New Target

The International Red Cross was founded 75 years ago as an agency to care for wounded war combatants. Last week, at the quadrennial Red Cross conference, originally scheduled for Madrid, then shifted to London, the fighting soldier received little attention. Instead, the main conference topic was the protection of the noncombatant man, woman & child in time of war.

Since the last International Red Cross meeting in 1934, three wars have been waged against both combatants and noncombatants. During the Italo-Ethiopian war, Ethiopian villages were gassed and bombed, Ethiopians who probably had only a vague idea of the war were slaughtered by the hundreds. In the Spanish civil war, heavy artillery, efficient new aircraft are being used to attack cities and civilians. In the year-old Sino-Japanese conflict, Tokyo's planes have devastated entire sections of unfortified Chinese towns, killing thousands of women and children.

The justification offered for these practices is the 20th-century concept of war as a totalitarian affair. Under this theory a whole nation is mobilized. A factory worker, a government clerk, a physician becomes just as important a cog in the modern war machine as the soldier at the front. All are legitimate "military objectives."

To Swiss Citizen Henri Dunant, who in 1859 witnessed the bloody battle of Solferino, Italy between the Franco-Sardinians and the Austrians, the paramount problem was to lessen the hardships of war by caring for the wounded soldier. Having seen thousands of wounded men lie on the battlefield for days in unattended agony, Dunant returned to Geneva to write his horror-filled Un souvenir de Solferino, to start a movement for an international, nonpolitical medical organization with headquarters in traditionally neutral Switzerland, with autonomous supporting units in every civilized nation. With his driving push, with the notable help of Napoleon III, Dunant and his associates were able to induce 26 governments to sign agreements guaranteeing respect for the wounded, neutralizing military hospitals, protecting the material and personnel of medical services. Also agreed upon was the use of a white flag bearing a red cross* as the international symbol of sanctuary.

First battlefield appearance of Red Cross units was in the Dano-Prussian War of 1864. The Red Cross was respected as a protecting symbol for doctors, nurses, medical units in many later wars--the Austro-Prussian, the Franco-Prussian, the Russo-Japanese, the Balkan, the World War, in some Colonial wars, in a few civil wars. Not until 1935 did the first flagrant, consistent abuse of the Red Cross symbol occur. Then giant red crosses painted on Ethiopian hospitals became welcome targets for Italian airmen. Against this abuse, International Red Cross President Max Huber, former justice of The Hague's Permanent Court for International Justice, ineffectively protested in person to Dictator Benito Mussolini.

Next year the Spanish civil war broke, the Red Cross symbol was soon found to be such a liability that the British medical journal Lancet was moved to accept totalitarian war as an accepted fact, philosophized: "The plain fact is that a doctor serving a modern army in any capacity is no more neutral than a munitions worker or artilleryman. Since he is not neutral he will be bombed. When he is bombed he will be compelled to remove or camouflage the Red Cross that no longer protects him."

In Spain, military hospitals are now camouflaged, ambulances are painted to look like trees, earth or grass. The International Red Cross has maintained neither hospitals nor medical units in Spain, but has concentrated on transferring Rightist refugees caught in foreign embassies in Madrid to France, in effecting agreements for the release of hostages and in sending from one side to the other messages from members of families split by the civil war. Chief U. S. relief aid for both sides of Spain has come from the Quakers' American Friends Service Committee, which has spent $150,000 in feeding children on both sides of the line. Chief medical aid has gone to Leftist Spain from the Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, which have outfitted 80 ambulance units, sent $464,621.85 to Spain for medical and refugee activities, have sent $330,400 worth of goods. At the outset of the Sino-Japanese war the Japanese refused International Red Cross aid, the Chinese accepted. This aid takes the form of Red Cross fund allotments to reputable hospitals, refugee camps, clinics already established.

Whatever the attitude of represented governments might have been, the International Red Cross conference showed its repugnance last week to totalitarian war. Curiously, the resolution of U. S. Red Cross Chairman Norman H. Davis, Mr. Roosevelt's former Ambassador-at-Large, to create zones immune from bombing was supported by Italian Delegate Giuseppe de Michelis and German Delegate Jorann Lohmann. Silent were the Spanish Rightist and Japanese delegates. Declaring the Red Cross faced an ever-increasing burden of aiding noncombatants as well as soldiers, Mr. Davis ejaculated: "Something must be done to restore civilization to a sanity which will at least stop the killing of the helpless and innocent by warring forces!"

*Red crescent is allowed in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and four Soviet Socialist Republics, Red Lion & Sun in Iran.

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