Los Angeles Times: The Rarely Told Story of WWII
Our tactics in the "good war" aren't any less brutal than our tactics in the present war. Excerpt below.
Hollywood and the American public have always loved the images of heroic young GIs battling German soldiers in Europe (witness the popularity of films such as "Saving Private Ryan" and the "Greatest Generation" books). However, as accurate as these images are, they are also somewhat "sanitized" because they don't tell the full story of how we won the war in Europe. What brought Germany to its knees was U.S. and British aerial bombing. This aspect of the war is rarely dramatized.
Obviously, dropping bombs from on high is less dramatic than going toe-to-toe with German soldiers on the ground, but I suspect there's another reason for Hollywood's reluctance to bring attention to the bombing campaign: In our bombing of Germany, heavily populated civilian districts were intentionally targeted. The idea was that by targeting the civilian population, we would disrupt Germany's economy, destroy the morale of its citizens and create chaos by rendering millions of people homeless.
It was a brutal way to win a war--and it worked like a charm . . . .
Why is this information relevant today? Because today's Americans have been led to believe that in a "good war," civilians aren't targeted. With every news release about Afghani civilians killed by stray American missiles, many Americans react with righteous indignation. "How can we kill innocent civilians? Why, we're as bad as the terrorists!" Hollywood helps foster the notion that we fought World War II in a strictly ethical way, but the truth is that the destruction of the brutal Nazi empire came about only through brutal methods.
By facing the non-sanitized reality of World War II, we can confront the assumptions and prejudices that color our views of the current war. If millions of civilian deaths were necessary to bring down Nazi Germany (a country that never attacked the United States), are not some civilian deaths to be expected--dare I say tolerated--in our war against Islamic fascists, who've already killed more Americans than died on D-day?
Most Germans voted against Hitler in the election of 1932. The German civilians who were burned alive in our bombing raids were no more likely to be Nazis than the Afghani civilians who've been hit by U.S. missiles are likely to be Taliban sympathizers. . . . .
Did the "greatest generation" lack our moral compass and restraint, or do we lack their resolve to do whatever's necessary to excise a cancerous growth from the body of nations?
| History | Military | War | WWII
