Anarchy and Apocalypse. Ronald E. Osborn. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Ronald E. Osborn
Издательство: Ingram
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Жанр произведения: Религия: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781621890751
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strategy of Allied planners.

      It did not begin this way. At the start of the Battle of Britain in 1939, leaders on both sides declared that they would not target civilian populations. It was understood that bombing military factories and installations would result in unavoidable civilian casualties. But the policy of minimizing deaths among noncombatants was widely supported by both politicians and the public on religious and ethical grounds. This course continued until August 24, 1940, when Luftwaffe bombs, intended for an oil storage depot, fell on London’s East End. Winston Churchill, overruling the Royal Air Force, ordered a bombing raid on Berlin the next day. Germany responded by unleashing the blitz over London. Still, for some months the RAF insisted that the ban against killing civilians was still in effect. There was a lingering sense of moral compunction among the Allied forces that the dynamics of violence had not yet fully eroded. This would change.

      First, because it was too risky to bomb by day, the Allies decided that bombing should be done only at night. This, however, made precision bombing impossible and proved militarily unsuccessful since targets were often missed. Realizing that their efforts to strike only military targets by cover of darkness were not working, the RAF therefore shifted to a policy of “area bombing.” The destruction of whole neighborhoods was now permitted, providing there was a single military target within a given neighborhood. But by 1942, with the war dragging on and casualties mounting, the Allies decided that even this was not enough. Abandoning any pretense of ethical standards, they adopted a more “realistic” policy once and for all: indiscriminate “obliteration bombing” of entire cities. The explanation given for the new phase in the Allied campaign was twofold: first, it would ensure absolute success against military targets; more importantly and explicitly, it would “break enemy morale.” Chivalric distinctions between civilians and combatants were no longer practicable. The morality of “total war” was tautologically justified by the necessity of “victory at any cost.”

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

      In the Pacific arena, however, moral fiber was in abundant supply. On the night of March 9, 1945, the United States set the entire city of Tokyo ablaze with napalm bombs. The heat was so intense it boiled the water in the canals. More than 100,000 civilians died in the attack. Bomber crews in the last waves could smell the burning flesh. The same was done to more than fifty other Japanese cities, leading to a befuddling dilemma for Allied strategists: by May and June there were few “untouched” cities left for the ultimate demonstration of Allied “resolve.” At last a list of cities, including the religious center of Kyoto, was compiled and submitted to the American High Command. None were proposed for primarily military reasons. What was critical in each case was that the target included a massive unspoiled population that could be annihilated without warning in a single moment. Civilian morale and psychological considerations—terrorism to be precise—dictated where the atomic bombs would fall.

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

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

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

      III

      But is there any alternative? Do we have