Terror in war

Hiroshima, Japan, Atomic Bomb Dome

Terror is an often-happening phenomenon both in daily life and in war, but what actually is terror? I’ll try to explain this with the help of Peter Sloterdijk’s Luftbeben (especially pp. 7-28) plus my own ideas (without separating which ideas are his and which are mine).
The word “terror” goes back to the France Revolution. It’s used to indicate the period of extreme violence and massacres of the first years of the revolution, between 1789 and 1794. The attempts and murders by anarchists at the end of the 19th century and during the first years of the 20th were a second period of terror in Europe. The best-known case is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on 28 June 1914. However, following Sloterdijk, the present idea of terror goes back to an event in the First World War (WW1) on 22 April 1915. On that day, near Ypres in Belgium, the German army launched the first large-scale gas attack in war against the French and Canadian troops on the other side of the front line. The front line broke, but the Germans didn’t succeed to take advantage of this local victory. However, by this attack the Germans introduced a new phenomenon in war: terror; a phenomenon that would not be limited to acts of war against enemy soldiers, but soon it would be directed also against civilians, and soon it would be practiced also by those who were no regular soldiers.
The new gas weapon was not a new weapon as any other new weapon, such as, for instance, the tank, which appeared in 1916 in WW1 on the battlefield. No, it was substantially different, for while till then (see note 1) fighting in war was directed against the person of the enemy soldier, now a weapon had been developed that attacked the environment of the soldier. Killing the enemy became indirect. Moreover, there was another effect: fear. Often, a gas weapon didn’t kill the soldier, but it made him suffer for a long time (some soldiers died many years after the war from a gas attack during WW1); or it could make him blind. Moreover, you often didn’t know whether the gas was there; it could be invisible or you could hardly smell it, if you could. It was quite abstract compared with a gun. You never knew where it was and whether it was there. The fear of the fear became bigger than the fear of the weapon itself, so to speak. Also the French and British forces developed gas weapons during WW1 and also Hitler became a gas victim and he was blind for some time. Was it why he refused to use chemical weapons in World War 2, fearing that he, too, could be hit again, if the enemy would use them, too? Was it why he used gas to murder the Jews?
So the essence of terror is not so much that it kills people but that it kills their environment; literally, as chemical weapons do, or psychologically, in the sense that people become afraid of places where an invisible enemy or weapon might kill you. The weapon is invisible for you, and you cannot notice that it is there. You have no idea from which direction an attack can come and in extreme cases you even don’t know whether there is a weapon or whether there isn’t. Terror is invisible like a ghost: it’s not there and it’s there.
Since 22 April 1915 the weapon of terror has been further developed and increasingly used. It has been used against soldiers but even more against civilians. During WW1, the Germans bombed London and other cities in England and the French and English bombed German towns. The same happened during the Second World War. Also legal military objects like weapon factories were then attacked, but not only. Rather the civilian population was the target of the bombardments. A main idea behind these bombardments was: Surrender, for if you don’t, we’ll destroy your life world. Even if you survive, we’ll make life for you impossible. Also the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of that kind. Modern attacks by Islamic extremists on the Twin Towers, on cartoonists and so on are also terrorist attacks in the sense just described. They are not only meant as “punishments” of the persons killed or of the USA or of whoever else, but these attacks contain a message: We are everywhere, but you don’t know where we are or where we are not and we’ll kill you if you don’t stop to draw those cartoons that we don’t like or when you don’t accept our interpretation of the Islam. We’ll make your life impossible if you don’t accept our world view.
And that’s what we see now also in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Often civilian objects like houses, flats and residential quarters are hit by Russian missiles, bombs and grenades. There can be all kinds of reasons for that. The Russian army may think that there are military objects at the site targeted; the missile missed the target; it was a case of collateral damage; it was a mistake; etc. But often in this war hitting a civilian target is intentional. The message sent is: Surrender, for nowhere you are safe. Give in to our demands, for if you don’t, we’ll make your life impossible. When this happens, it’s pure terror. 

Note
(1) Also before WW1, even in Antiquity, sometimes it has been tried to contaminate the environment, for instance by means of dead animal bodies, which was also a kind of terrorism. But the modern idea of terror goes back to WW1.