How war dehumanises everyone it touches

Dresden 1945, view from the City Hall.
Credit: By Deutsche Fotothek‎, CC BY-SA 3.0 de.

On a recent
visit to one of my favourite haunts in London, Gloucester Books, I flicked
through the secondhand paperbacks and old magazines that were fading in the
sun. The leading article in a National
Geographic Magazine commemorated the crews of the US Eighth Army Air Force for their
forbearance and sacrifice during WW2. Nothing unusual in that, but the honour
extended to their bombing raids over German cities. The story focused mainly on
the former pilots and had photos of young men running towards their planes,
waves and smiles as they climbed in, each touching for luck an illustration
painted on the side of some forties' pin-up girl with red lips.

The men, who
were now grey-haired, appeared kind and benevolent, all the more so through
their understandably emotional reunion. The editorial, too, was kind. It
claimed that German civilians were regrettably but justifiably killed during
'surgical' bombing raids owing to legitimate enemy targets being situated near
built-up residential areas. It sounded familiar, and sadly all too recent. I
dropped the magazine into the pile in disgust.

I thought
about the Lancaster bombers thundering through the night sky, wave after wave disgorging an evil alchemy over hundreds of thousands
of civilians—the elderly unable to run, the children
clutching toys, all bursting into flames. And I thought about the campaign of
dehumanisation that continued into the last days of the war that portrayed all
our enemies, and even their children, as less than human.

This campaign
was hardly subtle, with the enemy depicted as bugs. Magazines carried cartoons showing
Italians,
Germans and Japanese as part cockroach, and prior to the mass incendiary
bombing of Japanese cities, the US Marines' magazine Leatherneck displayed a cartoon of a half-human, half-insect creature entitled Louseous Japanicas to accompany an article that
called for "enemy breeding grounds to be completely annihilated."

In the month
following the article—March 1945—seemingly
endless waves
of B-29s roared across Tokyo, dropping one million bombs containing 2,000 tons
of incendiaries. In under three hours, over 100,000 people lay dead and one
million were homeless. The firebombing of 67 cities over the following five months
resulted in the further deaths of at least half a million people—a deliberate
policy of wiping out civilians living in the densely populated poorer
districts. With no remorse, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay openly declared, "They were
scorched and boiled and baked to death." Although it didn’t dampen their
enthusiasm, bomber crews said that the stench of burning flesh rose high into
the air, forcing them to use oxygen masks to keep from vomiting. At the end of
that five month period came atomic destruction.

The writer Kurt Vonnegut—an eyewitness to the Dresden raid and
deeply troubled throughout his life by what he described as ‘the greatest massacre in European history’—said that from what he had picked up the USAAF did not
enjoy bombing German towns, unlike their British counterparts who saw some
sport in it. Nonetheless, they carried out the raids, and far from attempting
to ‘precision-bomb’ military
targets the Americans played a key part in RAF Bomber Command’s drive to terrorise populations by round-the-clock
bombing.

Over 1200 Allied
bombers dropped more
than 3,000 tons of incendiaries over Dresden, a thousand tons more than were
dropped in the Tokyo raids in the following month. The official line was that
the war would be cut short by demoralising the enemy, achieved by firebombing
civilians and destroying their entire socio-cultural life: hospitals,
libraries, universities, houses and schools. Whilst some influential figures
such as George Orwell called for the bombings to continue, many in Britain
empathised with the German civilians and protested, including the people of
heavily bombed Bethnal Green: it didn’t work in the Great War, it didn’t work in the London Blitz, so why would it
work now? The bombing continued regardless.

Hamburg,
described as Germany’s Hiroshima where more people
were killed in one night in July 1943 than in the whole of the London Blitz, was
bombed a total of 69
times before the end of the war. The allies stepped up the level of bombing
after the war was as good as won, with a thousand planes at a time flying over
towns. Over a million bombs were dropped on Germany in the final months of the
war, and the intensity continued even into the last weeks. Many of the bombing
raids were conducted on towns with high cultural but low military significance,
including small cathedral and university towns such as Freiburg.
Some indication of the ferocity of the attacks is given by the writer A.C. Grayling:

"Phosphorous,
magnesium and thickened or gelled petroleum (the best example of which is ‘napalm’, invented at Harvard University in 1942 and used by
the USAAF in Japan later in the war) were almost impossible to extinguish,
splashing viscously and adhesively over buildings and people like lava, and
burning at ferocious temperatures. People who leaped into canals when splashed
with burning phosphorous found to their horror that it would spontaneously
reignite when they got out of the water. Among the incendiaries were scattered
2-kilogram ‘X’ bombs with a delayed fuse, designed to explode later
when fire-fighters and other emergency workers had arrived on the scene."

Cities were
reduced to kindling by dropping thousands of ‘Blockbusters’ on entire
residential districts—bombs that blasted whole blocks apart and tore the roofs
from buildings so that the high intensity incendiary devices that followed
could reach their interiors, including basement shelters. The idea was to
engulf the city in a hurricane of fire. Among the fallen ruins families were
found huddled together in the centre of rooms with their arms around each
other, making their last stand. It appeared as though they were made of wax.
The asphalt in the city streets caught fire, and large areas were deprived of
oxygen by the firestorms that raged at one hundred and fifty miles per hour,
leaving civilians the option of suffocating in their cellars or trying to make
a run for it—which meant running through the equivalent of an open air blast
furnace to almost certain death.

Eyewitnesses
spoke of adults cremated to the size of small dolls, of arms and legs
everywhere, of whole families burnt to death, and of people on fire running
from burned coaches that were filled with civilian refugees and dead rescuers.
The rapidly rising hot air above the bombed areas caused cold air to rush in,
drawing people into the escalating tornado. Survivors reported people who dropped
on the spot from lack of oxygen, like a device unplugged; others were seen to
be hysterical, dragging off their clothes as they burst into flames, and
everywhere people were helplessly, and what must have seemed inexplicably,
pulled backwards and upwards into the raging fire winds.

One spoke of
her mother’s bid to get her family to safety. In the race against
the firestorm she lost her older sister and baby twins. Like many others, they
looked for them in vain, and spent the last hours of the night in a hospital
cellar among people who lay dying in agony. They went back to the tenement
house the next day, but everyone was dead. There were so many dead in the
cities that disease was the next major threat, resulting in thousands of bodies
being heaped together and set ablaze. Was this what Churchill had in mind when
he called for an "exterminating
attack" on
Germany?

The historian Max Hastings has stated that these bombing
missions could not be regarded as war crimes, for ultimately they were aimed at
bringing about Germany's military defeat, and as such the deeds had no moral
equivalence with the crimes of the Nazis. But aren’t all acts of
mass murder equivalent? Grayling thinks so: he maintains that the British air
force was engaged in the deliberate and merciless mass murder of German
civilians on a devastating scale—with as many people killed by bombing as
British men killed altogether in the First World War. Moreover, he contends
that such men obeyed orders and are therefore as morally guilty as those who
issued them.

This was not an isolated instance. The bombers returned to repeat
the procedure, much to the bewilderment of the remaining population who were
making their way out of the city with their belongings, such as they were. In
his book On
the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald gives an account of a homeless woman
whose suitcase sprang open in the street. The only contents
that dropped out were the bones of her dead child. A review in The
Guardian of Sebald’s book described the woman as deranged, but it seems to me entirely sane to carry
the bones of your children with you until a suitable place for burial can be
found—a place where you might visit them
later on.

Dehumanisation—the
process of debasing one's perceived enemy—is not the preserve of evil people:
humiliation, alienation, non-recognition, exclusion, the indiscriminate
slaughter of civilians, and even campaigns of genocide, all fall well within
the realm of possibility for the majority of human beings. There are many
examples since WW2 of dehumanization at the extreme: Vietnam, Indonesia, Rwanda,
Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria, where populations
have also been described as less than human, and where civilians have been killed
as a result of so-called 'precision bombing' or drowned in their attempts
to flee from war and persecution.

The treatment
of other people as lesser beings has been the subject of research within the
field of social psychology for over half a century, but whilst this work helps
to explain the proclivities of our darker side, the solution to dehumanization,
and ultimately annihilation, lies within the broader context of history,
politics, philosophy and social activism—in struggles for emancipation from oppression
or dehumanization in all its forms.

Whilst it is
the dominant order for many people, dehumanisation is not a historical
necessity but a distortion. For radical educator and social activist Paulo Freire, humanization is the natural order.
Freire was keen to point out that, in an effort to restore their humanity,
oppressed groups who have been treated as less than human tend to struggle
against their oppressors. But given the available role models the danger is
that oppression will simply be practiced in reverse. The real task, he argues,
is for the oppressed to liberate not just themselves but their oppressors, and thereby
recover the humanity of both. This sounds a bit like learning to love your
enemy, which has always been a good place to start.