The Pittsburgh Press (November 30, 1945)
Maj. Williams: Modern warfare
By Maj. Al Williams
There are those who insist that modern warfare must be total warfare in every respect.
This is just as erroneous as the opinion of Dr. Conant (president of Harvard) when he said, “Lethal gases were not used in the present war because they were ‘ineffective weapons.’”
The records of World War I refute this opinion. Likewise in World War II military experts thought enough of this ineffective weapon to manufacture millions of tons of it. But they didn’t dare use it for fear of reprisal.
Previous to this war, the objective of combat forces was not so much to kill the enemy as to wound him. When an enemy was dead, he was an erased account. When he was wounded, however, he became a liability, involving manpower and facilities to move him from the front to hospitals and to care for him there.
We started this war without airplanes adequate in type, quality or quantity, or careful plans for their employment. As soon as we got the planes we couldn’t wait for the plans. The result was the indiscriminate bombing of cities, homes, hospitals, and the mass destruction of men, women and children.
Some farsighted thinker had said that the true purpose was to “break the will of a people to fight.” Without thinking of how many different ways it might be done, we just went ahead and “destroyed” the people. Sure, munition factories and cities were legitimate military targets, but the homes and hospitals of noncombatants? Oh well – too bad. But they had to go too, because we thought the only way we could stop the factories was to destroy them.
Dead and wounded cities
The barbarism of warfare in the darkest days of history pale before the records of this war. Was this only because we had to destroy people to break the will of the people to fight? I don’t think so. If a wounded soldier is a greater liability than a dead soldier, why isn’t a wounded city a greater liability than a dead city?
But how could a city be wounded? Well, I caught one glimpse of a wounded city when Pittsburgh was completely isolated by raging floods.
The city’s distress was acute – no light, heat, or food supplies.
Visualize a city of a million people, munition-producing factories, homes and everything else that goes to make up a modern metropolis. All communications and transportation facilities between that city and the rest of the country are destroyed by airpower and not one person killed and not one factory or home razed. Cut off from the supplies of food, raw materials and medicines, this is the true picture of a wounded city.
Communication and transportation facilities are truly the prime military objectives of airpower.
We can do it again
The mass bombing of Germany did not stop the manufacture of the component parts of weapons and munitions in various sections of the country. The Germans couldn’t get these parts to the assembly people because all transportation facilities had been dislocated by our Air Forces. But this destruction of transportation facilities was accomplished only as incidental to the destruction of entire cities. Modern warfare does demand total effort, and total mass production. But only by barbaric thoughtless has the “total” idea been translated into “total destruction.”
Isn’t it about time that we planned a world agreement defining military objectives of war and holding warfare to those objectives. Today we are in the depths of degraded barbaric warfare. We were there before and raised ourselves to the plain of the Christian warrior’s code. And we can do this again.