War is inherently violent. It is also no secret that atrocities happen in most armed conflicts. The laws of war are designed to prevent them, and to limit the impact of fighting on the civilian population.
We have seen the continuing targeting of civilians in Sudan. Despite its capacity to inflict overwhelming force against most potential adversaries, the United Kingdom has not been engaged in these sorts of operations for a very long time. The deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq saw some isolated abuses, but in general all three services have shown considerable restraint towards non-combatants, neutrals, and captive enemy servicemen.
During the Kosovo and Libyan air campaigns in and , for instance, the targeting officers always had legal advisers on hand who would try to ensure that risk to civilians was minimised. The constraints these posed were vividly dramatised in a different context by Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman in the movie Eye in the Sky. It was not always thus. For hundreds of years, the English and then the British state inflicted extreme violence in pursuit of strategic objectives.
It would be a mistake to assume that there is a distinction to be made here between ruthless measures undertaken in colonial contexts, or in Ireland and Scotland, and the supposedly more limited warfare practised in Europe. If anything, the English β and, later, the British β have acted far more brutally in Europe than elsewhere.
This should not be surprising, because it was in Europe that the main threat generally lay. According to the historian Clifford Rogers, armies under the direct command of King Edward III destroyed at least 17 towns and cities in the year alone. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British attacked the neutral state of Denmark and bombarded its capital Copenhagen, killing nearly civilians, displacing about 20, people, and burning down roughly a fifth of the city. During the two world wars, Britain inflicted extensive damage on the societies of its European adversaries.
