ADVANCE TO BARBARISM

The Development of Total Warfare From Serajevo to Hiroshima

by F.J.P. Veale

To

PROFESSOR HARRY ELMER BARNES

A TIRELESS EXPOSER OF HISTORICAL MYTHS

Contents

Foreword by The Very Rev. William Ralph Inge

Foreword by The Rt. Hon. Lord Hankey

Author’s Introduction

Chapter

1. Primeval Simplicity

2. Organized Warfare

3. Europe’s Civil Wars

4. “Civilized Warfare” (The First Phase)

5. “Civilized Warfare” (The Second Phase)

6. The Splendid Decision

7. The Nuremberg Trials

8. The Last Phase

9. Postscript

Bibliography

Index [omitted]

The Devin-Adair Company, New York 1968

Copyright © F. J. P. Veale, 1953, 1968

Note: An earlier version of this book was printed by the C. C. Nelson Company in 1953. The present edition is an extensive revision of that text.

FOREWORD

By The Very Rev. William Ralph Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s[*]

An early version of this book was first published in England in 1948. A second revised and greatly enlarged version appeared in the United States in 1953. This version was then translated into German and published in Hamburg in 1954; and a second edition was published in Wiesbaden in 1962. The present edition is a major revision of the earlier versions.

I am glad that a new edition of Advance to Barbarism is called for. In this book, first published in England in 1948 under the nom de plume “A. Jurist”, the author, Mr. F. J. P. Veale, said, and said very well, what needed to be said by someone, and, we may add, what in 1948 in most countries nobody would have been allowed to say.

I disliked the Nuremberg Trials for three reasons: First, trials of the vanquished by the victors are never satisfactory and are generally unfair. Secondly, the execution of the political and military leaders of a beaten side by the victors sets a most dangerous precedent. The Germans were certainly guilty of “crimes against humanity”; but war is not a humane business and it would always be possible for the victors in any way to find enough examples of atrocities to justify vindictive punishments. After the next war, if there is one, trials and hangings will follow as a matter of course. We may go further. One of the indictments of the German leaders was not that they waged war inhumanly, but that they made war aggressively. They did; they desired large annexations of territory in the East. But have we not heard of other nations who have acquired extensive empires without consulting the wishes of the inhabitants? Thirdly, one of the judges—Russia—ought certainly to have been in the dock and not on the bench.

The main object of Advance to Barbarism is to call attention to the terrible retrogression of civilized humanity towards the worst cruelties of barbarism. The so-called Wars of Religion were sometimes savage, but in the eighteenth century it was possible to talk of civilized warfare, in which certain humane conventions were observed. Gibbon notices this advance in decent behaviour with complacency. A writer in the eighteenth century might reasonably speak of war as a relic of barbarism which might soon be abolished altogether. The Napoleonic Wars, except the guerilla fighting in Spain, were not fertile in atrocities; the decadence came later.

I comforted myself at one time by thinking that these horrors were confined to three nations, Germany, Spain and Russia. Nothing can be said to extenuate the excesses practised by the Germans. The only fair questions were, who were the culprits? and who ought to be the judges? It is not usual to hang officers for obeying cruel orders. The citizens in a police state in abdicating their rights as men have ceased to admit the duty of obeying conscience. As for Spain, it is high time to resume friendly relations with a noble people. But it must be admitted that there is a strain of cruelty in the Spanish character. In the country of the Inquisition and the bull-ring, civil war was not likely to be gentle. In speaking of Russia, one cannot do better than quote what Amiel, whose perspicacity is never at fault, wrote as early as 1856: “The harsh gifts of late have left their stamp on the race of the Muscovites. A certain sombre obstinacy, a sort of primitive ferocity, a background of savage harshness, which under the sway of circumstances might become implacable and even ruthless, a coldly indomitable force that would rather wreck the world than yield, the indestructible instinct of the barbarian horde still persisting in a half-civilized nation.… What terrible masters would the Russians be if ever they should spread the might of their rule over the southern countries! A polar despotism, a tyranny such as the world has not yet known, silent as the darkness, keen as ice, unfeeling as bronze, a slavery without compensation or relief.”

Perhaps in times to come, not so far distant, it may not be so readily forgotten that this was the enemy against whom the Germans fought.

But are there only three culprits, two of whom may plead some excuse? What of the destruction of Hiroshima by the Americans, of Dresden by the British, when the war was practically over? It is not pleasant to think of these things.

We must not speak too positively of retrogression. There was another side to European humanity before the insanity of nationalism. In dealing with “inferior races” the record was not good. The Irish have not forgotten the Tudors and Oliver Cromwell. Or listen to this horrible extract from the Daily Journal of March 1737: “They write from Antigua that they continued executing the Negroes concerned in the plot to murder all the inhabitants of the island: sixty-nine had been executed, of whom five had been broken on the wheel, six were hung upon gibbets and starved to death, of whom one lived nine nights and eight days and fifty-eight were chained to stakes and burnt.” Or think of the tortures inflicted on the assailant of Louis XV, which were gleefully witnessed by at least one English gentleman. Our ancestors were not all saints.

Some of us hope that now that war has been divested of all romance and chivalry, it may soon go the way of cannibalism and human sacrifice. It is a matter of life or death for civilization.

W. R. INGE
26th March 1951.

FOREWORD

By The Rt. Hon. Lord Hankey, P.C., G.C.B., G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O.[†]

In the Introduction of my book, Politics: Trials and Errors, published in 1950, I wrote, “I am indebted for inspiration and suggestion to Advance to Barbarism by F. J. P. Veale who wrote as “A. Jurist”; it displays great knowledge of the military art and profound research into the historical aspects of all that relates to War Crime Trials.”

Advance to Barbarism was first published in England in 1948. It was a noteworthy little book because it dealt for the first time with such then recent innovations as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations and the trial of prisoners of war by their captors as symptoms of a world-wide development which had begun in 1914.

At the time of its publication this point of view was considered so wilfully perverse that no British newspaper with a national circulation would review this book.

Fortunately, however, this book did not pass unnoticed. Among those who praised it was the Very Rev. William Ralph Inge, formerly Dean of St. Paul’s, who later contributed a Foreword to the revised and greatly enlarged Edition which was published in the United States in 1953. This American edition was translated into Spanish and published in Spain under the title “El Crimen de Nuremberg” in 1954, and later in the same year into German and published in Germany under the title “Der Barbarei entgegen”.

Since the publication of the first edition in 1948 many new facts have come to light and public opinion has changed. Few now maintain that an accuser is a fit person to act as judge of his own charges, in fact many now remember that they were always opposed to the Nuremberg Trials, although they omitted to make public their opinion at the time. The publication of The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939-45 by H.M. Stationery Office in September 1961 confirmed officially with a wealth of detail the view expressed in this book concerning the character of the air attack on Germany during the Second World War.

I recommend this new edition to the reader.

HANKEY, 7th February 1962

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

Tardily professional historians have at last begun to realise that the events of the first half of the 20th century have presented them with a problem of unique difficulty.

From the first it was apparent that 1914 was certain to be a memorable date in history because in that year began a war in which a vast number would be doomed to die violent deaths and which would certainly lead to sweeping changes to the map of Europe if only for the worse. For a decade historians limited themselves to investigating the origins of this struggle which they explained to their own satisfaction by attributing it to the chance that Germany was ruled by an emperor who was obsessed by an insane ambition to conquer the world. From patriotic motives, at first to assist the war effort and later to justify the dictated terms of peace, professional historians, many of them men of great eminence and learning, laboured to confirm and endorse the Wicked Kaiser Myth. Once however this had been exposed as an impudent propaganda fiction, they failed to find any generally acceptable explanation for the blind homicidal frenzy which seized the nations of Europe during the period, 1914-1918, and ultimately they became resigned to leaving the problem for solution to the psychologists and psychiatrists. Thus the First World War came to be regarded as a bizarre episode of history, mainly of significance as a grim warning to posterity of the consequences of allowing greed and pugnacity to overcome reason.

The conclusion that the great struggle which broke out in Europe in 1914 resulted from a pathological wave of hysteria which afflicted the most advanced nations of mankind in that year is now held up for admiration as the most remarkable achievement of modern historical research. But this diagnosis was first put forward over thirty years ago by Field-Marshal Lord Allenby who bluntly declared, “The Great War was a lengthy period of general insanity.”[‡] The view that the beginning of this struggle in 1914 and still more that its continuation after 1916 were essentially the result of an irrational and compulsive urge was accepted as self-evident and undeniable throughout the thirty-nine weekly televised programmes entitled ‘The Great War’ broadcast by the B.B.C. in 1965.

Not until after 1939 when another world war broke out, rendered inevitable by the terms of peace imposed on the vanquished after the First World War, was it realised how profound were the effects which the latter struggle had had on the character, outlook and ethics of the average Western civilized man. Since the times when the Dark Ages had gradually evolved into the Middle Ages, the story of civilization in Europe had been one of slow but steady upward progress. The advance of civilization apart from occasional fluctuations remained continuous until the beginning of the 20th century, by which time it had come to be regarded as an established law of nature that progress was an automatic process of unending duration. As the late Dean Inge observed, belief in Progress became a kind of religion with most educated men. Apart from the steady accumulation of scientific knowledge, arbitrary violence had gradually become controlled by the rule of law, manners had become milder and in warfare primitive savagery had become modified by the tacit adoption at the end of the 17th century of an unwritten code of restrictions and restraints which later codified at the conventions of Geneva and the Hague, became known as the Rules of Civilized Warfare. The fundamental principle of this code was that hostilities should be restricted to the armed and uniformed forces of the combatants, from which followed the corollary that civilians must be left entirely outside the scope of military operations. It was widely believed that war, being an essentially barbarous method of settling international disputes, was bound ultimately to die out. With seemingly full justification the outlook at the beginning of the 20th century was one of unclouded optimism.

As early as 1770, by which time the horrors of the Thirty Years War had become generally forgotten, the Comte de Guibert could express the already prevailing complacency by writing:—

“Today the whole of Europe is civilized. Wars have become less cruel. Save in combat no blood is shed; prisoners are respected; towns are no more destroyed; the countryside is no more ravaged; conquered peoples are only obliged to pay some sort of contributions which are often less than the taxes they pay to their own sovereign.”

In the 19th century this happy state of affairs was taken for granted: no one dreamed that it would shortly come to an abrupt end. To us it seems fantastically unreal, now that prisoners of war are faced with the prospect of being subjected to war-crimes trials at the pleasure of their captors, or of being sent to work indefinitely as slave labour; towns with their inhabitants are obliterated by terror bombing; conquered peoples are uprooted from their homelands and mass-deported abroad; and the property of the vanquished is either appropriated as a matter of course by the victors or systematically destroyed.

The war which broke out in Europe in 1914 seemed at first indistinguishable from the civil wars which previously had periodically devastated that continent. During the struggle, however, quite unforeseen by any one, civilization began a retrograde movement without a parallel in history. While the struggle lasted this retrograde movement was not generally perceived but after the wave of optimism generated by the creation of the League of Nations had faded, the realization dawned that somehow the times had become out of joint. Working below the surface a profound psychological change had been taking place. Many of the men then living in obscurity who in the next decade were to rise to power and fame—for example Yagoda, Stalin’s chief of the G.P.U. during the Great Purge, Heinrich Himmler, the S.S. leader, and Adolf Eichmann, the organiser of systematic genocide—might have been reincarnations of men who had flourished in the times of the Merovingian Kings. Even the outlook of so irreproachable a character as Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard with his then novel recipe for victory—“bomb the enemy civilian population until they surrender”—was nearer akin to that of an Iroquois war chief than to that of a professional European soldier of the 19th century.[§]

Hardly perceptible for twenty-one years, when hostilities were resumed in 1939 the reversion to primitive practices in warfare soon became headlong until at last all pretence of complying with the Rules of Civilized Warfare was abandoned and both sides tacitly adopted the principle that any act was justifiable if it held out even a remote hope that it might stave off the frightful consequences of defeat.

An explanation is clearly needed to account for the fact that governments composed of educated men, reared in the 19th century and brought up to accept as a matter of course the standards of conduct then accepted by everyone, should have so quickly and easily overcome their natural repugnance and adopted and carried out such enormities as the systematic extermination of a defenceless minority on account of its racial Origin, the mass-deportation of enemy populations numbering millions, and the deliberate slaughter of enemy civilians by terror bombing in order to generate among the survivors a disposition to surrender unconditionally.

It was many years after hostilities had ceased in 1945 before historians realized that this problem existed. In Germany the thinking powers of historians were for long paralysed by the ruthless brainwashing to which they with the rest of their countrymen were subjected in 1945 to force them to accept the propaganda fictions of the victors. In Britain and the United States historians were so preoccupied investigating the crimes against humanity committed by the vanquished that they overlooked the background of concentrated terror bombing against which these crimes had been committed. They failed to realize that genocide and terror bombing were not isolated phenomena but symptoms of the same retrograde movement which had mysteriously overtaken Western civilization.

It is commonly assumed that genocide and terror bombing were accepted respectively by the governments of Germany and Britain without protest or opposition from those they ruled who, it is assumed, were as completely subject to the spirit of the times as their rulers. The facts as now disclosed do not support either assumption but the subject remains uninvestigated.

Taking first the case of Germany, a strict censorship enforced by drastic penalties controlled the publication of news and the expression of opinion. It is impossible to determine the number of those who expressed opposition to the regime as any who so ventured came to an untimely end. One cannot protest effectively in secret and to protest publicly was equivalent to suicide. It is doubtful also whether any specific information was available concerning what was taking place behind barbed wire in the concentration camps, most of which were in remote occupied territory, inaccessible to civilians. It has been contended that it would have been impossible to put to death millions of persons without some facts about it becoming generally known. Estimates of the number of victims vary from ten millions to less than a quarter of a million, and the larger the estimate accepted the stronger this contention becomes. It will always be a subject for regret that the victorious Allies did not put the question beyond dispute by appointing in 1945 a commission composed of impartial judges selected from neutral countries to investigate the facts. The findings of such a body would have been accepted by posterity as final. The Allies however deliberately rejected this obvious course. The findings of the Nuremberg Tribunal are of course worthless: a court which convicted Admiral Dönitz against whom the prosecution had failed to produce even the shadow of a prima facie case was clearly incapable of disposing even of the simplest problem. After the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 another opportunity arose to dispose of this question by an enquiry by an impartial tribunal. Once again this course was emphatically rejected, a fact which in itself is highly significant. It remains therefore impossible to say with confidence whether the German people consented without protest to the departures from civilized standards, by its rulers during the Second World War.

Recently indeed several books have appeared disclosing that throughout the war there was an active underground resistance movement in Germany. Those who participated however seem to have been mainly political rivals of Hitler, jealous of his rise to power and intent on bringing about the downfall of his regime so as to be able to replace it by a regime of their own. His crimes against humanity do not seem to have greatly concerned them.

The situation in Britain was very different. There was no official prohibition on expressions of opinion as such, but persons who ventured to express opinions which the authorities deemed might hamper the war effort were put in prison without a trial or even without a specific complaint against them. With regard to the bombing of the enemy civilian population, everyone knew that civilians in Germany were being slaughtered wholesale but it was believed that this was an unavoidable by-product of an air offensive against military objectives. The comforting reflection was accepted that the German civilian population could at any moment bring its sufferings to an end by surrendering unconditionally.

It would not indeed be correct to say that what was officially termed “the strategic bombing offensive” was carried out to the last day of the war without opposition, protest or misgivings. Questions were asked in Parliament as to the character of this air offensive which were fully reported in the Press with the answers given. Certainly it cannot be said that the Ministers of the Crown upon whom fell the duty of answering these questions, resorted to evasion or equivocation. In accordance with the British tradition they kept a stiff upper lip and gave clear and emphatic replies, without any signs of embarrassment such as might have been expected from them having regard to the fact that as recently as March 1942 Mr. Churchill’s War Cabinet had accepted the plan laid before it by Professor Lindemann by which ‘top priority’ as an objective for air attack was in future to be given to “working-class houses in densely populated residential areas.”

This decision of the War Cabinet was kept a closely guarded secret from the British public for nearly twenty years until it was unobtrusively revealed in 1961 in a little book entitled Science and Government by the physicist and novelist, Sir Charles Snow, in which occurred the following oft-quoted passage which was immediately translated and published in every language in the world:

“Early in 1942 Professor Lindemann, by this time Lord Cherwell and a member of the Cabinet, laid a cabinet paper before the Cabinet on the strategic bombing of Germany. It described in quantitative terms the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next eighteen months (approximately March 1943–September 1943). The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them and so are bound to waste bombs; factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit. The paper claimed that—given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of aircraft—it would be possible, in all the larger towns of Germany (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants), to destroy 50 per cent of all houses.” (Pages 47-48).

Terror bombing as proposed in the Lindemann Plan was a novelty in warfare rendered possible by the conquest of the air during the first two decades of the 20th century. Genocide, on the other hand, was only the revival of an ancient practice, once probably worldwide, which had long been abandoned in Europe and which barely survived, in company with cannibalism, among the savages of Africa. It has never seriously been contended by anyone that either genocide or terror bombing were in accordance with the moral standards accepted at the time by all civilized peoples.

We do not know what were the thoughts in private of Hitler’s colleagues concerning his “final solution of the Jewish Problem.” Some of them surely must have found it at least disturbing that the Führer should have recourse to a practice which had only recently been stamped out in Africa by European Colonialism as the first step towards introducing civilization into that continent.

We know however that the members of the British War Cabinet who accepted the Lindemann Plan fully realized its enormity because concurrently with its acceptance it was decided that on no account must any inkling of its terms reach the public. The following extracts from the parliamentary reports of Hansard are set out verbatim here immediately after the passage quoted above, not to suggest that British politicians are exceptionally mendacious—politicians whatever their nationality have never been renowned for veracity—but to establish that those responsible for the acceptance of the Lindemann Plan were conscious of a feeling of guilt. They instructed those entrusted with the task of answering questions on the subject to give emphatic and unambiguous denials designed to stifle all further enquiries, as the following passages from Hansard show. Some or indeed most of them may have replied in the innocence of their hearts without personal knowledge of the truth but credulously believing what they were told by their departments.

On the 11th March, 1943 (a year after the acceptance of the Lindemann Plan) in the House of Commons, Mr. Montague, a Labour Member, having expressed the hope that our air raids on Germany were still being concentrated, as he believed they were, on military and industrial objectives, Captain Harold Balfour, Under-Secretary for Air, replied that he could give the House “an assurance that our objectives in bombing the enemy were industries, transport and war potential. There is no change in our policy. We were not bombing women and children wantonly for the sake of so doing. It is not for us to turn back. If innocent people, women and children suffer in the execution of our policy in Germany the remedy lies with the German men and women themselves.” (Hansard, 12 March 1943.)

On the 30th March, 1943, in reply to the Labour Member, Richard Stokes, the Secretary for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, replied blandly that, “The targets of Bomber Command are always military but night-bombing of military objectives necessarily involves bombing the area in which these are situated.” (Hansard, 31 March, 1943.)

On the 9th February, 1944, in the House of Lords, Dr. Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, in a memorable speech demanded a statement of the Government’s policy “in regard to the bombing of enemy towns with special reference to the effect of such bombing on civilian life.” Viscount Cranbourne, Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, replied for the Government that he was “very ready to give an assurance that the aim of our intensive attacks on German cities was to hamper and, if possible, to bring to a standstill enemy war production and not aimlessly to sprinkle bombs with the object of spreading damage among the enemy population. The R.A.F. had never indulged in purely terror raids.” (Hansard, 10 February, 1944.)

The last and most illuminating debate on the subject of terror bombing took place in the House of Commons on the 6th March, 1945, only three weeks after the ghastly mass air raid on Dresden on the 13th February, 1945.

This debate was initiated by the irrepressible Richard Stokes who demanded to be told the truth concerning an authorised report, issued regarding this raid by the Associated Press Correspondent from Supreme Allied Headquarters in Paris which gloatingly described “this unprecedented assault in daylight on the refugee-crowded capital, fleeing from the Russian tide in the East,” and declared it showed that “the long-awaited decision had been taken to adopt deliberate terror-bombing of German populated centres as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.”

Mr. Stokes began by reading this report which he reminded the House had been widely published in America and had been broadcast by Paris Radio. In Britain on the morning of the 17th February it had been released by the Censor but in the evening of that day it had been suppressed from publication, presumably as a result of the indignant protests which it had aroused.

Mr. Stokes insisted on being told, “Is terror bombing now part of our policy? Why is it that the people of this country who are supposed to be responsible for what is going on, the only people who may not know what is being done in their name? On the other hand, if terror bombing be not part of our policy, why was this statement put out at all? I think we shall live to rue the day we did this, and that it (the air raid on Dresden) will stand for all time as a blot on our escutcheon.”

Here a private member, Rear-Admiral Sir Murray Sueter, interposed with the fatuous observation that “all targets are very carefully planned by the Bombing Committee. The Committee go into each target which is of military importance, necessitating the carrying out of this bombing.”

Commander Brabner, Joint Under-Secretary for Air, then spoke on behalf of the Government. “May I conclude on a note of denial,” he observed apologetically. “The report which has just been read stated that the Allied Commanders had adopted a policy of terror bombing. This is absolutely not so. This has now been denied by Supreme Allied Headquarters and I should like to have an opportunity of denying it here. We are not wasting our bombers or time on purely terror tactics. Our job is to destroy the enemy. It does not do the Hon. Member justice to come to this House and try to suggest that there are a lot of Air Marshals or pilots or anyone else sitting in a room trying to think of how many German women and children they can kill. We are concentrating on war targets, and we intend to remain concentrated on them until Germany gives up.”

Quite unabashed by this expression of official disapproval, Mr. Stokes asked two supplementary questions, “If the report issued with the authority of Allied Headquarters in Paris was untrue, why when protest was made against it was this not stated at once, and why was it said at first that it was impossible to suppress a report approved by Allied Headquarters stating its official policy, although in fact it was immediately afterwards suppressed?”

Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary for Air, had pointedly left the House when Mr. Stokes began to read this report so imprudently approved by Supreme Headquarters in Paris. No doubt by this time he knew the contents of this compromising production by heart. Realising that Commander Brabner’s rambling evasions of the questions put to him, instead of disposing of them, would be more likely to arouse curiosity as to the truth and so lead to further enquiries, he decided to dispose of the subject finally himself. “This report,” be declared, “is certainly not true. The Hon. Member can take that from me. How it was handled, what newspapers published it, and whether publication was authorised, are matters which the Hon. Member had better discuss with the Ministry of Information.” (Hansard, March 7th, 1945.)

In passing it may be noted that this denial was in a sense true. No decision, long-awaited, had just been reached to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German main centres of population. The decision to do this had been reached three years before when in March 1942 the Lindemann Plan was accepted by the British War Cabinet. Ever since then it had been ruthlessly carried into effect: the Dresden massacre was merely the culmination of this policy.

Referring to the above quoted report issued from Allied Headquarters, the subject of the above debate, David Irving in his book, The Destruction of Dresden,[**] published in 1963, observes complacently, “What might be termed the ‘mask’ of the Allied Bomber commands for one extraordinary moment appears to have slipped.” It was however only a brief moment. “The debate on the 6th March, 1945,” he writes proudly, “was the last wartime debate on Bomber Command’s policy: the British Government was able to preserve its secret from the day when the first area raid had been launched on Mannheim, the 16th December, 1940, right up to the end of the war.”

The apparent indifference of the British public to the adoption of terror bombing as a method of waging war may be explained by the fact that the emphatic denials of the Ministers of the Crown were almost universally accepted as true. Officially this problem did not exist, hence the public apathy which certainly contrasts strangely with the frenzied moral indignation professed in Britain and elsewhere in 1966 when the Americans began to bomb communist troop concentrations, oil depots and ammunition dumps in Vietnam on the ground that bombs which missed their mark might endanger civilian life. The distinction between these cases is that the outcry in 1966 was perhaps more an expression of anti-American feeling than of a humanitarian regard for human life. In 1945 the death of German civilians troubled few people in Britain simply because the victims were Germans.

Be this as it may, the worldwide outcry of 1966 certainly tends to support the view that Winston Churchill and his colleagues were justified in fearing in 1942 that if the terms of the Lindemann Plan were made known to the public, an outcry, similar to that which arose in 1966, was to be expected.

Long afterwards in 1961 H.M. Stationery Office described in four volumes with a wealth of horrifying details the terror bombing offensive against Germany carried out from March 1942 to May 1945 in accordance with the Lindemann Plan.[††]

Immediately after hostilities had ceased in 1945, various aspects of the Second World War began to be subjected in print to unqualified condemnation. With regard to terror bombing, the eminent military critic, Captain Liddell Hart, in a little book entitled The Evolution of Warfare,[‡‡] published in 1946, declared that victory had been achieved “through practising the most uncivilized means of warfare that the world had known since the Mongol devastations.” Adverse criticism was at first mainly directed to the adoption of the novel system of ‘war-crimes trials’ as a method of disposing of enemy prisoners of war. Widely reported with gusto in the Press these so-called trials were soon in progress all over Europe and in the Far East. With regard to them therefore no question arises, as in the cases of genocide and terror bombing, whether an innocent public was kept in ignorance of what was happening. It cannot be denied that this particular reversion to barbarism was accepted by the public with astonishingly few misgivings.

Nevertheless there were occasional faint and disregarded protests. A booklet written by the present author twenty years ago provides the core of this book. Much of it is reproduced here in the same words in which it was written except that what was then put forward as daring and, in the opinion of most people, perverse speculation, is here stated as undeniable and long established fact. This booklet was published in 1948 under the pseudonym ‘A. Jurist’, under the title Advance to Barbarism.[§§] The word “Advance” was chosen in preference to “Retreat” or “Reversion” in deference to the belief, then still widely held, that progress was an unending and automatic process, from its essential nature advancing ever upwards. It was the first book which attempted to deal with the retrograde movement into which civilization entered in 1914, of which terror bombing, genocide and war-crimes trials were the principal symptoms, as a single phenomenon. From the lack of authoritative information available, much of this booklet consisted of speculations. In 1948 no one had ever heard of the Lindemann Plan, or for that matter of Lindemann himself except as a professor of physics who was known to be an adviser of Mr. Churchill on scientific subjects. Terror bombing was not a recognised term since officially it had never taken place. The term used in this booklet was “indiscriminate bombing” which means of course something quite different: terror bombing was not indiscriminate, being directed, as we now know, against working-class houses. With regard to war-crimes trials, the present author briefly pointed out the objections to trials in which the accusers of a prisoner of war acted as judges of their own charges, objections which were as obvious in 1948 as they are now.

This little book is cited here as an example of a small group of books published within a few years of the end of hostilities in 1945 which prove that the main features of the retrograde movement which had begun in 1914 were not accepted entirely with out opposition or comment as is so generally believed. Probably numerous similar books were written at the same time which failed to find publishers bold enough to defy the rigid taboo then in force on all mention of the subjects with which they dealt.

Outstanding among the few books fortunate enough to find publishers immediately after the War was a little book entitled Epitaph on Nuremberg, by the influential man of letters, Montgomery Belgion, in which for the first time were examined the flimsy arguments put forward to justify the trial at Nuremberg of the captured leaders of the vanquished side.[***] To this day this book, published in 1946, remains one of the most outspoken and boldest examinations of the nature of the Nuremberg Trials. After a brief but lucid outline of the circumstances leading up to the decision at the Yalta Conference to adopt an entirely novel method of disposing of captured enemy leaders, and a careful analysis of the legal principles involved, the author found himself driven to the conclusion that the Nuremberg Trials were not inspired by any overwhelming passion for justice and by a righteous determination that crime should not escape punishment. In essence, he pointed out, a trial is a means by which an existing law is enforced, and that at Nuremberg there was no existing law to enforce. The Tribunal merely invented the law as it proceeded and adjudicated accordingly. “The hands may have been the hands of Justice,” Mr. Montgomery Belgion wrote, “but the voice was Propaganda’s voice.” In short, the purpose of the trials was purely political. “The giving of a delusive appearance that Germany had caused the War,” he declared, “was an act of high policy which the Tribunal was entrusted to perform when it was given the job of passing sentence on most of the accused.” (Page 86.) It had soon been recognised, he pointed out, that “Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles which declared Germany solely guilty for the First World War had neither moral weight nor judicial validity,” and so the victors of the Second World War decided to hold trials of the vanquished that would, they hoped, conclusively establish for all time Germany’s guilt. “That”, he submitted, “was the real object of the Nuremberg Trial; it was a gigantic ‘put up show’, a gigantic piece of propaganda.” (Page 88.) “The Trial was decked out to look like an authentic judicial process: the victors showed a really astonishing contempt for justice and truth and a really pathetic faith in sophistry.” (Page 74.)

The conclusions of the author of this little book are remarkable if only because it was published three years before these conclusions were confirmed beyond any possible doubt by the publication in 1949 by the U.S. State Department of the short hand transcript of the deliberations held in London in 1945 to make arrangements for the so-called trials in Nuremberg during which General Nikitchenko, who later acted as one of the two Russian judges on the Tribunal, clearly disclosed the real nature of the trials. “We are dealing here,” General Nikitchenko declared, “with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose conviction has already been announced at both the Moscow and Yalta Conferences by the heads of State.… The fact that the Nazi leaders are criminals has already been established. The task of the Tribunal is only to determine the measure of guilt of each particular person and to mete out the necessary punishment.”[†††]

The publication of such books as Epitaph on Nuremberg and Advance to Barbarism within a few years of the end of hostilities proves conclusively that the reversion to barbarism which began in 1914 and reached its culmination in 1946 was not accepted entirely without at least some opposition or protest as is so commonly believed.

It must be admitted however that such books at the time exercised no perceptible influence on public opinion. So far as war-crimes trials were concerned the man in the street naturally preferred to rely on such weighty authorities as Professor Arthur Goodhart, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, who emphatically pronounced that war-crimes trials were an admirable innovation which would facilitate the speedy administration of justice, and Lord Justice Wright, one of the greatest English lawyers of his generation, who declared that so long as accused persons did in fact receive justice, it was immaterial that the court which tried them was composed of their accusers.

It is indeed hard to account for the equanimity with which the vast majority of lawyers accepted this view.[‡‡‡] For thousands of years in all civilized countries the principle has been accepted that criminal prosecutions and civil actions could only be decided by the decision of a strictly impartial court. “The very essence of a fair trial is a third-party judgement,” as Victor Gollancz pointed out in 1961 with regard to the trial of Adolf Eichmann by Jewish judges.[§§§] For lawyers to dispute this was no less astonishing than if a conference of eminent surgeons unanimously passed a resolution that no example could be found of anyone having benefited by a surgical operation, or as if a synod of leading Christian ecclesiastics approved a declaration that prayer could never be anything but a waste of time.

Had the Council of Nicaea, for example, passed such a resolution, historians of the Christian Church would have been set a difficult task reconciling this resolution with Christian thought and practice both before and since. Future historians of the development of jurisprudence will have similar difficulty in explaining how it came about that the Nuremberg Trials were approved by so many leading jurists from the most highly civilized countries in the world.

With regard to terror bombing which ranks with genocide and war-crimes trials as one of the three culminating features of the retrograde movement of civilization which began imperceptibly in 1914, it must be admitted that this innovation was accepted by public opinion without opposition or misgivings. The reason was that officially terror bombing was merely a figment of the imagination of the mendacious Dr. Goebbels. As previously stated, on the 7th February, 1944, two years after the Lindemann Plan had been put into operation, Viscount Cranborne solemnly declared, “The R.A.F. has never indulged in purely terror raids.” Also the British public first heard of this infamous plan when its adoption by Mr. Churchill’s War Cabinet in March 1942 was casually disclosed in the paragraph quoted above from the little booklet entitled Science and Government, by Sir Charles Snow, published in 1961.[****] Some six months afterwards voluminous details of the air offensive launched in accordance with this plan were published by H.M. Stationery Office in the four massive volumes referred to above. Nothing also was generally known to distinguish the mass air raid on Dresden as the crowning atrocity of this campaign. When the character of this air raid was disclosed in a book written with official approval and assistance in 1963, it was presented and widely accepted as an original discovery by an enterprising and industrious author.

With the wealth of information now available, it is hard to realise how little was known in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War of the nature of that struggle. Such booklets as Epitaph on Nuremberg and Advance to Barbarism mentioned above, whatever merits or shortcomings they may have possessed, at least demonstrated the possibility of making bricks without straw. They also expressed in print the misgivings and suspicions felt by many at the time, hitherto only expressed in Parliament by such upholders of earlier standards of conduct as Dr. Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, and Richard Stokes, M.P.

The British authorities, while the “strategic air offensive” was going on, were under no delusions as to what would be the reaction of a wide section of the public if its true nature was allowed to become known. Thus, in a minute dated the 28th February, 1943, Sir Archibald Sinclair explained to Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, that it was necessary to stifle all public discussion on the subject because if the truth had been disclosed in response to the enquiries being made by influential political and religious leaders, their inevitable condemnation would impair the morale of the bomber crews and consequently their bombing efficiency.

For nearly two decades it remained possible to do little more than speculate concerning the so-called Allied strategic air offensive against Germany. The particulars given in Advance to Barbarism were derived from the disclosures made in a little book entitled Bombing Vindicated[††††] by J. M. Spaight, Principal Assistant Secretary of the Air Ministry, published in 1944, perhaps the most illuminating book written during the Second World War, as confirmed by Air Marshal Harris’s book, Bomber Offensive,[‡‡‡‡] published in 1947.

It is not in the least remarkable that Hitler and his adherants were able to keep hidden from their countrymen the crimes against humanity being committed in Germany: anyone who ventured to protest at what was taking place faced death or being sent to a concentration camp which not seldom amounted to the same fate. When the war came to an end and the victims of the Nazi regime were released, a flood of information poured forth concerning the iniquities of the vanquished: nothing however was revealed concerning the conduct of the victors which remained as shrouded as ever by a cloak of silence. It may seem strange that it was considered necessary to maintain this cloak of silence for so long after victory had been won when the Government was in a position to say like Lady Macbeth, “What is done cannot be undone.” It is even stranger that it was found possible to do so after the emergency war legislation designed to suppress all expression of opinion deemed likely to hamper the successful conduct of the war had been allowed to lapse. In contemporary Russia or Spain this would have been an easy matter as in these countries functioned an official censor whose duty it was to censor the publication of all books and newspapers. But in Britain no censor had existed since the times of the Stuart kings. After 1945 everyone in Britain enjoyed the right once again to express any opinion they liked which was not libellous, seditious, blasphemous or obscene.

Nevertheless it was found possible to keep the truth from leaking out concerning terror bombing for upwards of two decades, although no legal machinery existed to control public expressions of opinion.

In no other country in the world would this have been possible. The British however are politically the most advanced people in the world, with unique powers of self-discipline when it is made to appear to them that national interests are at stake. These powers had first fully bloomed in 1936 when all the European and American newspapers were freely discussing an alleged association between King Edward VIII and a Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Yet for many months the entire British Press, as if edited by one man, preserved an unbroken silence. Naturally there was much verbal speculation and gossip in Britain but only those who read the Press knew any details, and as those British newspapers that specialised in scandalmongering remained silent with regard to l’affaire Simpson most people discounted as mere rumours what the foreign Press was saying. Few realized in Britain that a grave constitutional crisis was threatening which was causing the Government the gravest anxiety.

It was not until after the abdication that it became known how the Prime Minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, had dealt with the matter. Fortunately the leading national newspapers had recently fallen under the control of a few wealthy men, the so-called Press Barons of Fleet Street. Mr. Baldwin approached them personally, explained the situation frankly and appealed to them not to report l’affaire Simpson in the newspapers controlled by them and to bring pressure to bear on the smaller newspapers to ignore the subject until he had had time to ascertain the King’s intentions and to decide what had best be done. He stressed that the Crown was the link which bound together the British Empire and if this link was weakened, the unity of the Empire would be in peril.

Mr. Baldwin did not appeal in vain. The British Press remained silent. It was not until he had consulted at length with the Prime Ministers of the Dominions that he gave the signal to his stooge, the Bishop of Bradford, to give public expression to the heartfelt misgivings felt by the latter concerning the King’s mode of life and in particular the erring monarch’s resolve not to follow the example of his grandfather, Edward VII, when involved in an affaire de coeur, but to marry the lady in question. The taboo of silence was lifted. Edward VIII abdicated and retired into exile. Before the bulk of the British public had realised the gravity of the situation, this unique episode of British history was over with a minimum of excitement, scandal and recrimination.

In 1945 the Baldwin technique was adopted to prevent facts from being disclosed concerning two outstanding features of the war which had just been brought to a victorious conclusion. A taboo of silence was imposed on editors and publishers similar to that imposed so successfully nine years before in regard to l’affaire Simpson. In some ways this taboo was even more remarkable than the earlier taboo because no national interests seemed to be involved and yet it was found possible to maintain it, practically unbroken, for upwards of two decades.

An explanation still remains to be found why in 1945 the British authorities should have considered it necessary or even desirable to impose a taboo of silence on all mention of terror bombing and war-crimes trials.

Except that they were both, like genocide, symptoms of a world-wide tendency to revert to primitive practices in warfare, they were otherwise quite unconnected. They became linked entirely by a chance circumstance. The conception of terror bombing can be traced back to as early as the 1920s when Air Marshal Trenchard recommended the construction of large, long-range bombers designed for attacks on the civilian population of an enemy. The conception of war-crimes trials had originated as recently as November 1943, from an unconsidered suggestion by Mr. Winston Churchill at an alcoholic orgy held to celebrate the conclusion of the Teheran Conference. Without seemingly premeditation, the communist dictator, Stalin, proposed that when victory was achieved 50,000 German officers and technicians should be massacred. This proposal could not be dismissed as merely a result of drinking numerous toasts in vodka because everyone present knew that as recently as the spring of 1940 Stalin had carried out such a massacre of 15,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest where their bodies were subsequently found. President Roosevelt made the suggestion the subject for one of his tasteless jokes but Mr. Churchill indignantly declared that “the British public will never stand for mass-murder!” adding, probably as an afterthought, “No one, Nazi, or no, shall be dealt with summarily without a legal trial.”

An open breach between these ill-assorted allies was ultimately averted by a makeshift compromise. In deference to the strange susceptibilities of his British guest, Stalin agreed to forego his massacre and consented to “a legal trial” taking place before the prisoners were put to death. Later this compromise was formally confirmed at the conferences held in Moscow and in Yalta.

It was not until after the unconditional surrender of Germany in 1945 that the difficulties of carrying out in practice this novel idea became apparent. At the Yalta Conference it had been agreed that a score of the most prominent political and military leaders of the vanquished should be selected, labelled ‘war-criminals’ and subjected to a trial before a court composed of British, American, French and Russian judges. According to the Russian judge, General Nikitchenko, the only duty of the court would be to rubberstamp the decision of the politicians at the Yalta Conference that the prisoners were guilty. All seemed plain sailing. This view of the matter was naturally acceptable to Russian judges as being in accordance with communist theory and practice, but many were doubtful if Western judges could be found who would be equally accommodating. This difficulty was eventually surmounted by agreeing that the facts upon which the charges were based should be laid before the court in the usual way for adjudication, each judge being left free to reach his own conclusions on the facts placed before him.

This solution however immediately aroused widespread consternation. Most of the victorious Powers had skeletons in their national cupboards and were determined that no evidence should be produced to the court which would reveal these skeletons. To meet these objections, it became necessary to sift the evidence carefully beforehand. In addition, the court was directed, as it saw fit, to exclude any evidence submitted by the defence as irrelevant, by which was meant any evidence which would not support a conviction.

Britain had a particularly gruesome skeleton in her cupboard in the shape of her terror bombing campaign. In popular estimation in 1945 the most obvious of Hitler’s crimes was his initiation of what was then known as indiscriminate bombing, that is to say, bombing unrestricted to military objectives. Nevertheless, to the general astonishment, no charge relating to German bombing was preferred against any of Hitler’s surviving colleagues. “To have done so,” Mr. Justice Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, later declared frankly, “would have been to invite recriminations which would not have been useful at the trial.”

In short in 1945 the British Government found itself in a painful dilemma. A verdict based on carefully selected facts would not accomplish the purpose the trial was intended to serve, namely, to act as a substitute for Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles by establishing Germany’s war-guilt for all time. As the trial proceeded it would soon become clear to all that it was a mere bizarre farce, to use the description applied to it by the Oxford historian, Dr. Alan Taylor, twenty years afterwards.

Yet although it had become clear that the trial would serve no useful purpose of any kind, it was impossible for the British Government to refuse to take part because the proposal that a trial of the vanquished leaders should take place after victory had come in the first place on behalf of Britain from Mr. Churchill himself.

To preserve their secret the British authorities realized that it would not be sufficient to provide that evidence of British terror bombing should be excluded from consideration by the court at Nuremberg if concurrently the fact that terror bombing had taken place was allowed to become common knowledge as a result of free discussion in Britain of the subject. The court might then be tempted to take judicial notice thereof and enquire further, with the result the veracity of H.M. Ministers would ultimately be called in question.

It was therefore decided to impose a stringent taboo on all discussion of terror bombing. But it was realised that if free discussion were permitted of the nature of the Nuremberg trials and the other similar war-crimes trials then going on, the question was bound to be asked why had it been considered necessary to sift the evidence before it was laid before the court, thereby rendering worthless any verdict it might give, and why no charge of having initiated indiscriminate bombing had been included in the indictments. It was soon realised that too many people knew the answer to the latter question and if free discussion on the subject was permitted the truth would soon leak out. A similar taboo to that on discussion on terror bombing was therefore imposed on discussion of war-crimes trials.

Scores of memoirs, books and articles have made familiar to all every detail of the Abdication: the taboo of silence imposed by Mr. Baldwin is remembered with unstinted admiration by foreigners as an outstanding example of British self-discipline in a national crisis.

This taboo of 1936 remained in force for only a few months and was limited to newspaper editors. The taboo imposed in 1945 extended not only to editors but to authors, reviewers and historians: it remained in force for upwards of sixteen years. Only persons personally affected by this taboo realised that it existed: when in 1961 it was lifted surprise was expressed that no one until then had heard of the Lindemann Plan. Except for Air Marshal Harris, terror bombing found few defenders.

Although the British public seemed outwardly indifferent to this belated revelation, it may be that the vehement outcry in Britain when the American air force began to bomb military objectives in Vietnam in 1966 was a retarded expression of the horror subconsciously felt in 1961.

Those upon whom fell the task of enforcing the taboo of 1945 were no respecters of persons. They suppressed not only would-be authors striving to express their views for the first time in print but authors of long established repute and men of international fame. For example, the memorable book Politics: Trials and Errors[§§§§] by the late Lord Hankey was accorded ‘the silent treatment’ because it revealed the truth concerning the invasion of Norway in 1940 and denounced the conviction as a war-criminal of the former Japanese ambassador to London, Shigemitsu. Fortunately Lord Hankey’s appeal for rectification of this glaring miscarriage of justice won the support of General MacArthur and Shigemitsu was shortly released. Of all the books published in the post-war period, this book alone can be said to have definitely influenced the course of events.

Another distinguished victim of the taboo was Dean Inge, from 1911 to 1933 Dean of St. Paul’s. Not only was he the author of many learned works on philosophy and mysticism but he was also one of the most gifted journalists of his time. Among contemporary writers he had no rival in expressing a point of view lucidly, adequately and in the fewest possible words: his epigrammatic sayings, terse, stimulating and uncompromising, were quoted in the Press throughout the world. Editors competed eagerly for his articles: he commanded the highest rates of pay in journalism. Although a tireless critic of the shallow optimism, muddled thinking and the catchwords of democracy accepted by all but a few in the years after the First World War, the possibility that his articles needed censorship had never before 1945 occurred to anyone.

Naturally great was the Dean’s surprise and indignation when after the Second World War he found that his articles when they appeared in print had been drastically revised. His protests were vain. Fortunately a copy of the booklet by the present author entitled Advance to Barbarism published in 1948 came into his hands and he wrote at once, “In this book you have well said what it was high time was said by someone.” His efforts to review the book were politely rejected. “I had intended to write a book on similar lines to yours,” he remarked to the present author, “but at my age (he was then in his eighties) I cannot undertake the labour of finding a bold enough publisher.” Another effort to give public expression to his views on the Nuremberg Trials was again foiled by a watchful editor. “I hardly recognised my article when I saw it in print. It had been shamefully mutilated,” he lamented. “All mention of your book had been carefully omitted. My protests to the editor of the Evening Standard were politely evaded.”

Finding himself deprived of the right of free speech in his own country, the Dean at once complied with a request that he should contribute a preface to a revised and greatly lengthened edition of Advance to Barbarism which was awaiting publication in the United States. Within three days he supplied an admirable preface of some nine hundred words in his own handwriting. Thus supported, the American edition appeared in 1953 and aroused wide attention in the United States, receiving no less than thirty-nine favourable reviews. Its appearance was ignored in Britain except by Encounter, a publication, subsidised with foreign money by an organization labelled grandiloquently the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which denounced it hotly, presumably on the ground that a breach of the taboo was detrimental to ‘cultural freedom’.[*****]

An amusing sequel to Dean Inge’s vain efforts to defy the taboo occurred after his death in February 1954 when a valiant attempt was made to clear his memory of the stigma of having held opinions conflicting with the convictions of those considered right-thinking people. A certain Rev. C. Magraw wrote at once to The Times to say that although the Dean might at time have expressed regrettable doubts concerning the legal validity of war-crimes trials, yet his final conclusion was these doubts were baseless. “In the summer of 1947,” he wrote, “the Dean told me that he had changed his mind and he considered the Nuremberg Trials scrupulously fair.”

A brief correspondence in The Times, initiated by the present author, followed, but was ended abruptly on the 9th March, 1954 by a letter from Mr. W. C. Inge, the Dean’s son, who pointed out that whatever his father may have said to the Rev. Magraw in a casual conversation in 1947, his final and considered views had been clearly set in the preface which he had contributed to Advance to Barbarism in 1953. Mr. Inge added that he himself had often discussed the subject of war-crimes trials with his father who, while considering that the Nuremberg Trials had been fairly conducted, “never changed his opinion that they set a dangerous precedent and that the necessity for justice appearing to be done had been vitiated by the presence of the Russians on the Nuremberg Tribunal.”

One of the essential characteristics of a taboo is that even when innocently infringed an irrational feeling of guilt is engendered not only in the mind of the culprit but also in the minds of his relations and friends. Even as late as 1960 this feeling of guilty shame persisted with regard to the Dean’s unorthodox views which, it was felt, he had only been saved from expressing by watchful editors. When in that year his friend and former pupil, Canon Adam Fox, published what purported to be a complete biography of Dean Inge,[†††††] with the aid and approval of the Dean’s family, he not only avoided all mention of the Dean’s views on the Second World War and its aftermath but pointedly excluded from reference in the voluminous bibliography in his book mention of the preface which the Dean had contributed to the American edition of Advance to Barbarism. This omission could hardly have been accidental as this preface was the last production of the Dean’s pen.

When in the following year the true nature of what was then still known as “the strategic bombing offensive” was casually revealed by Sir Charles Snow in his little book, Science and Government, no attempt was made to maintain the taboo of silence on the subject. The exact contents of the Lindemann Plan came as a surprise to everyone who had not had access to official sources of information. No one was deeply disturbed to learn of a decision of the British Government so long before as 1942. As the war had been won, it did not seem to matter very much how it had been won. It is perhaps significant that less concern was expressed that terror bombing should have been formally adopted than that H.M. Ministers should have lied to conceal this guilty secret. Long before 1961 all inclination to discuss war-crimes trials had disappeared, and now it was felt that the question of terror bombing was also an unpleasant subject about which the less said the better.

In short, the taboos imposed in 1945 triumphantly fulfilled their essential purpose which was to gain time until the British public could regard terror bombing and war-crimes trials dispassionately as happenings of long past history which were best forgotten.

Both taboos were based on the principle so well expressed by the lines of the Victorian poet, Coventry Patmore, in his poem Magna est Veritas:

“When all its work is done the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevails or not.”

Chapter I — Primeval Simplicity

Once the theory of evolution had during the 19th century become generally accepted, a belief in human progress, automatic and ceaseless, naturally followed. The record of the rocks seemed conclusive: in the lowest and most ancient strata were to be found fossils of simple and primitive forms of life and above them the fossils of ever increasing complexity, culminating in the evolution of man. The story of life on this planet was a story of steady improvement, of better adaptations of each species to its environment. The most fitted survived.

The survival of the fittest became popularly interpreted as the survival of the strongest. As applied to mankind this was held to mean that the strongest races survived, their superiority being demonstrated by success in war. Naturally this view found favour among the leading nations of Europe who since the days of Marathon had repeatedly on the battlefield proved their military superiority to the oriental and coloured peoples. Down to 1914 White Supremacy by this or any other test seemed indisputable. Warfare was accepted as a characteristic of human life consistent with the irrevocable laws of nature. As the British economist Walter Bagehot (1826-77) wrote in his Physics and Politics, “war is the most showy fact in human history.” It was generally assumed that war was as old as mankind, expressing a fundamental human instinct. In his International Law the famous jurist Sir Henry Maine refers casually to “the universal belligerency of primitive man,” and adds clearly without fear of contradiction, “It is not peace which is natural and primitive but war.”

Since the war of 1914-18, the so-called War to end War, the truth of this assumption has been widely disputed, in particular by the psychologist, Havelock Ellis. The life of early man in the remote past, he argued, can best be determined from the mode of life of the most primitive of modern races living at the present day. “When Australia was first visited by Europeans,” he pointed out, “war in the sense of a whole tribe taking the field against another tribe had no existence among the Australian aborigines.”[‡‡‡‡‡] Undeniably for thousands of years the aborigines of Australia lived in conditions of contented and peaceful stagnation. Some indeed find it hard to believe that this exceptional state of affairs provides an example of conditions probably widely prevailing elsewhere in the world. They regard the case of the aborigines of Australia as evidence that when no struggle for survival has to be fought, no progress takes place. In Europe, Asia and Africa, man had to contend with dangerous beasts of prey, thereby developing daring and courage, qualities for which he found an outlet later in warfare with his fellow man. Notoriously the descendents of the original inhabitants of Australia lack ambition, enterprise and initiative, qualities necessary in a struggle for survival, qualities which some maintain are generated and stimulated by warfare.

The contrary view that war is an unmitigated evil of comparatively recent origin is well expressed by Dr. R. L. Worrall in his Footsteps of Warfare who contends that, until mankind began to settle in communities depending on agriculture for support, warfare was unknown. “In those days of savagery,” he writes, “men and women lacked every feature of modern life including all the savageries of civilization. Only with the passing of the Stone Age and of primitive communism did there come the supreme savagery of war.”[§§§§§] He pictures the sparse population of the hunting period wandering freely through country abounding with game of every kind and dismisses as baseless the view that clashes must have occurred between the various groups of hunters since no subject for conflict would exist in such conditions. There is, he points out, an entire lack of evidence of warfare in primitive times, although he admits that had warfare occurred it is difficult to imagine what evidence of it could have survived so vast a length of time.

From time to time in certain areas, no doubt, such idyllic conditions may have persisted for long periods and we are at liberty to imagine that during these periods man may have come dimly to resemble the Noble Savage of Rousseau. Thus, on the Australian continent, for tens of thousands of years mankind lived undisturbed by intrusive neighbours and probably by any major changes of climate. In such static conditions, occasions for warfare would seldom if ever arise: the Australian aborigines were certainly peaceful if not noble savages, and so they remained until modern times. On the other hand in Europe, Central Asia, and in North Africa, major changes of climate occurred during the Pleistocene Period with great frequency according to geological standards. At one period Europe enjoyed a temperate climate as far north as Lapland; southern Europe was tropical. Later began a succession of ice ages separated by mild periods lasting thousands of years. During the ice ages the climate of all Europe north of the Alps may be compared to that of Greenland at the present day. How did the hunting communities of northern Europe, during the oncoming of a glacial period, deal with the communities already occupying the lands to which they gradually withdrew as their own hunting grounds became less and less habitable? They had been accustomed, no doubt, to act summarily when, for example, they found a desirable cave already occupied by cave bears or wolves. Can it be doubted that in comparable circumstances they dealt with human obstructors by similar methods? And can it be doubted that the original inhabitants of these more habitable lands took up the natural attitude that changes of climate were no concern of theirs and that these intruders ought to have been content to die resignedly and quietly of hunger and cold in their own home lands without disturbing their neighbours? Surely, points of view so different and so irreconcilable could have only one outcome. One party had been doomed by nature to perish and each frankly preferred this fate should be suffered by the other.

Probably every major change of climate in the Stone Ages resulted in a series of minor wars—minor because in each only a few hundred individuals or less would be involved, but other wise presenting the essential characteristics of a modern war. It is a popular delusion that man in prehistoric times was a stupid, half-animal creature altogether different from modern man. Some types of man as long ago as 30,000 years—the Cro-Magnon man who inhabited southern France in the Aurignacian Epoch—had a brain of equal or even of greater capacity to that of the average modern European. (The average cubic capacity of a Cro-Magnon skull was 1590 c.c.: that of a modern European is 1480 c.c.) From this we can deduce that, as modern European brains have proved capable of grasping the fact that it is less trouble to dismantle and remove to one’s own country a factory belonging to a conquered people than to build a factory for one’s self, it should not have been beyond a Cro-Magnon brain to have grasped the fact that it was less laborious to appropriate the stone axe of a vanquished enemy than to chip out a new one. By the same argument, this much vaunted achievement of modern reasoning should not even have been beyond modern man’s cousins in the Stone Age, the celebrated Neanderthal species of the human race which, in spite of a shambling gait, great beetling ape-like eyebrow ridges and massive chinless jaws, possessed a capacious brain of a far from simple type. In fact, certain specimens of Neanderthal man possessed brains above the average in size—the skull found at La Chapelle had a capacity of over 1600 c.c., at least 120 c.c. above the modern average, according to Sir Arthur Keith.[******] We are justified in believing, therefore, that the La Chapelle man, in spite of his unprepossessing simian appearance, would have been fully capable of grasping all the motives for a modern war, of conducting warfare in entirely the contemporary spirit, so far as his limited resources permitted, and of dealing with a defeated enemy in accordance with the same principles and with precisely the same objects in view as were applied to a defeated enemy in that Year of Grace, 1945.

One fact relating to Neanderthal man, established beyond question but otherwise inexplicable, makes it possible to say that the first major European war took place during the Old Stone Age at a date which experts have estimated to have been approximately between thirty and fifty thousand years ago. For tens of thousands of years preceding this approximate date Neanderthal man was in occupation of a vast area stretching from Gibraltar in the West to Palestine in the East and extending southward from the great ice fields which then covered the northern half of Europe. Having been in undisturbed possession of this area for an enormous length of time, Neanderthal man disappeared, apparently rather suddenly. In strata of a later date his remains are no longer found; thereafter are found only traces of men of the same type as now occupy Europe.

What brought about the extinction of Neanderthal man will probably always remain a matter of speculation. All that is known for certain is that above a certain level all traces of his culture—known as the Mousterian—abruptly disappear and are replaced by traces of a distinct culture known as the Aurignacian. It is, of course, possible that Neanderthal man died out through some unknown natural cause so that his vacated hunting grounds were peaceably occupied by his successors, the men of the Aurignacian Epoch. Dismissing this vague possibility, Sir Arthur Keith writes: “Those who observe the fate of the aborigines of Australia and Tasmania will have no difficulty in accounting for the disappearance of Homo Neanderthalensis.”[††††††]

It is hard to believe, however, that the Neanderthals passively allowed themselves to be dispossessed of their means of subsistence. Through hundreds of centuries they had successfully adapted themselves to a most rigorous climate and had succeeded in the struggle for survival in competition with some of the most formidable carnivores that have ever existed—sabre-tooth tigers, lions, and cave bears. To quote Sir Arthur Keith again: “Neanderthal man’s skill as a flint-artist shows that his abilities were not of a low order. He had fire at his command, he buried his dead, he had a distinct and highly evolved form of culture.” He was a fearless and skilful hunter of big game. He was confronted by no such superiority in weapons as that which made it impossible for the aborigines of Australia to resist the firearms of the European invaders. The conclusion reached by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn in his Men of the Old Stone Age is that the Aurignacian invaders “competed for a time with the Neanderthals before they dispossessed them of their principal stations and drove them out of the country or killed them in battle.”[‡‡‡‡‡‡]

There is, thus, good ground for believing that the Mousterian Period ended as a consequence of a struggle which conforms with the definition of warfare accepted by Havelock Ellis—“War is an organised attack of one community on another.” The outcome of this struggle was ultimately the complete extermination of that distinct species of the human race, Neanderthal man. Regarding this grim outcome Professor Osborn observes:

“In the racial replacements of savage as well as of historic peoples the men are often killed and the women spared and taken into the families of the warriors, but no evidence has thus far been found that even the Neanderthal women were spared or allowed to remain in the country, because in none of the burials of Aurignacian times is there any evidence of the crossing or admixture of the Aurignacian peoples with the Neanderthals.”[§§§§§§]

There is no need for us to explain the fate which overcame the Neanderthals by stressing the superior intelligence of their conquerors or by attributing to the latter the possession of more effective weapons. It seems probable that Neanderthal man lived in small, isolated communities, each community quite unconcerned with the fate and perhaps unaware of the existence of other Neanderthal communities. Each community no doubt defended itself desperately—to quote Professor Osborn—“with wooden weapons and with stone-headed dart and spear,” probably each such isolated struggle was finally decided by weight of numbers.

If the conclusions of the authorities quoted above be accepted, it becomes possible to say with confidence that there took place in Europe in the Old Stone Age, according to the experts more than thirty thousand years ago, a decisive struggle between the representatives of two distinct branches of the human race, the Neanderthals and a tribe or tribes of men similar in all physical respects to modern man. Such a struggle would certainly merit the title of the First Great European War since its results were infinitely more momentous than the results of any of the tribal and civil wars which have occurred since in Europe—including any of the celebrated European wars of modern times.

It is probable also that some of those features of contemporary warfare which are popularly regarded as unprecedented innovations were a normal feature of warfare in the most remote times. What is now regarded as the old distinction between uniformed combatant forces and the civilian population is, judged on the scale of time by which man’s history on this planet is recorded, an innovation of yesterday—a matter of a mere couple of centuries. In prehistoric warfare, every member of the whole hunting community would be equally involved with no more regard to age or sex than in warfare to-day. In the event of defeat, all would suffer the same fate. Often, no doubt, during hostilities the women and children left behind in a settlement were in greater danger than the able-bodied males of the community away on a hunting expedition to collect food. It would surely not have been beyond brains with 120 c.c. greater capacity than the modern average to realize the tactical, material, and psychological benefits which would result from a sudden and devastating raid on “the enemy’s main centres of population.”

Even a recent innovation regarded as especially without any kind of precedent may not have been lacking in the earliest warfare. In the Stone Age men lived by hunting the herds of wild horses, deer, and wild cattle then living in profusion on the great Eurasian plains which were also the prey of various carnivorous animals, such as the sabre-tooth tiger and the cave bear. No doubt, these dangerous animals were bitterly hated as rivals for the available supplies of food, and feared owing to their taste for human flesh when occasion offered. Opportunities for reprisals would from time to time have occurred. We can only deduce the nature of these reprisals from what occurs at the present day in primitive lands. In parts of Indo-China, for example, the chief enemy is the tiger whose depredations are, as a rule, endured with resignation by the natives. Occasionally, however, a tiger blunders into a trap or is found overcome by old age, accident, or disease. A formal act of retribution is then staged in which the whole village community, men, women, and children, takes an enthusiastic part. The victim is first reduced to complete helplessness by being deprived of food and is then mocked, baited to frenzy, terrified by fireworks, and finally finished off in a slow and painful manner amid general rejoicings. The same custom prevails in far-off Tibet, where the chief enemy is the wolf. The Swedish traveller, Sven Hedin, tells us that, when the herdsmen manage to catch one of the wolves who live by preying on their flocks, they first blind the victim and then beat it to death with their knouts.

By analogy we can safely assume that the men of the Stone Age acted in the same way when chance placed at their mercy so dangerous and hated a rival as the cave bear. Upon one individual animal would be inflicted a kind of symbolic punishment for all the offences committed by the whole species to which it belonged. And, if the men of the Stone Age were accustomed to deal with animal enemies in this way, is it not probable that, on occasion, they dealt with particularly feared and hated human enemies in the same way? It follows that, if the above reasoning is justified, the practice of mock-trials recently introduced solemnly as an epoch-making innovation is nothing but a revival of a practice so long abandoned by civilized peoples that its origin in the remote past has become forgotten.

Although, as has been repeatedly demonstrated of late, a mock-trial can be carried out more or less in the form of a judicial trial, the origin and purpose of a mock-trial is entirely distinct from the origin and purpose of a judicial trial. The former, an act of symbolic vengeance in which the victim suffers for the misdoings of his species or nation, dates from remote antiquity, from the dawn period of humanity when the shadowy border line between the subhuman and the human had barely been passed. The judicial trial is obviously of much later origin, originating at the time when human communities had begun to adopt customs and taboos and the necessity arose of deciding whether these had been infringed. The person condemned at a judicial trial suffers not as a symbol but for personal acts of which he has personally been found guilty.

It is assumed that the reader is sufficiently familiar with the details of the Nuremberg proceedings of 1945-1946, so that there is no need to point out how closely primitive precedents were unconsciously followed in them. The underlying spirit will be further examined later in these pages. One indication of this spirit may, however, be given here. The announcement was actually made in the British Press that three British housewives were to be selected and sent to Nuremberg at public expense to attend these proceedings as representatives of the British housewives who had endured the Blitz.

Incredible as it now appears, the likelihood of some such arrangement being adopted was at the time widely discussed in responsible and influential circles. A variation of the idea, specifically reported not as a vague possibility under consideration but as a serious arrangement being actively carried into effect, will be found in the Daily Mail of November 29, 1945, under front page headlines, “Blitz Housewife to Face Goering & Co.” Beneath is printed a report from “our special correspondent in Nuremberg, Rhona Churchill,” which begins, “‘Mrs. Jones,’ typical British housewife, who has stood in the fish-queue, been through the Blitz, and had her whole domestic life turned upside down by the war, is to be invited to come to Nuremberg and see in court the men who caused her troubles.”

Rhona Churchill cites as her authority for this announcement, Major Peter Casson, whom she describes as an “officer in charge of V.I.P.s” (Very Important People). This military gentleman, she states, assured her that plans already existed to carry into effect this proposal, and that he himself “was asking Lord Justice Lawrence’s Marshal to make the necessary arrangements, because technically ‘Mrs. Jones’ will come here as a guest of the British judges.”

Unfortunately, it is not known what was the reaction of Lord Justice Lawrence when he was informed by his Marshal that the V.I.P. Officer had appointed him to act the part of host to the fish-queueing “Mrs. Jones”. We can but hazard the guess that it was both dignified and vigorous. Until definite information on this point comes to hand, Rhona Churchill’s message will remain incomplete. Nevertheless, as it stands, this message is of unique interest to historians and anthropologists, although clearly neither Rhona Churchill nor Peter Casson had the least comprehension of its significance. That there could exist any reasonable objection to such a proposal evidently occurred to neither of them although the sapient Major expressed fears that red-tape might cause some delay. As “Mrs. Jones” would “travel here as a V.I.P., possibly by air, live in a V.I.P. hotel, and use one of the V.I.P. gallery seats,” Major Casson had no doubt that there would be keen competition for the post, but he added, “We are hoping there will be no wire-pulling and the woman who comes here will really be a typical housewife.” He gathered that the Home Office would make the selection and that the housewife selected would be accompanied not by two female companions but by an A.R.P. warden and “a rank and file soldier who had won the V.C.” He concluded by telling Rhona Churchill that he understood that Lord Justice Lawrence had sent Mr. Winston Churchill a cordial invitation to come to Nuremberg, not as a member of “Mrs. Jones’” troop but as his personal guest. A close personal friend had reported, however, that the Prime Minister was hesitating to accept “for fear that he might give a false impression of gloating over his defeated enemies.”

It will be observed that both Rhona Churchill and the democratically-minded Major Casson assumed as a matter of common knowledge that “Goering & Co.” were, in fact, the men who had caused “Mrs. Jones’” troubles. Yet, only eighteen months before, an authoritative book had been published by a former Principal Secretary of the British Air Ministry, Mr. J. M. Spaight, C.B., C.B.E., for the express purpose of establishing the fact that the origin of the Blitz could be traced to a brain wave which came to British military experts as long before as 1936. Mr. Spaight made it clear that “Mrs. Jones” and everyone else who experienced the Blitz had endured it not as helpless and passive victims but as a result of “a splendid decision” to make them endure it which the British experts themselves had come to. This most remarkable book, Bombing Vindicated,[*******] will be examined in detail later in these pages: it is only necessary here to note that its conclusions were accepted by all informed persons without question at the time of its publication in April, 1944. In fact, no attempt has been made since by anyone to contradict or refute its claims. The British public gladly accepted Mr. Spaight’s contentions as a well deserved compliment, but at the same time remained as firmly convinced as ever that “Goering & Co.” were entirely responsible for the Blitz.

To social psychologists, also, Rhona Churchill’s message to the Daily Mail is of the greatest interest because it provides a classic example of that system of thought which George Orwell has analysed in his startling book, Nineteen Eighty-four,[†††††††] under the name, doublethink, the system which turns to practical account the philosophical proposition that truth is what best serves the interest of the community. Now, clearly, in 1945 it was in the interests of the community that the belief should be maintained that the Blitz had been endured as a result of a splendid decision to endure it by the British public. It was desirable that “Mrs. Jones” should remain convinced that she had voluntarily elected to undergo this ordeal as a result of her intellectual conviction that only by undergoing it could Right and Justice triumph. Therefore, Mr. Spaight’s facts were true and his contentions justified. But, at the same time, for the purposes of the trial at Nuremberg, it was desirable—and therefore true—that “Mrs. Jones” should be an entirely helpless victim. Not only was “Mrs. Jones” a symbol: “Goering & Co.” were also symbols. They symbolized, of course, evil overcome. The trial at Nuremberg was not what James Whistler would have called an “Arrangement in Grey.” It was an arrangement in black and white, jet Black and dazzling White. The Blitz was undeniably an evil.

For the purposes of the trial no limitations of the evil symbolized by “Goering & Co.” could be admitted. It was, therefore, necessary—and, therefore, true—to maintain that “Goering & Co.” were responsible for the Blitz, or as Rhona Churchill puts it, “they had caused ‘Mrs. Jones’ troubles.”

Acceptance of the plans disclosed by Major Casson to Rhona Churchill would thus have imposed on the British public the task of believing simultaneously two contradictory and utterly irreconcilable assertions. This, in itself, however, would have been no obstacle to their acceptance since, during the war years, the British public had been carefully trained in doublethink as an essential part of the war effort. The gallant Major himself only apprehended difficulty from official red-tape in arranging details. Nevertheless, after that first triumphant announcement of these plans in the Daily Mail, nothing further was heard of them. No alternative plans were put forward by anyone. For a reason or reasons unknown, discussion of the matter ceased and the whole subject as quickly forgotten.

Although abruptly cut short and consigned to oblivion, this episode provides an invaluable starting point for inquiry. The mere fact that it was possible without causing general astonishment to announce the existence of plans to carry out such a purpose, indicates that the British public in 1945 was in a frame of mind which it is impossible to describe as judicial in any accepted sense of the word. But the underlying idea is so entirely in accord with primitive tradition that the possibility is at once suggested that it might have been inspired by what Dr. Jung would call a dim racial memory. Among primitive peoples of the present day and, by inference, among those of the remote past, an essential feature of the symbolic act of retribution was the formal mocking of the victim. Whether a modern tiger, a prehistoric cave bear, or a captive human enemy, the preliminary part of the ceremony consists of reminding the captive of his past power and strength, contrasted with his present helplessness, and followed by a description of the torments which he must shortly endure. It seems also to have been a general practice to leave this part of the ceremony to the women of the community, probably with the idea that this would add to the humiliation of the victim.

A ceremony of this kind, carried out in accordance with prehistoric ritual is clearly indicated in the story of the downfall of King Agag in the first Book of Samuel. In a few terse, vivid sentences we are told how the gallant Saul defeated and captured Agag but spared his life contrary to ancient tradition and to the outspoken annoyance of the prophet Samuel, who strongly disapproved of what has now come to be called “pampering”. By threats of revolution, Saul is reduced to admitting that he had sinned in not acting in accordance with traditional ferocity and, to prevent any possibility of the captive escaping death by what we should call a “wangle”, Samuel undertook the role of judge-executioner himself, and “hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal”—clearly the form of execution called by the Chinese “death by a thousand and one cuts.” Before this gruesome work was commenced, however, the fallen King of Amalek is recorded as observing to the prophet, “Surely the bitterness of death is past.”

As it stands in the text this observation is utterly incomprehensible. Brought forth suddenly from honorable captivity as a prisoner of war to find himself arbitrarily condemned to a horrible and lingering death by a self-appointed judge-executioner, this is surely the last comment one would expect the unfortunate monarch to make to the bloodthirsty old prophet awaiting him, knife in hand.

If, however, we assume that the ancient ritual had been strictly followed—as a matter of course, and therefore not worth recording—the significance of Agag’s remark becomes clear. For some hours previously, Agag would have stood tied to a stake surrounded by the daughters of Zion screaming insults, enlarging on his shortcomings, and describing with a wealth of oriental imagery the details of the treatment which he would shortly endure at the hands of the prophet. Even if this ordeal had only been a matter of hours—and not twelve months—it is easy to understand how Agag could have reached the state of mind of exclaiming to Samuel, “I realize what you are going to do with me, but for pity’s sake begin it at once without any further waiting!”

Passing through space and time from Gilgal, in 1079 B.C., to Nuremberg, in A.D. 1945, it is interesting to speculate why ancient practice was not followed in this respect at Nuremberg. Perhaps it was feared that the presence of three housewives performing the symbolic act of gloating would prove embarrassing to the eminent members of the English Bar, who had been prevailed upon to take part in the proceedings on the assurance that these would partake strictly of a judicial character? Or perhaps the problem of deciding what exactly should be the role of these three females proved insoluble—should their participation be limited to one ladylike stare directed at each of the captives, or should certain sounds and gestures, strictly in accordance with the most ancient tradition, be barred because these had become associated in the modern mind with the music hall? A suitable attire for the ceremony would also not have been easy to find—traditional attire might have suggested fancy dress or a Hawaiian chorus, while umbrellas and handbags would have been an obvious anachronism for participants in so ancient a ceremonial. Most probably, however, the idea was abandoned owing to the stage managers despairing of being able to find three females who, however carefully selected and trained, could be trusted to act the role decided upon in such unfamiliar surroundings. Women of whatever class would to-day find it difficult to assume to order the manners of their remote ancestresses and in which ever way their deportment failed—whether it was too theatrical or too wooden—the result would introduce an atmosphere of farce or even of burlesque which, beyond all else, it was desired to avoid so far as it was possible.

To summarize the conclusions which we may arrive at with regard to warfare in prehistoric times, we may say that, in essentials, it in no way differed markedly from warfare to-day. It will be found that neither in causes, conduct, nor results do fundamental distinctions exist.

With regard to causes, in prehistoric times warfare probably usually arose as a result of a change of climatic conditions causing a shifting of population from an area which had become uninhabitable to another already populated. In modern times, one of the commonest causes of war is an over-populated country seeking to find by violence an outlet for its surplus population.

With regard to conduct, the spirit in which warfare was conducted in prehistoric times was probably exactly similar to that in which warfare has come to be conducted during the last three decades. In both, the main characteristics are directness, simplicity, and an entire lack of artificial restraints. In both, the only rule is to damage the enemy in any way physically possible. Above all, in neither will any trace be found of that perhaps arbitrary distinction between combatants and non-combatants, that is to say between the enemy’s armed forces and the enemy’s women and children. In both, democratic principles are followed: no privilege of immunity is granted to anyone—however weak and defenceless.

With regard to results, certain distinctions appear, but these cannot be termed fundamental. In prehistoric times, wars were wars of extermination: one killed all the enemies one could and took away or destroyed all enemy property upon which one could lay one’s hands. In present-day warfare, to date at any rate, only distinguished enemy leaders are done to death, although it must not be forgotten that, in 1945, many quite minor German political leaders and officials were summarily murdered. The fact remains, however, that the bulk of the enemy population is not at present deliberately exterminated. Still, much the same result however is achieved when an industrial population is dealt with by dismantling and removing the factories on which it depends for subsistence, by cutting imports, forbidding exports, and leaving the population to starve. The consequence of this procedure will be realized if one can imagine the fate of the inhabitants of Birmingham or Coventry if all their factories were dismantled, and the essential machinery removed to some foreign land. Prehistoric warfare created a desert and called it peace—solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant—warfare to-day creates a slum and calls that peace.

If the Second World War be taken as an example of contemporary warfare, the consequences to the vanquished are not merely the unintentional result of wholesale plundering inspired by simple greed and carried out regardless of the subsequent fate of the victims such as so frequently followed victorious wars in classical and mediaeval times. What the victors in 1945 intended should be the fate the vanquished was clearly set out in the infamous Morgenthau Plan, formulated by Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, under the influence and guidance of a fellow Jew, Harry Dexter White (alias Weit), Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, and later unmasked as a Communist spy. This plan was accepted by President Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, at the Quebec Conference on the 15th September, 1944. Under this plan Germany was to be transformed into a pastoral country by the simple process of blowing up the mines and demolishing the factories. With regard to the existing population, numbering some seventy millions, mostly relying on industry for support, reliance was placed on starvation reducing their number to a level which could be supported by agricultural and pastoral pursuits.[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡]

It was only owing to an unforeseen change in the political situation which began soon after the conclusion of hostilities, that the Morgenthau Plan was not carried out in its entirety. Still extensive sabotage operations, as distinct from systematic looting, were undertaken, for details of which the reader is referred to Freda Utley’s memorable book, Kostspielige Rache (Hamburg, 1950, Nölke Verlag). An enormous amount of wanton destruction was systematically carried out and this campaign was only reluctantly abandoned when the “Cold War” broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union. The memory of this campaign of planned destruction has been obscured by the “Wirtschaftswunder” which to the amazement of everyone began in Western Germany some ten years after the conclusion of hostilities and brought unprecedented prosperity and wealth to a land which so shortly before had consisted mainly of ruins and slums. This astonishing outcome of defeat was of course in no way connected with the intentions of the victors, so dearly propounded by them at the Quebec Conference in September 1944. It was in fact in every way the exact opposite to what Morgenthau and his sinister satellite Harry Dexter White, alias Weit, had so carefully planned and intrigued to bring about.

In summation it may be said that prehistoric and contemporary warfare share the same essential characteristics. The main distinction between them is that in prehistoric warfare all prisoners are killed as a matter of course, while in contemporary warfare only the leaders are done to death. The employment of captive enemies for forced labour for the benefit of their captors and of course mass-deportations are characteristics of present-day warfare which have been adopted from warfare as it developed after mankind had formed settled communities, a development which will be considered in the next chapter.

Chapter 2 — Organized Warfare

Wars in prehistoric times were unplanned, unrelated, and probably rare happenings. They might be what we should term wars of aggression, but they were certainly not wars of planned aggression.

A community living somewhere in northern Europe, let us say on the shores of the Baltic, would find their hunting grounds becoming less and less able to support them owing to the gradual advance of icefields from Scandinavia. In desperation, they would trek southward in search of less rigorous conditions and would find such in, say, some river valley in southern France. The inhabitants of this valley would resent this trespass on their hunting grounds. A clash—quite unintended by both sides—would result. One side would be wiped out or scattered, and for the victors life would proceed as peaceably as of yore.

All this was changed when mankind began to practise agriculture and to form settled communities. In the first place, this permitted a great increase in the density of populations. Secondly, it led for the first time to the accumulation in one spot of stores of food and desirable articles, such as weapons, tools, pottery and jewellery—that is to say, wealth, or to use military nomenclature, loot.

From this early period at the dawn of history, wars of conquest must be dated. The hunters, and, after the domestication of animals, herdsmen and shepherds of the surrounding country, were inevitably filled with covetousness when they visited those early agricultural settlements in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates. It is no accident that the composer of the Ten Commandments included covetousness among those sins under the particular displeasure of the Almighty. Perhaps, as he wrote, he had just seen in the eyes of some half-savage visitors to his native city the feelings which they could not disguise when they contrasted the wealth and comfort which they saw around them with their own poverty and precarious mode of life.

From the earliest times, the settled agricultural communities along the Nile and Euphrates were subjected to periodic raids and invasions by the savage tribes inhabiting the desert or mountain hinterland. These alternated with preventive wars undertaken in self-protection by the agricultural communities. The news would come in that the tribes w