Editor’s Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
Bombing civilians began long before the invention of the airplane or drone.
In September 1846, the future shining star of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee, then a captain, took off from San Antonio to join the U.S. invasion of Mexico . The following March, the military fired some 6,000 cannonballs into the city of Veracruz, and Lee’s skill as an engineer came in handy.
“I had placed three 32- and three 68-pound guns in position,” he wrote in a letter home. “Their fire was terrific, and the shells thrown from our battery were constant, so beautiful in their flight and so destructive in their fall. It was awful! My heart bled for the inhabitants. The soldiers I did not care so much for, but it was terrible to think of the women and children.”
Mexican leaders requested a ceasefire to evacuate civilians but Major General Winfield Scott refused. According to historian Glenn Price, the bombardment “was indiscriminate,” and projectiles were “lobbed up with the design of crashing through the flimsy roofs of the adobe houses and exploding among the families after falling inside.” Soldiers recalled the screams of those buried under the rubble.