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The line of what war may do, moved war by war

WHAT WAR WAS ALLOWED TO DO

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Each great war did something the war before it had not, and the rules were written afterwards. The American Revolution fought from cover. The First World War brought machine guns and gas on an industrial scale. The Second made the bombing of cities routine. Vietnam sprayed a poison that is still being born. Here is each step, and the rule that came after it.

1775: fighting from cover — THE RECORD

On 19 April 1775 British regulars marching back from Concord were fired on for miles by colonial militia shooting from behind walls, trees and houses; the column lost 273 killed, wounded and missing that day. The armies of Europe fought in lines, in the open. In the Carolinas in 1780 and 1781, partisan bands raided supply lines and vanished into the swamps, the way of fighting later called guerrilla war. It worked, and every army since has had to plan for it.

The rules, written after — THE RECORD

The first modern codes of the laws of war came in the 1860s: the Lieber Code, issued to the Union army during the Civil War (1863), and the first Geneva Convention (1864), for the wounded, after the battle of Solferino. The Hague rules (1899, 1907) forbade bombarding undefended towns and banned poison, and a Hague declaration of 1899 banned gas shells. The Geneva Protocol (1925) extended the ban to any use of gas in war, and to germ warfare, after gas had been used in breach of the Hague bans. The Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) protected civilians in enemy hands, after the war that bombed them. Additional Protocol I (1977) made civilians unlawful targets; the United States signed it and has not ratified it.

1914 to 1918: the machine and the gas — MEASURED (THE SOMME) · ESTIMATED (GAS, THE WAR'S DEAD)

On 22 April 1915 at Ypres the German army released more than 150 tonnes of chlorine from cylinders, the first large gas attack. By 1918 both sides used gas: an estimated 1.3 million gas casualties, some 90,000 of them deaths. On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme, the British Army lost 57,470 men, 19,240 of them killed: the worst day in its history. Estimates of the war's dead, soldiers and civilians, run from about 15 to 22 million.

1915 to 1945: the city becomes the target — THE RECORD · THE COUNTS: CONTESTED

Cities had been bombed before: German airships and bombers raided London from 1915. On 26 April 1937 German and Italian aircraft bombed Guernica, a Basque market town; the dead were first given as 1,654, and modern research counts a few hundred. The Blitz of 1940 and 1941 killed some 43,000 civilians in Britain. The raids on Hamburg from 24 July to 3 August 1943, with a firestorm on the night of 27 to 28 July, killed about 37,000. At Dresden in February 1945 a historians' commission later counted up to 25,000 dead. The firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9 to 10 March 1945 killed 80,000 to more than 100,000 people. Germany, Japan, Britain and the United States all bombed cities on purpose.

August 1945 — THE RECORD · ESTIMATED

Two bombs destroyed two cities: Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August. By the end of 1945 about 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima and about 74,000 in Nagasaki, by the cities' own estimates. The plate on the atom, further along this line, follows it from the first test to today.

1962 to 1971: Agent Orange — THE RECORD · MEASURED · THE VICTIM COUNTS: CONTESTED

From 1962 to 1971 the US military sprayed about 20 million gallons of herbicide over South Vietnam, more than half of it Agent Orange, in Operation Ranch Hand. Agent Orange carried dioxin (TCDD), which lingers in soil and in the body. The US Department of Veterans Affairs presumes a list of cancers and other diseases in exposed veterans to be caused by their service, and pays for spina bifida in their children. A 2003 study in Nature estimated that 2.1 to 4.8 million Vietnamese lived in villages sprayed directly. Vietnamese estimates of the number affected run as high as 3 million, among them children born with disabilities; those counts are contested. The United States paid to clean dioxin from the former airbase at Da Nang, finished in 2018, and began at Bien Hoa in 2019.

The line now — THE RECORD, READ

The armed drone moved the line again. The first armed Predator mission was flown over Afghanistan on 7 October 2001; in November 2002 one killed six men in a car in Yemen, far from any declared battlefield. In Ukraine since 2022, cheap drones flown by both armies have become a main weapon of the war: a February 2025 British study (RUSI) found they accounted for 60 to 70% of the Russian equipment damaged or destroyed. Each time the practice came first, and the rule, if any, came after.

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