War, Fate, Freedom, Remnant [3]
By Ronald E. Osborn

So began the routine bombardment of noncombatants. Yet soon Churchill was calling for still greater innovations in violence. "I should be prepared to do anything that might hit the Germans in a murderous place," he wrote to his Chiefs of Staff in July, 1944:

I may certainly have to ask you to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would require constant medical attention. . . . It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing, as she does between long and short skirts for women.5

In the end, the Allies were unable to devise a feasible plan for chemical war, but not for lack of will or trying. They were hampered, in Churchill’s words, by "that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists," and by logistical considerations within the military. "I cannot make headway against the parsons and the warriors at the same time," he lamented.6

The aerial campaign against civilian populations meanwhile proceeded without dissent. What feeble resistance there was to the policy of "total war" was kept to a minimum through pressure tactics and facile slogans. This will end the war sooner. This will save lives. We must take retribution. We must punish the aggressor.

There were, it should be noted, a surprisingly high number of RAF pilots and crews who objected to the terroristic annihilation of defenseless noncombatants now required of them. But the military took severe disciplinary action against these individuals, court-martialing and imprisoning them to prevent their strange ideas from spreading through the ranks. The official reason given for their punishment was "LMF"—lack of moral fiber.

Fortunately, in the Pacific arena, moral fiber was in abundant supply. On the night of March 9, 1945, the United States set the entire city of Tokyo ablaze with napalm bombs. The heat was so intense it boiled the water in the canals. More than 100,000 civilians died in the attack. Bomber crews in the last waves could smell the burning flesh.

The same was done to more than fifty other Japanese cities, leading to a befuddling dilemma for Allied strategists: by May and June there were few "untouched" cities left for the ultimate demonstration of Allied "resolve." At last a list of cities, including the religious center of Kyoto, was compiled and submitted to the American High Command. None were proposed for primarily military reasons. What was critical in each case was that the target include a massive "unspoiled" population that could be annihilated without warning in a single blow. Civilian morale and psychological considerations—terrorism to be precise—dictated where the atomic bombs would fall.

The strategy, as we all know, was a spectacular success. More than 350,000 civilians were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a litany of unspeakable horror, some instantly in the inferno that consumed the cities at the speed of two miles a second; some more slowly, their skin hanging from their bodies like rags; some vomiting and convulsing from radiation sickness days later; some bleeding out of the retina, the mouth, the rectum, and respiratory passages from decay of internal organs; others later still from cancer and unknown diseases. As a bonus, for years afterward thousands of children conceived in the two cities were born with chromosomal and genetic disorders—an added insurance policy against recalcitrant Japanese nationalism.

In five short years between 1940 and 1945 the cycle of violence had come full circle. The Allies began the war vowing that they would not use the techniques of their enemies, but in the end the logic of violence proved irresistible. Their cause was just. Their motives were pure. But the initial cause of war proved immaterial to the way in which the war was finally waged. Once violence was accepted as a means to an end, violence became its own end. Traditional morality was discarded as so much intellectual and spiritual deadweight.

"If [the Japanese] do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth," said President Harry S Truman in his radio broadcast to the nation.7 The nation applauded. A poll in Fortune magazine suggested that almost a quarter of the American public only regretted that more atomic bombs had not been used. Truman, for his part, insisted that after ordering the bombings he went to bed and slept soundly.

The point is not that Allied soldiers lacked moral principles, goodwill, or noble intentions. It is that war has its own will and its own intentions: it refuses to be contained or controlled by mere humanity. Whatever vestiges of decency and restraint America and England possessed at the start of the war gave way to more pragmatic calculations as the war progressed. The sentimental image of American GIs dispensing chocolate bars to German and Japanese children belies the staggering slaughter inflicted, with absolute calculation, on hundreds of thousands of civilians.

All of the mealymouthed arguments dredged up from medieval scholastic theology to vindicate violence for "a just cause"—and particularly World War II—therefore miss the mark. The ethical principles set forth for defending stone castles, if ever valid, were rendered obsolete by the advent of modern war. As Thomas Merton wrote in his essay "Target Equals City":

There is one winner, only one winner in war. The winner is war itself. Not truth, not justice, not liberty, not morality. These are the vanquished. War wins, reducing them to complete submission. He makes truth serve violence and falsehood. He causes justice to declare not what is just but what is expedient as well as cruel. He reduces the liberty of the victorious side to a servitude equal to that of the tyranny which they attacked, in defense of liberty. Though moralists may intend and endeavor to lay down rules for war, in the end war lays down rules for them. . . .War has the power to transmute evil into good and good into evil. Do not fear that he will not exercise this power. Now more than ever he is omnipotent. He is the great force, the evil mystery, the demonic mover of our century, with his globe of sun-fire, and his pillars of cloud. Worship him.8

Notes and References

5. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 782-83.
6. Ibid., 783.
7. McCullough, Truman, 455.
8. Merton, Passion for Peace, 28.