hamburg killed approximately forty thousand civilians, including both of Schmidt’s parents. In total, it is estimated that more than half a million German civilians were killed as a direct result of British and American bombing.

What must be absolutely clear about these deaths is the well-documented but largely ignored fact that they were absolutely intentional. These were not unfortunate casualties in a campaign against German military targets: from as early as July, 1943, on, they were the targets. The saturation bombing of German cities did not include the burning of children as an unavoidable "double effect" of "Just War"; burning children was the precise strategy of Allied planners.

It did not begin this way. At the start of the Battle of Britain in 1939, leaders on both sides declared that they would not target civilian populations. It was understood that bombing military factories and installations would result in unavoidable civilian casualties. But the policy of minimizing deaths among noncombatants was widely supported by both politicians and the public on religious and ethical grounds.

This course continued until August 24, 1940, when Luftwaffe bombs, intended for an oil storage depot, fell on London’s East End. Winston Churchill, overruling the Royal Air Force, ordered a bombing raid on Berlin the next day. Germany responded by unleashing the blitz over London. Still, for some months the RAF insisted that the ban against killing civilians was still in effect. There was a lingering sense of moral compunction among the Allied forces that the dynamics of violence had not yet fully eroded. This would change.

First, because it was too risky to bomb by day, the Allies decided that bombing should be done only at night. This, however, made precision bombing impossible and proved militarily unsuccessful since targets were often missed. Realizing that their efforts to strike only military targets by cover of darkness were not working, the RAF therefore shifted to a policy of "area bombing"; the destruction of whole neighborhoods was now permitted, providing there was a single military target within a given neighborhood.

But by 1942, with the war dragging on and casualties mounting, the Allies decided that even this was not enough. Abandoning any pretense of ethical standards, they adopted a more "realistic" policy once and for all: indiscriminate "obliteration bombing" of entire cities. The explanation given for the new phase in the Allied campaign was twofold: first, it would ensure absolute success against military targets; more importantly and explicitly, it would "destroy enemy morale." Chivalric distinctions between civilians and combatants were no longer practicable. The morality of "total war" was tautologically justified by the necessity of "victory at any cost."

Notes and References

2. Simone Weil, "The Iliad, Poem of Might," in The Simone Weil Reader (Wakefield, R.I.: Moyer Bell, 1977), 168, 170.
3. The facts in this section have been adapted from Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 69-116; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 391-96, 436-44, 453-60; and Thomas Merton, "Target Equals City," in Passion For Peace: The Social Essays (New York: Crosshaven Books, 1997), 28-36.
4. Glover, Humanity, 78.
5. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 782-83.