When Civilians Aren't Civilians: Blowing Up Bomb-Proof Cities, 1927-1934.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 915

We’re a few days past the 95^th anniversary of the first aerial bombing of a city, the first in the long and unhappy calculus of eliminating things and people in civilized settings  by dropping high explosives (and etc.) on them from the air. 19 January 1915 saw the first bombs dropped from an airship during WWI, two German Zeppelins lighting up Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and King’s Lynn in the U.K.—the physical and strategic outcomes were minimal; the psychological and intellectual aspects were not.

The effectiveness and temerity of bombing escalated exponentially--virally by the end of WWII. Aerial bombing’s future effectiveness and devastating potential was recognized by the early 1920’s, particularly  in the form of the Hague Conference (1924), where the bombing of cities and civilians was theoretically controlled, if not outlawed. 

Of course the definitions of “bombing” and “cities” and “civilians” and “non-combatants” were very loosely writ and were completely open to (completely) wide interpretation in practice, and were especially liable to racist necessities. I should also add that the concepts of “defended” and “undefended” cities were—somehow—nebulous.

An encyclopedia could no doubt be written on nothing but the these awful bits of bombing.  And for another example of this I turn to the French, who can supply more than their share, per capita, pound-for-pound, to this equation. No, not the French return to Indochina in 1945 (after having done business with the occupying Japanese forces for the entire war) and their resurgent colonialism as practiced against the Vietnamese, or the heinous practices against the Algerians just prior to that country’s independence:  it is their bombing practices in Damascus. Not the Syrian bombings of 1945 (which also included many other places like Aleppo, Hama and etc.) but the French civilian bombings of Damascus in 1925.  For it was in that year that the League of Nations found that the French really weren’t bombing and killing civilians indiscriminately when they were doing so; they were, ironically, bombing themselves, and so their actions were not illegal.  (It was problematic, identifying “civilians”, as the League didn’t necessarily grant the same sort of “humanness” to all human, finding categories for barbarians and savages.  It was acceptable to bomb those later two categories, but not the first.) So the French sought to subdue a rebellion against their oppressive rule in that country, identifying the Muslim population centers in Damascus as probable hotbeds of activities for the “bandits” that were causing them their problems.  October 18, 1925 is when this particular outrage occurred; the Syrians protested, and the League considered.

And that was about the size of the story for the Syrians, because as it turns out, the French were just maintaining an order that for them was a simple police action; civilians populations could not be bombed in the eyes of international law, if the bombing was being done to a foreign people; since the French were there and occupying the country, they were conducting a police action, and in a sense were merely bombing themselves, loosening them from the barriers of whatever international law could be applied to their actions by the League of Nations. 

 

These are just a few examples from the French; there are plenty more for other countries for every decade, every year.  (The Brits in Teheran in 1924, the Italians at Harar in 1935, Franco/Luftwaffe in Guernica in 1937, the Japanese against Shanghai/Beijing/Tianjin (etc.) in 1937, and on and on.)

 

The Big Fear of bombing from the air and the need to protect the populations of cities led to all sorts of anti-bomb/bomb-proof architectural plans, most not very good and not very practical.  Such is the price of trying to make your people happy.  I happen to have

a few in my files, which are seen above  and below. (The top images were printed in the Illustrated London News in 134; the bottom in 1927.) The results of the plans were no doubt intended to pursue a common belief that cities could be constructed to be bomb-proof, that the future that national leaders were dragging their subjects into wasn't necessarily as dire as the possibilities of aerial bombings hinted things might be.  Of course the resulting buildings would be massive and impossibly expensive; the prospect for underground cities (and roads!) was just a non-starter.  And these future-views would all be obsolete in less than 15 years what with the development of enormous firepower.  And I'm not talking atomic.  

Comments

[Airminded]

Good post -- thanks for this! I came across the plan in your 4th and 5th pictures early in my research, but didn't make a note of it and could never remember who was responsible. I knew he was French but I was thinking Le Corbusier (who also dabbled), but now I see it was Paul Vauthier. It's interesting that all these examples seem to be sourced from overseas (France, Germany, USSR). I found very few examples of such radical redesigns of the city by British urban planners and architects. In fact the ones I did find weren't very radical at all, eg http://airminded.org/2008/07/29/architects-of-preservation/

BTW, I apologise for being pedantic but the Zeppelin raids on Britain (which I forgot to post about, doh!) weren't the first bombing of cities: that was Venice in 1849. They weren't the first Zeppelin raids on cities either -- Antwerp was bombed in the first months of the war, and Paris later in 1914. Also, a German aeroplane dropped a bomb on Dover on Christmas Eve 1914 (it supposedly hit a cabbage patch).

[Ray Girvan]

Yes, very good. The prevalent belief that wars would be played out through a twin emphasis on aerial bombing and gas warfare - I guess extrapolated from World War I - is well-exemplified in HG Wells' "Things to Come".

[John F. Ptak]

True, though Wells saw through to a post-apocalyptic future (governed by Technocracy types) that would've eliminated wars. I wrote about this a little two weeks ago (with a film clip!), though I was much more interested in the Moon Canon than anything else. http://tinyurl.com/yk9tsnj

[John F. Ptak]

Airminded: mea culpa! I knew as soon as I wrote "first" that I should've changed it immediately to "extremely early" but then forgot. Thanks so much for pointing all of this out!