A Walk Through the 20th Century With Bill Moyers; The Arming Of the Earth

<STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> The cavalry charge. War in all its imagined glory. Pounding boots and weapons thinning in the sun. Stroke and thrust, and flesh, and cry for quarter or for victory. This is how it was supposed to be-- daring charges of glory and flashing Valery. Thus would young men go off to fight the first great war of this century dreaming of chivalry. Except the fields of combat offered not chivalry nor grandeur, but this-- [SOUND OF MACHINE GUN] the machine gun, spewing death in a fury of black rain of indiscriminate horror. Look closely-- here is the herald of this century's steady advance toward total war. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> Total war, total mechanized war. What a change from only centuries ago, when statesmen tried to fight wars more or less within tacitly accepted ground rules-- rules intended to limit the violence to combatants. It was, of course, still a bloody and miserable business for the common soldier, but nations that adopted war as an instrument of policy, saw it on the whole to keep it a conflict between professionals, a warrior class, an army hired and conscripted to fight other armies. Civilians were not meant to be part of the front lines. Furthermore, skilled troops were hard to replace, so generals committed them to battle with the greatest possible economy. All of this began to change somewhat in the last century. But in our century, the 20th century, the change has been complete. Now war is total. It's violence directed not against enemy armies alone, but against whole peoples. The development of modern weapons has made this change possible. And in this broadcast, we'll look at three of those weapons-- the machine gun, the submarine, and the airplane. They're metaphors for how our century has revised the art of war for modern civilized nations. I'm Bill Moyers. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> We begin at the turn of the century, a time of spreading optimism and idealism suitable for a new age of progress. Statesmen believed that while war had it rational purpose, it could be limited in severity. So twice in eight years-- in 1899 and again in 1907-- the diplomats of Europe and America came together to try to establish humane codes of war. Humane codes of war. Especially to protect the rights of non-combatants. They drafted a document which exemplified their good intentions. It's called the Hague Convention. Listen to their language. "We are animated by the desire to serve the interest of humanity and the ever progressive needs of civilization, even in the extreme case of armed conflicts between nations." That was their declaration. They resolved to hold a third conference in 1916, but it was canceled on account of war. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> By now, a whole generation of new weaponry would make rules irrelevant. This, for example, the machine gun. The essential thing to know about this gun is that it is a machine. Like any other machine, it's an arrangement of swiftly moving parts, performing a simple operation repetitively, untiringly, efficiently. It's purpose to spit out bullets at the rate of 10 per second. At first it's concentrated fire power was used by the Europeans to subdue rebellion in their colonial empires in Africa and India. High technology pitted against crudely armed victims. They were slaughtered by the thousands. But then in 1914 the industrialized nations of Europe, the great powers, turned machine guns against one another. [SOUNDS OF MACHINE GUNS] <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> We know it today as World War I, but then it was simply called the Great War. It was a new way of fighting, mechanized fire power reducing the individual soldier to an interchangeable part of the impersonal technology of war. <STRONG>JOHN KEEGAN:</STRONG> This chivalric ideal, which, indeed, depends on standing up, showing yourselves, was demolished by this. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> John Keegan, senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, England. <STRONG>JOHN KEEGAN:</STRONG> This is the Vickers machine gun, which was used by the British army in the First World War, indeed in the Second World War too. It files 40 times as fast as the rifle can. The British riflemen of the First World War would trend far 15 runs a minute, but this can fast 600 rounds a minute. A rifleman, if he's going to use his weapon effectively, there must be a degree, I suppose, of personal choice about it. He must look at a fellow human being, decide that he is the man he is going to try and kill, and align his sights up according to him. A machine gun is not like that. It is impersonal. It produces a stream of bullets, and the purpose of which is to catch whomsoever it may be, rather as fisherman don't have a particular fish in mind, when they cast a net into the sea. <STRONG>JOHN KEEGAN:</STRONG> And of course, the machine gunners were given very rigorous training in what they had to do. In a sense, they were depersonalized by the training before they actually came face-to-face with the enemy. They were working a machine, if you'd like, their concentration was on the machine and the process that they had to perform, not on the targets. They were trained to strike a smart tap on the side of the gun as they were doing this. And each time it was supposed to move two inches. And this, of course, produced what we call traversing fire. It's the sort of thing you will see in films like Path to Glory or All Quiet on the Western Front, when you see waves of infantry going down like corn before the side of the machine gun. [SOUND OF MACHINE GUNS] It made the display of the personal courage rather relevant. They felt primal, forced, more overwhelming. Can you fight a volcano? Can you fight an earthquake? It reduced men to the land, they felt like an insect under the foot of some titan. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> During the first two years of the war, generals who took the offensive, soon found their soldiers reeling back from the shock of machine gun fire. Now did security behind concrete and sandbags, machine guns held the line. Defense was supreme. Both sides were driven into trenches stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland-- a bloody mud-soaked stalemate called trench warfare. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> I was obsessed with the frilly and the wickedness of the war. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> Lord Phillip Noel Baker, born in 1889, he devoted his life to disarmament and international cooperation, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959. During the Second World War, he was parliamentary secretary in the British war ministry, and later Secretary of State for Air. He first experienced war as head of an ambulance unit in France in 1914. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> For four years of the First World War, there were two lines of trenches straggling across North Europe 400 miles long. In the air, they looked like wriggling snakes. Sometimes they were 100 yards apart, sometimes half a mile or more. And in between was the dread expanse of no one man's land. The men slept on the ground of the dug-outs. Lucky if they had a ground sheet to keep them away from the oozing mud. Infinite discomfort. Rats coming in and running over them at night, rats as big as dogs, as big as dogs, because they has been gorging on human flesh. And if you went out into no man's land, you would find the earth all churned up, monstrous shell hulls, crashed aircraft, and every here and there, the stench of disemboweled corpses who had been brave and beautiful young men. The trenches were a nightmare. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> This was not the war they expected to fight. Nothing had prepared them for a stand-off like this. There was no movement, no advancing armies, no decisive battles. Nothing but mud and trenches. On the front, the young soldiers were eager for a fight. Everyone was waiting for the breakthrough of the enemy lines, the big offensive. It came in the summer of 1916. Never has Western civilization seen an armed confrontation of such magnitude or cost. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> Even in the war filled with battles of senseless ferocity, its name lives on. It was called the Battle of the Somme. The battle took place in a tranquil valley near the river Somme in Northern France. In retrospect, it was a poor place to mount an offensive. The Germans occupied the crest of the hills, and the British had to advance upward into the guns of the concealed enemy. No man's land was heavily covered by barbed wire, the German positions were virtually impregnable. They had a well-secured first line of trenches connected to 40-foot bunkers cut deep into the mountain face. The British sought to dislodge them with one of the most massive artillery bombardments in the history of warfare. John Keegan, military historian. <STRONG>JOHN KEEGAN:</STRONG> The British staff had decided that they would fire a million shells at the German trenches on the chase in front of attack, which would take them about a week. [SOUNDS OF HEAVY ARTILLERY] So you had a week's long heavy bombardment of the enemy's trenches by the British. Several thousand guns firing one shell every half minute, so most of 24 hours and then on again the next day. [SOUNDS OF HEAVY ARTILLERY] <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> The artillery barrage directed at the German front lines suddenly stopped. July 1, 7:30 AM. The troops were assembled in the trenches, each man with 66 pounds of equipment on his back. <STRONG>JOHN KEEGAN:</STRONG> The instructions were very simple in the hole, and that is that at their appointed time they got out of their trenches and walked forward behind their officers. And kept on walking forward until they got to the enemy trench. And it was hoped that the Germans would either been killed or demoralized as the British would walk across. Unfortunately, it didn't work like that. [SOUNDS OF HEAVY ARTILLERY] <STRONG>JACK RON:</STRONG> Sometimes people ask you about the Battle of the Somme. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> Jack Ron of the Newfoundland Regiment. He fought in the Battle of the Somme in the village of Beaumont-Hamel. There were 800 men fighting in his battalion, 710 died in the first day. <STRONG>JACK RON:</STRONG> Fighting at Beaumont-Hamel wasn't a fight as fair because it was a one-sided affair for machine guns only. We went out of our-- St John's road, they called it. It was our back line. And we crossed two lines-- the second line of trenches and the frontline of trenches. And then we all came up over the top of the hill, just as we got our heads over the top, the machine guns opened up on us. And that's where most of the men died on the war, right in view of the German machine gunners. And the pile of the dead there, you know, bunches. <STRONG>JOHN KEEGAN:</STRONG> A lot of those who died were touched by bullets before they had left British lines inside the British position. They never crossed over their side at all. [SOUNDS OF HEAVY ARTILLERY] Very many of those who went forward were innocents who had never been on the battlefield before. They were imbued with very high ideals of patriotism and loyalty to comrades, and devotion to the regiment, and courage in the abstract. They'd had very strict instructions about what they would do. And they did it. <STRONG>AJP TAYLOR:</STRONG> And they were massacred. And nothing was achieved by the Battle of the Somme, except a great slaughter. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> AJP Taylor, British military historian. <STRONG>AJP TAYLOR:</STRONG> The first day on the Somme is one of the first, one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of war. Something like 60,000 men advanced in line, of them 20,000 were killed in a day. I don't think that death rate was equal even in the Second World War. And it accomplished virtually nothing. The Somme displayed, with all the shock of the first experience, displayed the impact that the machine gun was going to have on warfare. It shattered for the duration of the war and for many years thereafter the approach to the war of idealism. That if you are heroic, if you are inspired by spiritual sacrifice, and if you believed that your cause was morally better than that of the enemy, you would win. None of these things took place. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> The Battle of the Somme went on for four months, the generals learned nothing. Week after week they commanded their soldiers to advance on the machine guns in the same orderly procession, and in the same orderly procession the soldiers were slaughtered. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> In the Battle of the Somme 75,000 British soldiers lost their lives before a single man reached the German frontline. And among the 70,000, more than half of the members of my victorious track team of Cambridge University who had defeated Oxford two years before. I felt the Battle of the Somme was a very deep personal grief thanks to the machine gun. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> When the battle was over, 1,100,000 French, British and German young men lay dead. 1,100,000. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> West Point, New York. Future officers of the US Army training in the central area courtyard. Their swords and precision drill bring back visions of earlier, more limited warfare. In the 18th century war was fought by small professional armies with specific and rational goals which a nation could weigh against its costs. The machine gun ended this kind of warfare and raised new questions of morality. West Point history professor Major John Brinsfield is the author of numerous books and articles on the subject of military ethics. <STRONG>JOHN BRINSFIELD:</STRONG> When you use a machine gun that fires 300 rounds a minute, even a Maxim gun, like the French were using in World War I, it raised the issue of whether the land that you were fighting for was worth the number of people it took to take the land. At the Battle of the Somme, the total casualties amounted to over 1,000,000 men. They turned a forest into a swamp. Was that swamp worth the death of that many individuals? It was a question which in terms of ethical parlance, raised some very sensitive issues. The head of the Kaiser's naval cabinet Admiral Georg Muller said in 1918, "Isn't it a pity that the Kaiser has lost all sense of proportionality, that is all sense of the value of the battle in terms of human life?" <STRONG>JOHN KEEGAN:</STRONG> Why did the First World War get as nasty is it did, and why did it go as long as it did? It's an extraordinarily difficult question to answer. Wars develop dynamics of their own. And the First World War harnessed the industrial and demographic resources of some very, very large rich states to a cause, which they felt important. And they went on pouring on, they went on pouring out blood and treasure until they had no more to give. But I think you have to come to the First World War to find the time and people again to say, war isn't worth the price that you have to pay for it. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> After one of the first British attacks in Belgium a young officer said to Lieutenant General Sir Douglas Hague, sorry, sir, we didn't know it would be like that. We'll do better next time. They tried and they tried, and they tried. But going up against the machine gun, they didn't have a chance. Or against some of the other new weapons either, like poison gas. The Germans used poison gas first. They used it with barbarous efficiency. And the British struck back with chemicals of their own. George Bernard Shaw would write that "In the arts of death, man outdoes nature herself and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. Man outdoes nature." <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> He certainly did with the submarine, which occupies a special place in our story of war. With a weapon like this, the lines of battle leap the boundaries of armies' fixed in place. And the distinction between civilians and soldiers would disappear forever. The Hague Convention of 1907 placed strict limitations on Naval warfare. But a new weapon like the submarine had a particular logic of its own. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> Well, I'm afraid laws of war don't count much when you're in battle, when you have an enemy advancing on you, who will destroy you, unless you destroy him. You take the action which you think the moment requires. I'm afraid, war makes people go mad. <STRONG>AJP TAYLOR:</STRONG> One of the things that men have sought for for a long time, particularly, I would say since the 18th century, is the way in which warfare and humanity can be combined. I don't say you can fight a war without hurting anyone, but you can fight a war limiting it strictly to the competent forces-- the sailors or soldiers-- you would not affect the civilian population, least of all, would you kill them in the process. But the submarine was one of the weapons which changed the character of warfare in the 20th century. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> The submarine. A British admiral had called it underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English. During World War I it gained acceptance only slowly. Naval commanders on both sides had trouble figuring out what it could do best. At first, the Germans hoped to use it against the British fleet blockading their shores. But one year into the war the Germans sent the submarine to do some blockading of its own. It's target-- merchant ships trading with the British. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> There were, however, still the rules of war. Civilians were not to be indiscriminately torpedoed. In this German World War I film, The Voyage of the U-35, German sailors blockading the British coast paused to refresh themselves in the North Atlantic. Soon they were returned to their deadly business sinking enemy merchant ships. But for this film their submarine attacks, according to the laws of naval warfare, first it puts up flags, warning its intended victim that it's about to be sunk. The crew leaves the merchant ship in lifeboats. And the firing commences. Within minutes the ship begins to sink. No loss of life, and the rules of war still intact. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> These images of the chivalry submarine are the last vestiges of a fading morality. The slow submarine running on the surface and warning its victims was, in fact, vulnerable pray. The pressures of total war would soon release it from any constricting rules. Submarine would do what its designers intended-- attack, from the depths, invisible, and without warning. <STRONG>AJP TAYLOR:</STRONG> There comes a moment when the weapon of war which is being used can't be civilized, despite the rules. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> The Lusitania, the $10 million pride of the Cunard fleet, launched in 1907 as a floating palace. Inside her spacious ballrooms, domed dining rooms and regal suits, she was a world of Doric columns, candelabras, elaborate woodwork, inlaid mahogany tables, and damask sofas. <STRONG>FEMALE PASSENGER:</STRONG> My father was quite ill during the war. And it was suggested by the few relatives I have that I go over and visit him, and take his only granddaughter over. And that's why I went on the Lusitania. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> The Lusitania was the fastest passenger liner on the ocean. She could make the trip from New York to Liverpool in less than seven day. <STRONG>SECOND FEMALE PASSENGER:</STRONG> My husband said it was a speedy boat, so that is why we picked the Lusitania. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> May 1, 1915, New York City Pier 54. The final dockside flurry, as the Lusitania prepares for her departure. Aboard were the famous, the playwright Charles Klein, the writer Elbert Hubbard, and Alfred G. Vanderbilt, off the visit his stable of horses in England. None of the 1,257 passengers aboard appeared to have thoughts of submarines on their mind. True, the German Embassy had placed an advertisement in the American papers that very day, warning passengers that ships heading for England were entering a war zone and were liable to destruction. Those who saw the ad dismissed it as German propaganda. This was a passenger ship, there were women and children aboard. <STRONG>MALE PASSENGER:</STRONG> We'd heard so many things that the Germans were going to do. They'd promised to be in Paris by Christmas. They'd threatened all sorts of things. In any case, I felt to hell with the whole damn thing. I will go in any case. <STRONG>THIRD FEMALE PASSENGER:</STRONG> I went on-board the Lusitania with the baby. It was on the first of May, on a Saturday morning. I stood on deck watching people coming on. And as we steamed out of the harbor, and the band started to play "God Be with You, Till We Meet Again." [MUSIC PLAYING "GOD BE WITH YOU, TILL WE MEET AGAIN"] <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> As the ship slowly left the New York Harbor, 3,600 miles away a German U-boat was sailing into the North Sea. <STRONG>PAUL OF DANZIG:</STRONG> [SPEAKING FRENCH] <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> Paul [INAUDIBLE] of Danzig, the last surviving crew member of the submarine the U-20. <STRONG>PAUL OF DANZIG:</STRONG> On the morning of the 7th of May, we were at the south exit of the English off [INAUDIBLE] Head. After a successful run from the Dover Calais entrance to the Channel. At 1 o'clock from a far distance layer of haze a large ship came towards us. We were given the alarm to submerge. We made an attack, but the ship zig-zagged and evaded us. About a quarter of an hour later, she changed course again and steamed directly towards us. The commands fairly burst from the commander, click short commands, radar commands. We made all speed to get into position. At 750 meters about half a mile, we shot our last torpedo. [EXPLOSION] <STRONG>THIRD FEMALE PASSENGER:</STRONG> The ship had started to shake, so I picked up my baby and I started to go upstairs. The ship gave another lurch, and everything was thrown all over the place. <STRONG>SECOND FEMALE PASSENGER:</STRONG>It seemed as if the whole dining room, all the china came in on top of us, that's the feeling. <STRONG>MALE PASSENGER:</STRONG> People were jumping overboard, people were being thrown overboard, boats were being smashed to pieces. It was most outer chaos. <STRONG>FIRST FEMALE PASSENGER:</STRONG> Oh, it was a terrible thing. Everyone was just beating everybody. <STRONG>SECOND FEMALE PASSENGER:</STRONG> I waved to my husband as he went down with the boat. As long as I could see him, we waved. <STRONG>THIRD FEMALE PASSENGER:</STRONG> When she took a final plunge, I wasn't far enough away. It sucked the baby out of my arms. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> As the survivors staggered off the rescue ships, the final death toll was counted. 1,100 men, women, and children were dead. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> Somebody brought us the news that Lusitania had been sunk, and that hundreds of people had been drowned. And we were literally shattered. <STRONG>AJP TAYLOR:</STRONG> It was the first time that the horrors of war were brought home to many people, particularly Americans. After all, America, the United States was still neutral. It was assumed that any ship carrying Americans would be safe. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> Moral revulsion swept across America. Newspapers cried for vengeance, marking the Germans as pirates, callously breaking international law. To a century which began with the belief in civilized warfare, this was wholesale murder. Across the ocean, there were riots. In Liverpool a crowd gathered before a cutlery shop owned by a German family and began heaving bricks through the window. In a few minutes the store was wrecked. The police stood by and did nothing. In Germany, Otto, [INAUDIBLE] and the crew of the returning U-20 received a hero's welcome. Schoolchildren were given a half day holiday, buildings were decorated with flags. There was a commemorative medal. The foreign office issued the statement, quote, "the scene of war is not a golf course, the ship of belligerent powers-- not places of pleasure. The sinking of the Lusitania was for us a military necessity." [BELL RINGING] <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> The sinking of the Lusitania broke a psychological barrier. Before the end of World War I, hundred of merchant ships would be sunk, and thousands of non-combatants would lose their lives. The graves of these civilians-- the men, and women, and children who went down with the Lusitania-- are notable today only because they were the first of many millions who would perish in this century's ever widening circle of war. Think of the ironies that accompany the arming of the Earth in the 20th century. The new weapons always seem to come packaged with the promise that they will, once and for all, put an end to war. Alfred Nobel sold his invention of dynamite to the makers of arms, convinced that it's terrible deterrent value would make war impossible. His enormous profits then funded the Nobel Peace Prize. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun, thought he had helped to end war between civilized nations. Only a general who was a barbarian, he said, would send his men to certain death against the concentrated power of my new gun. And the early inventors of the submarine saw their creature of the deep as the enforcer of peace on the high seas. And then came the invention of the airplane. Orville Wright was convinced that he and his brother had given the world the decisive deterrent. Said Orville, "when my brother and I built and flew the first man-carrying flying machine, we thought we were introducing into the world an invention that would make further wars practically impossible." <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> As World War I began, very few could have foreseen the military role of the airplane. The best planes in Europe had a range of under 200 miles, and a top speed of 65 miles an hour. They flew only in clear weather and could carry hardly more than the weight of the pilot. They were expected to do little more in the air than support the advancing armies on the ground. <STRONG>KIN PORTER:</STRONG> Primarily, at the start of the war, the airplane was used as an observation vehicle. And it was based on the idea that if they can see a little better, they might be able to use their artillery a little better. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> Kin Porter, 86 years old, one of the last surviving aces of World War I. He and the pilots on both sides, friend and foe, where the cocky young pioneers of airborne warfare. <STRONG>KIN PORTER:</STRONG> We were mostly observation to start with. Only when the enemy started to get airplanes to shoot at us why we started to become fighter pilots. And that's when we started to shoot them down. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> They were the modern cavalry, soaring exuberantly above the mud-soaked stalemate below. With names like the Red Baron, they evoked the noble gallantry of earlier war. In truth, the romanticism covers a sad reality-- the average life expectancy of these young heroes was less than three weeks. [SOUNDS OF PLANE ENGINES AND ARTILLERY] <STRONG>AJP TAYLOR:</STRONG> Nothing was achieved by this, except to interfere with the observation from one side to the other. But it initiated the idea of aerial warfare. And very soon people were considering that you could develop bigger aircraft and that they could be used not merely for observation, but for carrying weapons, which came to be called bombs, over to the other side. <STRONG>KIN PORTER:</STRONG> A bomber is nothing but a long-range piece of artillery. It will carry high explosives further then you can shoot it out of a gun. [EXPLOSIONS] <STRONG>KIN PORTER:</STRONG> Some of our fighter planes had 25-pounbd bombs on them, four to six bombs. Originally, the British and the French before they had bomb racks, they used to carry them up in the cockpit. Threw them out the -- just threw them over the side. They carried hand grenades, anything it would blow up, anything you could pop at. Well, you couldn't tell what was done, and we didn't know. We'd look down through there and try to hit something, hoped to hit it. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> These primitive attempts of bombings from the air did not deter the visionaries, men such as Colonel Billy Mitchell. He was throughout his life a passionate advocate of the military role of the bombing airplane. Today Billy Mitchell is regarded as the father of the United States Air Force. Mitchel was Kin Porter's commanding officer. <STRONG>KIN PORTER:</STRONG> Billy was a flamboyant type of a fellow and was well liked by all the pilots, but they weren't-- well, they didn't think he was such a hot pilot, but he did fly. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> When Billy Mitchell arrived in Europe in 1917, the United States had a few obsolete airplanes and only a handful of trained pilots. There was no independent Air Force at all. Mitchell quickly rose from his role as observer to operational head of a newly organized Allied Air Service. In August 1918 Mitchell coordinated the largest air operation of the First World War-- the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. Under Mitchell's command, British, French, and Italian airplanes took off in wave after wave to support an advance of allied ground troops. Within the first day of battle Mitchell's airplanes had established total air supremacy over the battle field. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> 1,481 airplanes were engaged in the battle. "Should they all fly at once," wrote Mitchell, "the sky would be black." His dream was to use his huge assembly of airplanes to fly behind the lines, bombing enemy cities and towns that supplied the "foe", in Mitchell's words, with the sinews of war. But near the end of the war Billy Mitchell's Air Service was specifically warned by the Wilson administration not to participate in any bombardment plan that, quote, "has as its objective promiscuous bombing upon industry, commerce, or population in enemy countries." The role of air power against enemy cities of civilians still raised moral questions for the leaders back home. For World War I ended for Mitchell on a note of frustration-- he never had a chance to show what his bombers could do. At home, Mitchell lobbied for the cause of air power. In July of 1921 the Navy agreed to allow Mitchell to conduct a series of bombing demonstrations. His aim was to prove to a skeptical Army and Navy that the airplane could be a deadly weapon of war. <STRONG>KIN PORTER:</STRONG> Billy wanted to show the people in Washington that a bomber could sink a battleship, and so he went out and did it. Did you ever see the armor plate on one of those battleships, how thick it is? They just didn't think a bomb would go through it. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> As his airplanes took off with 2,000-pound bombs to attack the captor German battleship, the Ostfriesland, the Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels allegedly offered to stand bareheaded on the bridge of the ship. It's lucky he didn't. If to modern eyes the experiment seems absurd, remember that in the 1920s the potential of the bomber was still just theory. But this demonstration was as much a publicity stunt as an experiment. And all the media were there. <STRONG>KIN PORTER:</STRONG>It's traumatic. He sinks a battleship. Wouldn't that open your eyes? That was the idea of it. He could have just as well bombed Times Square, but that would have killed some people. "In the war to come," Mitchell said, "God would be on the side of the heaviest Air Force." Keep your eye on the sky. <STRONG>BILLY MITCHELL:</STRONG> AFR is the first line of defense of every country in the world. Armies and army entrench the whole land, navies will be sunk during the first two weeks of war by air power. What determines the war today? The direct attack of the vital centers of an enemy-- its water supply, its means of planting food, his great cities, everywhere where these people live and carry on their ordinary existence. Without air power, a nation is lost. <STRONG>JOHN BRINSFIELD:</STRONG> This was certainly a new way of waging warfare from the air, and in particular, targeting civilian cities, roads, factories, and so forth. They really hadn't been able to do that to a large extent in World War I. The whole issue of strategic bombing was something that grew again in terms of retaliation in World War II. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> Billy Mitchell died in 1936. In America, his ideas about aerial warfare still met with skepticism and moral qualms. But in the rising militarism of Europe, any skepticism was overcome. Benito Mussolini sent his Air Force to attack spear waving villagers in Ethiopia. Hitler ordered his Air Force into Spain to support Franco. And in 1937 German Junker bombers devastated the town of Guernica. As with the sinking of the Lusitania, the world reacted with disbelief and horror. Billy Mitchell had defended the doctrine of strategic bombardment as humane, taking the battle directly to the enemy population, he had argued, would make for short and decisive war. World War II would put his prophetic powers to the test. [SOUNDS OF PLANE ENGINES] <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> World War II, as Billie Mitchell predicted, the skies were full of planes. On September 1, 1939, the very day war broke out in Europe, President Roosevelt sent a message appealing to all belligerent countries to prevent their Air Forces from bombing undefended towns and unarmed civilians. It would be a futile plea. In Europe the Germans held virtual air supremacy. They used it at first to support ground divisions. It was a terrifying armada of airplanes, artillery, and armor, advancing across Europe in a dreaded blitzkrieg. As the Germans swept through Poland, they met heavy resistance in Warsaw. They began a massive bombardment. The city crumbled under the ravages of aerial warfare combined with heavy artillery. Noel Baker as parliamentary secretary was with Winston Churchill when they screened German films of the besieged city. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> I sat next to Churchill when we watched this film of the bombing of Warsaw. And his comment as the film ended was, bloody amateurs. He thought nothing of what the Germans had done and knew that we could bomb much better. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> German bombs fell on Rotterdam, London, Coventry. The British struck back at Berlin, Lubeck, Cologne. For two months incendiary bombs and 13,000 tons of high explosives fell on London, bringing indiscriminate death from the sky. The planes were no longer operating in support of advancing armies. Their target-- civilian populations, their purpose-- to break up people's will to resist. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> I was a member of Parliament, and if anybody had asked me or anyone of 50 or 100 Labor members of the House of Commons, little they thought indiscriminate bombing of an open town would be undertaken by the Royal Air Force, we would have indignantly denied that such a thing could happen. We would have been absolutely certain that the nation would not tolerate it. But as the war went on, as the Germans bombed us, as we started retaliating, I came to accept as inevitable the kind of bombing that I should've thought totally unacceptable before the war began. <STRONG>EDWARD R. MURROW:</STRONG> Last night the Royal Air Force went to Hamburg, Germany's largest port and main center of their submarine building industry. The British bombers dropped more than 2,300 tons of bombs. It was the greatest weight of bombs ever dropped in any raid. Details of the raid have not yet come in, but preliminary reports indicate that results were good. The bombs went down at the rate of 50 tons a minute. That means that as many tons of bombs hit Hamburg in 10 minutes, as ever struck London in an all-night raid. The whole raid lasted only 50 minutes, and in that time the weight of bombs was equal to five of the heaviest all-night raids ever carried out against this city. The raids here were bad enough, but last night's bombardment of Hamburg was something never before experienced by the people of any city. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> We delivered 2,000 tons every night for five months until there was nothing left of Hamburg. And 40,000 people, at least, have been killed. I believe a great number more. The aircraft photographed Hamburg from the sky at night, and the photograph showed that on the third night there were 30o miles of street on fire. 300 miles of street. How good civilians escape from that appalling danger of being burned to death. Once fighting starts, once there is war, nearly everybody goes mad. And they only think of destroying the enemy and how that can be done most effectively, and not of the other human values that they may be sacrificing on the way. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> After the war, I went to Hamburg, and working helping our soldiers and airmen was one of the most beautiful gals I ever saw. And I talked to her at last, but she'd been in the war. And she said, I'm from Hamburg, I was here. And I said, what was it like when you were being bombed? She said, if I thought that I had to pass one more night under the Allied bombing, I would go down to the harbor and throw myself into the sea. She said it was unimaginably terrible. <STRONG>BILL MOYERS:</STRONG> So from the Sommes and the Lusitania in the First World War to Coventry, Hamburg, and Nagasaki in the Second, we have steadily widened the economy of war. Once it would have been unacceptable to throw away an entire generation of young men as grist to the insatiable mill of the machine gun. Once it would have been unacceptable to make victims of the innocent, as if they were warriors armed to do battle onto death. Each new weapon this century has been rationalized and turned as state of the art-- and the art is war-- employed by government to achieve their purpose. But what now that we possess new weapons whose power can smash, not only civilian and soldier alike, but the biological chain, which is the very being of life itself. Can we go on thinking of war in the same old way as an acceptable instrument of policy? This is the great and unresolved dilemma of our age, where we go on doing what our weapons make possible. <STRONG>JOHN KEEGAN:</STRONG> But I think all weapons have got very, very nasty, much nastier now than they've ever been. This, terrible is it was in its time, is a comparatively humane agent of death and destruction. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> The history of our 20th century has been dominated from the beginning until today by the arms race, and by the wars which the arms race has produced. It has been a military century, in which war has played a larger and larger part. <STRONG>JOHN BRINSFIELD:</STRONG> By World War I we have 8 million military, but 1.3 million civilians die in World War I. Now, by World War II, we have approximately 16.9 million military casualties, but we have 34 million civilians who are killed for the first time in history of warfare, at least modern warfare. We have almost twice as many civilians who were killed as military casualties. projections for World War III, if it were ever fought, approximately 253 million people in a nuclear type scenario. And that would mean that over 90% of the casualties would be civilians. <STRONG>AJP TAYLOR:</STRONG> If men behave in the future as they do, have done in the past, we are ultimately begging for our death penalty. But there have been occasions-- I can't think of any on the spare of the moment-- but I'm told that there have been occasions when men do not behave in the future as they did in the past. In that case, there will be no nuclear war, and nations would have to live in peace with one another. And we'd have to trust each other. <STRONG>JOHN BRINSFIELD:</STRONG> And now we're talking about global repercussions, we're talking about missiles being able to fly from somewhere such as Moscow all the way to Utah, across the Polar ice caps. We're talking about submarines that can surface, and seven minutes later deliver a nuclear warhead on New York City. We're talking about a time of reaction that is approximately the time of playing one inning of baseball. We're talking about a war of global proportions, but with a time of operability that is a decision time for a commander to decide whether or not we will react in about the same amount of time it takes to go to the refrigerator and get a beer. <STRONG>PHILLIP NOEL BAKER:</STRONG> I heard the head of the United States A-bombing enterprise all himself built up the United States nuclear stockpile. I hear him say in the special session the other day, I worked with enthusiasm to make our atomic stockpile enormously strong. I was convinced that I was finishing off war. But alas, I know see 20 years later that I didn't finish war, I only made it more terrible.