The devastating air-raids on Barcelona and Tarragona by General Franco's aviators has aroused the deepest disgust and anxiety, and representations are being made to him on the subject by both Great Britain-and France. Residents of Shanghai have n able to witness the disastrous effects of bombing from the air on crowded towns, and, though they actually had comparatively little to fear from it, have learned enough to realize the ruination and the mortality caused by these recen: raids on the above two cities, The raids appear to have divided the counsels of the Catalonian Government, and, while there is one section of it willing to put an early end to the war at almost any price, there is still another which is equally determined to fight to the bitter end. As a weapon for the purpose of striking terror into the civilian population of a country the aeroplane and its bombs have been decidedly overrated, as witness the manner in which the population of Madrid has stuck to its guns despite the almost daily bombings to which it has been subjected. There is a very large portion of world opinion which deplores the bombing of open towns, which feels that, even if the process does not indeed spread all the terror it was expected it would, international agreement should be reached outlawing this form of warfare. An attempt to bring about agreement on this subject was made at Geneva between 1932 and 1934, when the subject was discussed by the representatives of no fewer than sixty states with such divergent points of view that the discussion came to nothing. It was said that the British reservation regarding bombing in outlying districts was responsible for the failure of the negotiations. That untruth has been sedulously fostered, but is entirely unsustainable, for in 1933, during the period over which the discussions lasted, Mr. Anthony Eden, then Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs was reported as follows in the House of Commons:—
"He was convinced that the conference did appreciate the immense strength of their local case, and for them not to have put forward the reservation would have been a derogation of their responsibility in certain parts of the world. The size of this problem in relation to the size of other problems was minute. If the occasion arose when the only thing that stood in the way of agreement on a Convention was the reservation, then à very different situation would have arisen from the situation at present.
On February 2 of this year Mr. Eden disclosed that the Government had set afoot an expert enquiry for the purpose of reopening with other Powers the question of a general international agreement to prevent or restrict the air bombardment of civil populations. How far that enquiry has progressed has not ¿up to the present been disclosed.
In the meantime it is profitable to review what has already been attempted with regard to the control of air bombing. A commission of jurists representing Great Britain, the United States, France, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands prepared draft rules of air warfare at the Hague in 1922-23. Article 24 of the draft rules forbade aerial bombardment unless directed at a military objective, defined as follows:—
Military forces; military works; military establishments or depots; factories constituting important and well known centres engaged in the manufacture of arms, ammunition or distinctively military supplies; lines of communication or transportation used for military purposes.
Within that narrow definition, however, must also be included commercial docks and har-hours, merchant shipping and railway junctions and terminals, even if not used for military purposes, for, obviously, an enemy's lines of communication must be legitimate objects of attack. From this it follows that towns through which railways or canals pass may be attacked from the air so long as the bombs are directed at the means of communication, and bombing being what it is, it is inevitable that the towns themselves must suffer, for mis-hits in towns mean slaughter. Those rules were never incorporated in an international convention, and at the moment there is no code bearing upon the conduct of aerial warfare.
It might be argued that these raids on Barcelona and Tarragona might very well come within the definition, but it is apparent from all that has occurred in Spain during the civil war that the only real military objective was to strike such terror into the hearts of the civilian population that they would beg for peace at any price. Despite the shockingly high mortality amongst civilians, despite the widespread ruination that has been caused, aerial bombardments have not had the effect it was thought they would. It would be idle to claim that air raids, such as those of last week have no effect at all, but it may be urged with all good reason that the results have been entirely without relation to the magnitude of the conception, that they have been so comparatively small that there should be no real objection to the abstention from such practices in the future. It is apparent that no agreement completely to refrain from aerial bombing will ever be reached. If it were it is doubtful whether it would ever be fully observed, so that the definition of proper objectives arrived at by the jurists at the Hague is probably the only one which would emerge from any international convention which may be held in the future. Aerial bombing, in all probability, will never be completely banned. The doctrine is rapidly gaining more and more support that in warfare nowadays it is not merely armies that are at war with each other, but the whole of the civilian populations behind them, that starvation of a people by blockade is no less terrible than sudden death from the air. There is much to be said for that argument, but the world is coming to a wretched pass when it can contemplate the wholesale unrestricted slaughter of civilian men, women and children, and fail to take such steps as might mitigate the great evil. It is to be hoped that Franco-British representations to the Spanish insurgents will have some humanizing effect, though no surprise need be felt if they fail to do so.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.