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"When you look at a wind turbine, you can find the bird carcasses and count them. With a coal-fired power plant, you can't count the carcasses, but it's going to kill a lot more birds." - John Flicker, National Audubon Society, president.Sibley and Monroe estimated that there are about 9,703 species of birds[x]. They are found on all major land masses and over the oceans. Total populations are difficult to estimate due to seasonal fluctuations but Sibley & Monroe accepted that there are between 100 and 200 billion adult birds in the world. Kevin Gaston and Tim Blackburn[xi] doubled that estimate with 200 to 400 billion. Birds are killed by wind turbines and solar installations, but it turns out that the numbers of birds already killed by pollution from oil and gas, buildings, high tension lines, vehicles, cats, dogs and pesticides are so much greater that there is clearly a perception twist going on here, which is likely deliberate. This is not to say that we should be complacent about bird deaths. It’s a universally accepted fact that all parties are against any kind of animal mortality as a result of our energy activities. The presentation of it though, ought to be based on the factual wider context of bird deaths from other causes. The Altamont pass was one of the first locations in the U.S. that was preserved for wind power due to the excellent winds funneled by the hills. At the time bird deaths were not on the minds of the individuals who created this wind resource.BIRD DEATHS FROM DIFFERENT CAUSESBird deaths from different causes, showing that wind turbines are the least of threats among many. Source, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, U.S. Forestry Service. Not included in this chart are numbers of bird deaths caused by pollution and climate change which are responsible for the ongoing 6th extinction event.Even institutions who are protective of birds, the National Audubon Society, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wildlife Society all have commissioned studies that result in the same conclusions afforded by the above chart.Bird deaths by wind turbines do not remotely compare with the impact of cats, cars, power lines or buildings. As wind power increases its penetration however, its currently small impact on birds will grow less than proportionately as operators learn how to avoid avian mortality by siting, colors on blades, kick in speeds and other methods. Perception of bird deaths can halt wind turbine installations during the public planning phase and then effective resistance can scuttle installation plans. It turns out though, that wind turbines are responsible for only 1 in every 10,000 bird deaths.Small birds are killed in the millions by housecats while wind turbine casualties tend to be relatively larger bird species. Bigger birds, normally not the direct target of a housecat, like the protected Bald Eagles and other birds of prey, are more likely to be killed by a wind turbine than by a cat. Balanced against this must be the effect of coal and oil on birds mentioned in the earlier solar report. Many energy technologies apparently are bad for birds, but wind and solar are far from being the worst culprits. In 2013 a study[xii] by Smallwood indicated that the estimates of wind turbine bird deaths may be understated for three reasons. Estimates of bird deaths by wind turbines depended on counting carcasses found under the turbines. It was entirely possible that searches were done in less than efficient ways and in inadequate search radiuses. Additionally, carcasses could easily be removed by predators and his bird death estimate was 573,000, slightly higher than others.A 2005 study by the USDA Forest Service, was an early indication that wind turbines were a very small impact on overall bird populations.[xiii] The National Audubon Society produced a study[xiv], funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in September, 2014 which took seven years to finish and which looked closely at 588 of the total 800 species of bird found in North America. 314 of these species are threatened in some way with a loss of environment by the end of the century. Climate change (therefore CONG) is blamed for effectively potentially destroying the ecosystem for 28 species. This data is not included in the chart above in Figure 31. The Bald Eagle and state mascots are at serious risk due to climate change which reduces the bird’s range and alters the lifecycle of their food sources. Bird mortality from fossil fuel pollution and climate change represents a far higher risk than wind turbines as far as the Audubon Society is concerned.A recent study[xv] by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI), highlighted climate and environmental impacts on 1,154 native bird species in North America, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. The study was compiled by experts from all three countries and accounted for population trends and breeding ranges as well as the severity of threats. Due to changes in the environment, caused by man, birds in every habitat, but especially oceans and tropical forests are of highest conservation concern. In geological-time terms, these species-level impacts are happening in a human instant. 432 species merit a level of “high concern” due to declining populations and habitat loss and climate change. Species with long migration paths have suffered 70% losses in the last 50 years. We are all familiar with some famous bird species that have gone extinct such as the Dodo, the Great Auk, the Emu and of course the Passenger Pidgeon mentioned below. The oldest international nature conservation group, BirdLife International says that since the year 1500, 140 bird species have found extinction, and 22 of those in the last 50 years[xvi]. The rates of extinction are accelerating.I want to use evocative language here. The legacy of the Earth’s embrace of life and its eager occupation of different environments is something I believe we can so much better appreciate, since we are intimately a part of that process. We are part of a huge evolutionary, life miracle that we are only just now beginning to explore. Previous estimates for the number of species on Earth ranged from 3 to 100 million. PLos Biology published a report[xvii] in 2011 which was written by the Census of Marine Life scientists. It established a more accurate estimate of 8.74 million species on Earth of which 7.77 million are animals (only 953,4343 described). They used statistical methods to provide a more realistic estimate which nonetheless gave an error level of +/- 1.3 million. Bacteria and other small organisms were not counted. 86% of all land creatures and 91% of ocean creatures have yet to be identified. Only 1.2 million species have been officially registered in the Catalogue of Life and the World Register of Marine Species. The detail of the success of the DNA molecule in evolving all these species in this life encouraging Earthly environment over billions of years will never be properly appreciated, but it is at risk from our misadventure with the chemical legacy of CONG and our despoliation of habitats, both marine and terrestrial. We know more about the 22 million books in the Library of Congress than we know about our fellow species on Earth. We are also putting many species in danger of extinction because of the use of fossil fuels in what’s been termed the 6th great extinction level event, currently underway.Another great perspective on this is the work of a collector of natural sounds, Bernie Krause[xviii] who has spent decades capturing the sounds of nature around the world in places as far afield as Alaska and the Amazon, the Arctic and Fiji, the Great Plains and Mexico’s Chihuahuan grasslands. He also has an astonishing TED talk[xix] in which he describes how he separates sound into geophony; or wind, water and Earth sounds, biophany; the sounds of natural organisms and anthrophany; predictably the sounds of human noise. What he has recently discovered is very sobering. Recordings taken in the 1970’s compared to recordings taken in the same location today show declines or disappearance of species. Nature is going silent over the Anthropocene. John Bakeless, in his book on discovering America[xx], talks about how early explorers were acutely interested in the sound of nature and developed a faculty of listening and observing to identify birds and insects. I remember our guide, on the last day of a 10 day Colorado river rafting expedition on the calmer 60 miles of the Colorado River just prior to Lake Mead, asking all 28 of the rafters to sit for 30 minutes and listen carefully to nature and then exchange what they had heard. Indeed, there was a sudden realization of insects buzzing, water chirping under the raft, wind in the leaves of trees, echoes of sounds around rock walls and birds, distant and close, calling for myriad purposes of alarm, food or connection. My point here is that while human impacts on the Earth’s wildlife are currently very severe because of our chemical CONG energy impacts, moving to renewable energy reverses the situation over time, even if there are more humans around.Birds are famously victims of the huge wind turbine blades. This is certainly true and although bird fatalities from the house cat, vehicles and building windows account for literally millions or billions more, it doesn’t excuse the wind turbine’s effects impact. Efforts are made to relocate turbines out of birds’ migration paths. Also, most song birds migrate flying at a height of 2,000 to 4,000 feet, well above the tallest wind turbines, at least so far. There is a very disturbing YouTube video of a large, elegant bird of prey being struck down by such a rotating blade[xxi]. In an awful European case, there was the death of a rare swift, the White-throated Needletail, the world’s fastest flying bird[xxii]. The poor exhausted creature was spotted by a group of 30 birdwatchers who had made a special trip to the isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The sighting was only the 9th time that the bird had been seen since 1846, in Essex, UK. The last time it had been seen at all was 1991. The assembled enthusiasts assembled in the appropriate location and waited for hours before being rewarded by sighting the bird. They were summarily horrified to see the rare bird, which had flown all the way from Australia, perhaps several times, knocked down and killed by the rotating blade of a wind turbine.[xxiii]Between 2004 and 2009 in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, just 85, unprotected, migratory birds were deemed to have died due to exposure to oil and gas facilities owned by Exxon Mobil. The Justice Department fined the company $600,000 or about $7,000 for each bird killed.Exxon pleaded guilty and cooperated with the department spending a further $2.5 million to clean up the sites. It turned out that the fine was equal to twenty minutes of Exxon’s profits, based on $8.6 billion earnings for the first half of 2009[xxiv]. Other fossil fuel companies have been fined. BP paid $100 million for the impact of its 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill on migratory birds. Pacificorp, which operates coal fired power stations, paid $500,000 in 2009 after 232 eagles along power distribution lines between its substations were found to have been electrocuted.[xxv]Wind farms started to kill birds on a regular basis prompting calls of hypocrisy against those claiming that wind was an environmental solution. Wind farms have been fined for killing birds too, however. Duke Energy was fined $1 million for the deaths of 14 eagles and 149 other birds, including hawks, blackbirds, wrens and sparrows, between 2009 and 2013. Duke were also called upon to restore and do community service (how do you ask a large utility to do that!) and were placed on 5 years of probation while they put together an environmental compliance plan to prevent bird deaths. Interestingly, Duke then applied for a permit to kill eagles, to help provide a context within which the system can absorb the inevitability of bird deaths. Another group, the Wind Capital Group applied for such a license only to be embroiled in an argument over its granting, by the Osage Nation in opposition. Many applications for this license have been filed. Environmentalists complain bitterly when President Obama’s administration, eager for non-polluting wind power, announced a new federal rule that allows wind farms to lawfully kill birds of prey.There is some evidence that birds change their behavior when in the presence of wind farms. Lowther in 1998 discovered that studying a 22-turbine wind farm in Wales, UK, no birds were killed by the turbine and in fact they were seen to have shifted their activity to a different location. Some wind farms have no bird fatalities at all. A study[xxvi] published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by Pawel Plonczkier and Ian Simms monitored migrating flocks of pink-footed geese using radar as they returned during migration to the shores of Lincolnshire, UK. Monitoring the movement of the birds over 4 years from 2007 to 2010, established that two new wind farms effectively caused the geese to change their flight paths. The proportion of goose flocks flying outside the wind farm locations climbed from 52% to 81% in this time and even geese flying through the windfarm area had increased their altitude to climb above the turbines.An Australian online group called RenewEconomy had an article which summarizes the whole bird situation quite nicely called “Want to save 70 million birds a year? Build more wind farms”, drawing attention to the impact of CONG on birds. Replacing all fossil fuel worldwide, it says, would save about 70 million birds a year establishing wind farms as a strong net benefit for birds. Author Mike Bernard[xxvii] explains that wind farms kill less than 0.0001 percent of birds killed by human activities annually out of a total 1.5% of human caused mortality.Bats and Barotrauma - The other species which more recently became synonymous with death by wind turbine blade is bats. Most of the damage is done to migratory bat species in the autumn. Bats are famously known for their ability to echo locate hard objects in their local environment, such as tree branches or cave walls, and even insects on the wing while they are feeding. They can detect moving objects better than stationary objects so the high death rate from wind turbine blades was puzzling. Several explanations were proposed but 90% of the bat fatalities involved internal hemorrhaging just as might be expected with damage caused by sudden air pressure changes.Birds have a more resistant respiratory anatomy and are killed by being hit by the blades, whereas the bats do avoid the blades, but come so close that pressure changes around the blades cause the damage to their lungs. The mammals have larger, flexible lungs and hearts. Birds have compact, rigid lungs with very strong pulmonary capillaries which can resist the higher-pressure changes, even though the blood/gas barriers are thinner than those of the bats. An airfoil on a plane pushes against the wind but a wind turbine blade is moved by the wind. In either case, the airfoil cross section causes significant differences in air pressure. The greatest area of low pressure exists at the fast moving (approximately 180 mph) tip of the blade and cascades downwind from the moving blade. A zone of low pressure can cause a bat’s lungs to expand causing tissue damage, or barotrauma.A study[xxviii] was paid for by fossil fuel companies like Suncor and Shell, but also from wind turbine companies such as TransAlta Wind and Alberta Wind Energy Corporation as well as academic institutions. They found bat bodies from hoary and silver-haired bats killed at a wind farm in south western Alberta, Canada and examined them for internal injuries. Of 188 bat bodies collected, 87 had no external physical injury. Very few bats had external injuries without internal bleeding.In 2012, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory conducted pressure studies[xxix] on mice, which were used because they are a close approximation to bats and discovered that pressures of only 1.4 kilopascals (kPa) were experienced by the bats at the blade tips in 11 mph winds but that it took 30 kPa to cause fatality in mice. There was no suggestion by NREL for an alternative cause of death however. At low windspeeds the pressures are even lower and yet it is at the low speeds that the bats fly which further confuses the issue.[i] Wind energy is considered a disaster responding to the hoax of climate change in this vociferous website which of course also discusses wind turbine syndrome. Available at: What is Wind Turbine Syndrome?[ii] The Caithness Windfarm Information Forum. Available at: Caithness Windfarm Information Forum[iii] RenewableUK. A leading renewable energy trade association. Available at: http://www.renewableuk.com/en/events/conferences-and-exhibitions/renewableuk-2015/[iv] Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy. Available at: Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy[v] Available at: LiveLeak.com - Two Dead in Windmill Fire[vi] David Wahl, Philippe Giguere. Ice Shedding and Ice Throw – Risk and Mitigation. Wind Application Engineering. GE Energy. Available at: http://www.cbuilding.org/sites/cbi.drupalconnect.com/files/ger4262.pdf[vii] Cattin et al. Wind Turbine Ice Throw Studies in the Swiss Alps. EWEC 2007. Based on studies of a 600 kW Enercon E-40 at 2,300 mASL in Swiss Alps[viii] Summary of Wind Turbine Accident Data to 30 September 2014. PDF. Caithness Windfarm Information Forum.[ix] Payback time for renewable energy. NREL factsheet. Available at: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57131.pdf[x] Sibley and Monroe. 1992.[xi] Kevin J. Gaston and Tim M. Blackburn. April 1997. How many birds are there? Available at: How many birds are there?[xii] K. Shawn Smallwood, “Comparing bird and bat fatality-rate estimates among North American wind-energy projects”, Wildlife Society Bulletin, 26 Mar. 2013. Available at: Comparing bird and bat fatality-rate estimates among North American wind-energy projects[xiii] Wallace P. Erickson, Gregory D. Johnson and David P. Young Jr. A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions. USDA Forest Service. PSW-GTR-191. 2005. Available at: http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr191/Asilomar/pdfs/1029-1042.pdf[xiv] Erickson WP, Wolfe MM, Bay KJ, Johnson DH, Gehring JL (2014) A Comprehensive Analysis of Small-Passerine Fatalities from Collision with Turbines at Wind Energy Facilities. PLoS ONE 9(9): e107491. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107491[xv] State of North America's Birds 2016. North American Bird Conservation Initiative. Available at: Main Results[xvi] BirdLife International (2014) We have lost over 150 bird species since 1500. Presented as part of the BirdLife State of the world's birds website. Available from: BirdLife Data Zone[xvii] PLos Biology published a report in 2011 which was written by the Census of Marine Life scientists. Available to: How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?[xviii] Bernie Krause. A recorder of natural sounds in many global habitats. Available at: The World's Disappearing Natural Sound[xix] Bernie Krause. TED Talk. The voice of the natural world. TEDGlobal 2013 · 14:48 · Filmed Jun 2013. Available at: The voice of the natural world[xx] John Bakeless. America As Seen by Its First Explorers: The Eyes of Discovery. Dover Language Books & Travel Guides. Paperback – January 20, 2011. Available at: America As Seen by Its First Explorers: The Eyes of Discovery (Dover Language Books & Travel Guides): John Bakeless: 0800759260317: Amazon.com: Books[xxi] Bald Eagle seriously injured by wind turbine. Available at: Bird killed by green energy[xxii] The White Throated Needletail death on YouTube. Geobeats news service. July 1, 2013. Available at: Rare Bird Killed by Wind Turbine in Front of Horrified Spectators[xxiii] Rare swift killed by Scottish wind turbine. Available at: Birdwatchers see rare bird killed by wind turbine[xxiv] Exxon Mobil pleads guilty to bird deaths. Available at: ExxonMobil pleads guilty to killing birds[xxv] BP and Pacificorp pay fines for killing birds. Available at: The Obama Administration Is Ignoring The Massacre Of Thousands Of Hawks, Falcons, And Eagles Every Year[xxvi] Pawel Plonczkier and Ian C. Simms. Journal of Applied Ecology. 2012. Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2664.2012.02181.x/epdf[xxvii] Mike Barnard. 10 August, 2012. Want to save 70 million birds a year? Build more wind farms. RenewEconomy. Available at: Want to save 70 million birds a year? Build more wind farms[xxviii] Erin F. Baerwald, Genevieve H. D’Amours, Brandon J. Klug and Robert M.R. Barclay. Barotrauma is a significant cause of bat fatalities at wind turbines.[xxix] “NREL Study Finds Barotrauma Not Guilty”, November 27, 2012. Available at: http://www.nrel.gov/wind/news/2013/2149.html[xxx] Germany has 74% of its power supplied by renewable energy. 2014. Available at: For One Hour, Germany Was Powered By 74% Renewables - Gas 2[xxxi] Information supplied by Agora Energiewende, a research institute in Berlin, showed that Germany’s demand for electricity was almost 100% supplied by renewable energy including a large amount of wind on the 15th May, 2016. Available at: Germany Just Got Almost All of Its Power From Renewable Energy[xxxii] Posthumous pardons of First World War shellshock victims. Available on: Pardoned: the 306 soldiers shot at dawn for 'cowardice'[xxxiii] Information Paper: Evidence on Wind Farms and Human Health. February 2015. PDF. National Health and Medical Research Council. Available at: http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/publications/attachments/eh57a_information_paper.pdf[xxxiv] Ian Clark, William N. Alexander, William J. Devenport, Stewart A. Glegg, Justin Jaworski, Conor Daly, and Nigel Peake. "Bio-Inspired Trailing Edge Noise Control", 21st AIAA/CEAS Aeroacoustics Conference, AIAA AVIATION Forum, (AIAA 2015-2365). Available at: Bio-Inspired Trailing Edge Noise Control[xxxv] UK Renewable Energy Roadmap. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/48128/2167-uk-renewable-energy-roadmap.pdf[xxxvi] Positive environmental impacts of offshore wind farms. European Wind Energy Association. Available at: http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/files/members-area/information-services/offshore/research-notes/120801_Positive_environmental_impacts.pdf

There are numerous times when the United States has intentionally targeted civilian centers and populations. Most of them, however, did not take place in the current era of warfare, which I am considering after the fall of the atomic bomb. This is a rather long and in depth answer on the history of attacks by the United States military as well as some of their reasons behind doing so. This is admittedly blank for much of history. I simply don't want to write that much and want to focus on major events of history and more current actions taken in the course of modern warfare. Some of your favorite wars may not be mentioned, such as warfare against the Native Americans, Korea, Vietnam or many of the other acts of warfare in the history of the United States. Also is not listed any of the actions of intelligence agencies such as the CIA. Frankly, I am not an expert on them and to say that their history is muddled would be an understatement. So, please enjoy my lengthy screed on the subject in question.Revolutionary WarThere is a great deal of evidence that shows that the early exploits of John Paul Jones and the early Continental Navy engaged in targeting civilian trade in efforts to disrupt British supplies and revenues. Some might go so far as to call many of the tactics of the time and the overall strategy piracy. I have in jest numerous times. In that era it was generally considered a legitimate form of warfare and practiced widely by all the major naval powers of the era. Of course the military takeover of a civilian vessel and its cargo would not be acceptable by today's standards.American Civil WarSherman's March through the South during the Civil War is a famous example of this concept in action and one would be fair in wondering if this is something we should compare with modern terrorism. Yet, it isn't and there is an important reason that you need to understand for where we are going.What General Sherman did toward the end of the Civil War was lead a large army deep into Confederate territory. There he torched farms and even cities. He destroyed ports and severed communication lines. Famously he even dismembered railroad tracts, heating up the steel and wrapping the beams around trees in what was referred to as "Sherman's Knot". While I can't say for sure if civilians themselves were targeted, I have never seen that they were, it is sure that thousands probably died at least from the lack of infrastructure that the General destroyed.So why would you do this instead of just fighting the military? This is a case of total war and is the final point when wars have reached their ugliest. In the mid-19th century, "total war" was identified by scholars as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, there is less differentiation between combatants and civilians than in other conflicts, and sometimes no such differentiation at all, as nearly every human resource, civilians and soldiers alike, can be considered to be part of the belligerent effort.[1] During that period the theory on war was that in truth, you went to war with an entire country, not just between militaries. Still, civilian casualties were a thing to be avoided. We were all Americans afterall.That isn't, however, to say that the civilian infrastructure wasn't a valued target. As the old axiom goes, an army marches on its stomach, and more modern translations of this is a focus on the incredible importance that logistics plays in warfare. In the case of the Civil War South, their entire nation was geared toward fighting or funding the war. To damage their exports through naval blockades or just to outright burn their crops, had a direct and measurable effect on ending their ability to fund their army. By dismantling their railroads, the country was literally cut in two to the point that shipping goods, supplies, and fresh troops to and from one side of the country went from taking days to weeks or months. Essentially, it was a strategy to starve the South.Barbaric? Not really. We have to remember that the Civil War was by far the bloodiest event in American history, military or otherwise. You can observe the total American dead from the Civil War was so great that it equals about half of all wartime casualties of the entire United States military history.[2] The call to end the war as quickly as possible was a life saving one that almost all good historians will agree to. By severing the South's ability to raise money, move troops and goods, and respond to the North's actions they quickly lost the war. It was truly a study of utilitarian virtue where the loss of few hundred people and the economy of the South, saved tens, if not hundreds of thousands of American military and civilian lives.For this type of event to be considered ethical or humane, however, the belligerent force must have the means to quickly and completely stop the enemy's infrastructure and capability to function as a viable military or economic power. Reasonably they must also be capable of providing the reconstruction of that infrastructure as well, along with the ability to treat and care for the welfare of the displaced and battered civilian population when the war is over. So that I am clear and not misquoted later, four planes are in no way capable of doing these things.Indian WarsI wanted to address the Indian Wars where attacks against civilian populations took place at the command of at least General grade officers. I will be the first to admit that I don't know that much about this conflict, that what I do know I don't like. Since I am admittedly ignorant of this period I have written what I believe to be true in a response to Jim Gordon's comment below.World War IISeeing that this answer is getting longer than I had expected, I am skipping to WWII for obvious questions. In World War II the type of warfare that was practiced the same type of "total war" that I talked about during the American Civil War. In fact, it had evolved to become a much, much more potent form of violence.While we can trace it to many things, I am going to put the start of the WWII era practice of targeting civilians during the Spanish Civil War. There German involvement in the Spanish Civil War included military advisers and the addition of a Luftwaffe unit and modern warplanes. Italians also sent support and on the opposition, Mexico and Russia aided as well. During this war, the strategy of what we now call "carpet bombing" was tested for the first time successfully. The example of this is the city of Gernica in 1937. The Germans tried out many prototypes in Spain, and a variety of aerial tactics, from dive-bombing (in restricted and near-secret experiments) to large scale bombing of civilian populations.[3] Large scale artillery, which had been a city leveler since well before World War I was also becoming more and more advanced, now rivaling the class of weapons many countries now rely on even today.Guernica following the German and Italian bombing of the city in 1937.The reasoning for this amount of carnage was that the Spanish Government was desperate to wipe out the Rebel Nationalists once they had gained a foothold. With that, absolute destruction of the city and many others became an accepted and adopted practice because of the success that had shown in ending a rebellion's will and capability to fight.After Gernica we skip ahead to some of the major events of the rest of the war in Europe. Germany's relentless press for domination of Europe was total indeed. Numerous cities fell when they were blasted into complete ruin. What was important for modern readers to understand is that by the time the Germans did it, the strategy was actually part of their overall Blitzkrieg (Lightning War) strategy. Essentially it held the same premise that Sherman had in the Civil War. The goal is to essentially wipe out an enemy's capabilities to fight. This doesn't mean kill everyone until no one is left. The truth was that there were many more populated cities that could have been targeted, but had little strategic value. There weren't enough bombs in the world to hope to achieve this anyway. The goal was to destroy the war machine, the military support infrastructure that kept the military moving. Factories which produced everything from planes to ball bearings were crucial in the fight and were crucial targets as well. The allies countered by adopting the same strategy, if not for survival than at least for revenge. This continued throughout the war and the tactics only increased potency.By the time the Americans entered the war a typical bombing mission had already evolved into what would now be considered the attempted complete annihilation mission for either side. Massive area carpet bombing was the new norm. It wasn't really that it was the goal to destroy everything, but only what was really needed, however, technology was the limiting factor. We forget that we didn't always have precision guided missiles and robot planes. At the start of World War II for the Americans we had little more than planes flying so high that they avoided anti-aircraft fire, a few miles up, and 300 lbs. bombs propelled only by gravity. The USAAF believed the B-17 had a 1.2% probability of hitting a 30 metres (100 ft) target from 6,100 metres (20,000 ft), meaning that 220 bombers would be needed to ensure a target's destruction. This also means that miles and miles around the target were going to be destroyed as well.I want to remind readers that all parties involved were guilty of this sort of warfare. With that we can see by the end of the war across the board the world lost many of its cities and would see them in smoldering ruins. In no particular order: Shanghai, Wuhan, Chongqing, Juelich, Berlin, Dresden, Coventry, Malta, Warsaw, Cologne, Rotterdam, Tokyo, Berlin and London, just to name a few. And of course, there is Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Dresden after the Allied bombing campaign.The Dawn of Atomic Warfare.No history of U.S. military targeting civilians could be respected if it ignored Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were the most obvious cases and so frightening in the way that they were carried out that their memory haunt many of us today. First, however, some context.While bombing missions had become more efficient in the European theater, strategic pressures were now on the Americans to end the war quickly. While our sacrifice was minimal when you consider what was faced by the Chinese, Polish, French, Russians, English and scores of others, the war for many had gone on long enough and needed to come to a close. Perhaps more importantly, now that Europe was done Russia was gathering itself back together and preparing to fully join the war in the East. The history of warfare between the Russians and Japanese left them more than willing to fight their old enemy and claim their lands. The Americans knew that pressure was on to secure a Japanese surrender before the Russians could mount an invasion which would have likely led to a political and culturally divided country in the same that Germany was to end up Korea would become years later. The Americans were determined to prevent this.This urgency to end the war led to a terrifying bombing campaign against the Japanese mainland toward the end of the war. This of course culminated with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Factually speaking, these cities were similar to others in Europe that had far worse fates. Yes, the devastation suffered by the bombs were actually less potent then attacks that took place in most other parts of the war. Even the city of Tokyo, an attack most forget, suffered a worse fate. In one raid on Tokyo in the night of March 9-10, 1945, 100,000 civilians perished during a firestorm that occurred after the incendiary bombs hit the ground. This number is in fact more than many estimates for either of the atomic bombings. Rationally we can explain that these cities were devastated so completely because of their importance to the Japanese Empire. Both cities were labelled as urban/industrial zones with significant military production, including numerous military facilities. Most factories and strategic targets to the war were surrounded by densely packed civilian centers. These residential areas all served to funnel workers to the large factories at their hubs and created essentially towns around the factory. This may have been an efficient model, but when it was decided that the factories had to be destroyed, it meant disaster for the Japanese. This was the same story for Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Japanese capital of Tokyo as well as others.What does make Hiroshima and Nagasaki different is that they were the result of only a single weapon each. One single bomb was now able to do the damage of thousands that were necessary to take down cities like Tokyo, or the many thousand needed for attacks like Dresden, Berlin or London. We had reached the final point in warfare up to that point. I do want to state that there was significant military value to attacking these two cities in particular. They were major production centers for the war effort in Japan and part of its military production backbone. To also make the point that it was more than simple terror, there were much more populated cities that could have been the targets for those attacks; Kyoto, Yokohama and Niigata for example. Nagasaki was a late addition to the list of possible choices because, being surrounded by mountains, it was thought that it would have an increased effect if the weapon were used there. It fact it the original target for that day was the Kokura Arsenal with its naval base and weapons stores was the primary target, a much more obvious military target. Nagasaki only received it's sad fate, because Kokura was blanketed in cloud cover which it was thought may hinder the mission. Since it was decided that the bombs had to be dropped visually and not by radar, the mission was sent to Nagasaki. [4]What we can say with absolute certainty is that, while the extended carpet and fire bombings of cities like Dresden, Berlin, London and Tokyo did not bring about the immediate surrender of their countries, Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. Though devastating and remarkable in power and awe inspiring fear, these bombs, labelled as the most evil and terrible invention of war in the history of humanity, ended World War II in a matter of days. While the loss of a few hundred thousand in a matter of moments is something that even today we can't fathom, it was the event that ended a war that took the lives of as many as 85,000,000 people, a whole 4% of the world's population at that time. Estimates for what would have happened had a full on invasion of the Japanese mainland taken place have placed American casualties at around 90% with the Japanese likely loosing another several million at least. We may even have had to settle a country that would look much more like the divided Korean Peninsula today than the Japan we now know.While I don't want to stand up and say what a good thing for the world the Atomic bomb was, I do hope that I have shown an argument for how deeply misunderstood these weapons and their usage are today. There is a utilitarian truth that they saved many lives times the lives that were lost to them. Pragmatically we can't help but realize that since they were dropped, the world has changed for the better. The threat of war has most frequently been the worst thing that could happen and even when wars do break out, they are never more than regional conflicts with international support. Even in the last decade of warfare, we can see that at no time in the last 70 years has the world been more at peace. Check out this graph to see what I mean. It was created by a team in Norway to research the changes in war since the start of World War II.I don't want to be mistaken. I am going to drop the attempt that I am trying to feign being a good essay writer or even a decent historian and just be me for a moment. I don't think that the Atomic Bombs were a wonderful thing that brought the world peace at last. Quite honestly, for the decade leading up to their fall in 1945, the entire world lost its damned mind. Military technology cascaded in the most advanced grasp for power in the history of man. No other time including the present could hope to compare. It was a terrible time to be a human and a legacy we will all carry for the rest of history. While I do believe that the bombs were pivotal in ending the war, I believe more so they were a wake up call. They fell and everyone was forced to stop and ask with a deep sense of honesty, "What have we become?" not as individual nations, but as a species, to require such acts to maintain our survival. World War II was important for us all because it truly changed everything. Because of that realization of our destructive power we changed the way we fight, the way we communicate and our values. Where that is relevant to this question is that we would no longer accept the wholesale slaughter of civilians. World War II was the end of an era of warfare that would leave the world with a legacy that whole populations could never again be the target of warfare by a modern nation. From this point on we had to evolve. Warfare could never be the same again.Modern WarI'm skipping quite a lot again so that I can focus on the last section being how the military can collide with civilians today. I know that many individual events are being skipped, but this answer is already long enough. With that I wanted to focus specifically on two main events in the modern conflicts that most people want to talk about today; those being the United States initial attack on Iraq labelled, "Shock and Awe" (which in fact brought about this question) and the much more recent and controversial drone warfare program.Iraq WarThe Iraq war began with the most advanced strategic bombing campaign in history. This was termed "Shock and Awe".It follows the line of strategy known as rapid domination. Shock and Awe was a miracle in execution from a military examiner's prospective. Before it, when a war had to happen (not arguing that Iraq had to happen), it was expected that civilian casualties should be expected to number in the tens of thousands during the opening hours of the war. However, through advances in guided munitions technology, the Americans were able to bring that number down into the hundreds. It is a ridiculous notion to assume that reducing civilian casualties to zero is truly impossible, but to reduce it by more than 95% of what we might have expected only a few decades before and still completely stop the enemy from mounting a counteroffensive is miraculous. If you knew the complete history you would be surprised to know that it was even done with about a tenth of the people that were initially called for before Rumsfeld shaved that number down.There is a reason why Shock and Awe is listed on this answer. Namely because of the perception of many that it was an attack intended for Iraq, the government, military, and most importantly its people. Normally, a key element of the rapid domination stratagem is to disable your enemy's abilities to fight back through disabling their military infrastructure and communication networks. When attacking a country, such as was done in Iraq, to do this you would also need to take down not only military assets, but also civilian power and communication systems as well. It was my belief leading into this write up that this was done in 2003 as it was done in in the Desert Storm invasion of the early 90's. In that invasion facilities like power plants and civilian radio communication centers in and around Baghdad were targeted and destroyed. I was surprised, however, to find that these facilities were in fact not targeted for destruction during the attacks. Key targets included buildings crucial to the Iraqi government, the Iraqi military, Baath party, and several of Saddam's personal palaces were. Targets that were left unharmed included the previously mentioned power stations as well as most civilian communication networks and other facilities. We see evidence of this by the massive number of civilian reporters present at the time of the attacks. We can also see that even after the bombings were concluded, the power to Iraqi street lights continued to shine and the reporters began emailing out their observations that night from rooms with light and running water. Government television is still broadcasting news that Saddam Hussein is untouched and still in control along with the radio and telephones. Clearly the citizenry and their infrastructure were not the targets of Coalition bombs. Iraqi military and government centers on the other hand were annihilated.There is also the misconception that the "Shock and Awe" is meant to instill terror in the common citizen. I see that perhaps it could have been named better, but the citizenry simply aren't the target of this effect. As I have mentioned, it is the armed military personnel who were the target of the "terror" element of S&A. It was meant to scare them enough to abandon their posts or surrender for absolute certainty of annihilation. This was the perfect way to end a war as soon as possible with the fewest possible casualties on either side and not pulling the people into a prolonged war. Here is a video that shows some how a precise and devastating military engagement by a disciplined military force, can utterly decimate an enemy military without inflicting unnecessary casualties. This is a report made by a member of the Associated Press on an attack he witnessed where US ground forces engaged an Iraqi force with a single missile which lead to the surrender of more than 50 Iraqi troops.Don't get me wrong. I am not a fan of most of what happened during the Iraq War. It was a cluster from everything after the first two months fraught with political mistakes and disaster after disaster that didn't start to redeem itself until late 2007. Still, it is important to understand the true nature of Shock and Awe, as well as the history of it, to understand from a military point of view how the opening hours of a war should be fought. The military truly did something amazing in the opening days and weeks of the Iraqi war. No other time in history has so much ground been unquestionably taken with so few lives lost on all sides in an actual military invasion then what the Americans and coalition forces did in March of 2003. The military never get any credit for that because what happened next descended into a scaring event that will mar the image of the United States for many years to come as well as the rushed decision to even go. My fear is that wars in the future will be fought in the old way, which incur massive civilian casualties from the beginning only because "Shock and Awe" was what they did in Iraq and Iraq was a failure, so we won't do anything as they did in Iraq. If the lessons of Iraq, both the good and bad, aren't truly understand in future conflicts many millions of people will die in the wars to come, whether the United States has any part in them or not.Drone WarfareThe current fount of military ethical debate is without a doubt the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Drones in places throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan and much of the Middle East. They are being held responsible for an untold number of thousands of Pakistani civilians and the like. Abroad they are hated and scorned though every major air force is already deep in efforts to attain them themselves. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, even they even had a drone arsenal, though nowhere near as advanced as today's weapons. They are highly profiled in the media, misunderstood in their scope of power and use, as well as in the alternatives to their use.Drones are used today because of their efficiency in delivering reconnaissance and military strikes against enemy targets in extremely remote and geographically difficult terrain across vast distances. In most instances they are welcomed or at least allowed by the governments that control the airspace.In Pakistan the most important actions that have taken place are in a region known as the province of Waziristan, which forms the Northwestern border of Pakistan and runs along the Southeastern edge of Afghanistan. This region is the primary location that Taliban agents seek refuge after attacks in Afghanistan. To make a reference, this area is not too distant from the capital city of Pakistan, Islamabad. It also lies somewhat between Islamabad and the capital city of Afghanistan. It is also not far from the sight of Osama bin Laden's compound. Geographically, though it rests between large population centers, it is still in the extremely mountainous region before the Himalayas retreat into the Indus River valley. This remoteness makes it an ideal hiding place for escaping enemy Taliban.As I mentioned before, the key strategic value to the sight is it's location to former Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan. Today many Taliban fighting in Afghanistan continue to use it as a base of operations with which to conduct operations in Afghanistan. This began when it became known that US military forces were weary to enter the region as they were now crossing over into Pakistan. Knowing this the region soon became a safe haven for Taliban insurgents. Operations and training facilities quickly took root in the area and as I have mentioned before, was near the location of Osama bin Laden's hidden stronghold. It is important to remember that once these forces went into Pakistan, they did not stay. Raids on American and Afghan forces from the region were frequent and resulted in the deaths of many during the war. Forces trained here were also set out throughout the country to conduct operations from reconnaissance to sabotage and suicide bombing.So we see that in Pakistan we have many things working against the efforts to stop the militant insurgency. We have enemy forces safe within the confines of Pakistan, a country which either can not or will not intervene to remove them. The area is highly inhospitable to ground forces, both geographically and politically. The continued presence of the threat only strengths their ability to make war upon Afghanistan in the future and permanently a successful withdrawal by the Americans. Air strikes may be possible, but continued air strikes are expensive, far too much so to maintain in the long term. The current arsenal of fighting vehicles are made for either large area bombing, bombing of large targets, or for air combat. We have little that can efficiently deliver strikes from a long distance with precision throughout the duration of a very long campaign. I am going to be absolutely clear on this one, we have no choice but to eliminate these people. What we do have that can do this job is the US military unmanned aerial vehicles known colloquially as the "drones."The drones are an excellent force to take down enemy forces in Northern Waziristan. While reports would have you believe that for every insurgent killed there are thousands of innocent civilians caught in the attacks, the truth of the matter is that it is among the most efficient striking systems yet devised in the way of preventing civilian casualties while eliminating the threat.Todd Gardiner has collected a great deal of information on the subject and shows in his answer to How are drone attacks different than manned airstrikes? that this form of warfare is far less deadly to the a local population than what you might expect in traditional warfare where troops are forced to clear cities in house to house fighting and civilian targets quickly become the targets of terrorist bombings such as what happened in Iraq or Afghanistan.Drones are hugely more effective, produce far fewer civilian casualties and are usually conducted with the tacit (or proclaimed) approval of the government controlling the air space they are operated in.Overall casualties for the Pakistan Drone Campaign (2004-2012) are as follows:[Group: High Estimate to Low Estimate, from The Year of the Drone]Militants: 2769 to 1618Unknowns: 268 to 130Civilians: 192 to 153This means the average non-militant casualty rate over the life of the program is 15-16 percent. In 2012 it was about 1%.What makes them more effective? Over the past eight years the on-the-ground information network has improved. Waziris understand that informing the Pakistan government of the locations of Taliban and Al-Qaeda compounds means that they can be invisibly observed for days on end from the sky and a targeted strike made when it is prudent and highly effective.And the strikes are made to be effective. The average number of deaths per strike is less than seven people over these past four years.This to be compared with the 110,000 people reportedly killed throughout the campaign in Iraq over the last decade, around 50,000 to 60,000 of them being civilians. Most of these were killed by none other than the types of insurgents that we are fighting in Pakistan. We can also see why, the alternative to this kind of warfare is much more deadly than what we are seeing today.So then, why am I putting this kind of attack down on an answer like this down if it is my belief that in spite of popular belief, the drone program does not specifically target civilians? Perception. It is my belief that there is a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding the drone program. Namely that people don't think it is right, moral, fair and most importantly necessary. I would like to go on longer about the issue, but there are only a few points about it that feel need to be made clear about the campaign for a truly informed populous to rationally give their consent or condemnation.There is an insurgency force attacking Afghanistan that seeks shelter in remote regions of Pakistan.They utilize true terrorism, the purposeful targeting of civilians with the intention of motivating them to political action. This includes threats, kidnapping and murder.They hide in and among civilian targets and do not act as a recognizable military nor do they adhere to the any of the laws of warfare followed by legitimate militaries.Pakistan has shown either an unwillingness or an inability to police this issue, or a the very best a token effort to do so.Some of their tactics have included manipulation of the media to show unverifiable and exaggerated numbers of civilian casualties.To compound this the claims of civilian casualties will always be exaggerated because the United States is the only nation today which pays the families of victims of collateral damage condolence payments. As Dan Holliday puts it in Military Ethics: American Drone warfare in Pakistan ... How is this comparable to the actions and tactics of Al Qaeda? "The USA doesn't spend a lot of time vetting claims -- it generally pays the expected amount (within reason) and wants the issue buried. For this reason, few of the actual civilian claims are verified." [5]Continuing with this we must accept that:The insurgent forces must be killed to ensure that the Afghanistan government will have the ability to ensure that Taliban rule is not reestablished after the US leaves.Of all possible methods, drone strikes are by far the best way to ensure that militant threats are eliminated and that civilian casualties are minimized.The lives lost to drone strikes can be measured, be they civilian or militant. The lives saved by attacking those who willing do harm to civilians cannot be measured so easily.With that, I hope I leave you with at least a little bit of what you should know about the drone attacks on Pakistan, whether or not it is my belief that they should be included in an answer like this.SummaryWhile I hate to say trite things like how necessary the atomic bombs and drone strikes may have been, that they may have just been a necessary evil, or to dismiss so much as collateral damage, I hope that I have shown an argument for how deeply misunderstood these weapons and their usage are today. Dealing with ethics on matters like military involvement in death and destruction of civilian populations is a harsh battleground for ethical debate. It isn't, however, devoid of ethics because at least few of the ethical options include the death of other individuals. Within the muck and mire of total warfare we deal with the utilitarian and pragmatic search for greatest good available. Warfare is a reality and those who believe that it is the absence of morality suffer from a dangerous naivety and ignorance about how wars are fought. By looking at these wars in the passivist's deontological argument, all warfare is wrong. While the opposite extreme, we today don't understand there ever being a time where a civilian would be allowed to be attacked in the hopes of ending a war. To explore the true nature of real war you have to accept that wars are fought by men who are fathers and sons, women who are sisters and daughters. They each have a moral footing that allows them to fight and do so with the belief that they are the good guy. A nation and a people can't do this if there is not some ethical base with which to stand on, some reason that years later they will be able to accept that the choices they made in war were the right ones. I took part in what we call the War on Terror. From my perspective, I am proud of how we conducted ourselves given history as a context. To be clear that is, how the United States military has conducted itself. Yes, we are responsible for most of difficult things that are going on right now. We are making the most controversial decisions across the world. The choices we make are hurting the most people. It is easy to measure the deaths, but it is impossible to measure how many lives have been saved by making difficult decisions. All these are troubling, but need to be understand. With that understanding I believe that when we are a few paragraphs on pages of some future civilization's history books, our story will be one our predecessors will understand and be proud of.^ Edward Gunn. "The Moral Dilemma of Atomic Warfare", Aegis: The Otterbein College Humanities Journal, Spring 2006, p. 67. NB Gunn cites this Wikipedia article as it was on 27 September 2005, but on only for the text of the song "The Thing-Ummy Bob".United States military casualties of warBeevor, Antony (2006). The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. London: Phoenix. ISBN 978-0-7538-2165-7.Andrew Warinner's answer to Why did the US use its last nuclear weapon of World War 2 on a less significant city? If we had expended both nukes and the emperor had not intervened to end the war, the US would have been forced to invade, which would have been much more horrible.Hearts, Minds and Dollars: Condolence Payments in the Drone Strike Age

Introduction - Myths about the Middle AgesThe Flat EarthChurch Suppression of ScienceWitch BurningBathing and HygieneMedieval Technology and InnovationMedieval WarfareFurther ReadingIntroduction - Myths about the Middle AgesAs Shaun Bennett has noted, there are many historical myths about the Medieval Period. This is partly due to the rise of Humanism in the early Modern Period and the Renaissance movement in art and architecture. Both these movements venerated the Classical world and considered the period which followed the Classical era as degenerate and barbaric. So Medieval Gothic architecture, now recognised as being both extremely beautiful and technically revolutionary, was denigrated and abandoned for styles that copied Greek and Roman architecture. The very term "Gothic" was originally applied to this Medieval style as a pejorative: it's a reference to the Gothic tribes that sacked Rome and was meant to mean "barbaric, primitive".The other reason for many of the myths about the period is its association with the Catholic Church. In the English-speaking world these myths have their origin in a Protestant denigration of Catholicism and a corresponding disdain for the period in which the Catholic faith was dominant. In other European cultures, such as Germany and France, similar myths have their origin in the anti-clerical stance of many influential Enlightenment thinkers Here is a summary of a few of the myths and misconceptions about the Medieval period that have arisen as a result of these prejudices:1. People thought the earth was flat and the Church taught this as a matter of doctrine.In fact, the Church did not teach that the earth was flat at any time in the Middle Ages. Medieval scholars were well aware of the scientific arguments of the Greeks that proved the earth was round and could use scientific instruments, like the astrolabe, the accurately measure its circumference. The fact that the earth is a sphere was so well known, widely accepted and unremarkable that when Thomas Aquinas wanted to choose an objective fact that is not able to be disputed early in his Summa Theologica he chose the fact that the earth is round as his example.And it was not only the learned who knew the shape of the earth - all evidence indicates that this was commonly understood by everyone. A symbol of the earthly power of kings, used in their coronations, was the orb: a golden sphere held in the king's left hand to represent the earth. That symbolism would not make sense if it was not understood that the earth was round. A collection of German sermons for parish priests from the Thirteenth Century also mentions, in passing, that the earth was "round like a apple" with the expectation that the peasants hearing the sermon already understood what this meant. And the popular Fourteenth Century English book of travelers' tales, The Tales of Sir John Mandeville, tells of a man who traveled so far east that he returned to his homeland from the west, while not explaining to its audience how this works.​Medieval illustration of the earth as a sphereThe popular idea that Christopher Columbus discovered the earth was round and that his voyage was opposed by the Church is a modern myth created in 1828. The novelist Washington Irving was commissioned to write a biography of Columbus, with the brief that he depict Columbus as a radical thinker who turned his back on the superstitions of the old world. Unfortunately Irving found that Columbus was actually wildly wrong about the size of the earth and discovered America by pure chance. Since this did not make a very heroic story, he invented the idea that the Medieval Church taught the earth was flat and created this persistent myth when his book became a best-seller.Collections of famous quotes found on the internet often include a supposed quote from Ferdinand Magellan which goes "The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church." Magellan never said this, not least because the Church did not say that the earth was flat. The first use of this "quote" goes back no further than 1873, when it was used in an essay by the American freethinker and agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll. He gives no citation for it and it is highly likely that Ingersoll himself simply invented it. Despite this, the Magellan "quote" can still be found in quote collections and on t-shirts and posters sold by atheist organisations.2. The Medieval Church suppressed science and innovative thinking and burned scientists at the stake, setting back progress by hundreds of years.The myth that the Church suppressed science and burned or repressed scientists is a central part of what historians of science refer to as "the Conflict Thesis". This persistent idea has its origins in the Enlightenment, but was fixed in the public consciousness by two popular works of the Nineteenth Century. John William Draper's A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896) were both highly popular and influential works which popularised the idea that the Medieval Church actively suppressed science. Twentieth Century historians of science have since heavily criticised the "White-Draper Thesis" and noted that much of White and Draper's evidence was wildly misinterpreted or, in several cases, totally invented.Early Christianity in the later Roman era did initially have an issue with what some churchmen considered "pagan knowledge" - the scientific works of the Greeks and their Roman intellectual successors. Several preached that a Christian should avoid these works and rejected their knowledge as un-Biblical. The early Church Father Tertullian famously asked sarcastically "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" But this line of thinking was rejected by other prominent churchmen, with Clement of Alexandria proposing that just as God had given the Jews a special insight into spiritual matters, so he had given the Greeks a particular insight into things scientific. He argued that just as the Israelites carried off the gold of the Egyptians and put it to their own use, so Christians could and should use the wisdom of the pagan Greeks as a gift from God. Clement was later supported by the highly influential Augustine of Hippo and later Christian thinkers built on this idea, noting that if the cosmos was the product of a rational God then it could and should be apprehended rationally.Natural philosophy, based largely on the works of Greek and Roman thinkers like Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, Archimedes and many others, therefore became a major part of the syllabuses of Medieval universities. Thanks to the preservation of these works by Arab scholars when they had been lost in the West after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Medieval scholars did not just study these texts and the works of the Arabs who added to them, but used them to make discoveries in their own right. Medieval scholars were particularly fascinated by the science of optics and invented eye glasses partly as a result of their studies using lenses to determine the nature of light and the physics of sight. The Fourteenth Century scientist Thomas Bradwardine and a group of other Oxford scholars called "the Merton Calculators" not only first formulated the Mean Speed Theorem but were also the first to use mathematics as a language to describe physics, laying the foundations of everything done in the science of physics ever since.​A Medieval scientific diagram of the refraction of light in a spherical container of waterFar from being persecuted by the Church, all of the scientists of the Middle Ages were themselves churchmen. Jean Buridan de Bethune, Nicole d'Oresme, Albrecht of Saxony, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Bradwardine, Theodoric of Fribourg, Roger Bacon, Thierry of Chartres, Gerbert of Aurillac, William of Conches, John Philoponus, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton and Nicholas of Cusa were not only not persecuted, suppressed or burned at the stake, but were honoured and renowned for their learning and wisdom.Contrary to the myth and to the popular misconception, there is not one single example of anyone being burned at the stake for anything to do with science in the Middle Ages, nor is there any example of science being suppressed by the Medieval Church. The Galileo Affair came much later (Galileo was a contemporary of Descartes) and had far more to do with the politics of the Counter Reformation and the personalities involved than anything to do with the Church's attitude to science.3. In the Middle Ages millions of women were burned by the Inquisition as witches and witch burnings were a common occurrence in Medieval times.Actually, the "Witch Craze" was not a Medieval phenomenon at all. Its heyday was in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and was an almost exclusively early Modern affair. For most of the Middle Ages (ie the Fifth to Fifteenth Centuries) not only did the Church not bother pursuing so-called witches, but its teaching was actually that witches did not even exist.Until around the Fourteenth Century the Church scolded people who believed in witches and rejected the whole idea as a silly peasant superstition. Various Medieval law codes, both canon and civil law, did not declare witchcraft to be forbidden, but rather declared belief in the existence of witches to be outlawed and/or sinful. One churchman was confronted with a village of people who genuinely believed the claims of a woman who claimed to be a witch and who said, amongst other things, that she could turn herself into a puff of smoke and leave a locked room through the keyhole. So to prove the foolishness of this belief he locked himself in a room with the woman and encouraged her to escape through the keyhole by beating her with a stick. The "witch" did not escape and the villagers got the idea.Thinking about witches began to change in the Fourteenth Century, particularly in the wake of the Black Death of 1347-1350, after which Europeans became increasingly fearful of conspiracies by maleficent underground forces, mostly imaginary. Apart from blaming the Jews and fearing cells of heretics, the idea of covens of witches began to be taken more seriously by the Church. This came to a head in 1484 when Pope Innocent VIII published the bull Summis desiderantes, which effectively kicked off the Witch Craze which raged across Europe for the next 200 years.Both Catholic and Protestant countries were caught up in the Witch mania once it got going. What is interesting is how the Craze seems to have followed the fault-lines of the Reformation: Catholic countries which had little major threat from Protestantism, such as Italy and Spain, saw very little witch-hunting while those in the front-line of the religious struggles of the time, like Germany and France, saw the most. This meant the two places where the Inquisition was most active were also the places where there was the least hysteria about witches. Contrary to the myths, the Inquisition was far more concerned with heretics and relapsed Jewish converts than any "witches".In Protestant countries, witch-hunting flared when the status quo was under threat (such as in Salem, Massachusetts) or in times of social and religious turmoil (as in Jacobin England or under Oliver Cromwell's puritan regime). Despite wildly exaggerated claims of "millions of women" being executed for witchcraft, modern scholars estimate the actual death toll to be around 60-100,000 people over several centuries, with 20% of the victims being men.Hollywood perpetuates the myth of "Medieval" witch hunting and few Hollywood movies set in the period can resist at least some mention of witches or someone being threatened by a sinister churchman for suspicion of witchcraft. This is despite the fact the craze was largely post-Medieval and for most of the Medieval period belief in witches was dismissed as superstitious nonsense.4. The Middle Ages was a period of filth and squalor and people rarely washed and would have stunk and had rotten teeth.In fact, Medieval people at all levels of society washed daily, enjoyed baths and valued cleanliness and hygiene. As in any period prior to modern hot running water, they would have been less clean than we are, but like our grandparents or great-grandparents, they were able to wash daily, stay clean, valued cleanliness and did not like people who were filthy or smelt.Most people in the period stayed clean by washing daily using a basin of hot water. Soap first began to be used widely in the Middle Ages (the Romans and Greeks did not use soap) and soap makers had their own guilds in most larger Medieval towns and cities. Heating the water for a full bath was a time consuming process, so baths at home were less common, but even the lower strata of society enjoyed a hip bath when they could get one. The nobility raised baths to high levels of luxury, with bathing in large wooden tubs of scented water with seats lined with silk being not only a solitary pleasure, but something shared with sexual partners or even parties of friends, with wine and food on hand, much like a modern hot tub or jacuzzi.​Medieval bathing and dining (and sex) - from a Fifteenth Century manuscriptPublic bath-houses existed in most larger towns and hundreds of them thrived in larger cities. The south bank of the Thames was the location of hundreds of "stewes" (the origin of our word for the dish "stew") in which Medieval Londoners could soak in hot water, as well as chat, play chess and solicit whores. In Paris there were even more such baths and in Italy they were so numerous that some advertised themselves as being exclusively for women or purely for the aristocracy, so the nobles didn't find themselves sharing a tub with artisans or peasants.The idea that people in the Middle Ages did not wash is based on a number of misconceptions and myths. Firstly, in the Sixteenth Century and again in the Eighteenth Century, ie after the Middle Ages, there were periods in which doctors claimed bathing was harmful and in which people avoided washing too regularly. People for whom "the Middle Ages" seems to mean "any time longer ago than the Nineteenth Century" have assumed this means these ideas were prevalent earlier as well. Secondly, Christian moralists and churchmen in the Middle Ages did warn against excessive bathing. This was because such moralists warned against excess in anything - eating, sex, hunting, dancing or even penance and religious devotion. To conclude that these warnings meant that no-one bathed is clearly nonsense. Finally, public baths were closely associated with prostitution. There is no doubt that many prostitutes plied their trade in the bath-houses of Medieval cities and the "stewes" of Medieval London and other cities stood close to the most notorious districts for brothels and whores. So moralists railed against public bath-houses as sinks of iniquity. To conclude this meant people therefore did not use the bath-houses is as silly as concluding they also did not visit the adjoining brothels.The fact that Medieval literature celebrates the joys of a hot bath, the Medieval knighting ceremony includes a scented bath for the initiatory squire, ascetic hermits prided themselves on not bathing just as they prided themselves on not enjoying other common pleasures and soap makers and bath-house keepers did a roaring trade shows that Medieval people liked to keep clean. The idea that they had rotten teeth has also been shown to be nonsense by archaeology. In a period in which sugar was an expensive luxury and in which the average person's diet was rich in vegetables, seasonal fruit and calcium, Medieval teeth were actually excellent. It was only in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century that cheaper sugar from the West Indies flooded Europe and caused an epidemic of cavities and foul breath.A Medieval French saying shows how fundamental washing was to the pleasures of a good life in the period:Venari, ludere, lavari, bibere! Hoc est vivere!(To hunt, to play, to bathe, to drink! This is to live!)5. The Medieval period was a technological 'dark age' and there were few to no advances in technology until the Renaissance.The Medieval period actually saw many advances in technology, several of which were amongst the most significant in human history. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the Fifth Century the effect on material culture and technology in Europe was devastating. Without the Empire to fund major engineering projects and large scale infrastructure, many of the skills and techniques involved in monumental buildings and complex technologies were forgotten and lost. The break down of long distance trade meant people became increasingly self-sufficient and produced what they needed locally. But this actually had a stimulating effect on the adoption and development of technology in the longer run. Technical advances that helped self-sufficient farming communities to be more productive became more widely adopted across Europe and this led to the development of the horse-collar, allowing more efficient haulage and plowing, the horse shoe, the mouldboard plough, allowing the cultivation of heavier northern European soils and a widespread adoption of water power in the form of water mills and tidal mills. The result of these developments was wide areas of Europe that had never been farmed in Roman times came under production for the first time and Europe became vastly more productive and, ultimately, richer than it had ever been.The widespread adoption of water mills on a scale never seen in Roman times led not only to a wider range of uses for water power, but an increase in other forms of mechanisation. The windmill was a Medieval European innovation and both wind and water mills were not just used for grinding flour but also fuilling cloth, making leather and driving bellows and trip-hammers. These last two innovations led to the production of steel on a semi-industrial scale and, along with the Medieval invention of the blast furnace and development of cast iron, advanced Medieval metal technology well beyond that of the Romans..By the second half of the Middle Ages (1000-1500 AD) the wind and water-powered agarian revolution of the previous few centuries made Christian Europe into a rich, populous and expanding power. Medieval people began to experiment with other uses of mechanisation. Noting that warm air moved up a chimney (which were another Medieval innovation), larger Medieval kitchens had fans installed in the chimney to automatically turn spits by use of a gearing system. Medieval monks noted that using a similar gearing system driven by a descending weight might be used to measure out an hour of time mechanically. In the Thirteenth Century the first mechanical clocks began to appear across Europe, a Medieval innovation that would revolutionise how humans saw time. Medieval clocks developed rapidly, with miniaturised table clocks appearing within a few decades of the instrument's invention. Medieval clocks could be vastly complex calculating devices. The immensely complicated astronomical clock built by Richard of Wallingford, abbot of St Albans, was so complex it took eight years to run through its full cycle of calculations and was the most intricate machine ever built up to that point.​Abbot Richard of Wallingford and his astronomical clockThe rise of universities in the Middle Ages also stimulated several technical innovations. Scholars studying works on optics by Greek and Arabic scientists did experiments on the nature of light using lenses and invented eye glasses in the process. Universities also provided a large market for books and encouraged methods of producing books more cheaply. Experiments with block printing eventually led to the invention of moveable type and finally another highly significant Medieval innovation: the printing press.Medieval maritime technology meant that Europeans were able to sail to the Americas for the first time. Long distance maritime trade led to the development of increasingly larger vessels. though the older form of rudders - a large oar-style of rudder mounted on the side of the ship - limited how big a ship could be. In the later Twelth Century Medieval shipwrights invented the stern-mounted "pintle and gudgeon" rudder which allowed far larger ships to be developed and steered more effectively. The later Age of Exploration was made possible by this Medieval innovation.So far from being a technological dark age, the Medieval period actually saw many important innovations in technology and several of them - eye glasses, the mechanical clock and the printing press - are amongst the most important inventions of all time.6. Medieval warfare consisted of unorganised knights in massively heavy armour leading rabbles of peasants armed with pitchforks into battles that were chaotic brawls. This is why Europeans were usually beaten by their tactically superior Muslim enemies in the Crusades.The Hollywood image of Medieval warfare as unskilled, disorganised chaos where knights bent on individual glory led armies of peasant levies has its origin largely in one book - Sir Charles Oman's The Art of Warfare in the Middle Ages (1885). This book began life as an undergraduate essay at Oxford but was later expanded and published as Oman's first book. It then became the most widely read book in English on the subject of Medieval warfare, largely because there really were not any others until several decades into the Twentieth Century, when more systematic modern study of the period began.Oman's research suffered from many of the disadvantages of the time in which he wrote: a general prejudice against the Medieval period as "backward" and "inferior" to the Classical era, a lack of many sources which were yet to be published and a tendency to take sources at face value. As a result, Oman presented Medieval warfare as unskilled and without tactics or strategy and focused mainly on a quest for individual glory by the knights and nobles. But by the 1960s more modern historical methods and a wider range of sources and interpretations were being brought to bear on the subject, initially by European historians like Philippe Contamine and J.F. Verbruggen. These newer works revolutionised our understanding of Medieval warfare, showing that while many of our sources emphasised individual actions by knights and nobles, use of other sources painted a very different picture to Oman's.In fact, the rise of the knightly elite in the Tenth Century meant Medieval Europe had a professional class of warriors who dedicated their lives to the arts of war. While individual glory and prowess was prized, this elite trained from early childhood and knew well that battles were won by organisation and tactics. Knights trained in group maneuvers and aristocrats trained in how to co-ordinate a number of these groups (often called conrois or "lances") into "battles" or "battalions" . This was done through combinations of trumpet signals, flag signals or visual and verbal commands.The key to Medieval battlefield tactics was to position the core of the enemy's army - his infantry - so that its ranks were disrupted enough to be vulnerable to a killing blow: a charge by the knightly heavy cavalry. This had to be timed precisely and done while maintaining your own army and not allowing your opponent's heavy cavalry a similar opportunity. Contrary to popular belief, Medieval armies were substantially infantry-based, with cavalry, including the elite knightly heavy cavalry, forming a sizeable minority.The Hollywood image of Medieval infantry as a rabble of peasants armed with farm implements is also a myth. Infantry was often raised by levying men from the countryside, but the men who were selected were not untrained or ill-equipped. In lands where military obligation was required, there were always some men given time to train so as to be ready for war. The English longbowmen who won the day at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt were "peasant levies", but they were skilled, well-trained and efficient in the extreme. Italian city states set aside one day a week for citizens to drill and maneuver in unit formations and these units came to represent formidable forces. Finally, there were many men who chose warfare as a profession and nobles often took their vassals military obligations in cash and used this money to hire professional mercenary units and units of specialists in particular weapons or types of warfare (eg crossbowmen or siege engine experts).Pitched battles were risky affairs that could easily go either way even if you had the enemy greatly outnumbered. As a result, open battle was actually very rare and most Medieval warfare consisted of strategic maneuver and, more often, sieges. Medieval architects raised the art of fortification to new heights and the great castles of the Crusaders such as Kerak and Krak de Chevaliers or Edward I's chain of massive castles in Wales were masterpieces of defensive engineering.Along with the myths of Medieval armies as rabbles led by tactical idiots is the idea that the Crusaders were usually outclassed and defeated by a more tactically sophisticated Muslim enemy in the Middle East. Actually, a survey of the battles fought by Crusader armies shows that they won slightly more encounters than they lost, with both sides borrowing tactics and equipment from each other in what was generally an even struggle. It was a manpower shortage that led to the fall of the Crusader Kingdoms of Outremer, not inferior fighting skill.Finally, there are the myths about Medieval armour. The common misconception is that Medieval armour was massively heavy, that knights had to be hoisted into the saddle by cranes and that once unhorsed a knight would be unable to stand up again. Of course, only an idiot would go into battle and risk his life in armour that encumbered movement in such a way. In fact Medieval plate armour weight only around 20 kgs (45 pounds), which is almost half what a modern infantry carries into battle today. Modern re-enactors like to demonstrate how agile a fully armoured man could be by doing acrobatics in full plate armour. Earlier full suits of mail were much heavier, but even in them a fit man was entirely agileFurther Reading:Stephen J. Harris & B.L. Grigsby, Misconceptions about the Middle Ages (2008)Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (1991)Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (1996)James Hannam, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Lay the Foundations of Modern Science (2009)Brian Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe (2006)Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (1989)Ian Mortimer, The Time-traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (2008)Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1976)Lynn White jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962)J. & F. Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (1994)Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages (1984)J.F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe from the Eighth Century to 1340 (1997)