Viewpoint – Battles rage on

It was another impressive turnout for Anzac Day recently as the historical and cultural significance of this commemoration for our country continues to grow. And so it should, for as a small nation we’ve made a disproportionate sacrifice in wars. In WWI New Zealand’s population was just 1.1 million yet we lost a staggering 18,000 dead with 41,000 wounded. In WWII it was 12,000 killed and 16,000 wounded. On a per capita basis, our country’s losses were the highest in the Commonwealth and evident in every war memorial up and down the country. 

My uncle enlisted in the RAF at 18 years of age. He was a bomb aimer in the Pathfinders. The one thing that weighed heavily on his mind, however, was the prospect of bombing civilians. He said ordinary German or Italian people were no different from his own in Scotland and he didn’t want to bomb them. As it happened this moral dilemma was never put to the test as his squadron’s targets remained military – marshalling yards, bridges, supply routes. 

His view had been formed during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 when the German Luftwaffe and Italian Aviazone Legionaria bombed Guernica in support of fellow fascist Franco. This was the first time the bombing of a civilian population captured global attention. It was met with international outrage, the death toll in Guernica estimated between 400 and 1600. 

In 1939 Germany bombed civilians in the invasion of Poland and in 1940, British civilians in the Blitz where 43,500 were killed in just nine months. Their ‘strategic’ intent was to terrorise the civilian populations and disrupt their lives. 

Eighty-four years  on from those dark days and there are wars where the loss of life and scale of destruction is reminiscent of WWII. In Gaza, two million Palestinians are crowded into a narrow strip of land, one of the most densely populated areas in the world. To date 34,000 Palestinians have been killed and 80,000 wounded according to Hamas figures. 

Prior to this 1139 Israelis were killed in October last year, 764 of them civilians.

Two world wars over eight long years claimed 40,000 NZ service personnel with 57,000 wounded. In Gaza those horrific figures have been matched in just six months and are mostly women and children concentrated in the 365 square kilometres of Palestinian ‘territory’. 

In the Ukraine, well over 10,000 civilians have been killed  in the Russian invasion since 2022 while President Zelensky said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had also been killed (both figures likely to be higher). The BBC recently confirmed the Russian military death toll at 50,000.

History condemns those responsible for the loss of innocent civilian lives, whatever race or creed, but in these instances, history  might save its harshest judgement for the power brokers who have stood by and allowed the killing to continue despite the lessons of the past.