Killing Innocents

A few days ago, the Washington Post ran this review, by Jonathan Yardley, of A.C. Grayling's "Among the Dead Cities:  The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombings of Civilians in Germany and Japan."  The review opens with this:

In the summer of 1943, the Bomber Command of Britain's Royal Air Force began what it chose to call Operation Gomorrah, "five major and several minor" aerial attacks on the German city of Hamburg, "with the aim of wiping Hamburg from the map of Europe." Most of the bombs it dropped were incendiaries, "small bombs filled with highly flammable chemicals, among them magnesium, phosphorus and petroleum jelly." The result was "the first ever firestorm created by bombing, and it caused terrible destruction and loss of life," almost entirely among civilians. At least 45,000 human corpses were found in the ruins, and more than 30,000 buildings were destroyed. A.C. Grayling writes:

"In the cellars, otherwise unscathed people suffocated to death. Police reports and eyewitness accounts later confirmed many of the horror stories told 'of demented Hamburgers carrying bodies of deceased relatives in their suitcases -- a man with the corpse of his wife and daughter, a woman with the mummified body of her daughter, or other women with the heads of their dead children.' "

At about this time, Winston Churchill watched "a film showing RAF bombers in action over the Ruhr." According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?" Quite to the contrary was the view of Bomber Command, in particular its commander, Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, who "wanted to make a tremendous show" (the words are his own) in Hamburg and got what he wanted. But the question remains: Was the indiscriminate bombing of civilians -- in Hamburg, in Dresden, in Tokyo, in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki -- justifiable militarily, or was it "in whole or in part morally wrong"?

According to Yardley,

[Grayling] insists, correctly, that "acts of injustice can be perpetrated in the course of a just war, and if the injustices committed are themselves very great, their commission can threaten the overall justice of the war in which they took place." St. Thomas Aquinas argued that "on three conditions, war can be justified." These are "first, that there is a just cause of war, second, that it is begun on proper authority, and third, that it is waged with the right intention, meaning that it aims at 'the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil.' " Obviously World War II satisfied all of these conditions. But what about two others formulated by modern just-war theorists: "that to be just a war must have a reasonable chance of success, and that the means used to conduct it must be proportional to the ends sought."

It is on this final condition that bombing of civilians comes a cropper. Leave aside all the other objections to such bombing, moral and otherwise -- and there are plenty of them -- the simple fact is that it is disproportionately cruel, destructive and wanton. The ends sought -- defeat of Germany and Japan -- were in sight before the bombings of 1944 and 1945, and even the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 was out of proportion to the gains it allegedly brought to the Allied cause, if in fact there were any. The "horrific firestorm" it produced may have been small compared to the atrocities of Auschwitz, but it was horrific all the same. Grayling is right to insist that by acknowledging that we do not "have clean hands ourselves," we would be in a far stronger position to condemn "the people who plunged the world into war and carried out gross crimes under its cover." As matters stand now, we are at the very least open to the charge of hypocrisy.

I could be wrong, but I would not have thought that St. Thomas's view was that "acts of injustice can be perpetrated in the course of a just war[.]"  Rather, I would have thought that his view was that some acts -- acts that are not intrinsically immoral -- which might ordinarily, all things considered, be unjustifiable are justifiable (i.e, are not "acts of injustice") in the context of a just war.  Am I wrong?