This begs me to ask a question: do any of these people actually get their World War II history from anywhere but Saving Private Ryan...? For as much completely justified condemnation that’s been leveled at Germany for its bombing campaigns against Warsaw and London and other major European cities, those were as nothing compared to the sheer devastation the US and Great Britain wrought back on the cities of Germany and Japan. Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo were largely wiped out with fire bombings. Indeed, in one night's firebombing of Tokyo more civilians were killed than in either of the atomic bombings. Those shattered towns in Normandy that our soldiers were fighting the Germans through in Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers? It was the British Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Forces that destroyed those towns in the effort to end a war, and drive the Nazi forces out of Europe altogether.
Now before I get inundated by people trying to claim I'm impugning the honor of our World War II veterans, let me state my stance on warfare. It is the most horrible enterprise we as humans can engage in. Yet I will never deny that in many cases, we have very little choice in carrying it out. World War II was such an instance. Even if we were initially pulled into the European aspect of the conflict by Hitler's declaration of war on us after our declaration of war on Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was the end result of years of building animosity between the US and Japan... you get the idea there. The tapestry of history is so interwoven; it's not hard to see how multiple interpretations can easily come out, and factors forgotten or worse, ignored, in the interest of furthering our own causes.
The soldiers of World War II, and the sailors and airmen, were all following orders, the same as our soldiers, sailors and airmen are today. The difference is in World War II it was a war we were pulled into, which some will argue is also what happened in Afghanistan, but no one can deny (at least not in a reasonable manner) that Iraq was a war we pursued entirely of our own initiative. As would be a new war with Iran, whatever the fear-mongers have to say about it. This aspect of "we were attacked" tends to somehow lend credibility to any actions taken in the course of waging that war, but that does not make it ethical.
Going back to what Ratigan and Lt. Col. Shaffer were talking about, we’re now getting images and videos of our military attacking targets while knowing that civilians are present, and causing harm and death to these same civilians. When was the last war that we could do so and hardly anyone raised the slightest fuss about it? When was the last war that indeed, such destruction was in fact welcomed? World War II.
And it didn’t stop at just German and Japanese cities. In the lead up to the Normandy campaign, we estimated the bombings we needed to do to try and clear out the cities around the Normandy area for the invasion would kill 100,000 civilians, and even though Allied leaders had trepidation going into it, even a French general said to go ahead, that it was acceptable to carry out this bombing campaign; in the words of that general, "C'est la guerre."[i] And understand, this was not an accumulated number of people that would die over the course of years, this was the numbers estimated to be killed in a month. Innocent French civilians, the very people we were fighting to liberate. "Shoot the hostage," if you will. The civilians were not the target, but they were in the way of the target.
This is time for me to give another disclaimer. I am not condoning what happened in the lead-up to the Normandy campaign, I am not condoning what happened to almost every major city in Germany or Japan, and I am certainly not condoning what is happening right now in these videos. My point is, it doesn't matter what side of an issue you're on, a double standard, is a double standard. How were we more ethical back then than we are now? I would argue the exact opposite, that we are far more ethical today than we were back then, based on our current standards.
What else made today's conflicts and World War II different? Consider the difference between 1940s society and now. Seventy years ago, it was okay for cartoons to have titles such as "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips." US planes in WWII were commonly given names like “Nip ‘Nocker,” and “Nip’s Nemesis.” (never mind of course the extremely common practice of suggestive, even outright pornographic portrayals of women on these same planes, but I’ll touch more on that issue later in the article). The acceptance of such bombing tactics against targets with civilians present went far beyond even just the "necessities of war" in World War II.
In World War II, every German was a Nazi, and every Japanese person was any number of racial slurs you can think of. Both were dehumanized; evil. Immediately post Pearl Harbor, as many still remember, many Japanese citizens were rounded up in "containment camps." After World War II that changed, so drastically that only just over twenty years later there was massive outcry worldwide against our bombing campaigns over North Vietnam. Something had changed drastically, to where when even racism was still rampant here in the US, far more than it still is today, the massive levels of destruction that were acceptable only a generation before were now intolerable. The military is in fact made more ethical in its practices because the ethics of the population do not accept such tactics anymore. And so when a civilian wanders into the target area of a missile strike, we see it, we hear it, and we cry against it; a far cry from World War II ethics.
This highlights another difference, which is media. During World War II, the best images the average American had of what was being inflicted upon Japan and Germany were taken from the bombers themselves and high-flying reconnaissance planes, thousands to tens of thousands of feet in the air. And then later during the latter half of 1944 through 1945, when cameras could finally go into these areas, all that was left was the bombed out and hollow skeletons of buildings, not people. It was forlorn, but did not come close to capturing the true horrors that those people must have gone through at the time of the bombings. It took the giant mushroom clouds of two atomic blasts for us to finally begin to question this type of warfare, and even then not very much for several decades. And as I stated in the second paragraph, those weren't even the costliest bombings of the war. Today we have these crystal-clear images and videos such as Ratigan showed on his program. We can see what happens, almost as it happens.
The impact of these media changes go all the way back to Vietnam. Seeing the horrors of the war as it happens has injected far more "morality" and "ethics" into warfare than anything I can think of. We could never do things like name shows "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips" today, after all, just look at the animosity Lowe's received just because it pulled its advertising from the show "All American Muslim." Even things that can be implied as being racist are deeply scrutinized. We can no longer dehumanize our "enemies" anymore, civilian or combatant, that's how "unethical" we are today compared to the 1940s.
On another related subject of our soldiers “unethical” conduct in war and how it flies in the face of this argument of the “high ethics” we had during World War II, is this from Paul Fussell, historian, professor, and World War II veteran.
And of course the brutality was not just on one
side. There was much sadism and cruelty,
undeniably racist, on ours. (It’s worth
noting in passing how few hopes blacks could entertain of desegregation and
decent treatment when the U.S. Army itself slandered the enemy as “the little
brown Jap.”) Marines and soldiers could
augment their view of their own invicibility by possessing a well-washed
Japanese skull, and very soon after Guadalcanal it was common to treat
surrendering Japanese as handy rifle targets.
Plenty of Japanese gold teeth were extracted – some from still living
mouths – with Marine Corps Ka-Bar Knives, and one of E. B. Sledge’s fellow
marines went around with a cut-off Japanese hand.[ii]
Another aspect of this interview I take issue with is calling our soldiers “detached” and claiming how they spoke as if they were "playing a video game". When again, their language is very little different from that used in World War II. Take this excerpt from 56th Fighter Group commander Colonel Hubert Zemke discussing aerial combat in World War II in which he was in a one on one dogfight with a German pilot. “This last dive carried us to 5000 ft, where he began a very slight climbing turn. My ammunition ran out as I fired at a range of 400 yards with a deflection of a ring and a half.”[iii] That is rather dry language for a man describing firing eight .50 caliber machine guns (that's bullets 1/2 inch in diameter) at a plane carrying another human being, who was himself trying to get into proper position to try and shoot down or kill Zemke himself. Indeed, Zemke’s final assessment of the dogfight was: “The entire combat was extremely interesting…”[iv] And while some may say that is an assessment after the fact, read excerpts from actual in combat radio messages. The language is always very composed and collected, indeed what I would call mundane. It’s supposed to be, they’re trained to keep their heads in these situations, not give us Hollywood level entertainment, screaming and swearing and whooping and hollering. George Lucas combat, I call it. Meanwhile, actually listen to video game players, particularly online. Language is erratic, hardly controlled and balanced. And again, it is the way it has always been, to pretend it is otherwise to criticize soldiers conducting warfare much as it has been done for centuries is disingenuous, I feel.
And now the last thing I must get straight about my stances on this subject. I am a liberal, and a Democrat. I fully admit it. But I am not a blind-faith liberal. If I see my side in the wrong, I will call it out, and to me, criticizing our soldiers doing their duty with justifications such as these, is wrong. Call civilian deaths wrong then and now, which they are, but do not try to misrepresent facts to suit your claims. It's wrong when conservatives do it, and it's wrong when we do so as well.
Was World War II a more justifiable conflict than the one we are in today and arguably every conflict we've been in since? Yes, absolutely. But to say that we were more ethical at a time when the general plan of attack was bomb two belligerent nations into complete submission, including civilians, than we are today is frankly an insult to our men and women in uniform. It is a trap we have to avoid; it is the same trap the right has fallen into in attacking the left, attacking on so many issues just because they are "liberal". It is fine to disagree with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but do not start turning on our soldiers just because you finally have the privileged insight into how war is and has been conducted.
Where I would argue that we need to put considerably more pressure on our military to engage in “ethical” behavior is the treatment of women in the military service. And our treatment of women in general needs some serious reevaluation as well. This is by far our darkest black mark. The innumerable reasons given recently as to why women don’t deserve the same rights as men both in civilian life and in military life is appalling.
Especially when you consider that the only other major military to employ women in such front line combat roles was the Soviet Union. That the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin was more progressive than we are today is fairly alarming to me. In the Soviet Union, though they did not serve in overwhelming numbers, women were soldiers, snipers, scouts, fighter and bomber pilots. One Soviet women’s bomber regiment, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, which performed so well the Germans named them the “Nachthexen,” and after only a year of service the Soviet command reorganized them into the 46th Guards Night Bomber Regiment, recognizing them as an elite unit and several of their members were honored as “Heroes of the Soviet Union.” These were not back-seat roles they played. They were not simply nurses and radio operators and secretaries for officers, kept far out of harm’s way.
Indeed, the most hated person on the battlefield the world over is a sniper, and the Soviet Union’s Lyudmila Pavlichenko is listed as having killed over three hundred people during her time as a sniper during World War II. The closest US women, aside from nurses in the European campaign, some of whom did get captured and become POWs during the Battle of the Bulge, was again, on the planes that our airmen flew over enemy territory with. Which in itself, considering the nature of such art and depictions does not speak well to the general historical attitude of men in our armed forces towards women. In the Soviet Union, when token US bombers landed in Soviet held territory, Soviet officers were often appalled by such sights as naked women on these bombers, and ordered them painted over. No, Soviet women were not bystanders in the war on the Eastern Front. And to think somehow our women here in the US are less capable of combat, or our men too emotional to handle seeing women in the line of fire, or that women in front-line combat will be more likely to be raped is frankly just absurd.
That is where we need to examine our “ethics” in our military, in the rampant mistreatment of our women in uniform. And it is also where we need to now examine our ethics as a society, for clearly there it is no better. I posit that nothing would serve women’s rights more than giving them more combat responsibilities. Just as it did for African-Americans, and just as it is doing right now for homosexual Americans, the right to die for your country is the strongest right to obtain, and we need to give them that right.
So no, I would disagree that “we’ve walked away from our high ethics during World War II,” and are actually into an area where we have far more of them. It does not stop atrocities, and we should expect them. But at the same time we should not allow ourselves to become complacent to them to the extent we start moving back to the mass bombing days and the “they’re all the enemy” days. It does not excuse the fact that daily women in our armed services are being sexually assaulted by their fellow soldiers. And that is the point of this article; we have improved, in many ways, but our improvements have shown other areas to improve, and we need to work on them. But criticizing our soldiers on false information? That I cannot abide, no matter who’s saying it.
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