Map and Counters

Because I was away from my computer all day yesterday, I am a bit late in offering a 4^th of July greeting to my regular readers. Nonetheless, better late than never.

Independence Day, 2012

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.

Yesterday was Independence Day; moreover, it was, in fact, the two hundred and thirty-sixth Independence Day since our Country was first founded. For those Americans who actually know something of their history, this national holiday is intended to celebrate and honor the passionate thirst for liberty that, almost two and a half centuries ago, pushed delegates from Britain’s thirteen American Colonies to formally declare those colonies’ newly free and independent from a distant and increasingly tyrannical Parliament and monarchy. This declaration was no small thing; the men who debated and ultimately signed the “Declaration of Independence” had — as they knew only too well — all publicly endorsed treason against the British Crown as their political cause. The often soaring language used by Thomas Jefferson when he penned the controversial document might lift men’s spirits, but it was no protection against Royal reprisals by the British army. And simply by putting pen to paper, each of these delegates knew that he had done more than sign a statement of grievances to be delivered to the English Crown; he had — in both his own eyes and in those of the King — personally and publicly endorsed a formal “writ of rebellion.” Thus, the issuance of the “Declaration of Independence” was also a declaration of war against England; in political terms, it really changed nothing so far as America’s fractured relations with Britain were concerned. On the contrary, Jefferson’s words were intended to spur American patriotic ardor for the inevitable struggle already underway, at least as much as they were meant to rebuke both the British Crown and Parliament. And, of course, many years of suffering and bloody fighting were to follow the issuance of the “Declaration of Independence,” before the former colonies — now called states — would finally succeed in winning, through force of arms, their complete and permanent political separation from England.

Signing of the Declaration of Independence, painting by Jonathan Trumball
Nowadays, widespread popular reverence for both the men who signed the "Declaration of Independence" and the principles for which they were prepared to risk "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" so long ago seem to have largely faded from the public consciousness. In fact, in the eyes of many (but admittedly not all) modern Americans, not only are the backgrounds and motives of the Founders suspect, but the idea that they would lead the thirteen colonies to sever their long connection with the Motherland and risk open warfare with the greatest military power of the time over issues as seemingly trivial (and reasonable, on their face) as the modest new Crown taxes levied first by "The Stamp Act" and later by the "Townshend Act", seems almost incomprehensible to those who now tend to view the steady encroachments of a distant (and unresponsive) federal government on their individual liberties as a natural condition of modern life. Perhaps this is the depressing reality of our times; nonetheless, I find it personally inconceivable that a single one of the fifty-six signatories of the "Declaration of Independence" would agree with such a docile contemporary view. And, more than anything else, their example is the lesson that we modern Americans should take away from the Fourth of July: that liberty is precious only so long as a people value it more than they value their comfort and security; and when they come to prefer their ease and safety to liberty, then it is only a matter of time before they will no longer be free. As Benjamin Franklin, when asked as to what form the government of the newly-independent United States would take, tartly observed: "We have given you a Republic, if you can keep it."

Declaration of Independence Printable Text

Happy Independence Day, and may you all have an enjoyable holiday while, at the same time, taking a little time to reflect on the seminal events that long ago set the course of our forefathers towards war and ultimately independence from Great Britain.

Today, June 14^th, on large and small U.S. Army posts around the world, active duty troops, and their families and friends will — through official ceremonies and in smaller informal gatherings — observe, wherever circumstances permit, the 236^th Anniversary of the founding of the oldest of America’s military branches, the United States Army.

Interestingly, although the modern U.S. Army traces its roots back to 1775 and the Revolutionary War, the Army was not officially established by the Colonial Congress of Confederation until June 14, 1784; moreover, the fledgling Republic was not legally empowered to maintain a ‘regular’, standing army until the adoption of the United States Constitution in 1787.

The U.S. Army, like the country it serves, has undergone a number of profound changes since its founding 236 years ago. The size of the Army during the first years of the American Republic was small; there were two reasons for this: first, the citizens of the new democracy were mistrustful of large standing armies and, more importantly, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were formidable barriers to European meddling in the affairs of the New World. However, history inexorably marches on; not surprisingly, the world and the American Army’s role in that world have both changed dramatically since 1775. Today, the now all-volunteer U.S. Army totals nearly 550,000 officers and enlisted soldiers, of which almost 74,000 are female; furthermore, it is presently supported in its many far-flung and often remote outposts by the more than 240,000 civilian employees of the Department of the Army. One thing about the Army, however, has not changed: its many diverse, present-day missions are still difficult, often dangerous, and always critical to maintaining the security of the American people back home.

Of course, personally being a veteran of the U.S. Army, I am doubtless a little prejudiced on its behalf. Nonetheless, on this the day of the Army’s 236^th Anniversary, I think that it is again worthwhile to remember that on hundreds of battlefields — from Saratoga to Gettysburg; from Omaha Beach to Mosul — American soldiers have fought, and many have died, to secure the blessings of liberty for their own countrymen and, oftentimes, even for other peoples whose languages and customs they did not understand. Thus, because of the countless sacrifices of its soldiers over the years and because of the great good that the American Army has striven to accomplish throughout its history, I salute both the institution of the Army and all those who have worn its uniform, both past and present.

Today, June 14^th, on U.S. Army posts across the globe, active duty troops, and their families and friends will — through official ceremonies and in smaller informal gatherings — observe, wherever circumstances permit, the 235^th Anniversary of the founding of the oldest of America’s military branches, the United States Army.

Interestingly, although the modern U.S. Army traces its roots back to 1775 and the Revolutionary War, the Army was not officially established by the Colonial Congress of Confederation until June 14, 1784; moreover, the fledgling Republic was not legally empowered to maintain a ‘regular’, standing army until the adoption of the United States Constitution in 1787.

The U.S. Army, like the country it serves, has undergone a number of profound changes since its founding 235 years ago. The size of the Army during the first years of the American Republic was small. For one thing, the new democracy had been founded by men who, for the most part, shared a deep mistrust of large standing armies and, not incidentally, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were formidable barriers to European meddling in the affairs of the New World, in any case. However, history inexorably marches on; not surprisingly, the world and the American Army’s role in that world have both changed dramatically since 1775. Today, the now all-volunteer U.S. Army totals nearly 550,000 officers and enlisted soldiers, of which almost 74,000 are female; furthermore, it is presently supported in its many far-flung and often remote outposts by the more than 240,000 civilian employees of the Department of the Army. One thing about the Army, however, has not changed: its many diverse, present-day missions are still difficult, often dangerous, and always critical to maintaining the security of the American people back home.

Of course, personally being a veteran of the U.S. Army, I am doubtless a little prejudiced on its behalf. Nonetheless, on this the day of the Army’s 235^th Anniversary, I think that it is again worthwhile to remember that on hundreds of battlefields — from Saratoga to Gettysburg; from Omaha Beach to Mosul — American soldiers have fought, and many have died, to secure the blessings of liberty for their own countrymen and, oftentimes, even for other peoples whose languages and customs they did not understand. Thus, because of the countless sacrifices of its soldiers over the years and because of the great good that the American Army has striven to accomplish throughout its history, I salute both the institution of the Army and all those who have worn its uniform, both past and present.

First official flag of the United States.

June 14, 2010, marks a signal day in the history of our Republic: In Philadelphia, on 14 June, 1777, the Continental Congress passed a resolution that the American flag should display thirteen stars, thirteen stripes, and that its colors should be red (for strength and courage), white (for purity), and blue (for steadfastness, vigilance and justice). In the years following the American Revolution, a small but increasing number of communities began to commemorate the date of the resolution with locally-mounted ‘Flag Day’ ceremonies. However, it was not until 30 May, 1916, that President Woodrow Wilson declared June 14^th officially to be ‘Flag Day’ throughout the United States. Finally, in 1949, 172 years after the Continental Congress first debated and approved its flag resolution, Congress passed and President Harry S. Truman signed the Act of Congress that legally designated June 14^th as ‘Flag Day’.

Setting the Scene

Awhile back, I received several interesting and thoughtful written comments in response to my post: “THE PACIFIC:” POINT-COUNTERPOINT. Unfortunately, because I was tied up with several other projects at the time, I was not able to respond to those readers as quickly as I might have liked. In any case, these other projects have finally been taken care of, and I can now take the time to offer, I hope, a serious reply. I encourage anyone, by the way, who has not yet seen this set of comments, to visit the original post (AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, PART 3) and its follow-up (“THE PACIFIC”: POINT-COUNTERPOINT) before actually reading this newest installment in this ongoing dialog. That being said, the following extended remarks will attempt to at least touch upon some of the points raised by my readers.

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Greetings to my Two Anonymous Contributors:

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I sincerely appreciate your interest and, most especially, your written contributions; as is always the case, I look forward to thoughtful, well-reasoned commentary from my readers whether we agree or not. My reasons for this, I confess, are selfish. At worst, such discussions force me to refine and clarify my own thinking on a topic; at best, I am occasionally persuaded of the validity of the commentator’s position which, I hope, rewards everyone concerned. In either case, I feel that I am the one who most benefits from the written contributions of this blog’s readers.

Cultural Differences

General Hideki Tojo, Prime Minister of Japan

To begin with, although I may not have expressed my views regarding the ordinary Japanese soldier quite as well as I should have, I think that we are probably all in accord about his unfortunate circumstances. In fact, I do have a certain amount of empathy for the ferocious and determined foe that we faced during the Pacific War. The real tragedy, in my view, was that he and his fellow soldiers — like their civilian counterparts — were sacrificed in truly horrific numbers even after it had become utterly clear to the Tojo government in Tokyo that the tide of battle had turned against Japan, and that the war and the empire were both irretrievably lost. Moreover, it is not my contention that acts of brutality and cruelty were the exclusive province of the armed forces of our enemies; or that compassion and decency resided exclusively with the men who fought with the Allies. In truth, far too much evidence exists that convincingly refutes both points. Instead, my main object in alluding to American magazine covers in my second post was to underscore what I consider to be a significant cultural difference between our main Axis adversaries and ourselves: in the case of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, so far as I can find, official propaganda virtually never presented anything in film, writing, or pictures that might put a human face on the enemy. This basic difference in what a popular (or even a servile) press might think it worthwhile to convey to those on the Home Front, it seems to me, is not a trivial one.

Scene from HBO Series "The Pacific"

Thus, culture, whether on the Home Front or on the front line, matters precisely because I believe that it can serve to inculcate certain distinctively different types of socially-acceptable behavior in the individual. For example, during the Second World War in the Pacific: it is abundantly clear that the way in which the Japanese soldier perceived his duty was — in one way, at least — significantly at variance from that of his American or European counterpart. This difference, of course, was the ordinary Japanese soldier’s willingness to die rather than to accept the ‘shame’ of becoming a prisoner of war. This requirement that a soldier, whatever his circumstances, should always choose death over surrender — at least, from both a historical and a cultural standpoint — was not peculiarly Japanese. What made it uniquely Japanese was that such a personalized ‘warrior ideal’ should be lifted from the past and incorporated, without being altered or even questioned, into a modern military ethos. In one sense, this is a reversal of the popular view of the western versus Japanese fighting man: the American, British or Australian soldier, for example, tended to view his duty in terms of his obligations to his fellow soldiers and to his unit; for the Japanese soldier, like the medieval Samurai, duty in battle was ultimately an idealized expression of extreme individualism. He might belong to a well-disciplined military unit; but, in the end, for the Japanese soldier, all conduct in battle was personal. This suicidal devotion, on the part of the typical Japanese fighting man, to an individual warrior ideal is, justifiably or not, most often directly attributed to the code of Bushido.

Bushido: The Warrior Code

Japanese soldiers after capturing Corregidor

Bushido, itself, is a complicated subject about which I claim no special expertise. Nonetheless, the concept of the ‘warrior monk’, as epitomized by Myamoto Musashi’s peaceful later years of contemplation and writing — after his early life of constant dueling and warfare — is particularly illuminating. Interestingly, this all-encompassing Japanese code of martial conduct is not totally foreign to western military and religious traditions; in fact, it presents more than a few similarities to the underlying creeds of several of the European Crusader orders: most particularly, the Templars and the Hospitallers (Knights of Saint John). And it can reasonably be argued that the code of Bushido — like a number of other ethical and religious systems — has certainly been reshaped by different adherents, at different times, to emphasize or even to justify a great many things that are not actually central to the code, itself. Still, Bushido — at least as it was understood and practiced by the Japanese officer class throughout the early and mid-Twentieth Century — when combined with the peculiarly virulent form of Japanese xenophobia that had grown out of centuries of enforced cultural isolation, was an important factor in guiding the behavior of the Japanese military towards both foreign civilians and prisoners of war.

The Alexandra Hospital and My Lai Massacres: Similarities and Differences

General Yamashita surrenders on Luzon

The issue of crimes committed during wartime is, of course, an unpleasant one; but war crimes are war crimes; whether they are committed by the enemy or by our own troops. However, when the specific and well-documented criminal actions of Japanese soldiers at the Alexandra Hospital or Americans at My Lai 4 — separated in time though they were by more than a generation — are examined honestly; there is still, I think, a pronounced difference in the institutional attitudes of the Imperial Japanese and American militaries towards these types of episodes, and how those attitudes were transmitted up and down the chain-of-command. In the case of the Alexandra Hospital Massacre that occurred after the fall of Singapore in February, 1942, for example, it is important to remember that only about fifty of the patients and staff were murdered on the first day; the remainder, some 150, were held overnight and then bayoneted to death the next morning. This extended time frame suggests two things: that at least some Japanese senior officers had probably been informed of the circumstances at the hospital, and that those officers saw no reason to intercede to prevent further carnage. If General Yamashita apologized to the survivors of the massacre, it probably came as small comfort to the tiny group of fortunate prisoners, as there were only five of them. And as far as I can ascertain, no one in the 18^th Infantry Division was ever punished or even reprimanded because of the incident. Interestingly, despite the well-known facts of the Alexandra episode, General Yamashita was not even charged in his post-war trial for the actions of his troops in Malaya and Singapore, but was brought before a US military tribunal as the senior commander who bore final responsibility for the wide-spread depredations of the Japanese 18^th Army Group in the Philippines. The facts of these crimes, by the way, were so well established that the general’s own defense team did not challenge any of them in their particulars.

General Westmoreland escorting McNamara in Vietnam,  1965.

The Japanese killings at the Alexandra in 1942 and the massacre of Vietnamese civilians, by American troops at My Lai 4 in 1968, are similar, but not identical. Certainly, the appalling behavior of some of the troops from the American 23^rd (Americal) Division at My Lai, in March 1968, was indefensible. The murder of somewhere between 330 and 530 unarmed Vietnamese civilians — virtually all of them, women, children, and old men — was a terrible crime that stained the reputations both of the unit directly responsible and, later, the entire US Army’s chain of command, once the real facts about the massacre began to surface in the months following. No one, from General Westmoreland to Capt. Medina and Lt. Calley, to the officer entrusted with investigating the initial charges of criminal misconduct by ‘Charlie Company’, then Major Colin Powell, emerges from this tragedy with their honor or reputations intact.

Lt. William Calley, entering his courts martial.

I, personally, was in the Republic of South Vietnam at the time of the massacre, but rotated out in August 1968, before the details of the tragic episode had been exposed. Based on my own recollections, however, I can make at least one observation about the background of the incident. And that is that, although it still pains me to say so, even among other Army units stationed far from the Americal’s operations area, the reputation of the 23^rd Division during this period was not good. In fact, while there were thousands of men in the division who served honorably and bravely in Vietnam; nonetheless, the Americal was widely thought to be a dumping ground for every nut job, slacker, and incompetent that other Army units wanted to rid themselves of. Thus, it is my strongly-held opinion that the tragedy at My Lai was not typical of US operations or policy in RVN, but, in retrospect, should be seen instead as a catastrophic failure of training and leadership: a failure that started with the divisional C.O. and extended all the way down to the NCO’s actually in the field.

Forgotten hero of My Lai, helicopter pilot W.O. Hugh Thompson, Jr. (1943-2006), 123rd Aviation Battalion of the 123rd Infantry Division (Americal) and his crew (SP4 Glenn Andreotta and SP4 Lawrence Colburn) were awarded the Soldier's Medal thirty years later in 1998.  His actions at My Lai are included in U.S. and European military ethics manuals.

In spite of the indiscriminate mayhem caused by some green Americal troops at My Lai 4, however, it should be remembered that there were also a few American heroes present, as well as villains. For example, a number of soldiers in Captain Medina’s ‘Charlie Company’ categorically refused — despite the orders of their officers and the jeers and insults of their comrades — to participate in the slaughter of women and children. And a helicopter pilot, W.O. Hugh Thompson, and his crew personally intervened, during the height of the massacre, and managed to save a pitifully small number of Vietnamese from being killed. Interestingly, Thompson was so disgusted by what he saw at My Lai that he took the extraordinary action of ordering his air crew to fire on American soldiers if any of them attempted to interfere with his rescue effort while it was under way.

Representative Morris Udall, of Arizona

The institutional reactions of the chains-of-command of the Imperial Japanese Army and the US Army to the two criminal incidents are also instructive. In the case of the Japanese Army, nothing was done to redress or, in any way, to alter the behavior of its troops; in the case of the American Army, after strenuous efforts at covering the incident up, action belatedly came; and that action — initially, at least — focused on the commanders whose various failures had made the massacre possible. Admittedly, this response was not immediate. Many in the Army’s chain-of-command, in fact, did everything they could to bury the sordid facts surrounding the My Lai 4 operation. On an institutional level this was probably understandable, if reprehensible. I personally remember that, given the political tenor of the time, many in the US Army had developed something of a ‘siege mentality’; thus, it can be argued that it was probably only the personal intervention of Representative Morris Udall that finally forced the Department of the Army to proceed with a second, more rigorous and independent investigation of the crimes committed at My Lai than the Americal Division’s initial “white wash” of the incident. This second investigation led, although several years had passed, to formal charges being lodged against the commanding general of the 23^rd, the brigade commander — under whom Medina’s company served — Captain Medina, Lieutenant Calley, and dozens of others of various ranks who had played a direct role in the killings at My Lai.

Captain Ernest Medina

In the end, the Vietnamese victims of My Lai received little more justice than those unfortunates who had died at the Alexandra Hospital. General Yamashita was hanged, but for the crimes his soldiers committed in the Philippines, not for the massacre of the innocents at the Alexandra. The only individual actually punished because of My Lai, Lt. Calley, served only three years of his sentence, and even those he did under house arrest. Everyone else associated with the My Lai tragedy either had the charges against them quietly dropped, as was the case of the 23^rd Division’s commanding officer; or, in the case of Captain Medina, was acquitted of all charges. It is a further stain on the military justice system that, when Medina admitted after his trial that he had withheld evidence and perjured himself to gain his acquittal, additional charges were not immediately brought against him for these separate crimes. By this time, I think, everyone just wanted the story to go away. Nonetheless, one important point needs to be emphasized: the Imperial Japanese Army did not moderate the recurrent cruelty of its troops because its senior leadership saw nothing wrong with that behavior; senior officers within the US Army may have attempted to conceal the facts about My Lai, but they did so because they recognized the indefensible criminality of the episode in the eyes of the public, at large. Unlike their Imperial counterparts, they at least understood that what had happened at My Lai 4 was more than embarrassing, it was deeply shameful.

General Colin Luther Powell, then Major, was assistant chief of staff of operations for the Americal Division.

Although no one but Lt. Calley was ever punished directly for the crimes at My Lai 4, the results from the investigation into the massacre did, at least, lead to significant changes within the 23^rd Division; more importantly — fairly or unfairly — they also damaged or ruined a number of careers within the Army. Ironically, the only officer intimately involved with the initial 23^rd Division cover-up, Colin Powell, managed to escape untainted: ultimately rising to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and then Secretary of State. Finally, the fallout from My Lai did accomplish one additional good; after the facts emerged, new operational policies and guidelines were instituted or strengthened throughout the American military to encourage and, if necessary, enforce legal conduct on the battlefield. One massacre was one too many; so, the word went out to every combat unit on the ground in Vietnam: there were to be no more My Lai’s, ever again. There weren’t.

The Historical Revisionists

Turning now to a less troubling topic: it seems clear that, on the subject of ‘historical revisionism’, we are at least partly in agreement. And in so far as Gar Alperovitz is concerned, he is probably no worse than any of a number of counterfactual historians and political-economists, on both the Left and the Right, who feel compelled to revisit events and decisions about which none of us can really ever have a complete understanding. Do I personally wish that President Truman had not believed that circumstances compelled him to use atomic bombs against Japan? Of course, I do. On the other hand, I also regret, with equal irrelevance but with the benefit of perfect hindsight, the fact that the Allies bombed the ancient monastery at Monte Cassino because they erroneously thought German artillery spotters were concealed there. In both cases, these are easy opinions to hold — now; but, I suspect, they would have been much more unlikely views to have held then; particularly, if I had been one of the men who had just survived the ‘meat-grinder’ that was Okinawa, and was next slated to land against the Japanese Home Islands; or, if I had spent months slogging through the Italian mud in the shadow of the Gustav Line, under constant bombardment from German artillery.

Existential Threats: Real or Imagined?

Where — in our ongoing dialog — we disagree most, I think, is in our respective views of the seriousness of the ‘existential threat’ posed to the rest of the world by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II. This war, at its core, was about much more than past national grievances — real or imagined; or even about territorial expansion, at the expense of the two totalitarian regimes’ weaker neighbors. It was also about a clash between two essentially incompatible world views: one quasi-medieval and militaristic; the other, more modern, more culturally diverse, and much less regimented. This, by the way, is probably the one parallel between the war in the Pacific and the war against militant Islam that Mr. Hanks got, at least partly, right. Obviously, the major exception to this formula, the Soviet Union, ended up aligning with the western democracies out of necessity and not because of any shared goals other than the defeat of Germany. That having been said, let us briefly consider each of the two major Axis partners, in turn.

First, I acknowledge that, at least in the eyes of the leaders in Tokyo, Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia in the 1930’s and 40’s probably seemed justified, economically worthwhile, and militarily feasible. And it also had, without doubt, a racial component as well. Rightly or wrongly, many in the Japanese government and military, both prior to and during the war in the Pacific, viewed Japan's post-World War I role in Asia as that of a counter-balance to unwelcome European (white) regional influence. Thus, in the eyes of post-war apologists like Col. Masanobu Tsuji, the architect of the Japanese Malaya Campaign, the forces of Imperial Japan were not opportunistically grabbing European possessions in Asia during the early days of World War II, while the colonial powers were distracted by the far-off war in Europe; instead, Japan was unselfishly helping the 'colored' peoples of Asia throw off the bonds of 'white' colonial oppression. The fact that Japanese 'liberation' of native peoples from their European or American masters invariably led to much harsher, more exploitative military regimes than those of the 'white' colonialists that the Japanese replaced, seems curiously absent from post-war historical recollections of this type. Self-serving fantasies of Japanese altruism aside, however, there were clearly numerous examples of European and American colonialism in Southeast Asia that could be used to justify Japan's thinly-veiled imperial ambitions. These examples, however, did not change the fact that the Japanese desire for an empire was already almost a century too late. The tide of history, contrary to the arguments of Col. Tsuji and his counterparts, had already begun to run against colonialism even before the outbreak of World War II, and virtually all of the ‘Great Powers’ were beginning to see the first signs that their colonial trophies were inexorably slipping away. Moreover, post-war events have shown that, even if colonialism had not already been in decline, Japanese assumptions about their nation’s economic destiny would still have been wrong. Unfortunately, the militarists, who had steadily grown in influence since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, viewed the world much like a toddler with a hammer: the solution to every one of Japan’s economic and geo-political problems was to pound away at them. The end result of this, in my opinion, was that until the militarists in Tokyo were defeated and utterly humiliated, continued Japanese armed aggression against its Asian neighbors was inevitable.

The effect of World War II on China, of course, is the great imponderable. The Sino-Japanese War had festered since 1931 and showed no sign of abating in December of 1941.  Strangely, the Chinese seemed obstinately ungrateful to Japan for its anti-colonial efforts on behalf of the peoples of Asia. In reality, the war in China had quickly become an unending drain on Japanese resources and manpower; a war that Japan could not seem to win, but which it could not afford to lose. With Japan's surrender to the Allies in August 1945, Japan's Chinese adventure abuptly ended.  However, in so far as the post-war power balance in Asia between Japan and China is concerned: the rise of Mao Tse Tung and the communists or some other popular revolutionary alternative — given the wide-spread corruption, internal political divisions, and general ineptitude of the Kuomintang — was probably unavoidable, whether Japan was defeated or not. World War II or no, China was ripe for change, and outsiders were probably in no position to substantially influence either the trajectory or the substance of that change.

Prime Minister Édouard Daladier with Mussolini and Hitler at the Munich Conference.

Germany is a special case. Rarely, before or since, has a modern western nation-state so completely and determinedly repudiated both the best of its cultural traditions and its modern political institutions and — in a perverse exercise of the electoral will — instead chosen to exchange those things, imperfect though they might have been, for a noxious totalitarian form of quasi-barbarism. Even Mussolini’s fascists, obsessed as they were with restoring the first Roman Empire, did not attempt the transformative, all-intrusive type of social revolution in Italy that the National Socialists achieved in Germany. Churchill, in the course of his long career, was wrong about a great many things; but about Hitler and Nazism, he was most certainly right. Any long-term coexistence by the western democracies with the Third Reich was impossible; such a situation could only lead to one of two ultimate outcomes: political submission or war. No other alternatives were possible. Once Hitler had gained absolute power, there was no going back: a European war might be postponed, but it could not be avoided. Moreover, by the outbreak of World War II in September, 1939, this unfortunate state of international affairs no longer even had much to do directly with the German people, who — at least as much as the populations of Poland, France, and England — fervently hoped for peace. Tragically for Europe, both the ideology and the state apparatus of the Third Reich were focused on the acquisition of lebensraum through military conquest; and along with it, the enslavement or eradication of all those deemed “racially inferior.” Whether a long period of post-war peace might have gradually ameliorated the worst excesses of Nazism is difficult to say; what is easy to say, however, is that millions of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Russians, as well as hundreds of thousands of other ‘undesirables’ would not have been around to see it, if such a change did occur. As Heinrich Heine wrote, in 1821: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.” Heine was addressing the excesses of the Inquisition when he wrote those words; it is doubtful that he could have even begun to imagine the excesses of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

Final Thoughts

In a few months, it will be the seventy-first anniversary of the start of the Second World War. No war, before or since, can match this conflict for its sheer scale, for its destructiveness, or for its almost unbelievable and unrestrained ferocity. How many people actually perished as a direct result of World War II will never be known with any great degree of certainty, but given the scope and duration of this worldwide conflagration, estimates of sixty to seventy millions do not seem unrealistic. Thus, the war that officially began on 1 September, 1939, is a tragedy, the dimensions of which are still almost impossible to grasp.

Prime Minister Chamberlain after the Munich Conference; Hitler gets the Sudentenland, Great Britain gets "peace in our time."

Given the magnitude of the disaster brought about by the Second World War, it was probably inevitable that many post-war historians would feel compelled to search for villains on whom to fix blame. Unfortunately and probably undeservedly, the targets of this post-war criticism have not always been Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo; instead, they have too often been well-meaning democratic leaders like Édouard Daladier of France and Neville Chamberlain of England. Both statesmen were confronted at Munich with a terrible choice: to abandon their peoples’ desperate hope for a sustainable European peace or to abandon Czechoslovakia; they chose to abandon the Czechs. In the view of skeptics like Churchill who mistrusted Hitler, this was a catastrophic mistake; in the judgment of the vast majority of Frenchmen and Englishmen at the time, it was perceived as a miraculous reprieve from a ghastly repeat of the carnage of the ‘Great War’. In the long view of history, of course, it was Churchill and not popular opinion in the western democracies that ultimately proved to be correct.

Certainly, the western democracies were lethargic and even naïve in their dealings with the threat of fascism; but it is hard to see how, given the widespread popular opposition to military confrontation generally or even towards serious efforts at rearmament in France and England, that much could really have been done. In retrospect, the German remilitarization of the Rhineland, by a small contingent of German soldiers on bicycles two years before Munich, might well have been the perfect opportunity for the French and English to derail Hitler’s political adventurism. Regrettably, such action was rendered improbable by the unstable, pre-election political climate in France, and by the notable, if inexplicable, lack of concern within the British Government about Germany’s serial violations of the Versailles Treaty. Moreover, the passage of the ‘Neutrality Act’ in 1935 by the US Congress guaranteed that the European democracies could expect little, if any, help from the United States if war with Germany did come. Thus, in terms of international statecraft during the 1930’s, it truly can be argued that “the road to Hell was paved with good intentions.”

In the end, the fact that the great majority of the world’s people wanted peace — including those in Germany, Italy, and Japan — had little effect on the decisions of those on whom peace actually depended. By the late 1930’s, what the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan were determined to obtain from neighboring countries could no longer be gained except through war; so war, sooner or later, would have had to come. Undoubtedly, Hitler’s stunning early conquests in Europe appeared to create a once-in-a-generation chance for easy territorial gains for Germany’s Axis partners; and thus, it is hardly surprising that the temptations created by those German victories spurred first Italy, and then Imperial Japan to enter the war when they did. But it is also inconceivable that — given Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa and the Balkans, and Japan’s expansionist plans for Southeast Asia — that both nations would not, at some point, have come into conflict with France, England, or the United States. Finally, we are all left with the history of actual events, not the history of what might have been; in that sense, given the alternative, I remain thankful that the Second World War, inconclusive though it might have been in some regards, ended the way that it did. An Axis victory, or even some sort of negotiated stalemate, would, I think, have been an epic blow to civilization both then and now.

My Response to a Reader’s Thought-Provoking Rebutal of My Essay on HBO’S “The Pacific”

Soon after I published a rambling critique of the HBO miniseries “The Pacific,” I was pleased to receive the following very well-written and carefully-reasoned response to several of the issues that I had raised in my post: ‘And Now for Something Completely Different, Part 3’. The commentator presents a number of interesting arguments in rebuttal to several of the points that I had brought forward in my wide-ranging essay about Tom Hanks, ‘historical revisionism’, and the HBO series that Hanks and Spielberg produced. Originally, as I usually do, I had planned on dashing off a reply in the ‘comments section’ to my anonymous critic, but upon reflection, I have decided to expand my remarks and to post them as a regular blog entry. These remarks are presented in very much the same form as if they were in a direct email to this thoughtful commentator.

Here is the comment to which my response replies:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, PART 3...":

LeMay said it best: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal."

What was a clear violation of the Hague Conventions in early 1940 (a British Admiral refused to shell a German position in Norway due to the great potential of civilian casualties) became de-riguer in 1944-45.

(FWIW like you I see nothing wrong with this and a utilitarian analysis tells me the USAAF's area bombing, including the two nukes, were in all likelihood necessary if not sufficient to getting Japan to surrender to our terms cleanly, as opposed to the grinding mess we had to go through in Germany).

A lot of blood flowed under the bridge to get the national psyche there. The brutal bombing of The Blitz -- as Germany's ally and partner in crime, Japan received our enmity in transference.

The suicidal resistance we encountered every step of the way. The brutal mistreatment of our POWs and our Philippine friends we fully discovered in late 1944.

The payback we wanted to exact for Japan's brutal prosecution of their attacks on China.

A lot of our killing of Japanese civilians was done not regretfully but rather eagerly.

I think you have a comic-book view of the reality of WW2.

There was great racism directed against Japanese in the US prior to WW2. California and the US had passed an exclusion act against Japanese immigrants in the 1920s, something the 1941 diplomacy was looking at repealing as part of the reaching a modus vivendi.

The Japanese farmer's boy who did the bulk of the fighting and dying didn't know bushido from Bluto. His officers were inculcated in this tradition, they beat this into the NCOs, which in turn beat the idea of total obedience to the divine chain of command into their charges.

My grandfather was born in 1911 in rural Washington and he didn't rush out on Dec 8 to enlist. He finally did in 1943 as the Marines were getting pretty beat up.

FWIW, I think everyone was a victim in WW2. The Japanese pro-war militants, for being pigheaded fools trapped in their glory-seeking such that they failed to fully weigh the attendant risks of their actions, and everyone forced to fight and die for their country, and the millions of civilian dead from Burma to Peiping.

It was a crazy time, a time when revisionists thought they could bring back the 19th century norms of truculent politics into the mid-20th.

I don't think the current friction we have with the islamic world is anything close to this, any more than the Irish question was like WW2.

There may be a billion muslims, but this makes the situation more stable I think, over the long run.

Posted by Anonymous to Map and Counters at March 22, 2010 1:00 AM

Greetings Anonymous:

Thank your for your interesting, if challenging comments; it is always reassuring to a blogger like me to know that someone out there in the ‘internet ether’ — whether they agree or disagree with my occasionally eccentric musings — actually makes the effort both to read and then to respond to something that I have written. I sincerely appreciate your taking the time to share your views.

Based on your thoughtful and serious response to my post on the Spielberg-Hank’s production, “The Pacific,” I suspect that — at least, insofar as both the historical context and the major events of World War II are concerned — we probably agree about more than we disagree. In fact, it is possible that the majority of the questions that you raise are as much a product of my imperfect choice of language as of anything else. In any case, let me clarify a few points that, had this essay been more artfully written, might not have been quite so open to criticism.

Mixed in with your earlier remarks, you suggest that my sense of the national mood just after America’s entry into the war may be a little overblown. Perhaps, but I really don’t think so. I do acknowledge that once the initial wave of national shock and anger in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor dissipated in the months following the bombing of the Pacific Fleet, the vast majority of Americans gradually settled into a grudging, rather than enthusiastic, acceptance of the many changes that the war imposed on everyday life. However, it is also incontrovertible that prior to the Japanese attack, the vast majority of the population was certainly not clamoring to fight on behalf of the captive peoples in Europe or the Far East. Even Edward R. Morrow’s reportage on the German’ Blitz’ of London, and the photo essays on the victorious march of the Wehrmacht through Europe or the Japanese depredations against the Chinese in popular publications of the day like ‘LOOK’ and ‘LIFE’ magazines had been unable to significantly gin-up American public opinion. In fact, according to Gallup, just prior to the Japanese attack, well over 60% of Americans were strongly opposed to going to war with anyone; more interesting still, even after Pearl Harbor, perhaps as much as 17% of the population still opposed going to war against Germany and Japan. Thus, Pearl Harbor, if it did nothing else, dramatically changed popular attitudes, even if it did not completely expunge natural concerns about what entry into the war would mean. And popular worries were certainly justified, even for those who fought the war on the ‘Home Front’.

To begin with, things changed almost immediately, and not always for the better. Well-paying jobs, of course, became plentiful for the first time in over a decade. However, while the typical civilian worker may have been happy to have steady employment at a defense plant, he or she was also probably unhappy about the very real inconveniences imposed by rationing, chronic shortages in hitherto common goods, blackout regulations, and conscription. And certainly after the first wave of enlistments following America’s entry into the war, millions of young men — rather than rushing to sign up — were content to wait until they were called up in the draft. Nonetheless, I would argue that the war still affected the national psyche like no conflict since the Civil War. Was there a massive effort by both the government and the national media to propagate and promote patriotic themes? Of course, there was. And did war-weariness gradually begin to seep into the national consciousness as first the months, and then the years passed, and more and more ‘Blue Star’ mothers became ‘Gold Star’ mothers? Most certainly; it could hardly have been otherwise. Yet, World War II still represented a monumental and even transformative national experience. People picked-up and moved, oftentimes across country, in order to find jobs in the rapidly expanding war industry and they never went back to their original homes once the war was over. In short, the entire country changed, and changed forever.

We appear to differ as to degree, but not in terms of actual substance, on another issue. You point out, quite correctly, that the ordinary Japanese soldier would have had little real understanding of the traditional teachings of Bushido. This is a valid point. Japanese martial conduct was inculcated through rigorous training and constant indoctrination and was not a product of informed study on the part of the lower ranks. So, I grant you that the actual text of Miyamoto Musashi’s Seventeenth Century martial masterpiece, ‘The Book of the Five Rings’ would have been, I am sure, quite unfamiliar except by reputation to most of the men who fought for the Emperor during World War II; yet I would nonetheless argue that these precepts and the ancient warrior traditions of Bushido still shaped the conduct of Japan’s military in important and unfortunate ways. It was not, after all, Japanese officers and NCO’s, but ordinary soldiers, who went through military hospitals in Singapore — following the British surrender of the island fortress — bayoneting the wounded soldiers and medical staff that they found there. Moreover, this was not a regrettable, undisciplined aberration, but a continuation of the same types of military conduct that had been seen time and time again in Japan’s war with China. The ordinary Japanese soldier might not have known the subtleties of the creed that animated his leaders, but he certainly understood what was expected of him.

It was, by the way, interesting to see that you opened your commentary with a quote from the architect of the World War II American bombing campaign against Japan, USAAF General Curtis LeMay. His “war crimes” comment, discomforting though it may be, is simply a confirmation of the inarguable truth that the histories of all wars are largely written by the winners. Moreover, he was in a position to know about that of which he spoke: there is little doubt that LeMay’s strategy of area bombing Japanese cities was a calculated attempt to destroy the will of the Japanese people to continue the war. That it was seen as ruthless and controversial even by some within the US Government is inarguable. On the other hand, given the fact that — by the time of the battle for Okinawa — the Imperial high command had already begun extensive preparations for a last-ditch defense of the Japanese Home Islands against an Allied invasion that envisaged sacrificing their own civilian population in what was certain to be an act of national suicide, it is hard to see that LeMay really had many acceptable alternatives. It is, by the way, ironic that the cigar-chomping LeMay is today associated with the devastating and much-criticized air campaign against Japan, and almost no one remembers that the blunt-talking general was also the organizer and moving force behind the Berlin Airlift.

On one issue we do seem to differ. When it comes to the destructiveness and sheer ferocity of the war in the Pacific versus that in Europe, unlike you, I can really see no appreciable difference. The British may have been, as you point out, a little squeamish about the conduct of the war in its early stages, but once the survival of England was at stake, virtually all such considerations went ‘over the side’. The Vichy French Fleet, for example, was attacked by the British Mediterranean Fleet on 3 July 1940 while anchored at Mers el Kébir in Algeria; this patently illegal bombardment of a neutral country’s naval forces resulted in the sinking of three French battleships and the deaths of over 1,000 French seamen. Given the threat of a German controlled French fleet, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, showed no hesitation at all in ordering this attack against sailors who only a few months before had been England’s allies. Moreover, the air war between England and Germany showed little inclination by either side to avoid or even to minimize civilian casualties. Sadly, very soon after the fall of France, both British and German air force planners switched their emphasis from military to civilian targets; thus, the change in the Allied attitude towards civilian casualties actually occurred long before the more intensive air campaigns against Germany in 1943-45. In fact, the British Air Marshal, “Bomber” Harris, wasted little time — once he had the government’s approval — in changing over to night area attacks against German cities so as to conserve the British bomber force and its desperately-needed flight crews. For better or for worse, in the eyes of the British high command, the indiscriminate bombing of population centers was virtually the only strategic tool that the English had with which to strike back at the Third Reich. If there was significantly more soul-searching among the leaders of the air campaign against Germany than among those who led the air war against Japan, I have not been able to find it. As a final thought on the air war, given the Allied emphasis on a “Germany First” strategy for World War II: I have every confidence that had Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive been wildly successful, then Berlin rather than Hiroshima would have been the primary target for the first American atomic bomb.

In another part of your commentary, you suggest that I at least partially ignore the wide-spread anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States both before and during World War II. Although that was not my intent, I can understand how my poor choice of language could lead a reader to that conclusion. Nonetheless, as I conceded in my original essay: there was certainly a racial dimension to the bitter fighting that raged across the Pacific. My only point was that, if anything, it was culturally even more ingrained in the ordinary Japanese soldier than in the young marine who faced him. Nonetheless, the fact remains that those Japanese dwelling in the United States, like any number of other ‘suspect’ ethnic groups, suffered as a result of prejudice before the war, and from a very real and wide-spread racial animus after Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans was a regrettable and unjust overreaction to events in the Pacific. However, this treatment was not unique to the Japanese: the US Government had previously demonstrated no qualms, whatsoever, about abusing the Constitutional rights of German-Americans or of any others, for that matter, that the Wilson Administration had deemed as either unreliable or insufficiently patriotic during World War I. Clearly, it was a different time; the America of the early and mid-Twentieth century was simply not the same place than it is today.

At one point, you allude to my “comic-book” attitude towards the events of World War II. From this comment I can only infer that you view my arguments a being too critical of the Japanese, too biased in favor of the American marines, and not particularly nuanced when it comes to a world cataclysm that, when it was finally over, had consumed some sixty to seventy million lives. It is, of course, possible that I am predisposed because of my personal history and background to see the wartime conduct of the ordinary American serviceman in a more favorable light than someone else looking at the same events or the same set of facts. Fair enough; honesty compels me to at least grant that possibility. On the other hand, everything that I have seen and read, as well as my own experiences as a soldier in Vietnam tell me that, in the wars of the “American Century,” there have usually been profound differences between the way in which we have treated our enemies and the way that they have treated us. And that those differences have almost always redounded to America’s credit. So, in keeping with the “comic-book” metaphor, I offer a link to two photographs each used for a different cover of “LIFE’ magazine as visual illustrations as to why my faith in the basic decency of the ordinary American serviceman or woman remains unshakeable. Both photographs were taken by W. Eugene Smith in the Pacific during World War II: one was taken in Saipan in 1943; the other during the battle for the Marianas, in 1944. (Life magazine cover photos show a US Marine rescuing a Japanese baby, Saipan June 1943 and navy corpsman treating wounded Japanese soldier, Marianas, 1944.)
Both show, I hope, that despite the harrowing carnage of these different battlefields, the essential spark of humanity and compassion still managed to survive in the hearts of these ordinary American servicemen. In over forty years of reviewing various photo archives, I have yet to locate any comparable photographs of similar acts of compassion by German soldiers toward their Russian enemies, or of Japanese soldiers toward any non-Japanese babies or enemy wounded.

As you observe, war is a tragic, terrible business; but it is also a business that we, as human beings, seem either unable or unwilling to abandon. The war in the Pacific was, for the most part, fought over patches of ground that the majority of soldiers on both sides had never heard of and about which they didn’t care; they simply went where they were told and did, in so far as each was capable, what they were there for. It is easy, looking back on long-past, distant battlefields to confuse the sordid ugliness of the means by which wars are fought with their outcomes. By this logic, everyone from the luckless civilians suddenly buried under the rubble of their collapsed house, to the SS officer who presided over the massacre of American POW’s at Malmédy, to the Japanese guards who bayoneted American and Philippino prisoners during the Bataan “Death March,” were all victims. This, I think, is a gross mistake; the outcome of the Second World War mattered profoundly for both sides; and because the Allies finally won, everyone, despite the extraordinary expenditures of blood and treasure, lives in a different and, I would argue, a better world because of it.

When I was growing up, virtually every male member of my family, except for two uncles who had been classified as ‘4 F’, had served in either the Pacific or in Europe. In those days, being a veteran was not an oddity; it was the rule. And, to a person: my father, my many uncles, and all of their friends still believed and were not hesitant in proclaiming — without a hint of self-consciousness — that theirs’ had been a righteous cause, and that they had played a small part in overthrowing the greatest existential menace of their age.

Ruminations on HBO’s “The Pacific,” the War against Japan, and Historical Revisionism

On Tuesday evening, 16 March, the first episode of the much-anticipated Tom Hanks-Steven Spielberg production, “The Pacific,” debuted on HBO. I don’t know what the initial viewership was, but I do know that HBO had been intensively promoting the new series for months. From the very beginning of this promotional campaign, however, this production about the Pacific War had been billed as being a genuine departure from the earlier, superbly-realized Hanks-Spielberg miniseries for HBO, “Band of Brothers.” This project, it was claimed, was going to break with many of the forms of the earlier, highly-successful wartime narrative. The war against Japan, producer Tom Hanks argued, had been extraordinary in its cruelty, mercilessness, and ferocity. For this reason, the actor-producer continued, “The Pacific” had been envisioned as something very different from the previous story of American paratroopers in Europe; in short, it could not and would not simply be “Band of Brothers” with sandy beaches and coconut palms.

These initial comments and the kerfuffle over Tom Hanks’ attempt to link the current war against militant Islam with wartime events in the Pacific almost seventy years ago, I confess, worried me a little; but the early previews of the series, like its subject matter, nonetheless intrigued me. Thus, by the time the first episode finally aired, I had been looking forward to this historical docudrama for some time. And not just because I thought that “Band of Brothers” had been extremely well done, which I had; but also because the producers claimed that this new HBO project was based on the actual, unvarnished wartime experiences of several real marines. This was, I thought, an idea that was long overdue: the true stories of the men who fought in the Pacific needed a contemporary and honest retelling, particularly since so many years had passed since the end of World War II, and those who had been lucky enough to survive the many harrowing, bloody island battles against the Japanese were rapidly passing from the scene.

Maj. James Stewart is presented with the Distinguished Flying Cross by Col Ramsey Potts for combat over Germany, 1944

The first episode of "The Pacific," not surprisingly, begins with a portion of President Roosevelt's iconic "Date that will Live in Infamy" speech announcing the war with Japan. With the president's words fading with the opening credits, the narrative quickly moves on to introduce and then to follow the separate but converging stories of a handful of ordinary young Americans — each from different backgrounds and from different parts of the country — who, like the rest of their countrymen, are suddenly catapulted into an unwanted war by the underhanded and "dastardly" Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, 1941. This is, perhaps, one of the weakest elements of the early narrative. The tone conveyed by “The Pacific” about the attitudes of everyday Americans towards their own unanticipated and unwanted involvement in a global war is both overly lugubrious and strangely detached. There is no real attempt in this first installment of the series to convey the national outrage that animated every aspect of American life following the sneak attack on Hawaii; no sense of the tectonic shift in popular attitudes from New York City to Hollywood, and from Fort Lauderdale to Detroit that accompanied the nation’s rapid mobilization for the life and death struggle in which it now found itself. Instead, in “The Pacific,” things seem to plod along with an odd air of normalcy: people go to church, they speak soberly and regretfully about the sacrifices that must be made, but nowhere do they speak with convincing passion about the righteousness of the war against Japan, or of their commitment to an ultimate victory. Of course, there are nine episodes yet to air, so this may change; nonetheless, it seems odd that the series, so far at least, fails to display the galvanic spirit of national unity and commitment to victory that led even Hollywood stars like Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, and Jimmy Stewart to abandon their flourishing careers in movies to enlist in the crusade against America’s totalitarian enemies. Only the character who plays legendary Marine Colonel Lewis Puller speaks about the justice and the vital necessity of the task ahead, and of the terrible retribution that the Japanese, having chosen war, must now endure.

US marines landing on Guadacanal

Once the first episode moves on to “Operation Watchtower” — the invasion of the Solomon’s in August of 1942 — it rapidly regains both its momentum and its historical footing. The ordinary marine’s eye view of the Battle for Guadalcanal is generally convincing and emotionally engaging: the helplessness, seasickness, and fear of an amphibious run into an enemy beach; the oppressive, nerve-racking nature of jungle warfare; and the violent combat sequence that takes place near the end of this first episode are, as was the case with “Band of Brothers,” all harrowingly realistic. However, even here there are a few minor problems with the story. First, despite the best efforts of the production’s make-up crew, the marine riflemen all continue to look far too healthy as the campaign for Guadalcanal wears on. In reality, the combination of tropical heat and debilitating diseases tended to turn the ordinary marine — once he had been on the line for any length of time — into a gaunt, hollow-eyed shadow of his former self. Malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, and infections from minor wounds all combined, in fact, to inflict more casualties on the American forces than combat with the enemy. This is what made the fighting in the Pacific so grindingly miserable: not only did the ordinary marine have to contend with a ruthless and implacable foe, he also had to deal with the truly awful conditions under which he lived and fought. To be fair, these are all relatively minor criticisms when balanced against the dramatic sweep of the whole series. However, another far more important hint of future trouble in the narrative of “The Pacific” emerges near the end of the series’ first installment: that of historical revisionism.

When the sun rises on the first morning following their climactic firefight with the Japanese, the surviving marines in the story are greeted by an amazing and grisly sight: hundreds of enemy dead blanket the jungle floor and the open beach near their defensive position. This is the aftermath of the desperate battle of the preceding night. It is also the point at which a disturbing moral ambivalence begins to emerge out of the imagery and dialogue of the series. This detour into moral ambiguity begins when two Americans are killed — in what appears, to the other marines nearby, to be an incomprehensible act of duplicity — by the same wounded Japanese soldier that they are attempting to unselfishly help. This tragic and shocking event is followed almost immediately by an oddly contrived scene in which the murdered good Samaritans’ fellow marines are conveniently presented with an opportunity to torment an unarmed and helpless Japanese soldier. The unlucky victim is repeatedly wounded by different jeering riflemen until, disgusted by the pointless cruelty of his fellow marines, one of the series’ protagonists shoots the enemy soldier to end his suffering. Putting aside the fact that the M1903 Springfield Rifle (later replaced by the M1 Garand) fired a 30-06 round, and that minor flesh wounds from this rifle, because of the ballistic characteristics of its ammunition, were a virtual impossibility: even a bullet impact to the shoulder or arm — because of the tissue damage and hydrostatic shock caused by the impacting bullet — would have been enough to knock the hapless Japanese soldier right off his feet. There is another, more troubling aspect to this imagery as well.

Destroyed SBD after air attack on Henderson Field, Guadacanal, 1942

The not-so-subtle message from these two back-to-back scenes is clear: the Japanese and American fighting men who faced each other during the Pacific War — in terms of their cultural biases, battlefield behavior, and basic morality — were essentially the same. Tom Hanks is not the first person to spark recent controversy by talking about World War II in these terms. In fact, this argument on behalf of ‘moral equivalency’ and the shared guilt of both the Axis and the Allies for the millions of dead, and the enormous destruction and suffering caused by the Second War has become steadily more main-stream in the last few years. Writers as different as political pundit, Patrick Buchanan, and ‘counterfactual’ historian, Niall Ferguson, have both proposed variations on this revisionist theme. Given this fact, it was probably only a matter of time before some version of this alternative view of history should find its way into the script for an HBO miniseries. And despite the fact that “The Pacific” is mainly intended for entertainment, this kind of ‘hyper-modern’ historical message is both deceptive and pernicious, nonetheless. Of course, to understand the potential harm that can come out of such a theory, it is necessary to understand it, at least in its broad outlines.

Patrol on Guadacanal

In simplest terms, the ‘moral equivalency’ historical thesis proposes that World War II should be viewed from the standpoints of both the Axis leadership and the Allied heads of government who opposed them. Thus, at its core, this more nuanced view of world events is rooted in a cynical, barely-concealed admiration for ruthless ‘realpolitik’ writ large. History, proponents of this approach argue, is the product of the actions of political actors, and those actors can be understood purely in terms of their national geopolitical interests. Wars, they continue, arise when one or more political actors ignore their national self-interest in favor of some other consideration. Moreover, because wars, by their very nature, are terrible in their brutality and destructiveness, it is both pointless and dishonest to weigh the wartime actions of one side against those of the other other on any kind of 'moral scale'.

USMC Map Guadalcanal

Thus, in addressing the lead-up to the war in Europe in 1939, the revisionist argument typically goes something like this: the Versailles Treaty created the necessary preconditions for the Second World War; if the victorious Allies had been more solicitous of Imperial Germany in 1919, then the Weimar Republic would not have collapsed and Hitler would never have gained power. However, once the Nazis did come to control Germany, the western democracies should have accommodated Hitler and allowed the Third Reich to expand, unimpeded, at the expense of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. Where Mussolini’s African and Balkan ambitions for a reborn Roman Empire fit into this calculus is seldom discussed. In any case, this cringing, non-confrontational style of diplomacy, it is suggested, would have encouraged the two great dictatorships on the European Continent (Germany and Russia) to expend their blood and treasure against each other, rather than against the studiously neutral nations of the west. As to the ruthlessly authoritarian and 'quaint' racial theories of the Nazis: things might have been bad for the populations of Germany’s newly-conquered territories and really bad for a few million Jews, Gypsies, and other racial undesirables; on the other hand, the rest (or at least some) of Europe would have been spared a world war. And besides, the argument goes: the Germans did not even formally institute the legal and operational underpinnings for the ‘Final Solution’ until the Wannasee Conference in January of 1942. By which time, it should be noted, almost every Jew in Poland and the Baltic States had already been exterminated. Nonetheless, the revisionists still contend that had Churchill not been such a stubborn anti-Nazi and determined warmonger, there might never even have been a Jewish holocaust.

Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo

The hyper-modern view of pre-war Imperial Japan, not surprisingly, tends to hold to the same general themes as that of its European counterpart. Thus, war with Japan, it is argued, had its origins (at least partly) in the post-World War I redistribution of Germany’s colonial possessions in the Pacific. Japan’s political and military leadership (really the same thing, by the late 1920's), rightly or wrongly felt that they had been slighted by the western Allies. Thus, the argument goes: a future war was made inevitable because of unreasonable and ill-advised opposition on the part of the western colonial powers to Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia. The Empire of Japan desperately needed resources that it did not control domestically to fuel a modern industrial economy; therefore, it was only natural that Japan’s leaders look for ways to bring those resources under Imperial control. Moreover, Japan’s subsequent invasion and interminable war against the Chinese was basically an Asian matter and no business of either Europe or the United States. Clearly, western opposition to Japan’s legitimate aspirations were inextricably tied, counterfactual historians theorize, to racism and to an absolute commitment on the part of the western colonial nations to preventing Imperial Japan from attaining the ‘Great Power’ status to which it was entitled because of its poweful, modern military. To these revisionists, the responsibility for the attack on Pearl Harbor, seen in purely geopolitical terms, lay not with Tokyo, but with Washington, D.C. and London. If oil, scrap iron, and rubber had not been embargoed by the west, and reasonable accommodations had been pursued with the government of Hideki Tojo, then the carnage of the Pacific war could have been averted to the benefit of everyone. Everyone that is, except, perhaps, for the millions of Chinese and Koreans already living under Japanese military occupation in 1941. Inevitably, when considering the final outcome of Japan’s unsuccessful war in the Pacific, the most tiresome and persistent critics of U.S. policies before and during World War II always turn to the American use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These final devastating attacks — occurring, as they did, after Japan’s navy had been sunk and its air force driven from the skies — were, the critics say, totally unnecessary; instead, these final attacks were premeditated acts of racial vengeance: the final terrifying expressions of absolute domination by a white America over a prostrate and defenseless Asian enemy.

It remains to be seen, of course, how far down the road of ‘revisionist history’ Hanks’ and Spielberg’s “The Pacific” actually travels. Certainly, an honest attempt, by the series, to depict the common humanity shared by the ordinary American marines and their Japanese adversaries is really not at issue. What is at issue, however, is whether the story told by “The Pacific” describes, along with the inevitable acts of violence, mayhem, and cruelty committed by soldiers of every side in every war, the real history of the war in the Pacific and of the men who fought it. We already know that the typical Japanese soldier had a mother and father, and perhaps a wife and children; these facts make him human, but they do not make him a victim. Nor does this ordinariness excuse the very real atrocities that were, with dreadful regularity, committed under the banner of the 'Rising Sun'. This is, I think, an important distinction to remember.

Japanese MG Crew

In one of his many recent interviews about his new HBO miniseries, Tom Hanks suggested that racism was an important factor in how the US military approached and fought the war against Japan. Awkward as it is to consider now, this is, seen in the proper historical context, a perfectly valid point. Was there a racial component in the attitudes of many of the Americans who battled the Japanese in the Pacific, between 1941 and 1945? Most certainly there was; however, much of this animus was relatively new and had its origin in the nature of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Were the attitudes of the typical Japanese soldier and his leaders also guided by a cruel, unbending, and merciless warrior creed of their own? Anyone who knows anything about the ancient Japanese code of Bushido knows that the answer to this question is most assuredly, yes. Moreover, this medieval approach to warfare not only justified the mistreatment, torture, and even killing of prisoners, it virtually mandated it. Without the Japanese tradition of Bushido, would there even have been a Bataan "Death March?" Moreover, anyone who has even a passing knowledge of Japanese history during the 1920’s and 30’s also knows that militarism — closely-wedded to Emperor worship and a particularly noxious form of xenophobic racism — already deeply embedded in Japanese culture since the Seventeenth century, had become even stronger by the time of Pearl Harbor. For those who doubt this fact, they have only to examine the brutal history of the Japanese occupations of Korea, China, Malaya, Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, and beyond to see that this Japanese sense of racial superiority and divinely-sanctioned privilege was pervasive; moreover, that it was directed with just as much ruthlessness and ferocity against other Asians as it was against the deeply-resented Europeans and Americans.

Col Lewis B "Chesty" Puller, Commander 1^st Marine Infantry Regiment

Celebrities, even fundamentally decent, well-meaning ones like Mr. Hanks should probably, as the old adage goes: “tend a little more closely to their own knitting.” Playing an infantry officer in a war movie does not make you an expert on small unit tactics, and producing a historical miniseries, does not necessarily make you a knowledgeable historical commentator. The Academy Award winning actor suggested at one point to a TV interviewer that the Japanese wanted to kill us (meaning the Americans and British), but that we wanted to annihilate them; he was only partly right. In one of the early scenes in the first episode of “The Pacific,” the future ‘most decorated marine in USMC history’, Colonel Lewis "Chesty" Puller explains to his young marine NCO’s what to expect from the coming war in the Pacific, and more importantly, what they and their fellow marines are actually fighting to accomplish. Yes, it was necessary to annihilate and, in the process, utterly humiliate the adherents of Japanese militarism; but it was the belief system and those who preserved and continued it that had to be destroyed; not the Japanese people, who, in many ways, were as much victims of Japanese Imperialism as the faceless foreigners that their sons killed or enslaved overseas. This, I think, is where Mr. Hanks goes a little off-track. The Japan of today exists precisely because the American occupiers did not want to annihilate the Japanese people, or to destroy their culture; instead, they simply wanted to expunge those elements from Japan's martial traditions that led the country, and its hitherto powerless citizens, into almost two decades of continuous warfare.

Close action on Guadacanal

According to the previews for “The Pacific” the ten-part series will conclude its narrative arc with the story of the Battle of Okinawa. Nothing could be more fitting. In the protracted battle for this Japanese island, over 12,500 American soldiers, sailors, and marines were killed, and another 38,000 were wounded. The defenders lost somewhere around 110,000 killed; interestingly, for the first time in the war, Japanese soldiers began to surrender in large numbers; in fact, over 7,500 members of the island’s garrison laid down their arms rather than die for the Emperor. Tragically, however, along with the Japanese soldiers who died defending Okinawa, perhaps as many as 100,000 terrified civilians were either convinced or compelled by fanatical representatives of their own military to commit suicide rather than to accept American occupation. As a point of comparison, 60,000 to 80,000 Japanese died at Nagasaki as a direct result of the second American atomic bomb. Six days after the mushroom cloud appeared over Nagasaki, on 15 August 1945, the government of the Empire of Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The timing of the Japanese surrender was no coincidence. So, for that vociferous band of counterfactual historians, anti-war revisionists, and even uninformed TV personalities who, like Jon Stewart, self-righteously accuse President Truman of 'war crimes' because of the president's decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, I offer only a single closing question: based on the number of people from both sides — civilian and military — who perished during the battle for Okinawa: how many Japanese and Americans would have had to die before the Japanese Home Islands were completely in Allied hands?