Scorched Earth Warfare: From Scythian Wells to the Nero Decree

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This episode traces the deliberate destruction of food, water, shelter and infrastructure to deny them to an enemy. The phrase scorched earth entered English only in 1937, from reports of Chinese forces burning their own crops ahead of the Japanese, and the Romans never actually salted Carthage. The practice itself is ancient: Scythian nomads burned supplies and poisoned wells as they retreated from Darius the Great, the Helvetii burned their own homes before migrating, and Vercingetorix stripped Gaul to starve Caesar's legions. In 1069 William the Conqueror's Harrying of the North destroyed villages and food stores from the Humber to the Tees, and up to 150,000 people died in the winter famine that followed.

Mass armies that lived off the land made the tactic decisive. Portugal emptied the country before the Lines of Torres Vedras in 1810, Russia burned its own land ahead of Napoleon in 1812, and Manuel Belgrano ordered the Jujuy Exodus the same year. Industrial war widened the targets: Sherman's March to the Sea, Kit Carson's campaign against the Navajo, Kitchener's camps in the Boer War, Soviet sabotage in 1941 and Hitler's Nero Decree in 1945. The 1977 Additional Protocol I, Article 54, finally banned destroying what civilians need to survive.

• In 1462 Vlad the Impaler left some 20,000 impaled bodies outside Târgoviște, and Mehmed II's army turned back.
• Belgrano ordered residents to burn their homes and fields and carry off anything made of iron, on pain of death.
• Union troops heated rails and twisted them around trees, the so called Sherman's neckties.
• Emily Hobhouse exposed conditions in the Boer War camps, where more than 26,000 Boer women and children died.
• The British first used herbicides in the Malayan Emergency, and the United States later sprayed Agent Orange and Agent Blue in Operation Ranch Hand.