Admiral Cajal tells High Wyvan Liaw and First Marchwarden Holm:
"'We'd hate to bombard your planet. Please don't compel us to.'"
-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT Chapter X, p. 554.
Now that is going too far. No one can compel Cajal to bombard a planet. "The lesser evil"? If his Imperium orders him to bombard, then he should refuse, like another Anderson character. See High Treason.
The Avalonians even offer Cajal asylum if he fears court martial but, in the face of an order to bombard, the most moral course of action would be to attend and defy the court martial.
Holm comments:
"'Standard technique. Eliminate a space fleet, and its planet has to yield or you'll pound it into radioactive slag. Nice work for a man, that, hunh?'"
-ibid.
He assures the Admiral that Avalon, unable to counterattack "'...you bastards...,'" has built adequate defenses.
A bombardment that pounded a planet into radioactive slag would be genocide. Cajal's "lesser evil" defense of whatever he is ordered to do rings very hollow.
1 comment:
You fight a war to settle who's stronger and whose will therefore prevails; the general rule is that once you've done that and it's clear who's going to win, the other side should give up. If they do, there are limits on what the victor can do to them. If they don't, the consequences are on their own heads because they're responsible for prolonging the conflict.
Eg., the traditional rule was that a city would be summoned to surrender once a "practicable breach" had been made in the walls -- one that could be stormed, albeit at hideous cost as men rushed forward into grapeshot and fireballs and mines and massed musket-fire they couldn't avoid.
(The volunteers who led the storming party were known as a "forlorn hope", which is where the expression comes from.)
If the garrison surrendered once the walls had been breached, they'd be allowed to march out with the "honors of war" (keeping their regimental banners and so forth) and the civilians' lives and property would be guarded by the new occupants' commanders.
If you didn't surrender, all bets were off -- the city would be taken under the black flag, the surviving troops slaughtered out of hand and the civilians given over to the victorious troops for a sack.
At Bajadoz in the Peninsular War, the French refused to surrender -- Napoleon (who was not a nice man) had said he'd have any commander who surrendered while he still had ammunition shot and threatened their families with disinheritance, so Wellington had to storm the breach.
The British troops staged multiple successive assaults and when the final one went over the barricade it climbed up a slope coated three-deep in their comrades' bodies; the ground was quite literally running with blood, a sheet of red an inch deep pouring down the rocks and into the moat.
Then they went berserk and rioted through the city looting and raping and killing for three days, until Wellington was able to restore order.
The more general point is that you don't get to use your civilians as a "human shield"; you can't use weakness to foil strength.
Eg., if you declare a city an "open city" and withdraw your troops from it, it can't be legitimately bombarded. If you fight for it, it can -- and cut off from water and food -- and then blasted into rubble building by building to dig the defenders out. If you don't want that, give up and leave. If you put troops in a hospital or school or church, it becomes a legitimate target, regardless of who else is in it, and so forth.
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