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Terror bombing is a strategy of deliberately bombing civilian targets and strafing civilians in order to break the Morale of the enemy and make the civilian population of the enemy panic. LEGAL FRAMEWORK International law in 1945 International law relating to aerial area bombardment before and during World War II rests on the treaties of 1864, 1899, 1907 which constituted the definition of most of the laws of at that time. The most relevant of these treaties are the Hague Conventions of 1907 because they were the last treaties ratified before 1939 which specify the laws of war on aerial bombardment. Of these treaties there are two which have a direct bearing on this issue of bombardment. These are "Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907" and "Laws of War: Bombardment by Naval Forces in Time of War (Hague IX); October 18, 1907". It is significant that there is a different treaty which should be invoked for bombardment of land by land (Hague IV) and of land by sea (Hague IX). Hague IV which reaffirmed and updated Hague II (1899) contains the following clauses: :Article 25: The attack or bombardment of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended, is prohibited. :Article 26: The Commander of an attacking force, before commencing a bombardment, except in the case of an assault, should do all he can to warn the authorities. :Article 27: In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps should be taken to spare as far as possible edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not used at the same time for military purposes. :The besieged should indicate these buildings or places by some particular and visible signs, which should previously be notified to the assailants. In 1923 a draft convention, promoted by the United States was proposed: ''The Hague Rules of Air Warfare'', December, 1922-February, 1923", There are number of articles which would have directly affected how nations used aerial bombardment and defended against it; these are articles 18, 22 and 24. It was, however, never adopted in legally binding form. In response to a League Of Nations declaration against bombardment from the air, a draft convention in Amsterdam of 1938 would have provided specific definitions of what constituted a "undefended" town, excessive civilian casualties and appropriate warning. This draft convention makes the standard of being undefended quite high - any military units or anti-aircraft within the radius qualifies a town as defended. This convention, like the 1923 draft, was not ratified, nor even close to being ratified, when hostilities broke out in Europe . While the two conventions offer a guideline to what the belligerent powers were considering before the war, neither document was legally binding. After the war the judgement of the Nuremberg Trials , the records the decision that by 1939 these rules laid down in the 1907 Hague Convention were recognised by all civilised nations, and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war. Under this post-war decision, a country did not have to have ratified the 1907 Hague conventions in order to be bound by them. The legality of the status of area bombardment in during World War II rested on the language of 1899 and 1907, from a time before aerial mass bombardment was possible — language which, despite repeated diplomatic attempts, was not updated in the immediate run up to the conflict. In examining these events area bombardment in the light of International Humanitarian Law , it should be borne in mind that during the Second World War there was no agreement, treaty, convention or any other instrument governing the protection of the civilian population or civilian property, as the Conventions then in force dealt only with the protection of the wounded and the sick on the battlefield and in naval warfare, hospital ships, the laws and customs of war and the protection of prisoners of war. International law since 1945 In the post war environment, a series of treaties governing the Laws Of War were adopted starting in 1949. These Geneva Conventions would come into force, in no small part, because of a general reaction against the practices of the Second World War.
WORLD WAR I The first ever aerial bombardment of civilians was during World War I . On January 19 , 1915, in which two German Zeppelin s dropped 24 fifty-kilogram high-explosive bombs and ineffective three-kilogram incendiaries on Great Yarmouth , Sheringham , Kings Lynn , and the surrounding villages. In all, four people were killed, sixteen injured, and monetary damage was estimated at £7,740, although the public and media reaction were out of proportion to the death toll. There were a further nineteen raids in 1915, in which 37 tons of bombs were dropped, killing 181 people and injuring 455. Raids continued in 1916. London was accidentally bombed in May, and, in July, the Kaiser allowed directed raids against urban centres. There were 23 airship raids in 1916 in which 125 tons of ordnance were dropped, killing 293 people and injuring 691. Gradually British air defences improved. In 1917 and 1918 there were only eleven Zeppelin raids against England, and the final raid occurred on August 5, 1918, which resulted in the death of KK Peter Strasser , commander of the German Naval Airship Department. By the end of the war, 51 raids had been undertaken, in which 5,806 bombs were dropped, killing 557 people and injuring 1,358. The Zeppelin raids were complemented by the Gothaer bomber, which was the first heavier than air bomber to be used for Strategic Bombing . It has been argued that the raids were effective far beyond material damage in diverting and hampering wartime production, and diverting twelve squadrons and over 10,000 men to air defences. The calculations which were performed on the number of dead to the weight of bombs dropped would have a profound effect on the attitudes of the British Authorities and population in the interwar years, because as bombers became larger it was fully expected that deaths from aerial bombardment would approach those anticipated in the Cold War from the use of nuclear weapons. The fear of aerial attack on such a scale was one of the fundamental driving forces of British Appeasement in the 1930s. INTER WAR YEARS
Spanish Civil War In the 1930s, the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica both conducted aerial attacks during the Spanish Civil War . The Bombing Of Guernica was the foremost example, leading to the seminal painting of " Guernica " by the artist Picasso showing all the horror and terror of such attacks. Many other cities were also bombed in this conflict, including Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla, Zaragoza, Malaga, Bilbao, Alicante, and Valladolid. WORLD WAR II During the September Campaign , terror bombing became official policy of the German Air Force . The first city in Poland to be severely damaged by the German tactics was Wieluń . Many other Polish cities suffered the same fate including Frampol and the capital Warsaw . The tactics were later used in the Bombing Of Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1940 . The Luftwaffe carried out intensive bombing of cities in the United Kingdom , including London and Coventry , in a bombing campaign known in Britain as " The Blitz ", from September, 1940 , through May, 1941 . In World War II , the British RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF XXI Bomber Command both engaged in the Aerial Bombing Of Cities . Although they did not specifically target civilians, they did target civilian housing and other civilian infastructure which was known to cause a large loss of life among civilians. It is estimated, that from raids of Allied air forces on the Third Reich killed between 305,000 and 600,000 civilans of which about 80,000 were children . The primary objective of these attacks was to damage economic infrastructure to seriously weaken the enemy's ability to fight the war, in line with the doctrines of Total War . Senior Allied commanders and politicians also hoped, in the early years of the war, that the Morale of the Axis populations and governments could be so undermined by these tactics, that they would sue for peace. However the resilience of Londoners under the Blitz and the failures of Operation Gomorrah (the bombing of Hamburg) and the Battle Of Berlin to break the morale of the Germans, showed that this was unrealistic to all but the most ardent advocates of area bombardment like Arthur (Bomber) Harris . The Germans harboured similar unrealistic hopes for their V1 and V2 rockets. With only conventional warheads and limited to area targeting they did not make any difference to the military outcome. The Nazi government propaganda ministry made much of their use as reprisal weapons (''Vergeltungswaffen'') on the population of London in response to the Allied strategic bombing campaign waged against German cities. In the Pacific Theater , Japan specifically terror bombed Chinese civilian targets, inflicting massive civilian casualties in the Bombing Of Chongqing and various other bombings. The Fire-bombing Of Tokyo , Kobe , and other targets in Japan is another example.
Many see it as Victor's Justice that no one was ever tried at the post-war for participating in the decisions on, or execution of terror bombing. As no trial has ever decided upon the question, it is not possible to state that that aerial bombardment on enemy territory during World War II was or was not a war crime or a Crime Against Humanity . AERIAL BOMBARDMENTS SINCE WORLD WAR II Recent treaty obligations explicitly make the deliberate targeting of noncombatants a , NATO intended to bomb military and political targets in Serbia And Montenegro . However, scores of civilians were mistakenly killed in the bombings, leading to international protest. REFERENCES
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