Scorched earth

Scorched earth policies refers to deliberately burning down, or otherwise destroying, any valuable resources in an area, in order to deny an enemy the use of these resources. Typically, the enemy is expected to soon gain control over the area. One possible (side-)effect is destroying the ability of the civilian population in the area to survive. The term is usually not applied to strategic bombing, despite that the goal and effect of such bombing may be similar or even the same, e.g. the bombing of Germany during World War II.

From today's perspective, "scorched earth" is used, among other things, in guerrilla or partisan warfare, in which the aim is to defeat a virtually invisible enemy. This war tactic was used by both the Soviet Union and the German Reich in World War II. One example would be the use of the rail wolf. During the Vietnam War, the USA employed this war tactic to counter the invisible enemy in the jungle, the Viet Cong or the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. The USA used defoliants such as Agent Orange to defoliate trees and carried out bomb attacks on Vietnamese installations, roads, and bridges. Due to this expansionist effort and the neo-colonialism of the conflicting party, over 2,000,000 Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War.

See also

• Noble savage
• The World Wars and mass starvation
• Confederate revisionism: Treatment of the South during the war

Further reading

• Paul Carell: Scorched Earth – The Russian-German War, 1943–1944, Little, Brown and Company, Boston / Toronto 1970