funAtParties

What I really come away from the impression veterans and civilians of the time give of, is simply that it was unsporting, undignified, and unfair.

That, much more than it was punishingly cruel, in excess of death and dismemberment by other means.

They say, yeah, it's okay to zip a supersonic bullet through soft tissue such that it shreds with cavitation, and smash it through bone that splinters and explodes, so people lose whole limbs. And that's okay. It's like a deer hunt.

But hey, you don't hunt animals by mutilating their lings with bug spray. That's no fair. You wouldn't consume an elk carcass tainted with persistent organic pollutants. No fair. We can't even bury our dead.

But, you know what? You aren't going to bury your dead, when they're incinerated by high explosives.

And hey, what's fair about war at all? What's fair about several hundred planes unloading kilotons of conventional munitions, indiscriminately, to break an apparatus of geopolitics.

Gee, unfair, undignified, unsportsmanlike, in the pain, injury and slow death (leaving a contaminated corpse) department.

When you piece those explicit details together, the real problem is that it deals a degree of harm to the perception of gallantry, duty and honor of service. It's pretty much impossible to pat a chemical burn on the back, and say "there, there, thanks for defending the country" but, you can still pull that off, when sharing the room with an amputee that lost a limb to ballistics.

Exchanging chemical weapons for aerial bombardment exhibits "differences" but nothing that makes me say "wow, one is okay, and the other isn't."

Both are essentially equally bad, and neither is remotely good, or an improvement over the other.

People have their preferences, but in the same way that they rationalize the side effect of rampant smog and pollution as bad, but millions of fatal car accidents as normal, and a calculated risk.

The real choice being put on the table though, is: Would you choose between an air war that includes both regular explosions and chemical attacks, or just a regular air war only?

At that point, the choice becomes more rational. We say: "Hmmm, well, at least I can take some of the destruction out of the equation. I get to make one kind of misery go away. I can choose X = A as an alternative to X = (A + B + C). A never goes away, and nothing can be done about that, but at least I don't have to think about B and C anymore."

So, it's not about incediaries and high explosives being okay. Or aerial bombardment being different, and better. It's just that they can't be taken off the table, under any circumstances, no matter whatever else gets negotiated. I guess it's just a fundamental characteristic of destruction, that if destroying things is on the table, the basics of destruction get to keep their scalar qualities. You can limit the method of destruction but not the quantity.

  There's obviously a 
  difference because 
  people differentiate.

Sorry, but I'm not buying it. In exactly the same way I don't differentiate between being maimed by a flamethrower, versus being maimed by battery acid. The presumptive idea of innate wisdom of the crowd doesn't sway me.

Ask most people choose between burning their face off with a chemical or fire, and they'll likely choose fire, but getting your face burned off is categorically bad. Why distinguish.

I'll argue that the surviving people on the pointy end of the stick haven't thoroughly considered how pointy conventional aerial bombardment gets.

There's another aspect to the sheer insanity of the period that probably would be worth exploring, if only it were possible.

People were so mentally numbed and damaged by the carnage of the first world war, that the second world war was put on track by the leadership that had survived the carnage.

But looking at engines like this, and knowing that they ran on leaded AvGas, and knowing that leaded mechanization was the norm, you wonder if the psychotic leadership was actually an expression of lead poisoning from environmental factors. Just like all those crime curves that trend according to leaded gasoline bans, what if front line WWI veterans were driven psychotic by frontline exposure to heavy metals through exhaust fumes?

Sometimes I think about aerial bombardment, and what that really meant during that period of conflict.

When you think about the effort to concoct the compounds for the air war, and drop them on cities, with no guidance like lasers or anything, and then you look at the sheer tonnage dropped, and how indiscriminate it really was, you wonder how aerial bombardment is at all distinguishable from chemical weapons.

It really is chemical warfare by another name. The only real difference being the explosive burning. Clean up was still a similar problem, since, as with shells, munitions would hit but not detonate. Couple this with such indiscriminate bombings that cities were engulfed in fire storms, and I think it's splitting hairs, for the most part.