IS Beheadings, Cruelties Have Always Been a Part of War Itself
(Tokyo’s Sumida River during idyllic past)
IS beheadings and other cruelties continue to shock comfortable moderns unaccustomed to atrocities, but they’ve always been a part of war. Underdogs hope to terrorize the timid into submission, thus ending conflicts earlier rather than later.
Vlad the Impaler had to do something to turn back rapacious Turks from overrunning eastern Europe, didn’t he? Strong fear is a shock-and-awe deterrent, an alternative to long, stalemated attrition. The Turks themselves once sent thousands of Russian POWs home afoot, but all blinded except that each 100th soldier could keep one eye to act as a guide.
US novelist Kurt Vonnegut (bareheaded photo) was a POW in WW2 Dresden when, it is reported, 600,000 civilians died in firebombing raids.
On March 10, 1945, the firebombing of Tokyo was well underway as 300 B-29s dropped over 2,000 tons of incendiary napalm and magnesium bombs, killing at least 100,000 in an attempt to end the war in the Pacific.
Though bombing campaigns seem more abstract than foxhole combat, war is never polite or humane. Given their druthers, military planners always prefer just military targets early in a war, but the realization inevitably sets in that a country’s war machine includes the whole population, not just the combatants.
Ten square miles of the city were wiped out completely, as carbon monoxide poisoning competed with lack of oxygen to claim lives on a massive scale. The picturesque Sumida River was turned into a boiling cauldron for those who sought refuge there. Similar attacks on Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka soon followed, but it was the atomic bombs that accelerated the firebombing strategy and brought the war to closure.
After a war, the civilians are once again turned into innocents as the top leaders of military regimes are blamed more fully, at least on the side of the vanquished. Japanese who had relocated to the country were largely spared, as had the children during the Battle of Britain.
With more and more people crowding into urban areas, it seems likely that what happened in Tokyo and other cities in both Europe and Japan will be part of future warfare. Upfront deterrents will be as lurid and heinous as possible in order to get countries to give up the fight. Proponents believe that more lives are actually saved this way than the drawn out, grinding-down alternative of attrition.
