Roosevelt’s appeal to spare civilians

On 1 September 1939, a few hours after Germany invaded Poland, the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sent an urgent appeal to the governments of Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Poland. He asked every government that found itself at war to undertake publicly that its armed forces would “in no event, and under no circumstances” bomb civilian populations or unfortified cities from the air, on condition that the enemy observed the same rules. The replies came that same day, and all were in the affirmative. Adolf Hitler assured the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Alexander Kirk, that the Luftwaffe had been ordered to attack military targets only. The British, French and Polish governments answered in similar terms. Two days later, on 3 September, Britain and France issued a joint declaration in which they pledged to bomb only strictly military objectives. On Polish soil, things had looked entirely different since dawn.

A telephone call in the night

News of the outbreak of war reached the White House at about 2.50 a.m. Washington time. The ambassador in Warsaw, Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, could not get through to Washington directly, so he passed the news to the ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, who telephoned the President. According to Bullitt, Roosevelt said: “Well, Bill, it has come at last. God help us all.” Before dawn the President and the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, had agreed on the text of the appeal. At 5 a.m. the State Department cabled it to the embassies in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin and Warsaw with instructions to deliver it immediately. An hour later Hull sent a second telegram: the British, French, Italian and Polish replies were to be favourable and to arrive as quickly as possible, so that they could be published at once.

The text was short. Roosevelt recalled that the ruthless bombing of civilians in unfortified centres of population, carried out in recent years in various corners of the world, had maimed and killed thousands of defenceless men, women and children, and “has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity”. If recourse were had to this “inhuman form of barbarism” in the “tragic conflagration” now beginning, hundreds of thousands of innocent people who bore no responsibility for the war, and were not even remotely taking part in it, would lose their lives. The President therefore called on every government that might be drawn into hostilities to affirm its position publicly, and asked for an immediate reply.

Behind these words lay the experience of the preceding years. In April 1937 aircraft of the Condor Legion and the Italian air force had destroyed Guernica; Nationalist and Italian aircraft had bombed Madrid and Barcelona; and from 1937 Japanese aircraft had been attacking Chinese cities, above all Shanghai, Canton and Chongqing. Roosevelt had already condemned these raids in his Chicago speech of October 1937, and in the summer of 1938 the State Department began discouraging American aircraft manufacturers from selling aeroplanes to states that bombed civilians. International law offered no protection here: the Hague Conventions predated the aeroplane as a weapon, and the draft rules of air warfare drawn up at The Hague in 1922–1923 never came into force. In June 1938 the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, set out in the House of Commons three principles that Britain regarded as binding: deliberate attacks on civilians were forbidden; only identifiable military objectives might be attacked; and attacks had to be carried out so as not to endanger civilians in their vicinity. In the autumn of 1938 the Assembly of the League of Nations adopted a similar resolution. Roosevelt had addressed the dictators directly before: in April 1939 he appealed to Hitler and Mussolini for an assurance that they would not attack thirty-one named states, and in the last days of August he urged Hitler and President Ignacy Mościcki to settle their dispute without resort to force. The appeal of 1 September was an attempt to turn these declarations into concrete commitments by the belligerents in the first hours of a new war.

The replies

Rome was the first to answer. At 5 p.m. an official of the Italian Foreign Ministry told Ambassador William Phillips orally that, since the Council of Ministers had announced that day that Italy would undertake no military operations, the matter addressed by the appeal did not concern Italy.

The British reply was delivered in Washington by the ambassador, Lord Lothian. His Majesty’s Government welcomed the President’s “grave and moving” appeal and declared that, in the event of war, it had long intended to refrain from such action and to confine bombardment to strictly military objectives, provided the enemy observed the same rules. It added that it had already agreed the detailed rules it intended to impose on itself with “certain other governments”, meaning above all France. That evening the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, sent Bullitt a note assuring him that the Commander-in-Chief of the French forces had received orders ruling out the bombing of civilians and restricting air raids to strictly military objectives. At the same time he reserved the right to take all appropriate measures should the enemy fail to respect these limits.

The German reply arrived late in the evening. The Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, sent Kirk a note containing the answer of the “Reich Chancellor”. Hitler wrote that the President’s view that it was a humanitarian principle to refrain in all circumstances from bombing non-military objectives was “in complete accord” with his own position, which he had in fact championed before. He therefore unreservedly endorsed the proposal that the belligerent governments make such a declaration. He pointed out that in his speech to the Reichstag that very day he had already announced that the Luftwaffe had been ordered to confine its operations to military targets. And indeed, at the Kroll Opera House he had said: “I do not want to wage war against women and children. I have ordered my Luftwaffe to restrict its attacks to military objectives.” The condition for maintaining this order was, “of course”, that the enemy air force observed the same rule.

Poland replied through two channels. In Warsaw the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, assured Biddle that the Polish air force and army had already been ordered not to bomb unfortified towns, or even military centres if an attack would endanger the civilian population. He added confidentially that these instructions had been issued together with the first mobilisation orders and that no Polish aircraft had flown over German territory that day. In Washington Ambassador Jerzy Potocki handed Hull the government’s official note. Poland thanked the President for his telegram and fully agreed with the principles it set out, but pointed out that since the morning it had been the target of unprovoked aggression and had already suffered many attacks from the air. Reports of civilian casualties gave reason to doubt whether the other side was respecting the principles of which the President spoke. Poland would observe them, provided the enemy observed them just as scrupulously.

Words and bombs

The Polish note came closest to the truth. When Roosevelt took Bullitt’s call in Washington, it was already morning of the first day of the war in Poland. At about 4.40 a.m., by most accounts a few minutes before the Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Westerplatte, Junkers Ju 87s attacked Wieluń, a town with no garrison and no anti-aircraft defences. Bombs fell on the hospital and on the town centre, most of which was reduced to rubble. That day the Luftwaffe also bombed Warsaw, Kraków, Gdynia, Lwów (Lviv) and dozens of other places. By the evening Beck was already checking reports of seventy civilians killed in Lwów.

During the night of 1–2 September the German government transmitted through The Hague a proposal that both sides restrict air raids to military objectives. The Dutch minister delivered it to Beck at 4.30 a.m., and Beck replied at once that Poland agreed, provided Germany observed the principle. Biddle remarked in his report that Hitler had made this gesture only once he realised he might have to fight not just the Polish air force but the French and British as well. A few hours later, at around 8 a.m. on 2 September, German aircraft bombed Ciechanów, killing, according to Polish reports, twenty-one civilians and four soldiers, and Lublin, where some thirty people died. On 3 September bombs fell on Konstancin, where the Polish Foreign Ministry had lodged the diplomatic corps as the safest place available. One of them damaged Biddle’s villa, where his whole family was staying.

Washington instructed its military attachés in London, Paris, Berlin and Warsaw to investigate on the spot every case of the bombing of non-military targets. In Poland such cases multiplied by the day. On 12 September Biddle reported from Krzemieniec, to which the Foreign Ministry had moved, that German aircraft had bombed the main street of that defenceless little town, killing eleven people. The next day German aircraft almost completely destroyed Frampol, while Warsaw, bombed since the first day of the war, endured ever heavier raids, culminating in the massed attack of 25 September. The Luftwaffe claimed that it was attacking military targets, a category in which it also included railway junctions, bridges, barracks and towns lying in the path of retreating troops. In practice, the line between a “military objective” and terror against the civilian population ceased to exist.

The Anglo-French declaration

Overnight on 2–3 September the governments of Britain and France issued a joint declaration, which Lothian passed to the State Department on 3 September. The two governments solemnly affirmed that if war were forced upon them, they would conduct it “with a firm desire to spare the civilian population” and to preserve by every means the monuments of human civilisation. They had welcomed Roosevelt’s appeal with deep satisfaction and had answered it in the same spirit. They had already given their commanders explicit orders forbidding bombardment from the air, from the sea or by land artillery of anything other than objectives that were “strictly military in the narrowest sense of the word”. Artillery was not to shell targets without a clearly defined military importance, and in particular large urban areas outside the battle zone.

The declaration went further than the President’s appeal. War at sea was to be waged in accordance with the London Protocol of 1936 on the rules of submarine warfare, and aircraft were to attack merchant ships only under the rules that applied to surface warships. Both governments also affirmed that they would abide by the Geneva Protocol of 1925 banning chemical and bacteriological weapons. They announced that they would ask the German government whether it was prepared to give the same assurances, and stipulated that should the enemy fail to observe these restrictions, they reserved the right to take whatever action they deemed appropriate.

That condition had already been broken by the time the declaration was published, but London and Paris had no intention of enforcing it. The first operations of the Royal Air Force were aimed at warships, and British bombers flew over German cities carrying leaflets. Polish diplomats in Paris and London pressed in vain for air raids that would relieve Poland. On 12 September Ambassador Edward Raczyński complained to the American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, that the British, though they did not say so openly, were afraid that by bombing German cities they would kill women and children; American opinion would then regard them as the ones who had started it and would refuse to amend the Neutrality Act, without which Britain and France could not buy arms in the United States. Roosevelt’s appeal, directed against barbarism, thus became in part one of the arguments for Allied inaction while Poland fought on.

Place in the war

Restraint on both sides in the west outlasted the war in Poland. The first German bombs fell on Britain in October 1939, when the Luftwaffe attacked warships in the Firth of Forth. Throughout the winter both sides avoided raids on each other’s cities. Roosevelt invoked his appeal once more in December 1939: when, after the attack on Finland, Soviet aircraft bombed Helsinki, he placed the USSR under a “moral embargo” on the sale of aircraft. The turning point came in May 1940. On 14 May the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam, and during the night of 15–16 May British bombers attacked targets in the Ruhr for the first time. Then came the Battle of Britain and the night raids on London, Coventry and other British cities, and from 1942 the British and American strategic bombing that destroyed whole districts of German cities, culminating in Dresden in February 1945. In the Far East the war ended with the raids on Tokyo and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Roosevelt’s prediction that, if recourse were had to bombing, hundreds of thousands of people would lose their lives thus proved, if anything, cautious. Wieluń, Frampol and Warsaw in September 1939 showed from the very first day what the assurances Hitler had given the President were worth, and the declaration of Britain and France survived only until the war spread to the west.