War is inherently violent. It is also no secret that atrocities happen in most armed conflicts. The laws of war are designed to prevent them, and to limit the impact of fighting on the civilian population. But what of “strategic violence”, military measures ordered at the highest level to achieve political objectives? Over the past three years of Russia’s war, we have seen the widespread use of aerial bombardment, for example in the coastal city of Mariupol, to demoralise Ukrainians. We have seen the continuing targeting of civilians in Sudan. We have seen Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli towns and villages on 7 October, which was intended to spread terror, and we have seen Israel’s devastating response in Gaza which has been punitive as well as purely coercive.
Despite its capacity to inflict overwhelming force against most potential adversaries, the United Kingdom has not been engaged in these sorts of operations for a very long time. The deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq saw some isolated abuses, but in general all three services have shown considerable restraint towards non-combatants, neutrals, and captive enemy servicemen. During the Kosovo and Libyan air campaigns in 1999 and 2011, for instance, the targeting officers always had legal advisers on hand who would try to ensure that risk to civilians was minimised. The constraints these posed were vividly dramatised in a different context by Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman in the 2015 movie Eye in the Sky.
It was not always thus. For hundreds of years, the English and then the British state inflicted extreme violence in pursuit of strategic objectives. It would be a mistake to assume that there is a distinction to be made here between ruthless measures undertaken in colonial contexts, or in Ireland and Scotland, and the supposedly more limited warfare practised in Europe. It is true that, as the historians David Edwards and Murray Pittock have shown, brutal force was often used on the Celtic periphery, but this was partly because these territories were seen as “backdoors” for European adversaries.
If anything, the English – and, later, the British – have acted far more brutally in Europe than elsewhere. This should not be surprising, because it was in Europe that the main threat generally lay. The continent, as Winston Churchill once said, was where “the weather came from”.
The English reputation for brutality originated during the Hundred Years’ War in France. According to the historian Clifford Rogers, armies under the direct command of King Edward III destroyed at least 17 towns and cities in the year 1346 alone. One province was so badly mangled that the French Marxist historian Guy Bois even spoke of “Hiroshima in Normandy”.
A hundred years later, the armies of Henry VIII invaded France no fewer than five times. As the Irish historian Neil Murphy has shown, the king’s commander, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was a man noted for extreme violence in both Scotland and mainland Europe – this included sexual violence against women.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the British attacked the neutral state of Denmark and bombarded its capital Copenhagen, killing nearly 200 civilians, displacing about 20,000 people, and burning down roughly a fifth of the city. This was not “collateral damage” incurred in the course of military operations. Instead, it was the intended object of the operation, which as the British ultimatum warned would lead to the “devastation” of the city and would harm “inhabitants of all ranks, of every age and sex”.
During the two world wars, Britain inflicted extensive damage on the societies of its European adversaries. From 1914-19, the Royal Navy enforced a rigorous blockade on the Central Powers, which cut them off from food supplies to feed their populations. As the historian Mary Cox notes, this led to more than 400,000 civilian deaths in Germany alone. In July 1940, shortly after the fall of France to Hitler, the Navy and the Royal Air Force attacked and largely destroyed the formerly allied and largely helpless French Mediterranean fleet at Oran in North Africa, without declaration of war, causing considerable loss of life, though mostly French naval personnel rather than civilians.
It was the British air war on German cities, however, which most demonstrated the willingness to use extreme violence against civilian populations. The purpose of the raids was, as their architect, Air Chief Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris put it, to “kill Boche”. He planned to raze German cities through an “inextinguishable conflagration”. In July 1943, RAF bombers struck repeatedly at Hamburg igniting a firestorm which burned down much of the city and killed about 35,000 civilians.
The intention of the attacks was annihilatory. The chief of the air staff, Charles Portal, told the chiefs of staff that Bomber Command could kill 900,000 Germans in 18 months, destroy six million homes, and leave 25 million homeless. In the end, “only” about 500,000 civilians were killed. As the historian Richard Overy tells us, the head of Bomber Command Operational Research reached for a biblical metaphor when he regretted that most raids had failed “to create a conflagration in the sense of an all-consuming holocaust”.
All this violence was driven not by sadism or vengeance but by a strategic rationale. In the Middle Ages and early modern period, the purpose was to wear down the French (the usual enemy), to goad them out of their fortifications into a field battle in which they could be defeated, and to frighten towns into submission. This is what Henry V was trying to do in his brutal ultimatum demanding the surrender of Harfleur in 1415. At Copenhagen, the bombardment was undertaken to ensure that the Danish fleet was not handed over to Napoleon; that at Oran in North Africa was likewise intended to deny the French fleet to Hitler. The First World War blockade and the bombing of Germany in the Second World War were intended to disrupt production and break civilian morale, thereby hastening the end of the war.
The advocates of these measures were conscious of operating within a tradition of ruthlessness. One violent assault set a precedent for another. The spectre of Copenhagen, for example, had a long afterlife. Shortly afterwards, a Royal Navy force commanded by Sidney Smith turned up at Lisbon demanding the evacuation of the Portuguese court and the withdrawal of the Portuguese fleet in order to prevent it from being seized by Napoleon. In his ultimatum, Smith hoped that “the recent example at Copenhagen” would encourage the recipients to avoid “Lisbon becoming the theatre of similar scenes of horror”. During the Crimean War nearly 50 years later, as the historian Andrew Lambert reminds us, it was the Russian fear of a Copenhagen-style assault on their capital St Petersburg that helped to propel them towards a negotiated peace. During the Oran crisis the British cabinet explicitly drew on the Danish precedent, arguing that public opinion demanded such ruthless action. Judging from newspaper reporting at the time, this conclusion seems to have been warranted.
The resort to extreme measures was also intended to deliver political effect more widely, signalling the capacity and the will to fight on. In the context of Copenhagen, which came at a low point in British fortunes against France, the British foreign secretary George Canning stated that “we are hated throughout Europe and that hate must be cured by fear”. He also wanted to dispel the notion that “we are half-beaten already”. The same thought animated the British cabinet over Oran in 1940. Only by “ruthlessly” taking “violent action” against the “dearest friends of yesterday”, Churchill argued, could Britain make clear that it was still very much in the fight.
British statesmen were aware that their actions might not fall strictly within the bounds of international law but believed passionately that they constituted legitimate responses to extraordinary threats. Canning, for example, denied that there was “now a community of states in Europe connected by the solemnity and sanction of public law”, arguing instead that there was “but one devouring state [Napoleonic France]” which had to be stopped at all costs. Likewise, Churchill argued at Oran that “we have a right and indeed are bound in duty” to be temporarily exempted from “the very laws we seek to consolidate and reaffirm”. Faced with this “supreme emergency”, the prime minister claimed, Britain must make “humanity rather than legality” its guide.
In some cases, the violence was entirely routine in the context of the time. For example, the devastation of enemy countryside was a standard feature of medieval and early modern warfare. Yet, in other instances, English and, later, British actions stood out. When the Holy Roman emperor Charles V was considering a brutal war against France in 1553, one of his close advisers remarked that the most skilled at burning were the English. Even in a Europe which was more or less permanently at war, the English enjoyed a fearsome reputation. Copenhagen provoked widespread revulsion. Likewise, British blockade tactics and aerial bombardments were condemned not just by enemies but by neutrals as particularly brutal.
That said, there was also widespread acceptance that the use of extreme violence might be necessary for the common good. One American observer deplored the “infamous” attack on Copenhagen but added his hope that the Royal Navy would remain dominant over Napoleon because this was necessary for “the peace and safety of mankind generally”. Over Oran, the Reuters news agency reported that the operation had shown that “the iron will has not yet rusted out of the British character”. Even the notoriously cantankerous Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle took the view that Oran had been necessary.
Many outside observers accepted London’s contention that the European balance – and thus their freedoms – rested on the use or threat of British violence. During the Cold War, British nuclear weapons were aimed at Soviet cities, threatening the deaths of millions of civilians in retaliation in the event of a Soviet attack. However morally complicated, this stance helped to contain the Soviet Union and keep peace in Europe. Today, the targeting of UK missiles is a secret, but we must assume that the strategy, which specifically speaks of the defence of not only the UK but its Nato allies, has not changed. We are left with the uncomfortable fact that it is British violence – including extreme violence – which underpins the capacity of UK armed services to deter Russian conventional forces in the Baltic and High North and to balance Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats.
Brendan Simms and David Trim are co-editors of “Harfleur to Hamburg: Five Centuries of English and British Violence in Europe” (Hurst Publishers)
[See also: Correlli Barnett: the prophet of the new right]