The Greatest Lie, via the fetishization of the American military

I would encourage you to read, in Nation magazine, Christian Appy's excoriations of America's use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago this month, and then read Richard Cohen's reply to it, in the Washington Post. History professor Appy is indignant, and his writing is of these times; columnist Cohen is more philosophical, and his writing is of those times.

If you haven't the time to read Appy's piece, Cohen provides a fair synopsis of its arguments: "The bombings were animated by racial animus, they were disproportionate to the number of U.S. deaths that might have resulted from an invasion of the Japanese mainland and the bombs amounted to wretched excess: Japan was ready to surrender anyway."

From a military point of view, the weakest of Appy's arguments, it seems to me, is the one of disproportionality. The United States had been engaged in a global war for survival, and its intent was never to trade man for man and woman for woman. To suggest that President Truman should have limited Japanese civilian casualties to some rough equivalence of projected American troop casualties "that might have resulted from an invasion" is both strategically unhinged and historically strange. (In sheer numbers, the Second World War inflicted far more suffering on civilians than soldiers.) The third of Appy's argument — that Japan "was ready to surrender anyway" — is at best dubious. His first argument — "racial animus" — is undeniable; yet dehumanization of the enemy comes with every war, and the war with Japan, we didn't start.

Appy looks at our dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki from what we might call the morally superior vantage point of 2015 (which is to say, a safe vantage point). Cohen looks at the dropping of the bomb from Truman's point of view in 1945 — on the heels of hundreds of thousands of American lives lost — again, in a war we didn't start: "What could Truman have said to Americans who lost a loved one in an invasion of the Japanese home islands if they knew he had a weapon that could have ended the war and not used it? What, in the dead of night when sleep did not come and he stared at the ceiling, could he have said to the American dead? I chose Japanese lives over yours? Truman did what he had to do."

What Appy gets right, I think, is what he merely implies and barely intimates, in a segment titled "Our Unbroken Faith in the Greatest Generation." We have, in a way, glorified the slaughter of the world's bloodiest war by glorifying the generation that fought it. Appy notes the enormous commercial success of, for example, Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. The book is part of a popular "narrative" of American gallantry abroad. As Appy summarizes it: "The book is decidedly a page-turner, but its focus on a single American’s punishing ordeal and amazing recovery inhibits almost any impulse to move beyond the platitudes of nationalistic triumphalism and self-absorption or consider (among other things) the racism that so dramatically shaped American combat in the Pacific."

To repeat, what "shaped American combat in the Pacific" was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. End of that story. Appy seems unable to place himself in the bloodied national mindset of 1941-1945. (He also utterly neglects America's unprecedented magnanimity toward the vanquished in the postwar era.) It's the "platitudes of nationalistic triumphalism" that bother, though, since we have, especially since 9/11, moved from glorifying "the greatest generation" to glorifying absolutely anyone and everyone in U.S. military uniform. We have fetishized the military as a singular force of endless virtues: only courage and sacrifice reign in our men and women in khaki, and "thanking them for their service" has become frighteningly obligatory for interviewing news anchors.

Is this healthy, or even rational?

For most recruits, service in the military is a job; for some, a career. Either way, it's just a job, a way to earn a paycheck and perhaps a pension, nothing more. Most labor in support positions and never face even a second of danger. In return, they receive not only that paycheck, but job benefits that make most working Americans lavishly envious. This is a sacrifice?

The keenest concern that comes from our fetishization of the American military is that it makes the use of that military far more likely. After all, our boys don't lose, for they are uniquely courageous; and our boys engage in only virtuous wars, for they themselves are so virtuous. (If you haven't yet, see Eastwood's American Sniper, which, I'm convinced, is a commentary on just how colossally wrongheaded the "narrative" of military virtue is.)

Such is the sales pitch from neoconservatism, and we hear its "puppets" every day on the Republican campaign trail.

It's a lie. It's all a lie. But Americans keep getting themselves sucked into this perilous lie, for they fetishize the always courageous, always sacrificial, always victorious American military.

***

I'll be back later today. This morning, a brief (I hope) medical procedure awaits.

 

Comments

[Peter G]

If you want an interesting perspective on the subject of weapons of mass destruction in that time, ask the Chinese. Of war crimes? Ask the Korean sex slaves. Not only did the Japanese government have its very own nuclear weapons program, it invested heavily in biological weapons research and experimented on the Chinese with aerosol weapons. When one looks at the occupation practices of the Japanese government at that time they have absolutely nothing to complain about in how that war was prosecuted against them. Racial animus? Indeed there was. As there was cultivated among the Japanese the very same spirit against anyone who wasn't Japanese.

[Alex]

Excellent post, Mr. Carpenter. A very fine read, even by your usual high standard of output.

Good luck with your procedure!

- A.

[Bob]

It's tempting to dismiss Christian Appy's piece as an example of liberal guilt, but it also seems likely that at some point an apology will be issued by all parties. It won't be soon because Japan has never fully apologized for its own actions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan ). Neither will the worship of WWII soldiers diminish soon. America sees itself as having saved the civilized world, and the war and post-war years are remembered as a time of unquestionable American greatness and exceptionalism.

The popularization of militarism in America has been a constant since 1945 and is, for the most part, pushed by the ubiquitous war machine that Eisenhower warned against in his Farewell Address ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY ). It constantly feeds the perception, exaggerated or not, that the world is an extremely dangerous place and by doing so keeps a disproportional budget flowing to defense contractors and "security state" actors. They're always at the ready to take the fullest advantage of any real emergency:

"Obviously, we've got budget matters. You know, when I was running for President, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta." - George W. Bush, Taft for Governor Luncheon, Ohio, May 10, 2002

[Peter G]

I wouldn't say liberal guilt so much as patronizing morality. You are obviously well aware of how the Japanese conducted themselves in warfare so I need not comment on the hypocrisy of that demand for an apology where only the most tepid and self exonerating has been offered.

Appy throws numbers around without foundation. Certainly anyone familiar with the casualties in Iraq after conquest would know his minimization of the cost in American lives in Japan is largely bullshit. Worst still is his apparent excuse of the millions upon millions of lives lost in other nations owing to Japanese invasion and conquest. His insistence that the use of nuclear weapons on Japan was racially motivated is suspect. Had it been necessary in Germany I am pretty sure they would have been used there as well. Certainly no distinction was made between German cities and Japanese cities when it came to carpet bombing.

There was, however, a perfectly good alternative to either invasion or nuclear weapons that would have ended the war. And that was blockade. It would have been very easy to starve the Japanese into submission for they did not have the resources to even feed their population without imports. And they had no shipping left. Had this course been followed today we would be reading pieces by forgetful historians such as Appy about how evil that particular course was. Yet Appy should have some cause to be grateful and that is that neither the Germans nor the Japanese made it to the bomb first.

[Charlieford]

The moral issue was not the use of atom bombs per se, but the bombing of civilians. The US had moral objections to the practice when it entered the war in Europe, but dropped those objections on practical grounds. War aims and the need to preserve planes and their crews over-rode just war strictures. LeMay and Tibbets dismissed any moral concerns by saying "All war is immoral anyway," which may be true, but doesn't obviate the need to think through what we were doing. Their flippant retort could just as easily be used to justify My Lai, or death camps for that matter. This is the great unaddressed legacy of WWII.

[Peter G]

But it was addressed most succinctly in your own Civil War by one William T Sherman. He is the one who pointed out that "War is hell" but furthermore that it needed to be lest we resort too easily to war. To me the moral issue, if one wishes to frame it as a moral issue, is why you go to war. I do agree with you that it can be used to justify just about any action or policy. The justification does not always succeed.

To this day, the British, who invented the concentration camp will defend its use because it was not actually intended to kill thousands of Boer civilians. But it did anyway.

[Bob]

I wasn't defending Appy but suggesting, with a little fleshing out, that as long as the war paradigm dominates we're limiting our ability to balance other legitimate needs against the defense establishment. I couldn't find a recent poll, but over time the Japanese government will likely soften its position: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/08/world/pearl-harbor-remembered-japanese-think-they-owe-apology-are-owed-one-war-poll.html

[brave captain of industry]

It's not like policy makers had a recent (say within three months) example of another advanced nation fighting to the last shell....

Furthermore, if it was some racist bullshit, we sure put that aside in making Japan our closest friend in the Far East....

[Peter G]

I did not think you were defending him Bob. In fact I agree with you that dismissing his arguments as Liberal guilt would be wrong. There's nothing particularly liberal about it. But it does have a powerful odor of sanctimony about it. Frankly apologies mean nothing to me. Agreements not to do that shit again count for more.

[Bob]

I agree non-aggression pacts matter more, but think the distortions left by WWII are major stumbling blocks to optimizing our own society. In that way apologies matter. Compare German society, which has apologized profusely for Nazism, to Japanese. The Japanese need to be made more aware of their own past. It also wouldn't hurt Americans to better understand the Japanese (see the poll cited above).

BTW, while it's from a POV, I was impressed by J.G. Ballard's 'Empire of the Sun', a novel about his time as a child in a Japanese POW camp in China. It's much better than the movie.

[Turgidson]

Some more interesting reading on this topic can be found in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's "Racing the Enemy" which basically argues that dropping the bombs was inconsequential and that it was primarily the Soviets' formal entry into the war against Japan and campaign in Manchuria that prompted the Japanese to surrender.

It's come under some well-sourced criticism, but is an interesting read, at least.

Disclaimer - I took a couple of Hasegawa's classes back in the day. Good prof, once you get used to his accent.

[Peter G]

There's something in that. I think the Japanese knew that when the Russians come they don't leave. And they would certainly known what was happening in the occupation zones in Europe. The wisdom of embracing the idea of keeping the emperor in his job was quickly apparent. I doubt there would have been a peaceful occupation without the authority of the emperor behind it.

[Shaun Appleby]

The importance of the demonstration of these weapons to a Soviet Union revealed by August 1945 as an untrustworthy ally and geopolitically aggressive actor in Europe was considerable. What protection could be afforded against their vast and mobilised continental military power at that time? The B-29 and atomic weapons were it.

[Charlieford]

Sherman was describing the destruction of property, not the mass killing of civilians.

Not that destroying homes is a small thing. I certainly wouldn't appreciate it.

But central to just war theory is you do distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. We never decided that was mistaken, we just found a few workarounds.