Desperate times, desperate measures the causes of civilian victimization in war

International Security

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 152-195

  Downes, Alexander B ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33646402326     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2006.30.4.152     Document Type: Article

References (199)

1. William Eckhardt, "Civilian Deaths in Wartime," Bulletin of Peace Proposals, Vol. 20, No. 1 (March 1989), p. 91.
2. Figures are from William Eckhardt, Bulletin of Peace Proposals, ibid., pp. 90, 92. Interstate wars are particularly deadly, killing about twice as many noncombatants as civil, colonial, and imperial wars combined.
3. By contrast, a mere 3 percent say that belligerents should be permitted to attack combatants and noncombatants alike. Greenberg Research, The People on War Report: ICRC Worldwide Consultation on ihe Rules of War (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 1999), p. 13 (emphasis in original), http://www.icrc.org/Web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/p0758?OpenDocument.
4. George E. Hopkins, "Bombing and the American Conscience during World War II," Historian, Vol. 28, No. 3 (May 1966), p. 453;
5. and "Bush Performance Rating Climbs Back to Low 60s; Ameri cans More Hawkish over Iraq but Still Considerably Reluctant, Newest Zogby America Poll Reveals," February 9, 2003, http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=675,
6. Caleb Carr, The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare against Civilians (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 12.
7. Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996);
8. and Robert A. Pape, "Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work," International Security, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 90-136.
9. See also Michael Horowitz and Dan Reiter, "When Does Aerial Bombing Work? Quantitative Empirical Tests, 1917-1999," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 45, No. 2 (April 2001), pp. 147-173.
10. On the destructive potential of sanctions, see John Mueller and Karl Mueller, "Sanctions of Mass Destruction," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 3 (May/June 1999), pp. 43-53.
11. In this article I examine states' victimization of foreign civilians in interstate wars, that is, armed conflicts between recognized states that generate at least 1,000 battle deaths.
12. Benjamin Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, '"Draining the Sea': Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare," International Organization, Vol. 58, No. 2 (April 2004), pp. 375-407;
13. Robert A. Pape, "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 3 (August 2003), pp. 343-361;
14. Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
15. R.J. Rummel, "Democracy, Power, Genocide, and Mass Murder," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 39, No. 1 (March 1995), pp. 3-26;
16. and Michael J. Engelhardt, "Democracies, Dictatorships, and Counterinsurgency: Does Regime Type Really Matter?" Conflict Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1992), pp. 52-63.
17. President George W. Bush lent support to this view when he declared in 2002 that "targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong" and asserted that fighting fair is what distinguishes democracies from rogue states, terrorists, and barbarians. Bush, "Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy," http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06;
18. and Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: White House, 2002).
19. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002);
20. and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, "An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace," American Political Science Reivew, Vol. 93, No. 4 (December 1999), pp. 791-807.
21. Mark B. Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations (London: Pluto, 2002), pp. 3639.
22. A historian of Spanish colonialism, for example, writes that European powers made "a distinction . . . between the treatment of fellow Europeans and that of colonials who resisted European advance. The standards of warfare that could be applied to the colonial enemy were different because these opponents were not 'fully civilized.'" Sebastian Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 123.
23. For example, more than 90 percent of the population in Kosovo is Albanian, which enormously strengthens and legitimizes their claim to self-rule.
24. Civilian victimization - although masquerading under other names, such as nuclear deterrence, punishment, barbarism, and terrorism- is already a key independent variable in security studies. See, for example, Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966);
25. Pape, Bombing to Win;
26. Ivan Arregufn-Toft, "How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict," International Security, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Summer 2001), pp. 93-128;
27. and Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
28. On democracies' supposed vulnerability to suicide terrorism, see Pape, Dying to Win.
29. On norm creation, see Richard M. Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997);
30. and Nina Tannenwald, "Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo," International Security, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Spring 2005), pp. 5-49.
31. On escalation, see Richard Smoke, War: Controlling Escalation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977);
32. and Eric J. Labs, "Beyond Victory: Offensive Realism and the Expansion of War Aims," Security Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer 1997), pp. 1-49.
33. Conservative Party leader Andrew Bonar Law speaking in the House of Commons on March 1, 1915, See The Parliamentary Debates, 5th Ser., Vol. 70: House of Commons, Third Volume of Session 1914-15 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1994), p. 607.
34. See, for example, Geneva Convention (IV) Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949) and Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I, 1977), http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/ siteeng0.nsf/html/genevaconventions.
35. On jus in bello - the part of just war theory that regulates who may be targeted in war - see James Turner Johnson, "Maintaining the Protection of Noncombatants," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 4 (July 2000), pp. 421-448.
36. Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 10. Unlike Valentino's definition, however, it is not necessary that a particular number of people die - or that a belligerent intends to annihilate a group - for a case to qualify as civilian victimization.
37. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1993), pp. 160, 161.
38. For a similar definition, see Arreguín-Toft, "How the Weak Win Wars," pp. 101-102. In practice, civilian victimization may be initiated by the military on the ground, but once political leaders become aware of the strategy and approve it-or decline to stop it-it becomes de facto government policy.
39. Protocol Additional (I) to the Geneva Conventions, art. 43.
40. See also Valentino, Final Solutions, pp. 13-14;
41. and Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 2d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992), pp. 42-43. I exclude prisoners of war from this category mainly for lack of data and to focus sharply on those who are clearly civilians rather than former fighters.
42. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 145-146.
43. I acknowledge the difficulty of drawing a clean line between combatants and noncombatants. A third category of "quasi combatants" may be needed for those - such as munitions workers -who build weapons but do not wield them. Such individuals would be accorded greater protections than soldiers but fewer than civilians employed outside the defense industry. 22. Carr, The Lessons of Terror, p. 47;
44. and Barry Buzan, "Who May We Bomb?" Prospect, No. 69 (December 2001), pp. 38-39.
45. Johnson, "Maintaining the Protection of Noncombatants," p. 423.
46. John C. Ford, "The Morality of Obliteration Bombing," in Richard A. Wasserstrom, ed., War and Morality (Belmont Calif.: Wadsworth, 1970), pp. 22-26.
47. Valentino, Final Solutions, p. 11;
48. and Rummel, "Democracy, Power, Genocide, and Mass Murder," p. 4.
49. Instances of domestic violence that were directed at other groups - such as Turkey's mass killing of Armenians inside Turkey during World War I or Nazi depredations against German Jews -are excluded.
50. This is not to imply that desperation or appetite for conquest does not apply to these types of cases, but merely that for the purposes of this article, I test these arguments on interstate wars.
51. Rummel, "Democracy, Power, Genocide, and Mass Murder," pp. 5-6;
52. Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, "'Draining the Sea'";
53. Engelhardt, "Democracies, Dictatorships, and Counterinsurgency, " p. 56;
54. and Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars, p. 24.
55. On the restraining effect of democracy on human rights violations and genocide domestically, see Christian Davenport and David A. Armstrong II, "Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights: A Statistical Analysis from 1976 to 1996," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48, No. 3 (July 2004), pp. 538-554;
56. and Barbara Harff, "No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955," American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (February 2003), pp. 57-73.
57. Rummel is the only scholar to emphasize the limits that democratic institutions impose on policymakers, arguing that "the more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide." R.J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994), pp. 1-2.
58. Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, "'Draining the Sea,'" p. 382.
59. Markus Fischer, "The Liberal Peace: Ethical, Historical, and Philosophical Aspects," Discussion Paper 2000-07 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, April 2000), p. 15.
60. See also Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 287 n. 81;
61. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 97;
62. and John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 377-378.
63. Doyle also concedes that liberal norms are not always effective in preventing counter-civilian violence: "The terror bombing of civilians-as in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki -constitutes, in this view, violations of these [individual] rights and of Liberal principles and demonstrate the weaknesses of Liberal models in these cases." Doyle, Ways of War and Peace, p. 287 n. 81.
64. The role of democratic institutions, according to the norms argument, is to enforce normative restrictions on targeting civilians by threatening leaders who violate the rules with removal from office via regular elections. As Merom puts it, democracies "are restricted by their domestic structures, and in particular by the creed of some of their most articulate citizens and the opportunities their institutional makeup presents such citizens." Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars, p. 15.
65. John E. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973).
66. Bueno de Mesquita et al., "An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace," p. 798. The authors do not make this claim, but it is consistent with the logic of their argument.
67. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, pp. 19-20.
68. Reiter and Stam also suggest that democratic institutions present no obstacle to "wars of empire or genocide," but they do not argue that democracy causes brutal treatment of civilians. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, Ibid., p. 163.
69. John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
70. Quotations are from John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648-1789 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), p. 102;
71. Jurgen Osterhammel, quoted in Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations, p. 38;
72. and International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, The Other Balkan Wars (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993), p. 95.
73. These two mechanisms are obviously related: protracted wars are often costly; rising costs can contribute to desperation to win; and civilian victimization implemented to conserve costs is also intended to help win the war. They do not always go together, however, and thus I present them separately.
74. See Max Hastings, Bomber Command (New York: Dial, 1979), p. 128.
75. Thomas R. Searle, '"It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers': The Firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945," Journal of Military History, Vol. 66, No. 1 (January 2002), pp. 117-118.
76. Conrad C. Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950-1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), p. 47, Although not examined in this article, the denial logic of civilian victimization is even more apparent in counterguerrilla warfare. Insurgent forces rely on the assistance they receive from the civilian population. Counterinsurgency strategies use civilian victimization to sever the link between the guerrillas and the populace by one of two means: to deter people from helping the insurgents or to physically prevent such support by removing the population from areas where guerrillas operate. The deterrence tactic employs murders and massacres of known or suspected insurgent supporters to frighten those left alive. The interdiction method, by contrast, concentrates people under government control or simply kills them, rendering them unable to support the guerrillas.
77. V.E. Tarrant, The U-Boat Offensive, 1914-1945 (London: Arms and Armor, 1989), p. 45.
78. See also Germany's note to the U.S. government, delivered the day before the campaign began, quoted in R.H. Gibson and Maurice Prendergast, The German Submarine War, 1914-1918 (London: Constable, 1931), p. 137.
79. Desperation to win is also behind many instances of civilian victimisation in wars against guerrilla insurgencies: incumbents become increasingly desperate over time as conventional tactics fail to defeat the insurgents, who hope to prolong the war indefinitely and wear out their opponent. Incumbents, therefore, eventually strike at the guerrillas' Achilles' heel - the civilian population from which they draw recruits, supplies, shelter, and information. For a similar logic, which maintains that governments target civilians when the guerrilla force is large and has widespread support among the population, both of which make the rebellion more threatening, see Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, "'Draining the Sea.'" Incumbents also have incentives to hold down their costs so as to be able to prosecute a long war. Directing force at civilians helps to achieve this goal.
80. George Kennan, "Morality and Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Winter 1985/86), p. 206.
81. Ward Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction: Norms and Force in International Relations (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 185.
82. Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars, pp. 42-46.
83. Gary Shandroff, "The Evolution of Area Bombing in American Doctrine and Practices," Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1972, pp. 97-98.
84. John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983).
85. Exceptions - such as the German bombing of Belgrade in April 1941-may occur when a state finds itself under tremendous pressure to win quickly and cannot spare the forces to execute an alternative conventional strategy (such as a blitzkrieg). In spring 1941, for example, the Wehrmacht was feverishly preparing for Operation Barbarossa when it was required to assist Italy against Greece and conquer Yugoslavia at the same time. German bombers struck Belgrade on the first day of the invasion to frighten the Yugoslav government into an early capitulation. For an explanation along these lines, see Matthew Cooper, The German Air Force, 1933-1945: An Anatomy of Failure (London: Jane's, 1981), pp. 197-198.
86. I thank Tanya Schreiber for suggesting this phrase.
87. Mutual deterrence of this kind, for example, restrained the onset of urban aerial bombing by Britain and Germany in the early years of World War II. George H. Quester, Deterrence before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background to Modern Strategy (New York: John Wiley, 1966), pp. 82-122. Belligerents may also be deterred from victimizing noncombatants by the fear of alienating a powerful third party or even provoking it to enter hostilities.
88. On the difference between constitutive versus instrumental effects of norms, see Nina Tannenwald, "The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Nonuse," International Organization, Vol. 53, No. 3 (July 1999), p. 440.
89. For U.S. and British examples with regard to Italian, German, and Japanese bombing in the 1930s, see Dower, War without Mercy, pp. 38-39.
90. Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 304.
91. Avraham Ussishkin, quoted in Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 50.
92. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Ibid., p. 227.
93. International Commission, The Other Balkan Wars;
94. and Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin, 1995), pp. 135-177.
95. Massacres by North and South Korea in the early stages of the Korean War are examples.
96. See Pape, Bombing to Win;
97. Horowitz and Reiter, "When Does Aerial Bombing Work?";
98. and Pape, "Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work."
99. On the self-defeating effect of indiscriminate violence in guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency, see Stathis N. Kalyvas, "Wanton and Senseless? The Logic of Massacres in Algeria," Rationality and Society, Vol. 11, No. 3 (August 1999), p. 251;
100. and Matthew Cooper, The Nazi War against Soviet Partisans, 1941-1944 (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), pp. 11-29.
101. Michael Ignatieff, "Barbarians at the Gates: Warfare against Civilians, Caleb Carr Argues, Should Always Be Viewed as Terrorism," New York Times Book Review, February 17, 2002, p. 8.
102. The Anglo-American naval blockade of Germany in World War I, for example, is credited by some with contributing to Germany's collapse in the fall of 1918. Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 72.
103. An example of targeted violence is the Phoenix program in the Vietnam War. See Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viel Cong (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997), pp. 258-259, 262-264. Examples of indiscriminate violence include the Second Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902), the U.S.-Filipino war (1899-1902), the Second Italo-Sanusi war (1923-32), and the Franco-Algerian war (1954-62).
104. Russia assisted in the creation of a Bulgarian state by killing and expelling Muslim Turks in the Russo-Turkish war (1877-78); the Balkan states each expanded at the expense of Ottoman Turkey in 1912-13; Israel consolidated and expanded its territory in the 1948 war; and Turkey established a Turkish-Cypriot enclave in northern Cyprus in 1974 by driving out Greek Cypriots.
105. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace, pp. 261-264.
106. As a secondary measure of democracy, I rely on the Polity 4 data set, which uses a 21-point scale to measure a country's political institutions. Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2000 (College Park: Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2001). All results reported below use Doyle's coding; substituting Polity does not substantially change the results unless otherwise noted.
107. Differences within a major religion (such as Catholic/Protestant or Sunni/Shia) are not coded as religious differences, but this decision does not affect the results, nor does using membership in different civilisations as defined in Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
108. There are only two guerrilla wars in the data set, however: Vietnam and NATO-Yugoslavia 1999. Interstate wars are overwhelmingly conventional wars. I also employed the extent of belligerents' war aims and expansions in these aims as a fourth indicator of desperation, following the logic that higher political demands induce greater resistance by the adversary, which leads to longer, costlier wars.
109. This index includes population, urban population, iron and steel production, energy consumption, military expenditure, and military personnel.
110. The variable, however, only codes whether a belligerent was the target of civilian victimization by its opponent, and thus a positive and significant coefficient does not necessarily mean that civilian victimization by one belligerent causes civilian victimization by another.
111. I thank Barry Posen for suggesting this argument, which is also raised in Otto Hintze, The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 174, 199.
112. Nor did I find support for the view that democracies choose easy fights and thus avoid wars of attrition and civilian victimization: democratic war initiators are not significantly less likely than democratic targets to victimize noncombatants. Democracies are also somewhat less likely than autocracies to have their own civilians targeted (10 percent vs. 15 percent, Pr = 0.32), contrary to the idea that democracies are more vulnerable to coercion by punishment.
113. Civilian victimization occurred in 35 percent of wars between belligerents with different religions, compared with 25 percent of the time when they shared the same religion (Pr = 0.14).
114. Bivariate correlations are only suggestive because they measure the impact of each variable separately. Multivariate regression analysis allows one to estimate the effect of each variable controlling simultaneously for the effects of all the others. Because the dependent variable in this case is either present or absent, I employ a logit model. The signs and coefficients of the variables signify how much they increase or decrease the probability that civilian victimization occurs.
115. Total or expanding war aims also takes a positive sign, but it does not achieve statistical significance. The indicators of desperation and appetite for territory are also substantively important. Holding other variables constant at their mean values, changing war of attrition from 0 to 1 more than doubles the likelihood that a belligerent will target civilians, while the intention to annex territory more than triples it. Moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile of battle deaths and war duration increases the probability of civilian victimization 66 percent and 87 percent, respectively. All calculations were performed using CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results, ver. 2.1, by Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg, http://gking.harvard.edu/stats.shtml.
116. If the identity argument were true, however, civilian victimization should have been more frequent in colonial wars (nearly all between white Europeans and native peoples of Africa and Asia) than in interstate wars. Data collected by Ivan Arreguín-Toft, though, reveals that states used barbarism-"the systematic violation of the laws of war"-in asymmetric conflicts (mostly colonial wars) about 20 percent of the time, whereas the frequency of civilian victimization in my interstate war data set (capable belligerents) is 30 percent. The quotation is from Arreguín-Toft, "How the Weak Win Wars," p. 101; I thank Arreguín-Toft for kindly providing these data.
117. Among democracies, only France (Roman Republic, 1849), Italy (World War I), and Israel (War of Attrition, 1969-70) did not target civilians in wars of attrition. Given that only the last of these three is coded as a democracy by Polity, the relationship is even stronger using that coding: 93 percent versus 50 percent.
118. In this sample, the deterrence variable must be dropped because it perfectly predicts civilian victimization. The variable for post-1945 is also dropped.
119. This table may be viewed at http://www.duke.edu/~downes.
120. McCarthy, Death and Exile, p. 68.
121. Germany's Health Office estimated that 763,000 civilians died from the effects of the blockade, not counting 150,000 influenza deaths in 1918; a second estimate performed ten years later put these figures at 424,000 and 209,000, respectively. C. Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915-1919 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 141;
122. and Offer, The First World War, p. 34.
123. Austria-Hungary lost an estimated 467,000 civilians to the effects of the blockade. Leo Grebler and Wilhelm Winkler, The Cost of the World War to Germany and Austria-Hungary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 147.
124. For data on the effects of the blockade on the German population, see Offer, The First World War, pp. 21-78;
125. and Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, pp. 124-156.
126. On the possible influence of civilian deprivation on the German decision to surrender, see Offer, The First World War, pp. 72, 76.
127. Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 166-167, 221.
128. Quotations are from David French, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914-1916 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), p. 22;
129. Labs, "Beyond Victory," p. 42;
130. and French, British Strategy and War Aims, p. 23.
131. Quotations are from Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1988), p. 37;
132. Oliver Viscount Esher, Journals and Leiters of Reginald Viscount Esher, Vol. 3: 1910-1915 (London: Ivor, Nicholson, and Watson, 1938), p. 177;
133. and Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years, 1892-1916, Vol. 2 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925), p. 71.
134. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Ashfield, 1976), pp. 230-231;
135. and Offer, The First World War, p. 301.
136. Particularly contentious were restrictions on the cotton and copper trades, both of which were dominated by U.S. producers. See A.C. Bell, A History of the Blockade of Germany and of the Countries Associated with Her in the Great War, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, 1914-1918 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1961), pp. 46-58, 119-142.
137. A.C. Bell, A History of the Blockade of Germany and of the Countries Associated with Her in the Great War, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, 1914-1918, Ibid., pp. 50-51, 228-229.
138. Quoted in A.C. Bell, A History of the Blockade of Germany and of the Countries Associated with Her in the Great War, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, 1914-1918, ibid., p. 115.
139. Offer, The First World War, p. 276;
140. and Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, p. 31. Although Britain was not a signatory to the declaration in 1914, its rules had been incorporated into the Admiralty's regulations on how it would wage war.
141. Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, pp. 30-31.
142. Marion C. Siney, The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1914-1916 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1957), p. 22.
143. Bell, A History of the Blockade, p. 53.
144. This threat helped to induce Germany's neutral neighbors to enter into negotiations to restrict voluntarily their export trade with Germany. This practice, known as "rationing," became a key part of the blockade.
145. Bell, A History of the Blockade, p. 51;
146. and Siney, The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1914-1916, p. 25.
147. Vincent, The Poulies of Hunger, p. 38;
148. and Bell, A History of the Blockade, p. 44.
149. Churchill in The Parliamentary Debates, 5th Ser., Vol. 69: House of Commons, Second Volume of Session, 1914-15 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1944), pp. 937-938.
150. Figures in this paragraph are from Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 68 (early casualties);
151. John Keegan, The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998), p. 143 (Ypres);
152. and Spencer C. Tucker, The Great War, 1914-18 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 38 (total 1914 casualties).
153. Quotations are from David French, "Allies, Rivals, and Enemies: British Strategy and War Aims during the First World War," in John Turner, ed., Britain and the First World War (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 25;
154. Esher, Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher, p. 192;
155. and Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections, 1852-1927 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928), p. 62.
156. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 1974-1975 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), p. 317;
157. and Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 3: 1914-1916: The Challenge of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 225-226.
158. For these quotations, see David Lloyd George, "Suggestions as to the Military Position," CAB 42/1/8, p. 2;
159. H.H. Asquith Letters to Venetia Stanley, sel. and ed. Michael and Eleanor Brock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 345;
160. and Lord Esher, "The War: After Six Months," January 29, 1915, CAB 42/1/29.
161. The French figure is from Tucker, The Great War, 1914-18, p. 38;
162. the Russian from Keegan, The First World War, p. 184.
163. French, "Allies, Rivals, and Enemies," p. 25.
164. French, "Allies, Rivals, and Enemies," Ibid., pp. 25, 26.
165. Lloyd George memo of January 1, 1915, quoted in Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 1914-1915, p. 326.
166. Siney, The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1914-1916, p. 67.
167. Quoted in Bell, A History of the Blockade, p. 233.
168. Vincent, Politics of Hunger, p. 38.
169. The Parliamentary Debates, 5th Ser., Vol. 69, p. 937.
170. Indeed, the 1915 submarine campaign was hardly unrestricted. See Philip K. Lundeberg, "The German Naval Critique of the U-Boat Campaign, 1915-1918," Military Affairs, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn 1963), p. 110 n. 35.
171. Bonar Law and Asquith, respectively, are quoted in The Parliamentary Debates, 5th Ser., Vol. 70, p. 609 and pp. 600-601.
172. For Hankey's words, see his memo "The Apparent Deadlock on the Western Front," December 28, 1914, CAB 37/122/194, pp. 3-4.
173. On official British silence regarding the blockade, see Offer, The First World War, pp. 227-229.
174. "Memorandum by Lord Crewe," June 18, 1915, CAB 37/130/15, p. 1.
175. "Notes on Lord Crewe's Memorandum," June 23, 1915, CAB 37/130/25, pp. 1, 2.
176. "The New Blockade," Times (London), October 5, 1917.
177. Bell, A History of the Blockade, p. 117.
178. M.P.A. Hankey, G. Herbert Fowler, and Mervyn O'Gorman, "Proposed Devastation of the Enemy's Crops," April 1, 1915, CAB 42/2/16.
179. The report also recommended using incendiaries carried by balloons, but the cabinet ruled this out as being too indiscriminate. See M.P.A. Hankey, "Proposed Devastation of the Enemy's Crops: Report of a Conference," September 28, 1915, CAB 42/3/32.
180. The British made much of the humanity of burning German crops and blockade compared to the brutality of the enemy's practice of sinking merchant ships, and tried to shift the blame for any harm done to civilians by these policies to the German government's refusal to surrender. Hankey, Fowler, and O'Gorman, "Proposed Devastation of the Enemy's Crops";
181. and A.J. Balfour, The British Blockade (London: Darling and Son, 1915), p. 4.
182. See "Proposed Devastation of the Enemy's Crops: Report of a Conference," p. 4. References to this plan disappear after 1915.
183. Lloyd George, "Suggestions as to the Military Position," p. 6.
184. See "Food Supplies of Germany," June 2, 1915, CAB 37/129/7, p. 4;
185. and "Report on the Working of Food Legislation in Germany during the War, August to December 1914," July 1915, CAB 42/3/13.
186. "House of Commons: The Blockade," Times (London), March 16, 1917.
187. Bell, A History of the Blockade, pp. 408, 449-452,
188. and Siney, The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1914-1916, pp. 101-102, 129-132.
189. "Full Use of Sea Power," Times (London), December 2, 1916.
190. "Two Blockade Debates," Times (London), March 28, 1917.
191. Some Britons positively reveled in German suffering: one article published in September 1918 commented approvingly that "not only are ten thousands of unborn Germans destined to a life of physical inferiority . . . but also that thousands of Germans, not even yet conceived, will have to face the same fate." Quoted in Werner Schaeffer, War against Women and Children (Scotch Plains, N.J.: Flanders Hall, 1941), p. 1.
192. Quoted in Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), p. 61.
193. Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, p. 79.
194. Offer, The First World War, pp. 77-78.
195. For example, see Edward N. Luttwak, "A Post-heroic Military Policy," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 4 (July/August 1996), pp. 33-44;
196. and Harvey M. Sapolsky and Jeremy Shapiro, "Casualties, Technology, and America's Future Wars," Parameters, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 119-127.
197. Daniel T. Kuehl, "Airpower vs. Electricity: Electric Power as a Target for Strategic Air Operations," in John Gooch, ed., Airpower: Theory and Practice (London: Frank Cass, 1995), pp. 254, 265 n. 57.
198. Alberto Ascherio et al., "Effect of the Gulf War on Infant and Child Mortality in Iraq," New England Journal of Medicine, September 24, 1992, p. 933;
199. and Beth Osborne Daponte, "A Case Study in Estimating Casualties from War and Its Aftermath: The 1991 Persian Gulf War," Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly, Vol. 3 (1993), pp. 57-66.