” ‘...three principles of international law... applicable to warfare from the air...it is against international law to bomb civilians as such...targets which are aimed at from the air must be legitimate military objectives and must be capable of identification...reasonable care must be taken in attacking those military objectives so that by carelessness a civilian...population...is not bombed.’
- Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in the House of Commons, June 21, 1938...” [Captain Walker, post 170]
Neville wasn’t really up to the job. He’d have been a disappointment to his dad, had old Joe lived so long.
Citing PM Chamberlain as justification for condemning Allied aerial bombardment strategies during the Second World War isn’t much of a gambit.
“International law” has never been set in stone. It’s a shadowy mishmash of vaguely good intentions forever in a fluid state, changing in accordance with the whims of the various nations and societies who purport to agree with it and claim to live by it; despite what attorneys, moralizers, and social engineers yearn for, it’s honored more in the breach than in the observance. Nations large and small cling to it when it suits them, level accusations of violations against adversaries when it suits them, and plead reasons of state when it suits them to ignore it.
The only individuals who take it seriously - in the United States at least - are deficient in understanding, incapable of leading responsibly, and ought to be kept as far from the levers of power as possible.
It is laughable to discover anyone at this late date who attempts to hang a guilty verdict on the UK government for any of its actions or policies of the period 1939-45. Ironic, too; it’s arguable that the UK was the most morally aware and morally compliant power to be involved in that conflict.
Anyone from Pope John Paul II to Donald Trump to the millions of people who were publicly stating that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a Very Stupid Thing to Do are all too familiar with these lines.
But the truth of these words does nothing to deny the existence of a Natural Law we are obliged to follow.