ABSTRACT
War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds. Carl von Clausewitz, On War the civilian has been pronounced dead. His death knell, which was yet only faintly audible in 1940 in Hiroshima, Japan. Blitzkriegs and obliteration bombings, extermination camps and death by fire storm in Hamburg and Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki—these were the lessons that instructed the survivors of World War II was total. World War II probably marks a point of no return; it is unlikely that the superpowers will directly confront each other in conventional warfare. There is no irony at all, however, in the fact that the calloused, indifferent and even cynical destruction and depredation visited upon civilian populations by all parties in World War II is reflected in the contemporary attitude of most people toward the civilian. If World War II has been singled out as the conflict most responsible for the demise of noncombatant immunity in the strategic and tactical practice of warfare.
