Jonathan Zimmerman: You Can't Judge a War by the Atrocities Committed Fighting It
[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”]
Most Americans regard World War II as a "just war" because the United States helped stem the vicious tide of global fascism. But during that war, American soldiers dismembered Japanese corpses and collected their body parts as souvenirs.
A contradiction? Not really. You can commit war crimes on behalf of a just war just as easily as an unjust one....
Let's leave aside the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the U.S. justified as a way to prevent further carnage. On the battlefield, American soldiers routinely killed Japanese civilians and mutilated Japanese bodies. Yes, our enemies committed all kinds of atrocities during the war. But so did we....
Although some Americans did object to these atrocities at the time, it would be much later before WW II veterans expressed regret for them. In a 1981 memoir, American biologist E.B. Sledge recalled watching American soldiers cut off a hand from a dead Japanese, urinate into the mouth of another corpse and shoot an old woman who was "just an old gook," as one of Sledge's comrades told him. "The fierce struggle for survival eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all," Sledge wrote.
Significantly, though, Sledge continued to believe in the larger purpose of the war. The Japanese had attacked the United States and conquered much of East Asia, and they had to be stopped. Some U.S. military men had committed monstrous acts, to be sure, but America's larger military cause remained just....
Read entire article at LA Times
A contradiction? Not really. You can commit war crimes on behalf of a just war just as easily as an unjust one....
Let's leave aside the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the U.S. justified as a way to prevent further carnage. On the battlefield, American soldiers routinely killed Japanese civilians and mutilated Japanese bodies. Yes, our enemies committed all kinds of atrocities during the war. But so did we....
Although some Americans did object to these atrocities at the time, it would be much later before WW II veterans expressed regret for them. In a 1981 memoir, American biologist E.B. Sledge recalled watching American soldiers cut off a hand from a dead Japanese, urinate into the mouth of another corpse and shoot an old woman who was "just an old gook," as one of Sledge's comrades told him. "The fierce struggle for survival eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all," Sledge wrote.
Significantly, though, Sledge continued to believe in the larger purpose of the war. The Japanese had attacked the United States and conquered much of East Asia, and they had to be stopped. Some U.S. military men had committed monstrous acts, to be sure, but America's larger military cause remained just....