Scorched earth

• 1. Introduction

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  Scorched earth is a military strategy as old as recorded warfare, and its name comes from a 1937 report on the Second Sino-Japanese War, when retreating Chinese forces burned crops and shattered infrastructure to deny them to the advancing Japanese. The principle is brutal in its simplicity: destroy everything an enemy needs to fight. Water. Food. Livestock. Roads. Cities. Shelter. The goal is not merely to retreat but to leave a desert in your wake, one that starves, exhausts, and breaks an opposing force before it can ever reach you.

  This is a strategy that has been deployed by nomadic herders fleeing Persian emperors, by Welsh and Scottish kings holding off English invasion, by Russian tsars burning Moscow itself, and by generals fighting wars of independence on three continents. It has also been turned against civilians with devastating effect, producing famines, mass displacements, and some of history's worst atrocities. The 1977 Geneva Conventions eventually banned its use against non-combatants, prohibiting the destruction of foodstuffs, agricultural land, livestock, and drinking water installations when the purpose is to deny civilians the means to survive.

  So what made this strategy so enduring? How did commanders across centuries and cultures independently arrive at the same devastating calculation? And when does a weapon of war become a war crime?

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• 2. The Logic Behind the Ash

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  Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military theorist, identified the logic with precision. Writing in his Principles of War, he argued that the goal of defense is not simply to hold ground but to destroy the enemy's army, either through battle or by making subsistence so difficult that the army disintegrates. He cited Wellington's campaign of 1810-1811 in Portugal as a clean illustration.

  In On War, Clausewitz described what a pursuing army actually finds after a scorched-earth retreat: wasted villages, fields from which crops have been gathered or trampled, empty wells, and muddy brooks. The pursuing force, he wrote, contends with pressing wants from the very first day.

  The strategy has two distinct applications in practice. A retreating army uses it to leave nothing of value behind, weakening whoever follows. An advancing army can also employ it, clearing territory to deny supplies and cover to irregular fighters who lack fixed lines. Both uses rest on the same core insight: an army that cannot eat cannot fight.

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• 3. Ancient Precedents

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  The Scythians deployed scorched-earth methods against the Persian Achaemenid Empire led by King Darius the Great during his European Scythian campaign in the 6th century BC. Being nomadic herders, they had no cities to lose. They simply retreated into the depths of the steppes, destroying food supplies and poisoning wells as they went, denying the Persian army any means of sustaining itself in hostile territory.

  The Greek general Xenophon recorded a similar encounter in his Anabasis during the 4th century BC: the withdrawing enemy burnt up the grass and everything else that was good for use in front of the Ten Thousand.

  During the Second Punic War, which ran from 218-202 BCE, both Carthaginians and Romans applied the method selectively during Hannibal's invasion of Italy. After the Roman defeat at Lake Trasimene, Quintus Fabius Maximus instructed people living in the path of the invading Carthaginians to burn their houses and grain rather than let those resources fall into enemy hands.

  After the Third Punic War ended in 146 BC, the Roman Senate went further: they elected to permanently destroy the Carthaginian capital city, near modern-day Tunis. Buildings were torn down and their stones scattered so that not even rubble remained, and the fields were burned. The famous story that they also salted the earth, though, is apocryphal.

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• 4. Medieval Devastations

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  William the Conqueror's response to a northern English rebellion in 1069 became one of the most documented scorched-earth campaigns in medieval history, known as the Harrying of the North. His men burned whole villages from the Humber to the Tees and slaughtered inhabitants. Food stores and livestock were destroyed so that anyone who survived the initial massacre would succumb to starvation over the following winter. Survivor accounts describe people reduced to cannibalism, with skulls of the dead cracked open so that brains could be eaten. Between 100,000 and 150,000 perished, and the area took centuries to recover. The destruction is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry.

  Robert the Bruce pursued the same logic during the Wars of Scottish Independence, but as defense rather than conquest. Counselled in a 14th-century poem to use the tactic to frustrate the invasion of Scotland by Edward I of England, Bruce adopted a strategy of slighting Scottish castles, meaning their deliberate destruction, to prevent them from being occupied by the English. The Mamlukes also applied this castle-destruction approach in the Holy Land during their wars with the Crusaders.

  Stephen the Great of Moldavia used scorched earth in the Carpathians against the Ottoman Army in 1475 and 1476. And in 1462, Vlad the Impaler retreated from a massive Ottoman force led by Sultan Mehmed II, conducting scorched-earth tactics during his withdrawal to Transylvania. When the Ottomans approached the city of Tirgoviste, they encountered over 20,000 people impaled on stakes by Vlad's forces, a sight that caused Mehmed to withdraw from battle entirely and send his ally Radu, who was Vlad's own brother, to continue the fight.

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• 5. The Poet's Witness and the Knight's Harvest

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  Edmund Spenser, the poet, left one of the most harrowing first-hand descriptions of scorched earth in practice. Writing of the Desmond Rebellions during the Tudor conquest of Ireland, where English commanders including Walter Devereux and Richard Bingham devastated the province of Munster, he described survivors crawling on their hands out of woods and glens because their legs could not bear them, eating carrion, eating one another, flocking to any patch of watercress or shamrocks as to a feast. A most populous and plentiful country, he wrote, was suddenly left void of man or beast.

  A very different calculation drove the Knights of Malta in early 1565. Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette, warned by spies of an imminent Ottoman attack, ordered the harvesting of all crops in Malta, including unripened grain, to deprive the invaders of any local food source. The Knights also poisoned the wells with bitter herbs and dead animals. The Ottomans arrived on the 18th of May, and the Great Siege of Malta began. They managed to capture one fort but were ultimately defeated by the Knights, the Maltese militia, and a Spanish relief force.

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• 6. Empires and Their Retreats

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  During the Nine Years' War, Louis XIV and his War Minister the Marquis de Louvois resolved to systematically destroy the German Electoral Palatinate after France found itself overextended. By the 20th of December 1688, Louvois had drawn up a list of every city, town, village, and chateau intended for destruction. On the 2nd of March 1689, the Count of Tesse torched Heidelberg. Six days later, Montclar levelled Mannheim. Oppenheim and Worms fell on the 31st of May, Speyer on the 1st of June, Bingen on the 4th of June. In all, French troops burned over 20 substantial towns and numerous villages.

  From 1655 to 1660, Swedish armies robbed Poland of thousands of works of art, books, and valuables. Almost all cities, towns, castles, and churches where Swedish troops were stationed were destroyed, and guides to Polish towns still carry notes that an object was destroyed during the Swedish invasion. Only Lwow and Gdansk among major Polish cities escaped destruction. An estimated 3 million people died, and so few pre-Baroque buildings remained that the Swedish Deluge reshaped the architectural record of an entire country.

  Peter the Great of Russia used the same logic defensively, deploying scorched-earth tactics to check the Swedish King Charles XII's campaign toward Moscow in 1707-1708 during the Great Northern War.

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• 7. Napoleon's Empty Harvest

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  In 1810, during the third Napoleonic invasion of Portugal, the Portuguese population retreated toward Lisbon and was ordered to destroy all food supplies, forage, and shelter across a wide belt of the country. The order was followed willingly: after French plundering and abuse of civilians in previous invasions, people preferred to destroy what they had to leave behind rather than let the French take it. When French armies reached the Lines of Torres Vedras, soldiers reported that the country seemed to empty ahead of them. Hunger, disease, and low morale compelled a French retreat.

  Emperor Alexander I of Russia used the same principle against Napoleon's 1812 invasion. As Russian forces withdrew before the Grande Armee, they burned the countryside over which they passed, including, allegedly, Moscow itself. Napoleon's army had relied on living off the land it conquered. Encountering only desolation, that doctrine became useless. Napoleon arrived in a virtually abandoned Moscow, a tattered shell of its former self. When his army finally retreated, they marched back along a route that had already been scorched once and marched over once, and they starved as they went.

  Toussaint Louverture articulated the Haitian strategy in a letter to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, written as the Haitian Revolution was gathering force starting in 1791. His words are worth quoting: "Do not forget, while waiting for the rainy season which will rid us of our foes, that we have no other resource than destruction and fire. Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest sustenance."

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• 8. The Modern Record

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  The American Civil War produced one of the most documented scorched-earth campaigns in the modern era. General Philip Sheridan and William Tecumseh Sherman applied the policy widely for the Union, and Sheridan's own account of it is precise: supplies within reach of Confederate armies were treated as contraband just as surely as weapons, and their destruction tended to the same result as the destruction of armies. Sherman's March to the Sea put the principle into practice at scale.

  During the Second Boer War of 1899-1902, British forces under General Lord Kitchener destroyed the farms and homes of civilians across the occupied Boer republics to deny supplies to guerrillas still fighting. Boer non-combatants, mostly women and children, were held in concentration camps. English activist Emily Hobhouse exposed the conditions inside, and the British government's own Fawcett Commission confirmed her findings. A decade after the war, historian P. L. A. Goldman estimated that 27,927 Boers died in the camps: 26,251 women and children, of whom more than 22,000 were under sixteen, and 1,676 men.

  In 1944, retreating German forces devastated northern Finland. More than a third of the area's dwellings were destroyed. The provincial capital Rovaniemi was burned to the ground. All but two bridges in Lapland Province were blown up, and all roads were mined. Adolf Hitler in 1945 ordered his armaments minister Albert Speer to carry out a nationwide scorched-earth policy across Germany itself, in what became known as the Nero Decree. Speer actively resisted the order, as he had earlier refused Hitler's command to destroy French industry.

  A 2003 United Nations report called Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth, following the 1999-2000 Battle of Grozny during the Second Chechen War, in which heavy and indiscriminate artillery and airstrikes systematically leveled the Chechen capital. The UN in December 2024 reported that over 60,000 structures in Gaza had been destroyed, with more than 20,000 severely damaged, as international courts continued to investigate potential war crimes related to the scale of destruction there.

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