***
“War carried out by gas and bombing is no longer war, it is a kind of bloody surgery. Each side settles down behind a concrete wall and finds nothing better to do than to send forth, night after night, squadrons of planes to blow out the guts of the other side (…).”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes, 1939 (English translation by Lewis Galantiere: Wind, Sand and Stars, London, The Folio Society, 1990, p. 189).
“I remember once, looking through an eyeglass, I spotted one of our observation aircraft falling onto enemy lines. Its fall seemed slow to me, because of the distance. Every war, seen from afar, is like an abstract game, not at all offensive to the eye. The courage, the resolution, the anguish and the suffering of two men – all that was wiped out instantly under a small heap of earth.”
Émile-August Chartier (Alain), Mars ou la guerre jugée, 1936, p. 66.
***
Conjuring up images very different from those of the trenches, the words “Zeppelin”, “Big Bertha”, “U-boat” and “spy mania” bring to mind a second memory of the First World War.Footnote 1 They are a reminder of the emergence of a new type of long-distance warfare, whose weapons – out of range of retaliation, and sometimes out of sight – were originally regarded as immoral.
In this new kind of warfare, the civilian population became a target for both bombingFootnote 2 and propaganda. Progress in technology opened up new areas for fighting, in the air and under the sea. The development of telegraphy and wireless telephony completely transformed the role played by spies, who could now inform an enemy submarine of the exact time a ship would be putting out to sea.Footnote 3 Telecommunications also meant that gunners could adjust their aim without being able to see their targets.
The Great War was globalized: its theatre of operations was just as much at the rear as at the front, it was fought in neutral countries as well as those officially at war, and it involved the civilian population as much as the fighting forces. The ethical and political questions raised at the time by the new “weapons, means or methods”Footnote 4 of long-distance warfare have remained remarkably relevant today.
At a century's remove, a new “global” war against terrorismFootnote 6 is now confirming the growing power of three long-range military capabilities: armed drones, special forces and cyberweapons. All three are evidence of a different kind of warfare, so disengaged that many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have condemned the emotional as well as the physical remoteness of its operators.Footnote 7 A report published in October 2014 by the Rand Corporation talks about the ethos of a “quiet professional” which, it claims, a cyber-warrior might share with a fighter in the special forces.Footnote 8 In the past seven years, I have taken part in many international working groups and conferences on the ethics of roboticized weapons technology, and I am struck by the frequent references to the Great War. For example, I have heard the far-away pilot of an armed drone – having dinner with his family in a Las Vegas suburb after a day “waging war” 12,000 kilometres away – being compared to French fighter pilot Charles Guynemer who, in 1917, drank a glass of champagne at Maxim's following an afternoon's fighting high up over the trenches.Footnote 9 This comparison with the First World War shows that issues raised by combatants fighting not necessarily on a battlefield are not unheard-of. Is there really nothing new? Or to be more specific, did the conflict that took place between 1914 and 1918 open up a new age – one we are still living in today?
Taking a historian's view may help clarify what is at stake in the development of methods of combat – a development that began in 1914 not just with aerial and submarine warfare, but also with espionage, propaganda and, during the latter years of the conflict, with the invention of prototypes of radio-piloted and radio-guided weapons, known today as drones and missiles.
The emergence of a new, multi-space battleground
The progress of weapons technology is often presented as a kind of continuum. From the invention of the first thrown weapon, so the theory goes, man constantly lengthened the distance between himself and his enemy, the better to ward off retaliation. From the slingshot to the crossbow (Figure 1), from the musket to the missile – so it is said – there was never really a revolution in weapons technology, just a series of more or less noticeable evolutions.
Crossbow “Letellier” – model “Grasshopper Type A”, June 1915, Éric Germain's private collection. Footnote 5
All the same, without wishing to question the existence of the so-called preservation instinct that is said to drive Homo sapiens (and therefore prudens) to extend the range of his new weapons,Footnote 10 the Great War may be regarded as opening up a radically different era. It was then, for the first time in history, that very long-range weapons were used on a massive scale. With artillery guided by radiotelegraphy, and weapons operated from previously unheard-of places (in the air and under the sea), targets were increasingly disappearing from the field of vision of the fighter who was deploying them.
Early in the morning of 23 March 1918, Parisians thought the bombs being dropped on them must be coming from a Zeppelin or a Gotha bomber flying at a very high altitude. Then they learnt that they were actually being targeted by cannons operating at the incredible distance of 121 kilometres away.Footnote 11 These Pariser Kanonen required ballistic calculations of such complexity that mathematicians were sent specially from Berlin to ready them for firing. For the first time in history, projectiles manufactured by human beings were now crossing the stratosphere, where the low air density allowed the shells to travel these remarkable distances.Footnote 12
“Unfair” weapons of warfare on land, under the sea and in the sky
Even before the war broke out, the international community had tried to ban bombing from the air. People realized that, because they were so inaccurate, these bombs would mainly strike non-military targets, including the civilian population. The Austro-Hungarian balloons’ attempt to bomb Venice in the summer of 1849 had not been forgotten. Banning aerial bombing was one of the major aims set for the peace conference held in The Hague, in The Netherlands, from 18 May to 29 July 1899.Footnote 13
In 1899, a preventive attempt to ban “blind” weapons
In a letter to St Petersburg's embassies on 24 August 1898Footnote 14 Tsar Nicholas II proposed “to convene a Conference (…) [aimed] above all [at] limiting the progressive development of existing armaments”.Footnote 15 The Tsar wished to ban the “throwing of projectiles or any explosives from balloons or by similar means” (at the time, heavier-than-air aircraft was still a futuristic technology).Footnote 16 This humanitarian goal was achieved in one of the texts of the 1899 Convention, but only for a period of five years. Declaration (IV, 1) “to prohibit (…) the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons, and other new methods of similar nature” was adopted by most of the nations, with the notable exception of the United Kingdom.Footnote 17 The United States of America signed the document, but did not ratify it.Footnote 18
At the Second Hague Conference in 1907, by contrast, Declaration XIV “prohibiting the discharge of projectiles and explosives from balloons” was ratified by the United Kingdom and the United States, but by neither France nor GermanyFootnote 19 (Austria-Hungary did sign the text, but did not ratify it).Footnote 20 France and Germany thus found themselves bound by the sole – unanimously accepted – principle that the aerial bombing of undefended towns was not permitted.Footnote 21 The United Kingdom's change in attitude may have been partly influenced by the popularity of machine-oriented science fiction prophesying the horrors to be expected from the weaponization of the sky.
In 1908, H.G. Wells published a serialized version of his novel The War in the Air.Footnote 22 In it, he depicts a world war waged by aerial vehicles (airships, aeroplanes and “ornithopters”) armed with new weapons of mass destruction that lead to the extinction of civilization. The book came out three years before Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti carried out the very first aeroplane bombing against Ottoman troops in Libya, thereby launching the era of aerial warfare. Italy justified this action by claiming it was lawful under the Hague Convention which, it said, banned only aerial bombing carried out from airships.Footnote 23
Although this first Italian aerial bombardment was restricted to military targets, such restraint quickly disappeared at the start of the war. From London to Salonica, from Paris to Warsaw, the hearts of European cities were hit. All the same, none of the belligerents admitted to a deliberate desire to target the civilian population. When the conflict began, Kaiser Wilhelm II formally forbade the bombing of the centre of London, both in the name of humanist principles and out of a concern not to hurt his cousins in the British royal family.Footnote 24 Later, on 16 June 1915, at the urging of his chief of staff, he used the many civilian losses sustained in the French air force bombing of Karlsruhe as a pretext for authorizing the bombing of the City, with the exception of the royal residences and certain iconic monuments.
Civilian victims become less and less “collateral”
From the first aerial bombings of the civilian population, in Paris in 1914 and then in London in 1915, to the very long-range artillery fire of the Pariser Kanonen at the end of March 1918, the humanist principles that had inspired the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 were violated.
At the start of the war all the belligerents declared that they were aiming solely at military objectives, even though they must have known perfectly well that, more often than not, in urban engagements their shells and bombs missed their targets causing civilian losses. Soon, however, some voices in the army commands put forward the “strategic” argument that, by weakening the morale of a country's population, these bombings would force a government to sue for peace.Footnote 25 They swung from ethics based on absolute values to so-called consequentialist ethics whereby, if the ultimate goal sought is a moral one (peace), then “bending” principles (i.e. violating the neutrality of a country or a flag, or targeting a civilian population) becomes acceptable.
The first strategic aerial bombardments were launched from rigid airships with a very long range manufactured by the firms of Zeppelin and Schütte-Lanz (Figure 2). These dirigibles – painted black to blend in with the darkness – were swiftly named “baby killers” by the British press. This furtive, “cowardly” technology aroused such abhorrence that it came to be condemned in the same terms as the submarine war waged by the U-boats. Indeed, an airship's ability to rise swiftly to altitudes where it was out of reach of anti-air artillery and night fighters perfectly mirrored a submarine's ability to avoid retaliation by diving into the abyss.Footnote 26
“Punishing the Pirate – A Zeppelin L-19 sinking in the Channel while returning from a raid over England”, front cover of Le Petit Journal, Paris, 27 February 1916, Éric Germain's private collection.
Before the war, the British Admiralty had looked with some disdain on submarine vessels, which they saw as a “weapon for maritime Powers on the defensive”Footnote 27 – some senior officers going so far as to say that their use would be contrary to English values.Footnote 28 Although in 1901 the Royal Navy did decide to adopt them as a weapon,Footnote 29 it was nonetheless surprised and deeply disconcerted by the use the Germans made of them in their “all-out war”.Footnote 30 The demonization of these “ghost ships” also seems to have affected the military staff in their investigation into methods for combating an elusive threat. The British Admiralty even engaged the services of a medium to see if she could locate U-boats on a map of the Atlantic.Footnote 31 The emotional reaction to this new war technology gradually subsided, with the emergence of methods for dealing with attacks by using aircraft (anti-aircraft guns, telemetry and special munitions)Footnote 32 and submarines, along with the constant effort to innovate both tactics (convoys, camouflage paint, Q-ships and other “disguised” ships) and weapons (mines and anti-submarine grenades).
Targets beyond visual range
In 1917, the French navy set up a submarine warfare laboratory in which physicists Paul Langevin and Constantin Chilowski carried out research on ultrasonic echoes, laying the foundations for modern underwater acoustics.Footnote 33 At the end of the summer of 1918, in Toulon harbour, they tested a sonar prototype designed for pursuing and attacking submerged submarines.
Research on acoustics also made it possible to locate enemy batteries made invisible by distance and camouflage. By 1915, scientists and self-taught inventors alike were coming up with different types of recorders that equipped sound-ranging sections to identify where firing was coming from, using triangulation.Footnote 34
In offensive action, submarines were the first weapon to glimpse the possibility of vanishing completely from human view in order to detect and aim at their target. From 1917 onwards, U-boats were equipped with microphones, which enabled them to locate the ships to be torpedoed. On land, in the air or at sea, the operators of the new long-range weapons all shared an inability to distinguish clearly those they were firing at – sometimes even to see them at all.
The philosopher Alain wrote of his “war seen, so to speak, over the telephone”. Before joining the third heavy artillery regiment, all he knew about telephones was “the receiver and the microphone – that little box filled with grains of carbon – that you speak into”.Footnote 35 Now he had been placed at the head of “a thirty-two-line apparatus which was the intermediary between divisional artillery and infantry”.Footnote 36 Alain described the telephone as a ten-kilometre-long sword with a foot-soldier's corpse on its tip.Footnote 37
A fighter in the trenches sometimes experienced reality in both of these ways, as a gunner and a foot soldier. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, for example, was posted to a field artillery regiment before being transferred to the infantry. On the evening of his fourth day at the front line he described his experience of being a “bulwark of living flesh”, contrasting it with a gunner's war, which he depicted as “an outing where the risks are not much greater than in mountaineering”.Footnote 38
Long-distance warfare rehabilitated in reaction to the horror of the trenches
The technological tools of distance warfare were developed in a conflict distinguished by extreme proximity between belligerents. Paradoxically, it was trench warfare that was to confer a degree of moral rehabilitation on distance.
The flying ace: a useful heroic figure from olden days
The early days of fighter aircraft were studded with chivalrous acts that were harder to imagine in the brutality of hand-to-hand combat on the ground where, by comparison with the knives of the wretched “trench sweepers”, the much-reinvented (less lethal) club seemed like a “humanist” weapon. Significantly, while aviators kept their leather helmets throughout the conflict, in the trenches the képi, side cap and peaked cap had to be replaced by helmets.Footnote 39
From the end of the sixteenth century, the foot soldier's metal helmet had gradually fallen into disuse among European armies.Footnote 40 It resurfaced at the same time as hand-crafted shields and many other forms of protection that were an odd reminder of the armour of bygone days. The British helmet was directly inspired by the kettle hats worn by foot soldiers in the Hundred Years’ War.Footnote 41 The return to medieval forms of protection, however, was by no means accompanied by a resurgence of chivalry in ground fighting, which had become extraordinarily deadly.
In the air, a fighter pilot's talent and daring could offset the disadvantages of having a less powerful aircraft than his adversary. This relative degree of fair play gave licence for the elegant behaviour of some aviators, who dared to disobey orders, for example if they wanted to give the enemy news of their fallen pilots.Footnote 42 In October 1917, at a time when camouflage techniques were widespread, the decision by the pilot Manfred von Richthofen to have his new triplane painted bright red was not without a certain panache.Footnote 43 The Red Baron, as he was known henceforth, became the most famous of these “aces”, who provided the German press with valuable heroes.
First the press, and then literature, highlighted a code of honour among fighter pilots which reassured public opinion. Their “air duels” showed that some of civilization's values were being upheld despite the horrors of a war in which, more often than not, the only law was necessity, and the heroic figure of the aviator played an increasingly important role in keeping up the morale of the civilian population. This explains why the German command decided to bring its last flying ace, Oswald Boelcke, back from the front until his Fokker monoplane – now obsolete – could be replaced by the brand-new Albatros D1.Footnote 44
Even bombing, the form of aerial warfare most objected to, appeared to be better tolerated by the end of the conflict. In 1914, aerial bombing was considered legitimate only in actions against military infrastructure,Footnote 45 but as fight succeeded fight it gained in acceptability, even when targeting troops and no longer just equipment. At the end of 1916 the Germans created an “aerial infantry”. Former soldiers and non-commissioned officers from the trenches were trained to pilot small biplanes flying at a very low altitude. In attacks known as “strafing”, these “assault aviators” (Sturmflieger, or storm flyers) machine-gunned and bombarded the enemy to support their comrades advancing on the ground.Footnote 46 After feeling stuck in the stalemated war in the trenches, superiority in the air revived their hope of being able to carry out offensive actions with minimal loss of life among their own forces. Two months before the armistice was signed, confidence in a reversal of the balance of power enabled the Secretary of State of British aviation to write to General Hugh Trenchard: “I should be very glad if you could unleash a bloody great fire on one of the German cities (…). The German is sensitive to bloodletting.”Footnote 47 Vae victis!
Aerial bombing accepted as a means to destroy more inhumane weapons
Did all moral objections to the bombing of civilians fade away in the four years of conflict? No. Even at the end of the war, many political leaders remained opposed to the idea of deliberately striking the civilian population. President Woodrow Wilson, for example, refused to allow the American air force to take part in a messy bombing of industrial and commercial sites, or of the people of enemy countries, which would not meet a demonstrated military need.Footnote 48
All the same, the ethical principles underpinning the rules of engagement as stated and practised in 1918 were no longer as intangible as they had been at the start of the conflict. On 26 May 1915, for instance, it was solely in retaliation to the German army's use of asphyxiating gas that the French air force was authorized to bombard the chemical factory at Ludwigshafen am Rhein. At the time, taking the risk of killing the workers in an armaments factory was justified by the lack of alternative means of stopping the manufacture of an odious weapon. To exonerate the military command from this first large-scale bombing of German territory, newspapers stressed the use of asphyxiating gas during the Battle of Artois.Footnote 49 A caricature in the British press also drew a parallel between this raid and the bombing of a London suburb by a Zeppelin on the very same day (which killed two women and injured a child). The Kaiser was shown as a dunce in short trousers, under the wrathful glare of his teacher, in front of a blackboard on which was written: “An act of war – French raid on Ludwigshafen” and “An act of murder – German air raid on Southend.”Footnote 50
This need for moral justification was felt again when it came to the use of incendiary ammunition filled with phosphorus, which was explicitly banned by the Saint Petersburg Declaration of 11 December 1868.Footnote 51 The British christened these “Buckingham” bullets, to justify using them against the Zeppelins that deliberately hit the civilian population of London. The Germans, for their part, gave their fighter pilots written orders stipulating that the incendiary bullets they took on board were strictly reserved for firing at airships, and were never to be used against planes.Footnote 52 The French and British pilots asked for a similar document, for fear they would be shot if captured with this type of ammunition in their possession.Footnote 53
“First Spring night in Paris – Fireworks missing its browning piece”, front cover of L’Illustration, Paris, 27 March 1915, Éric Germain's private collection.
A 1921 adventure story, L’aéroplane invisible, illustrates the post-war fragility of the moral rehabilitation of aerial warfare.Footnote 54 In literature for the edification of the young, it is considered acceptable for a bombardier to be invisible only if he is destroying a German submarine base – submarines having been discredited by being used against civilian and non-belligerent targets.Footnote 55 A “sneaky” weapon seemed legitimate only for combat against other “unfair” weapons, and in the post-war period an aircraft that could not be seen from the ground was still regarded as being incompatible with military ethics.Footnote 56 This reservation may also be found in the work of the commission of jurists meeting in The Hague from December 1922 to February 1923 which, interestingly, combined two new elements in long-distance combat: wireless telegraphy and air warfare.
The “Rules concerning Air Warfare” they drew up forbade “any bombardment of cities, towns, villages, habitations and building [sic] which are not situated in the immediate vicinity of the operations of the land forces” (Art. 24(3)), but they state that air bombing directed against a military target in urban areas is lawful “in the immediate vicinity of the operations of the land forces” if “there is a reasonable presumption that the military concentration is important enough to justify the bombardment” (Art. 24(4)).Footnote 57
As so often in this post-war literature, the character at the centre of the plot in L’aéroplane invisible is a spy. For, in the collective imagination, the new long-range weapons used in the first worldwide conflict were closely associated with the (even sneakier) tools of long-distance warfare – espionage and propaganda – which were facilitated by the dawn of a new era in communications technology.
The hidden face of long-distance weaponry: wireless warfare
The First World War was marked by the extreme physicality of the front – a battlefield whose western border barely shifted for the whole duration of the conflict. The fighting there ploughed up a landscape whose relief, a century afterwards, is still visibly shaped by those shells.
The rear was defined as being behind the lines where the foot soldiers were fighting, but that did not put it beyond the area of conflict. It was a target not only for aerial bombing but also for (real or perceived) acts of espionage and sabotage, as well as propaganda to influence the population, which had now become “public opinion”.Footnote 58
Seeing without being seen: espionage and “the enemy within”
Espionage activities and the new weapons for long-distance combat were linked in many ways. In the field, spies gave the enemy precise information about the targets to bombard: the railway convoy at the platform, the weapons factory, the ship whose sailing times they had obtained. Progress in wireless transmission enabled them to send the information with previously unheard-of speed and reliability. In the air, the possibility of flying over enemy territory without being seen (or without giving an adversary time to hide its troops or vehicles) clearly represented an extremely valuable advantage.Footnote 59 In 1912 Admiral Sir John Fisher prophesied that wireless telegraphy would become “the pith and marrow of war!”.Footnote 60
Airborne intelligence was a task explicitly entrusted to the “spy basket” (Spähkorb), or “spy gondola” (Spähgondel), a feature of many models of German airships.Footnote 61 The single-seater nacelle, or basket, was suspended by a steel cable (joined to a telephone wire) a few hundred metres below the Zeppelin.Footnote 62 This observation post made it easier to navigate and to aim the bombs, while still allowing the airship to remain hidden by cloud cover. A scene from the film Hell's Angels, shot by Howard Hughes in 1930, illustrates the ethical dilemma facing the operator of a “spy basket”, who refuses to bombard Trafalgar Square and deliberately aims his Zeppelin's bombs at the waters of the Thames.
A new type of combatant: the spy
The watching eyes in the sky were not the only ones: there were also those of the “traitor” who blended into the population and gave the enemy intelligence about targets. Spies became active participants in the globalization of warfare: they were the individuals a submarine could infiltrate, and subsequently exfiltrate, on the isolated coast of an enemy nation, and also in a neutral country, or a remote colony.Footnote 63
British submarine, 1917, Éric Germain's private collection.Footnote 64
Today, our view of espionage in the Great War seems inextricable from the narrative constructed about it in the inter-war years with the publication of novels and what purported to be memoirs, often adapted for the cinema.Footnote 65 The reality was less romantic, and it remained significantly different from that of previous wars. During the course of the conflict, espionage and counter-espionage activities became a good deal more professional, and came to be incorporated into the planning and conduct of hostilities.Footnote 66
Although espionage constituted an extreme form of long-distance warfare, those who became spies out of patriotism – both men and women – regarded themselves as actual combatants.Footnote 67 At the same time, despite the risks they ran, these spies were conscious that they had a more enviable lot than combatants at the front. On this subject we have the account of the British writer Somerset Maugham, who was working at the time for the Secret Intelligence Service. The writer-cum-secret agent describes his unbearable, overwhelming feeling when, on a mission to Russia in 1917, he found himself face to face with a mutilated Russian soldier on the platform of a Trans-Siberian Railway station. He – the soldier without a uniform, as he calls himself, operating in the comfort of the rear – felt a painful empathy with this man who was begging, and singing in a voice that told of the terror, suffering and death he had faced on the battlefield.Footnote 68
Somerset Maugham's eyewitness account is also a reminder that espionage is not the only “invisible” form of warfare. That is also – and above all – the war waged after a conflict, with the (mostly visible) physical wounds of disfigured veterans and the (mostly inaudible) psychological scars. The label “shell shock” was given to one of the syndromes that would be included today in the category of “post-traumatic stress disorder”, affecting the lives of soldiers and their families many years after a war had ended. This conflict ushered in an age in which people began to realize that a war could have more casualties after the cessation of hostilities than under enemy fire.Footnote 69
Like other weapons of long-range combat, espionage was to be somewhat rehabilitated in the post-war years, when the physical courage and moral qualities of some of its protagonists were recognized. In this respect the Great War fits in with an older trend in the evolving relationship between States – to codify espionage and, thereby, legitimize it. The Hague Convention of 1899 – signed by all the First World War belligerents – guaranteed that a spy caught in the act on enemy territory would be given a trial (Hague (II), Article 30).Footnote 70 The following article added that: “A spy who, after rejoining the army to which he belongs, is subsequently captured by the enemy, is treated as a prisoner of war, and incurs no responsibility for his previous acts of espionage.”
From espionage to spy mania: a new battleground emerges
The relative normalization of legal measures to combat espionage in wartime was also partly due to its rapid expansion in the preceding decades. The upsurge in hostile actions in peacetime had pushed most European countries to adopt new legislation to punish and deter spies.Footnote 71 Moreover, on the outbreak of war, codes of military justice regained their full value in the belligerent countries. In France, it was pursuant to Article 206 of the French code that fifty-six people convicted of espionage were shot between 1914 and 1918 (more than half of them in the first year of the war).Footnote 72 Despite the media coverage given to some convictions (such as that of Margaretha Zelle, alias Mata Hari, who was executed on 15 October 1917), this double-digit number suggests that there was actually far less espionage going on than what society perceived. The fear of espionage, which was evident well before the war broke out, also reflected growing xenophobia.Footnote 73 Spy mania was based on a high degree of irrationality, but for the public authorities this collective paranoia had the advantage of strengthening the involvement of the whole nation in the war effort, and justifying the sacrifices asked of people.
With the threat of espionage hanging over them, silence and discretion were required of civilians. Propaganda reminded them incessantly that, in the World War II slogan, “careless talk costs lives”, that the smallest piece of a priori harmless information could prove to be of real military interest to the enemy. In factories, on the docks or in a train station, the supposed presence of spies brought the battlefield to well behind the front lines. In 1915, French Minister of War Alexandre Millerand ordered posters to be put up to warn people: “Keep quiet! Be on your guard! Enemy ears are listening.”Footnote 74 (Figure 5)
Special number “Shut up – be wary” of the satirist review La Baïonnette, front cover of No. 28, Paris, 1 January 1916, Éric Germain's private collection.
In passing the Espionage Act on 15 June 1917 in the United States, thousands of kilometres away from the military theatres of operation, President Woodrow Wilson extended the concept of a spy to opponents of the war. The following year, the Sedition Act made it possible to imprison influential pacifists such as the trade unionist Eugene Debs.Footnote 75 The 1917 Espionage Act was to have a surprising legacy, from the Rosenbergs to the more recent cases involving Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, as it has been regarded as an effective tool of war in peacetime.
Propaganda transformed into “psychological warfare”
The war experienced by the soldiers of the shadows was genuinely worldwide. It brought a growing need for clandestine communication, which sparked the development of new technology, such as wireless transmission.Footnote 76 As the conflict went on, dissimulation methods became more advanced. Formulas for invisible ink, for example, which were invented in both camps, show such a level of ingenuity that they would be the oldest secret documents kept by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and not declassified until 2011.Footnote 77
From wire tapping to the semantics of deception
The sabotaging of German underwater cables by the Royal Navy was the very first military action carried out after war was declared on 4 August 1914.Footnote 78 Aware of the fragility of their networks, the Germans had anticipated this threat by developing radio stations to keep in touch with their African colonies.Footnote 79 In 1914 the German Admiralty set up its telecommunications centre in the long-wave radio station built in 1906 by the Telefunken group in Nauen, near Berlin.
Throughout the conflict, the Allies had the benefit of a secure network of underwater cables, while the Entente countries were forced to use Hertzian communication, which was susceptible to wire-tapping. As a result, techniques for encryption and decryption and for locating transmitters (radio direction finding) became major challenges at which the Allies showed a marked superiority. In early 1917, the interception and decryption of the Zimmermann telegram by the British Admiralty's intelligence services played a crucial role in leading the United States of America into the war.Footnote 80
Fear of espionage prompted the belligerents to develop ground-breaking semantics of deception around the new weapons, especially those used in long-distance fighting. The first German air squadron – created in November 1914 for bombarding Britain– was thus christened “Ostend Homing Pigeons Detachment” (Brieftauben Abteilung Ostende). In the same spirit, the British engineer Archibald Low gave the name “Aerial Target” to his radio-controlled aeroplane project, to make the Germans think it was about research on a simple target drone to test anti-aircraft capabilities.Footnote 81
The prime example from this semantic jamming war, however, was the word “tank”, which Lieutenant-Colonel Swinton suggested as the name for the British project on an armoured fighting vehicle. In 1914, Lord Kitchener sent Ernest Swinton to the western front to serve as a war correspondent. His task was to give the news to journalists, who were not authorized to go onto the battlefields. No stranger to the workings of propaganda, the Scottish officer (the same one we have to thank for coining the term “no man's land”)Footnote 82 came up with the idea of using the word “tank” to deceive the enemy about the purpose of the armoured car.
While it may be easy enough to keep a new weapon secret at the experimental stage, this becomes infinitely more difficult when it moves to production in the factory. Its designers therefore decided not just to avoid names that were too explicit, such as “land-cruiser” or “land-ship”,Footnote 83 but also to build stories around the word “tank” (Figure 6). This resulted in the propagation of rumours whereby these so-called “tanks” were mobile, armoured containers of water intended for troops fighting in the deserts of Egypt and Mesopotamia, or else that they were snow ploughs for the Russian front.Footnote 84
A British tank taken in the battle of Menin Road, September 1917, Éric Germain's private collection.Footnote 86
In a booklet published before the end of the hostilities, Colonel Swinton claimed that his choice had contributed to the element of surprise in September 1916 (Battle of Flers-Courcelette, where tanks were used for the first time), and the psychological shock that hampered the response by the German forces.Footnote 85
Winning hearts and minds: from text to image
Ernest Swinton presented himself as the inventor of “psychological warfare”.Footnote 87 In October 1914, his first feat of arms was to drop 25,000 pamphlets printed in German on the lines of the Central Powers. Their typography and the colour of the paper (arsenic green) were carefully chosen to reinforce the psychological impact of the text.Footnote 88 According to Swinton, the initiative was discontinued because of fear of the treatment that would be meted out to the pilot of an aeroplane captured on this type of mission. Indeed, the airborne propaganda actions, which proliferated from 1917 onwards, drove the German authorities to court-martial captured pilots.Footnote 89 In August 1915, France was the first country to create a department of airborne propaganda. On the British side the activities carried out to weaken the adversary's morale met with hostility from the Royal Flying Corps, which felt that they did not merit the risks run by the pilots. The propaganda office, set up at the start of 1916 within the military intelligence section of the War Office, concentrated on domestic public opinion.
To boost public support for the war effort, British propaganda posters readily used the icons of German long-distance warfare: airships and submarines. These new weapons made the British public realize that their protective insularity, hitherto guaranteed by the superiority of their navy, was at an end. A 1915 recruiting poster showed a Zeppelin flying over London on a moonless night, and a caption that read: “It is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home by a bomb. Join the army at once and help stop an air raid.” Footnote 90
German airships became a dominant theme in propaganda posters, especially in English-speaking countries, which often depicted the black silhouette of a “cowardly” Zeppelin driven out by the crossed beams from anti-aircraft defence projectors. One poster underlines the “murderer's impunity” by a chromatic contrast between the pastel-tinted sky, in which two airships are cruising peacefully, and the garish colours of the explosions lighting up the dead bodies of women and children.Footnote 91 The image was skilfully designed to inspire a feeling of outrage at the Zeppelin crews “serenely” striking civilians, whose status was reduced to that of innocent prey.Footnote 92
In this war-by-image, photography played an increasingly important role: it showed those living behind the lines pictures of the “reality” of the front, which it presented as having been taken “live”.Footnote 93 In 1914, the Germans were way ahead of the French in their use of this new medium, with a Militärische Film und Photostelle which centralized production and distribution in a single body. The Leipzig office flooded neutral countries with German photographs, to the point where the French foreign ministry was alerted. In 1915 they encouraged their military authorities to set up the army's photographic and cinematographic sections (SPA and SCA).Footnote 94 Camera operators in the SCA shot short documentaries and a weekly news film. The latter (Annales de la guerre) was screened in cinemas before the main film. The propaganda films made by the French army were scripted, and were sometimes even filmed by experienced directors using professional actors.Footnote 95
Distance humour and rumours to counter globalized propaganda
In the first half of 1915, the major warring countries decided to set up central censorship bureaus,Footnote 96 which soon became united with propaganda offices. The British MI7, founded in January 1916, exemplified this innovative approach by including censorship as part of a comprehensive propaganda strategy.Footnote 97
Neither soldiers nor the general population remained passive in the face of this industrialized information war. The fact was that alongside organized propaganda consisting of selective truths and outright lies, there also developed a vast realm of gossip and make-believe which emerged spontaneously. In a 1921 article about the war's cacophony of “false news”, historian Marc Bloch recalled that, in the trenches, censorship gave rise to the feeling that “anything could be true except what was allowed to be printed”Footnote 98 – words that have the ironic ring often found in post-war writings. Indeed, during the conflict, humour – sometimes bordering on nonsenseFootnote 99 – was another form of reaction to the most overt forms of propaganda, although it was sparked primarily by the difficulty of responding directly to the absurdity of the army command's decisions in trench warfare.
For official communication, two areas were demarcated in France: an internal zone and an army zone. Even though it was placed under the strict control of the military authorities, the latter did not escape the “curious efflorescence of the collective imagination”.Footnote 100 Marc Bloch recounts the manufacturing of one of these rumours, which he witnessed when serving at the front as an intelligence officer:
We saw how one day (in September 1917), by virtue of imaginations heated by tales of espionage, a burgher from Bremen [“Brême” in French] [a German soldier who had just been captured] was transformed into a spy who had treacherously settled in Braisne [pronounced “Brêne” in French] [a small town south of the Chemin des Dames plateau, on the front line of the Aisne battlefield, where his regiment was].
Where did this transfiguration first take place? Not quite along the line of fire, but a little farther away from the enemy, in the batteries, the convoys, the kitchens. It was from this relative “rear” that the rumour flowed back to us. That was the route almost always followed by false news. (…) In that little world of the trenches, it was the kitchens that stood in for the market square.
… On a map of the front, a little behind the intertwining lines recording the infinite detours of the front positions, one could shade in a continuous zone in hatching; that would be the zone where legends were created.Footnote 101
Marc Bloch invites us to consider a new cartography for this “army zone”. He reminds us that, while there was a front and a rear, the fighting front itself had its own “relative rear”.
This was also true on a broader scale, and those designing propaganda gradually realized that their sphere of influence needed to be worldwide. The German news agency – significantly named Transozean (Trans-Ocean)Footnote 102 – sent messages at least twice a day to its North American wireless station in Sayville. The Telefunken transmitter, located near New York City, had the most advanced technology availableFootnote 103 and was used as a relay for reaching Asia and South America.Footnote 104
In their efforts to customize their war propaganda, the Germans displayed great inventiveness, both in the media they used and in the intellectual and emotional arguments they marshalled. In Muslim countries, with the help of the Turkish authorities they created the ideological framework for a “holy war” which was intended to set the French, British and Dutch colonial empires ablaze. “Jihad made in Germany” was master-minded in the Berlin-based Oriental News Department.Footnote 105
The orientalist and archaeologist Max von Oppenheim theorized about an ideology of pan-Islamic jihad which was scientifically designed to be a tool in a war encompassing the religious psyche.Footnote 106 Despite rather lacklustre results, this nevertheless represented the first modern use of a strategy for manipulating the emotional sphere of religion in order to spread a bellicose ideology.
Are there lessons to be learnt for the new battlefields of the twenty-first century?
If the First World War may be regarded as a watershed moment in the development of long-distance warfare techniques, it is partly because of the experiments with the first guided munitions and unmanned aerial and naval vehicles. Although they mostly remained at the prototype stage, the emergence of this category of weapons shows that the concept of the legitimacy of military action was evolving.
First marine, ground and aerial drones invented between 1909 and 1917
“Manned” and “remotely driven” military aviation came into being within a few years of one another. On the French side, the pioneer of the so-called “automatic” aviation was Captain Max Boucher, who began to experiment with radio-controlled aeroplanes in the summer of 1917.Footnote 107 The military command encouraged this research in the hope of preserving its precious, qualified human resources at a time when the life expectancy of a fighter pilot operating in French skies was six weeks at most.Footnote 108 The controls for these biplanes were operated by radio waves, which meant that they had to be guided within sight of the pilot on the ground. It is conceivable, therefore, that they may have been initially intended for observation at close range, or even for anti-aircraft defence, to dissuade or neutralize enemy airships, as had already been imagined in the English film of 1909, The Airship Destroyer.Footnote 109
An identical project was being developed on the far side of the Channel by Captain Archibald Low, who was working on a model of a radio-controlled aeroplane.Footnote 110 In the same period, the British engineer is said to have designed the first radio-guided missile. In the United States, meanwhile, Elmer Sperry, the inventor of the gyroscope, and his son Lawrence, were developing the concept of a drone-cum-aerial torpedo loaded with trinitrotoluene (TNT).Footnote 111 The first test flight of the Curtiss-Sperry Flying Bomb was on 6 March 1918, although it was not until 1926 that the project was revealed by the American press.Footnote 112
“Aeroplane Torpedo”; front cover of Le Pays de France, Paris, 2 December 1915, Éric Germain's private collection.
The idea of remotely controlling not the delivery vehicle (the drone) but the munitions themselves (the rocket or torpedo) emerged very quickly, with the first “radio-automatic” torpedoes tested by Gustave Gabet in the waters of the Seine in 1909.Footnote 113 The French engineer, a committed pacifist, presented his invention to the navy command as a deterrent.Footnote 114
At the start of 1915, Paul Aubriot, a trade unionist and Socialist deputy for the fifteenth arrondissement in Paris, proposed to the minister for war that he should assign Gustave Gabet to the technical section of the Engineers.Footnote 115 In July, thanks to private financial aid from François de Wendell, an industrialist from Lorraine and also a deputy, Gabet gave a demonstration of a prototype electric, wire-guided “ground torpedo” mounted on caterpillar tracks.Footnote 116
Some months later he presented a more impressive model, an “armoured, automobile blockhouse” armed with a 37-mm cannon under a turret operated by two men.Footnote 117 The “Gabet Electric Blockhaus”, adapted from an American Caterpillar tractor, was first produced in an electric version (powered by a cable) before being given autonomy through motorization. It was one of the many prototypes that preceded the effective introduction of the new armoured weapon – the “tank” – on the battlefields of the Somme on 15 September 1916.
The pioneering research conducted on munitions and unmanned aerial and marine vehicles was abandoned at the end of the conflict. However, the ambition of gaining ground in an engagement from a distance, and thereby protecting soldiers’ lives, was pursued through a doctrinal reflection on aerial bombing and operational use which was experimented with many miles from European soil.
Air power and the temptation of a war without foot soldiersFootnote 118
After 1918, theories began to emerge around the idea of a “contactless” engagement. For air combat, Giulio Douhet, an Italian general, developed the first doctrine of “air power”, a force that relied on strategic bombardments and whose effectiveness would make war with foot soldiers obsolete.
Winston Churchill was one of the first politicians to interest himself in modern ways of using the new aerial weapon. In 1919, when he became Secretary of State for War, he was up against the collapse of military budgets combined with fierce public hostility to the prospect of again seeing Tommies shed their blood. In this situation, a colonial air force seemed like “a manpower-compensating component”.Footnote 119 On the advice of General Hugh Trenchard, Churchill decided to set up a permanent contingent of the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Mesopotamia, to deal with the many revolts that were undermining the Empire.Footnote 120 In the 1920s, British squadrons successfully carried out several air strike campaigns to suppress rebellions in Somaliland, Iraq, Kurdistan and Waziristan.
It is tempting to draw a parallel with the contemporary situation that has led the American president, Barack Obama, also to gamble on air power (although remotely controlled) to carry out drone strikes in these same areas of Somalia, Iraq, Kurdistan and Waziristan. This choice was also made out of a concern to spare human and material resources, when faced with the necessity of making safe a world shaken by terrorist shocks. Comparing two historical moments is a risky game, but it does have some advantages. Here it reminds us that immediately after the Great War people believed that developing technology for keeping fighters at a distance from one another would make it possible to escape the “blood sacrifice”.
This illusion did not last long – only for the 1920s, in a colonial context featuring a marked asymmetry in material capacity.Footnote 121 In 1935, after Adolf Hitler had come to power, and finding himself faced with the prospect of confronting an enemy equipped with similar technology, Winston Churchill critically reassessed an air power that, he said, could as easily put an end to a civilization as to a war.Footnote 122
During the Somaliland campaign in 1920, the use of RAF bombardments was still regarded, ethically, as an exception. The asymmetry of the military resources deployed was justified by the supposed abnormality of the adversary: “religious fanatics” led by a person known in the London press as the “Mad Mullah”. In the following years, air strikes – outside of tactical missions giving “fire support” to troops on the ground – became commonplace and no longer sought any particular ethical justification.
From the Second World War on, high-altitude bombing by the Unites States (US) air force again raised this ethical question, in a different context, depending on the type of weapon used: conventional in Dresden and Tokyo, nuclear in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the spring of 1999, before “precision-guided munitions” became widespread, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing in Yugoslavia was to be the last episode in the trade-off – challenged on moral grounds – whereby a high altitude which increased crew safety was given precedence over the aim of reducing collateral damage.
Today's challenges of disengaged warfare and detached public opinion
In April 1916, the British 39 Squadron was formed in order to fight the infamous “baby killers” – the Zeppelins. Disbanded several times, the 39 Squadron was reformed on 1 January 2007 to host the pilots of the RAF armed Reaper aircraft at Creech Air Force Base,Footnote 123 from which the drone fleets of the US Air Force – and, very probably,Footnote 124 the CIA – were also operated. In the past decade the CIA's “drone war”Footnote 125 has brought fresh acuity to the debate on disengaged combat. The remotely piloted aircraft and their ammunition (which is both miniaturized and “intelligent”) are presented as offering the most technologically advanced countries the promise of completing the transition from the “bloody surgery” (to use Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's words) of long-distance warfare in 1914 to the “clean surgery” of modern conflicts.Footnote 126 We have not yet fully realized that this borderless drone war is being fought after a century-old process of blurring the distinction between front and rear.
Today, when the spouse of a drone pilot is driving her husband to work, does she become a legitimate military target? Many jurists specializing in the law of armed conflict may agree that she does. The questions raised by “cyber warfare” appear just as troubling. The post-traumatic syndromes that affect both cyber-activists and drone pilots show that the reality of the violence they watch is far from disembodied.Footnote 127 But does this mean that “cyber-activists” are warriors? Where do their combats take place? The ubiquity of a (no longer merely worldwide, but global) war with the previously unheard-of capabilities offered by remote-controlled, automated forms of technology has radically transformed our concept of military action and the law and ethics relating to it.
On Monday 7 August 1911, announcing the first test of a torpedo controlled by Hertzian waves, the daily newspaper Le Gaulois prophesied the transformation of warfare this invention could lead to:
The question of remote control has thus been raised, and it is a good one, and the time is doubtless not far off when, from the Eiffel Tower, our officers will be able to blow up bridges and detonate mines beneath the feet of marching battalions. (…)
When that time comes, we shall see aeroplanes (…) criss-crossing space, blindly obeying orders from the transmitter. (…)
The time is not far off when remote control will perform veritable miracles and will transform (…) war itself.Footnote 128
In one century, Western societies have come from a bloody conflict with over eighteen million casualtiesFootnote 129 to military operations that are both more disembodied and more contained. Are we to regard this as progress in humanizing war?
The laudable concern to save the lives of soldiers and of the civilian population is currently leading to investment in more discreet technology and resources, which are less sensitive to public opinion. The development of weapons and means and methods of warfare for which the involvement and consent of a country's citizens is no longer a requirement is something we should be worried about.
Democracies that have abandoned conscription in favour of professional armies must take care to maintain the conscious, responsible involvement of the nation and its representatives in acts of war carried out in their name. Early in 1917, German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg resigned after failing to contain an all-out underwater war that “placed the fate of the Reich in the hands of a hundred U-boat commanders”.Footnote 130 In tomorrow's wars, will it not be just as risky to entrust the artificial intelligence of a hundred totally autonomous future robots with the responsibility of distinguishing between civilians and combatants?Footnote 131
History will perhaps remember that it was actually in 2014, the year of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, that an international discussion on the issues at stake in lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) began in Geneva.Footnote 132 The particular sensory and cognitive capacities of those future LAWS are still hard to imagine, as the technology is still in its infancy. We do already know, however, that they are likely to be used in a type of ubiquitous warfare that is not completely unknown to us, because most of its distinctive features first emerged during the four years of the First World War.
