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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Here's a fun historical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"

What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)

This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.

So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"

The minimum necessary for victory.

My answer would be something along the lines of "keep civilian casualties low enough that France does not regret choosing to ally with you" (or slightly more precisely, "don't have policies that impose costs on your allies that are high enough that they would not have allied with you if they knew what your policy was").

I don't have a solid answer for what that number would be, that would depend on the scope of the operation and the expected costs and benefits of doing that operation over the expected costs and benefits of doing the next-best thing. But I would imagine that number is pretty high.

5 years ago an interview with air marshal Arthur Harris from 1978, originally created as additional learning material for Royal Air Force cadets, and of course restricted material as such, was made public, and interestingly he addresses this specific issue. His response basically was: as many deaths as militarily necessary, stemming from the main consideration that the French didn't fight well at all when they had to in 1940, so trying to spare their lives out of some sort of benevolent political consideration is foolish.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UCWK-O7cKvc?si=mRrlXuHGzsl7brSo

(at the 31:45 mark, for example)

To give a concrete example, he did oppose proposals to carpet-bomb the town of Bordeaux, but only because he judged that such an attack would have zero military value.

There were similar discussions to the hypothetical I mentioned before D-Day as well. Churchill was probably the most outspoken advocate for French civilians, and constantly fretted about their lives, even though he also ordered the infamous (but in my mind, eminently justified) raid on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir.

You'd think the brits would have some consideration for those that covered their retreat at Dunkerque and allowed them to have a war to fight instead of a total defeat, but Harris always had a total warrior mentality rather than that of a man of honor. For good or ill.

I ... assume that the view under consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

So, do I get all this extra knowledge on collateral damage, or are the Western Allies just that desperate?

Acceptable cost depends on expected benefit. The Wikipedia page for Operation Overlord says anywhere from 210,000 to 530,000 German casualties over the summer. Taking the low end, I like the 15% ratio mentioned downthread, so…about 30,000, maybe?

But this doesn’t count materiel losses or the commanding position that would lead to millions more Nazis killed or captured. And 15% is completely arbitrary. I am not happy with the uncertainty on my choice at all.

Scrolling down a bit further, the actual civilian cost was under 20,000, perhaps doubled if you count earlier strategic bombing. Pretty good! Except I’d be willing to bet the 15% number was chosen based on WWII experiences, so it might be assuming the conclusion.

I mean it is a direct analogy to a current geopolitical crisis to bring this up now.

I reject the idea of collateral damage applies to USA in WW2 to the extend that all actions is about limiting collateral damage. Like the nazis, but less so some of the killing done by American forces was deliberate mass murder.

Also, a key reason the USA commited less mass murder than the nazis was that there was pushback in American society eventually to some of the psychos in American goverment who were probably worse than less edgy Nazis like Rommel. Like Henry Morgenthau. The kind of people who promoted this pushback were attacked for it as nazi sympathisers, or indeed had some sympathy towards the German people. Although even them were negative for the most part about Nazi Germany.

If things were left only to the most gung ho bloodthirsty antinazi types, some of which were communists, USA would have been even closer in conduct to the nazis.

The problem of a totalitarian system and a supposed democracy can be captured by totalitarianism and be a fake democracy, is that some key psychos in positions of power can do enormous damage. In a sort of kind of, democracy unless the bloodthirsty more neocon types destroy democracy once and for all while pretending they are bringing freedom tm, is that there will be those who will promote restraint and be disgusted at unnecessary atrocities. Or not see in their interest to be savage oppressors of others. But democracy isn't the only thing important but also the dominant ideology of society.

This is why I would expect actual supporters of freedom to be paying attention to what the entrenched and powerful faction of neocons is advocating in power, what certain states like Israel are doing and what Ukraine and its leader has done with the blessings of the west. And we will find that in addition to attrocities, we have seen extremely authoritarian moves crushing dissent. But even within western world we have seen a rise of authoritarianism agaisnt opposition to the neocon foreign policy agenda, and that cancel culture was also part of the Iraq war.

Anyway, Eisenhower wouldn't take my suggestions seriously, and I reject your hypothetical because it promotes the inacurate implication of the USA and certain other country as more ethical than they really are. And it promotes the inaccurate view that we are dealing with a crowd of people who are out of trying to minimize collateral "damage", when actually there are plenty of people who are bloodthirsty in such debates and in positions of power and there is a strong attempt to frame things in a more flattering manner than the uglier reality. The Japanese imperialists, Nazis, Soviet Communists aren't as unique as people think.

Having said all that, I would play along with your scenario. I would oppose the mass bombing of cities like Dresden. And various other attrocities that happened like Morgenthau's mass murderous genocidal plan that was implemented in part. Moreover the allies send millions of people back to Stalin. These were fugitives from the USSR who went west during the age of WW2 by the allies.

From wiki which has a bias in a pro left direction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_against_former_prisoners_of_war

At the Yalta Conference, the Western Allies agreed to repatriate Soviet citizens regardless of their wishes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul

https://youtube.com/watch?v=z6ak1OtC_gM

And avoid general savagery attrocities towards civilians after victory.

And also like Patton argue for western conquest of all of Germany so the Soviets wouldn't take it and oppose further help at that point towards the Soviets.

I don't have particular recommendations about the war in France due to the issue not having something as obvious as the others, and not researching it particularly. After WW2 there are plenty as I mentioned but the while fighting it definitely the mass bombing of German cities as a means of harming the populace instead of seeking military targets is the obvious issue, if the goal is to reduce civilian casualties and avoid killing for the sake of revenge.

I mean it is a direct analogy to a current geopolitical crisis to bring this up now.

I was merely inspired by a discussion with a friend. No point on sitting on the prompt for a few months hoping Israel/Palestine clears up.

Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"

There is no upper limit on how many civilians could die with the actions being entirely acceptable. The key point is how necessary any particular action is. Militaries are mandated to take on a certain risk by virtue of being non-civilian, and that risk can be asymmetrical if you're the invader. For example, it may not be acceptable to bomb a factory making fighter jets that kills 10 people if those jets can be shot down in the air by SAMs even though the latter is more dangerous to the armed troops.

That level of analysis assumes there’s never going to be a genuine threat to your own civilians. This was true for the mainland USA. It wasn’t for any of the countries in Europe or asia.

If you’re a country in range of enemy bombers during WW2, any enemy planes you fail to shoot down are now a threat to not just your own troops but also your own civilians. The less enemy planes built, the fewer that can potentially get past your air defences.

Additionally, the distinction between a civilian working at a military manufacturing plant vs a soldier working in the logistical side of things is blurry, especially in a country with mass conscription and a totally mobilised war economy.

Besides even today, Civilians get contracted to do also sorts of support services for the military, particularly in terms of logistics, that soldiers also get used for. Why is the life of a 19 year old conscript assigned to drive a truck somehow less morally worthy than a civilian contracted by the military to do the same thing?

That level of analysis assumes there’s never going to be a genuine threat to your own civilians. This was true for the mainland USA. It wasn’t for any of the countries in Europe or asia.

It's worth noting that a great deal of effort to minimize the damage of war to civilians came about in Europe. Despite the threats each nations armies posed to each other, they were willing to accept the idea that it was best to avoid going after non-combatants even if they were in a position to strike. Indeed, there was significant debate over this precise issue when Germany and Britain were exchanging air strikes in WW2.

Additionally, the distinction between a civilian working at a military manufacturing plant vs a soldier working in the logistical side of things is blurry, especially in a country with mass conscription and a totally mobilised war economy.

True. I don't have any hard-line stance on what is or isn't an acceptable target. But this is precisely what the lawyers and scholars do for a living, so I'm fine leaving it to them to decide on a case-by-case basis.

Certainly the western allies saw very little distinction to be drawn between German civilians and combatants. There was sometimes an employment of various euphemisms to skirt around the brutal logic of this worldview (the proponents of strategic bombing liked to talk about "damaging enemy morale" or "targeting worker housing"), but generally the perspective was that the ultimate good was forcing unconditional surrender as soon as possible, by any means possible.

I started to go down this rabbit hole, arguing that the correct decisions have to be made case-by-case. You don’t decide civilian casualties on the operational level; you handle it in target selection. “Be aware of your target and what’s behind it.”

But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that there is a role for macro estimates. It’s a go/no-go signal for the whole operation. Eisenhower & company had the option of saying no, we can’t do this without depopulating the whole countryside, we will wait for the Soviets and Italy to apply more pressure. They had good reasons not to do this, but Overlord could have theoretically been shelved.

Why is Eisenhower asking a Catholic woman? Eh, weirder things happen in wartime.

There are a few criteria for waging a just war according to Catholic doctrine:

  1. The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain.
  2. All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.
  3. There must be serious prospects of success.
  4. The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

I think your scenario takes for granted #1 and #2. The historical record bears out #3, but it could be an interesting exercise to determine if this could have been known at the time. Your question is getting to the heart of #4.

Then I look at the doctrine of Double Effect. When an action produces both a negative and a positive effect, it is permitted if:

  • The good effect outweighs the bad effect.
  • The action is undertaken with the intention of producing the good effect, not the bad effect.
  • The bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect.

Given this, the most simple answer to "How many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?" is one less than the number of lives saved by the success of Operation Overload, as long as the rules of Double Effect are applied. Of course, we don't live in a counterfactual world where we know for certain how many people would have died had we not acted. We should be careful and allow for our knowledge being imprecise.

There would be some actions that could not be tolerated - we could not attack civilians directly in the hope that it would redirect medical supplies from the military and therefore weaken the military. This would violate the "bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect" clause. But overall, as long as we are attacking legitimate military targets for the sake of attacking legitimate military targets, and we are reasonably certain that each attack will save more lives than cause civilian deaths, it is morally permissible.

There would be some actions that could not be tolerated - we could not attack civilians directly in the hope that it would redirect medical supplies from the military and therefore weaken the military. This would violate the "bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect" clause.

While this idea was not pursued with respect to targeting French cities, it was employed in the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. Learning from experiences from the Blitz and the early years of strategic bombing, it became to be understood that attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure were in some respects more effective than targeting enemy manufacturing. Mass civilian casualties, and both damaging transport infrastructure and then deluging it with fleeing/wounded civilians, had larger downstream effects on military capabilities than directly targeting military elements themselves. The apogee of this mentality was the firebombing of Dresden, which was deliberately designed to cause maximum chaos in the German rear to limit their ability to co-ordinate a response to concurrent Soviet offensives.

The criteria you mention seem to be re the initiation of war, whereas the OP is asking about the conduct of war. This Catholic source discusses both.

Discrimination and Due Proportion seem like they are applications of Double Effect, which is why I went into the more general Double Effect, but for the curious and lazy:

(1) Discrimination — Armed forces ought to fight armed forces, and should strive not to harm non-combatants purposefully. Moreover, armed forces should not wantonly destroy the enemy's countryside, cities, or economy simply for the sake of punishment, retaliation or vengeance.

(2) Due proportion — Combatants must use only those means necessary to achieve their objectives. For example, no one needs to use nuclear missiles to settle a territorial fishing problem. Due proportion also involves mercy — towards civilians in general, towards combatants when the resistance stops (as in the case of surrender and prisoners of war), and towards all parties when the war is finished.

Sure, but they are much more specific to the issue of civilian casualties, which I think is helpful.

I'd ask the French exile leadership what they consider a tolerable price of liberation, given that it is their people we are talking about.

15% of the population, that's one of the few things I remember from my reserve officer training.

"As many as are necessary, and no more."

I’d show Ike this and let him do his thing https://youtube.com/watch?v=JUDbwWxTExQ

Not sure what innocent French civilians have to do with this.

Innocent French civilians died to keep Poland independent. Allegedly.

How did that work out for them? (Speaking plainly, see video linked above)

National Socialism was relatively progressive on the role of women in practice (which actually annoyed some German tradcons) and had a moderately large number of semi-open homosexual men even after the SA was purged. The great irony of WW2 counterfactualism is that it’s entirely possible that, had Germany won, 20th century social liberalism would have progressed anyway. Hitler very pointedly chose not to roll back a lot of reforms that had been passed by the German parliament under Social Democratic control and influence (during the Imperial and Weimar periods).

This is a wittier version of the same point I was going to make - bravo

Not an answer but I think it's interesting to note that even in WW2, a 'total war', both sides held back some of their most deadly weapons.

The British and Americans had mass-manufactured anthrax and poison gas ready for use by their bombers, while the Germans had just invented nerve gas (sarin amongst other things). Neither ended up using them. Japan deployed bioweapons against China killing hundreds of thousands and considered using them against the US, before concluding that escalating the war at that late stage would not be advantageous.

One of the combat experiences about WWI is that the effect of chemical weapons in the battlefield environment were awful, but not decisive. With both sides prepared for the possibility, it raised the upper bound on human suffering without making your chance of victory any more certain. Chemical weapons were always fickle allies; they were very sensitive to changes in weather, they did unpredictable things, and ultimately if you were trying to use them to achieve some breakthrough you were inundating the areas you hoped to yourself capture.

There were various uses of chemical weapons against populations who could not fight back by the Germans and Japanese (moreso the latter), which was in many respects their "ideal" use case. But given the ability of both sides to be able to both manufacture large amounts of chemical weapons and deploy them against enemy civilian populations, and their marginal battlefield use, ultimately neither side saw them as practical.

But contingency planning and a German air raid led to the accidental discovery of chemotherapy, so that was cool.

But we did use nukes. The difference being both sides had chemical weapons.

We also made heavy use of fire bombs in Germany and Japan, and I find it hard to believe only the Allied forces had that capability. From what I have read about the effects they sound as terrifying as chemical weapons but for some reason the ethics of using them are never discussed, especially in comparison to chemical and nuclear weapons. What is the difference? There was the lingering memory of The Great War where chemical weapons were deployed and condemned, so that certainly contributed. Fire has also been a component of war since mankind first sought to wage it, so perhaps packaging it in bombs did not seem like much of an escalation (though these were napalm bombs, which have uniquely nasty properties). From a strategic perspective, chemical weapons do not destroy materiel, and ostensibly the goal of strategic bombing is to destroy your opponents industry. Fire bombs do not share that issue, and American strategists liked them in Japan especially because of how effective they were at destroying (mostly wooden) Japanese structures - never mind the fact that they tested the bombs on a replica of a Japanese family home.

The development of the fire bombing campaign against Japan was a very late shift in the war; it started in February 1945 but really only got truly going in May. There were a number of unique circumstances that essentially only then made very low-level night bombing attacks viable, with B-29s literally stripped of all their defenses crammed to the gills with incendiaries.

I find it hard to believe only the Allied forces had that capability.

Well, believe it, because in practical terms, only they did at that scale. The germans attempted something similar with the Blitz in London, but it came nowhere near the heights of the Allied bombings late in the war. Partly due to doctrine, partly due to better technology, partly due to the fact that by then the Luftwaffe was on the defensive and badly worn down. In greater part because the long war had hardened feelings and the Blitz/Pearl Harbor had Britain and the US spoiling for revenge.

It is my contention that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo would not have been done or at least repeated if the Axis powers were witholding a similar threat. Germany bombed London when the Brits had no prayer of bombing Germany. Then, a couple years later, the Brits bombed Germany when they were unable to respond in kind. A few V2 rockets were all the germans could manage by then.

Not a technological barrier then but a tactical one. Agree on all counts.

I say, "nah, we're gonna wait till the Soviets and Nazis tire each other out much much more, then sweep over both of them like a puppy running over a carefully arranged house of cards." And then I'd also be like, "whats a civilian? In the future people like me are wise to such silly ideas."

We are talking 44 here. By that time the question was if the Soviet Union will rule all of Europe or just half of it.

The second front was not opened because Stalin needed the help that much, but to make sure that US will have influence in the continent.

I'd have nuked the Soviets, and used nukes to secure a decisive hegemonic status into the future for as long as it lasts.*

*After they've done their job in killing the slightly more odious Nazis.

This is outside the bounds of the hypothetical. Dwight Eisenhower is not relinquishing command of the Allied Expeditionary Force to you, nor are you personally replacing the Allied heads of state as chief coordinators of war strategy. The only role you have is to advise Eisenhower to what degree French civilian casualties are acceptable.

What exactly is this hypothetical meant to reveal?

I suppose at its heart it's a more complex trolley problem with a historical context. It's an interesting moral dilemma to tease out.

There is no upper bound. Civilian casualties are a fake concept. And although I like the French as a people, generally, that is entirely subservient to the cause of winning the war, particularly because my tomfool general Eisenhower and his higher ups are insisting we go in deep when the Nazis are ready, and for some reason aren't anticipating the Soviet threat at a level obvious to the average 1940s steel worker.

Ah, yes. We had to destroy the village in order to save it. And, if civilian casualties are a fake concept, then I guess 9/11 was perfectly acceptable.

No, they are our people.

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