AIR WAR RESPONSIBILITIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 50, 27 August 1937, Page 8

AIR WAR RESPONSIBILITIES

"Almost inevitable in the circumstances" was President Roosevelt's verdict when one rating was killed and eight wounded by a shell that dropped on the deck of the United States flagship Augusta at Shanghai —"an anti-aircraft shell of unknown origin." This occurred a little over a week ago, and the matter of obtaining satisfaction concerning "the incident" was on August 19 "delegated to American officials at Shanghai." Compare the President's philosophy of "inevitability," and his failure to order the flagship to kill somebody on die Japanese side, or on the Chinese side, with Herr Hitler's reprisals policy and with the German shelling of Ahneria. There is room for n diplomatic attitude that will neither be on Almeria lines, nor yet a mere confession of inevitability; and such an attitude Britain will probably adopt towards the air attack, with bullets and bombs, on the British Ambassador's motor-car — an attack which might have killed instantly its diplomatically immune passengers, and which may yet result in death caused by the serious wounding of the Ambassador himself, Sir Hughe Knatchebull-Hugessen. President Roosevelt's verdict of inevitability is possibly based on the idea that, since the Great War, air warfare has so developed that mistakes in the selecting of targets and the hitting of objects may be expected as a matter of course. An air attack, plus anti-aircraft firing from below, may fill the air, over a given area, with aimed or falling missiles, each one of great potency. Can diplomatically protected persons be actually protected from these showers any more than from the rain? Can any non-combatant be protected? Can neutral warships or neutral merchantmen be protected, and how can another Lusitania incident be avoided in a war of three dimensions, not only submarine and terrestrialbut also aerial? The present American philosophy, underlying the neutrality legislation, is to keep American ships and American travellers away from trouble areas, in which they will go at their own risk. But this .is a policy (if it can be called a policy) untried in practice; its hold on the. American mind may be brief, especially if more American ...sailors get killed. It is iby no means the policy of Britain. | who does not admit the theory of inevitability any more than ' she favours the practice of reprisals.; Her policy is fact-finding investigation— this, it will be remembered, was the main rock on which British and German policy split after the Leipzig "incident" in the Mediterranean—to be followed by such diplomatic representations as the authenticated facts warrant, in conformity with friendly relations and with international principles. Facts concerning the wounding of the British Ambassador to China are still incomplete. It is stated confidently that two Japanese aeroplanes carrying on warlike operations (though no war has been declared) on the Nanking-Shanghai road, regarded by the Japanese / as a Chinese strategic highway, attacked a Shanghai-bound motor-car* and deliberately made it a target for their machine-guns and for at least one bomb. British reports state that the motor-car bore the Union-Jack; but the Japanese Foreign Office spokesman says that the car, was "inadequately identified," and that the Japanese aeroplanists did not know who the passengers were.. He does not say—though it is a possible explanation—that they regarded the Union Jack as cover for some particular Chinese enemy, who had hoisted the flag as a ruse. One thing is quite clear—if everybody in charge of an aeroplane is allowed to use his own hasty judgment as to whether a flag is a ruse, flag-flying vehicles may be placed in even more danger than those running the gauntlet flagless. It will be seen that the question of responsibility for non-combatants and their property, in an air-fighting age, bristles with difficulties. Another phase of the flag problem will probably be opened by the reported Japanese blockade to be applied toChinese ships but not to neutral ships. A discriminative blockade, always difficult, may be, in a flying age, impossible. Only by much self-re-straint will neutral civilisation survive the new perils that the old international law never contemplated.