A Summer Bright and Terrible Read Online Free PDF

banish poison gas, but that was an easy one.
People were terrified of gas, so the ban was popular among the populace. What’s
more, it had never been an effective military weapon, so the ban didn’t bother
the people in charge. The airplane, though, was a different matter: It
definitely had its uses, particularly to the British, for whom the subcontinent
of India and the vast deserts of Arabia constituted a tremendous burden—the
white man’s burden, as Kipling so famously put it. There were enormous profits
to be garnered there, but there was also considerable expense in the form of
standing armies to keep the peace along the Northwest Frontier of India and
wherever the Bedouin tribes gathered in Arabia. The natives were understandably
restless, feeling that the white man was a burden too heavy to be borne, and so
the British were forced to keep armies permanently garrisoned, clothed, fed,
and housed throughout their recalcitrant empire.
    But no longer were these armed masses
necessary, not since the British had discovered that a few squadrons of bombers
could take the place of these large, expensive armies. If a tribe along the
Northwest Frontier or far up the Nile began attacking its neighbours or the
local missionaries, a couple of bombers would fly up from Bombay or Cairo and,
within a few hours, would destroy the offending village from the air. The
marauding tribesmen could do nothing but prance around helplessly on their horses
and fire ineffective bullets into the air while their homes, wives, and
children were blown to bits. If the very next day another rebellion were to take place hundreds of miles
away, the same squadron could deal with it. A minuscule number of men and machines
could keep the king’s peace throughout the Mid- and Far East.
    So when the League of Nations was presented
with a resolution prohibiting the use of military airplanes to bomb civilians,
in the manner that poison gas had been prohibited, the Colonial Secretary and
the Chancellor of the Exchequer of England hesitated to embrace it. The British
army battalions that had earlier policed the Empire had been largely disbanded
in an effort to satisfy the budget that had been ruined during the war, and it
would be prohibitively expensive to bring them back again under arms and ship
them out. No, the bombing of civilians was here to stay; it was simple
economics.
    What the British began to whisper in the back
rooms of the League was something a bit subtler. They suggested the civilized
nations should ban airpower against each other, but should not interfere in
each nation’s internal affairs. To put it bluntly, which they tried desperately
not to do, it was a regrettable but stern necessity to keep the peace among benighted
natives by bombing them, though it would be morally reprehensible to use those
same airplanes to bomb the people of Berlin or London.
    The ban on poison gas was simple and
straightforward; the proposed British ban on airplanes was cluttered with subordinate
clauses, winks, and tongues firmly in cheeks. It did not have the clear moral
suasion of the ban on gas.
    There was yet another problem with the proposed
ban. Despite having one of the world’s smallest armies, Britain had become the
most powerful nation in the world, because of its navy. If any country should
go to war against this island nation, Britain’s first course of action was to
use the navy to blockade the offender. The effect of the blockade—to starve the
country into submission—was essentially a weapon against the civilian
population. How then could the British argue for the abolition of the airplane
on the grounds that it attacked
civilians, when their own basic strategy was just as guilty? They could not
press for an international agreement against air forces unless they were
prepared to give up their navy’s most effective weapon. And this they were not
about to do.
    There were still more problems. Airliners and
bombers alike are designed for the