User talk:Dougwillis1936/sandbox

Suggested additions to Formally described Just War section of Just War Theory [proposed subheading, "Supreme Emergency"]

Supreme Emergency

In his first radio address as Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill proclaimed that "our task is not only to win the battle - but to win the war. After this battle in France abates its force, there will come the battle for our Island -- for all that Britain is, and all that Britain means. That will be the struggle. In that supreme emergency we shall not hesitate to take every step, even the most drastic, to call forth from our people the last ounce and the last inch of effort of which they are capable. The interests of property, the hours of labor, are nothing compared with the struggle of life and honor, for right and freedom, to which we have vowed ourselves." At the time of Churchill's address on May 19, 1940, the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were swiftly occupying territory in Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, and Denmark. The seriousness of Britain's predicament as stressed by Churchill was rooted in "the historical experience of Nazi rule . . . a threat to human values so radical that its imminence would surely constitute a supreme emergency . . . ." Nazism had fully emerged as "an ultimate threat to everything decent . . . an ideology and a practice of domination so murderous, so degrading even to those who might survive . . . ."

After the surrender of France to Germany in June 1940, the Battle of Britain began. Hitler failed in his efforts to subdue Great Britain by air and sea engagements and called off a proposed full-scale invasion (Operation Sea Lion). Instead he launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. Following that, Churchill's friend Frederick Lindemann presented Churchill's Cabinet with a paper advocating the area bombing of German cities with the intent of serious civilian demoralization. Specifically, "working-class residential areas were [to be] the prime targets," with a hope to rendering "a third of the German population homeless by 1943."

The only viable force available in the summer of 1942 capable of carrying out the area bombing directive was the RAF Bomber Command, led by Commander-in-Chief Arthur Harris. Harris was a proponent of offensive, strategic bombing, eventually arguing "that only the destruction of [German] cities could bring the fighting to a quick conclusion." Britain had suffered the effects of the Blitz since 1940, but by 1942 Bomber Command was being readied to deliver a "severe, ruthless bombing of Germany [to] cripple her war-effort [and] create conditions intolerable to the mass of the German population." Churchill had declared the existence of a "supreme emergency" in May 1940; the summer of 1942 saw the 1,000 aircraft RAF bomber raid against Cologne. After the bombing of Hamburg in June/July 1943, Harris would claim that such raids "would end the war sooner that it would otherwise end and, despite that large number of civilian casualties they inflicted, at a lower cost in human life." The opinion of Harris reflects a basic paradox in the thinking of Churchill, his cabinet and advisers; "when a fundamental human value, like the rights of noncombatancy, is threatened, then action may be taken to preserve that value, even if in the short run protecting it may require disregarding it. This is the principle that justifies acts out of supreme emergency, and it is an extremely dangerous one.  When invoked, it must be circumscribed by extreme restraint, or else its actions lead directly to what they were meant to correct."

Douglas Willis 18:47, 10 August 2013 (UTC)