Balancing Act: Bombing the Auschwitz Rail Lines

The inherent conflict between the strategic and humanitarian concerns of the Allies as the war drew to a close is perhaps best symbolized by certain aspects of the Holocaust. One of the major ethical debates that has arise out of the Holocaust is the decision by the Allied forces not to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, the single deadliest of the Nazi extermination camps. While a consensus has arisen since the end of the war that bombing the rail lines was impractical and could actually have done more harm than good, a persistent minority of voices has insisted that the Allies should have done anything possible to prevent or delay the extermination process.

The majority position on this question was well stated by Peter Novick, in his book The Holocaust in American Life. He points out that the precision of Allied bombers was such that perhaps as many as a third of the bombs dropped on the camp would have hit prisoners' barracks. Moreover, experience with the strategic bombing had indicated that bombing of rail lines was actually quite ineffective. Novick concludes, "the current received version -- a fruitful opportunity, fervently pressed and frivolously dismissed -- must contend with the strong possibility that this ambivalently presented suggestion was a well-intentioned but misbegotten idea that we can perhaps be grateful was turned down."[1]

The minority position is represented by David Wyman, in his book The Abandonment of the Jews. Wyman focuses much of his argument on the bombing of rail lines specifically to prevent the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and elsewhere in the summer and fall of 1944. He lays the blame at the feet of the Roosevelt administration and specifically the War Refugee Board. Conversely, he rejects arguments about the feasibility and efficacy of bombing the rail lines and the preference of the Operational Plans Division to bomb industrial targets. "In reality, Auschwitz was part of those target systems," Wyman writes. "OPD was either uninformed or untruthful."[2]

For my own part, I come down on the side of the majority position as expressed by Novick. In either case, the debate brings to the fore the matter of whether a balance can struck between strategic and humanitarian goals. I don't think that they can: strategic goals or concerns will always override humanitarian goals. In considering this question, I often think of the current situation in North Korea. On the one hand, North Korea is easily the most repressive state in the world today. Its leadership cares so little about its own people that the country has regularly experienced famine while the ruling elite lives in luxury. It is a situation that virtually calls out for humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, North Korea has nuclear weapons, and any attempt to intervene militarily in its affairs would almost certainly be answered with the deployment of these weapons. The strategic concerns must outweigh the humanitarian concerns.

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     [1] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1999), 58.
     [2] David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 297.

The War in 1943: Allied Victories and Outproduction

While I am cautious to state that I do not believe that the whole of the Allied victory in World War II can be attributed to a handful of causes, I do nevertheless believe that two of the factors Richard Overy lists in his book were more decisive than the others: the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk; and mass production on the Allied side. Whereas the Soviet victories early in 1943 provided much needed momentum for the Allied military cause, mass production allows the Allies -- particularly the Soviets -- to produce far more materiel than Germany, even if it was arguably inferior materiel.

While Germany's gains on Soviet territory in the first six months following the invasion in June 1941 were enormous, the Germans were stalled by winter, and the Soviets were able to mount a counteroffensive. However, the Wehrmacht still had sufficient strength to launch a second offensive in the spring of 1941, ultimately driving to Stalingrad. In contrast, the loss at Stalingrad, including the surrender of Friedrich Paulus's Sixth Army, was a crushing blow to German morale.[1] Perhaps more importantly, it forced the Nazis to fully mobilize their economy for the first time since the war began. The subsequent need to supplement domestic workers with slave laborers from Slavic countries belied the notion of Aryan racial supremacy.

If morale was badly damaged by the loss at Stalingrad, the loss at Kursk was a coup de grace. In addition to this effect, Kursk provided an object lesson in Overy's second important point -- i.e., that mass production by the Allies would ultimately result in victory for their side. In the battle, which involved more tanks than any battle before or since, sheer superiority of numbers was essential to the Soviet victory. Soviet mass production would continue apace, augmented by ongoing British and American war production, while the strategic bombing took a toll on Germany's only recently maximized production. In fact, the highest-quality German tanks had not yet rolled out from the factories.[2]

Kursk also drove home a point that all the counter-production of full mobilization in Germany could never counter -- superiority in numbers of people. Although the Wehrmacht had superior numbers of soldiers to the British, the American and Soviet militaries had far more. While the U.S. would need time to train its soldiers and the Red Army was somewhat crippled by the initial Barbarossa offensive, by early 1943, both these issues were no longer factors. Plus, Germany had lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and while the Soviets had lost even more, they had virtually endless population stocks from which to draw.[3]

In conclusion, the Allied victories at Kursk and Stalingrad and the ability of the Allied economies, particularly that of the USSR, were decisive factors in the Axis losing the war. Of course, other factors contributed significantly, but I feel that these issues at the very least knocked Germany out of the war, although defeating Japan required additional contributions.

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     [1] Jay W. Baird. "The Myth of Stalingrad," Journal of Contemporary History, 4 (1969): 201
     [2] Valeriy Zamulin, "Could Germany Have Won the Battle of Kursk if It Had Started in Late May or the Beginning of June 1943?" Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 27 (2014): 607
     [3] Mark Harrison, "The Economics of World War II: An Overview," in The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, edited by Mark Harrison (New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 14-15.

Perkonkrusts and the Final Solution in Latvia

Andrew Ezergailis, the author of what remains the standard work in English on the Final Solution in Latvia, gave his book the subtitle The Missing Center.[1] He chose this subtitle to represent what he felt was a noticeable absence in the discussion of collaboration by Latvians with Nazis. On the one hand, Ezergailis argued, some scholars tried to argue that the Latvians were rabid collaborators who couldn’t wait to lay their hands on their defenseless Jewish neighbors; on the other hand, other scholars depicted the Latvians as selfless rescuers who, with a very small number of exceptions, disagreed with Nazi Jewish policy and would have resisted more had the choice to do so not been deadly. The truth, Ezergailis wrote, lay somewhere in between.

Defenders of Latvian honor rightly pointed to a significant history of tolerance of Jews in Latvia, both during its period as a province of the Russian Empire and also during its brief period of independence between 1918 and 1940. Despite this relatively peaceful history in Latvia before the German invasion on June 22, 1941, the Jews of Latvia nevertheless suffered horribly during the Nazi occupation, with more than 75% of the almost 100,000 Latvian Jews murdered during the German occupation -- a percentage exceeded only in Lithuania and Poland.[2] The factors that contributed to this firestorm of extermination were multiple, but central was the role played by Latvian auxiliaries, who were drawn from a variety of sources, including the Perkonkrusts (Thunder Cross; PK) ultra-right-wing militia. PK was a conscious choice of the Nazis as a collaborator to assure the liquidation of the Jewish population, as shown by the pre-war contacts between the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) intelligence division of the SS and PK, the split in PK in the early days of the Nazi occupation roughly along predominantly anti-communist and anti-Jewish lines, and the percentage of the early death toll committed by members of the PK, notably the renowned Latvian airman Herberts Cukurs.

Latvia and Perkonkrusts Before June 1941

Perkonkrusts had emerged during the period in which Latvia was an independent state. January 1932 saw the rise of the Ugunskrusts (Fire Cross) organization founded by Gustavs Celmins,[3] a veteran of the Latvian War of Independence, ultra-nationalist member of the student fraternity Selonija, and sometime political attaché. The organization encountered opposition from the government and was banned in April 1933, after which point it morphed into PK and operated for another year. The organization, using the slogan "Latvia for Latvians," was virulently anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic, as well as anti-German, given the historical role of Baltic Germans in Latvia's ruling elites.[4]

With the seizure of power by Prime Minister Karlis Ulmanis in an authoritarian coup in May 1934, PK was also banned and many of its members arrested. Celmins fled abroad.[5] Latvia continued to be ruled by Ulmanis through the first year of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, but he was forced to resign in July 1940, one month following the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union. For nearly the next year, the nation was subjected to severe repression under Soviet rule, the height of which occurred on June 13-14, 1941, just one week before the German invasion, when the NKVD ordered in a single night of terror the mass arrest and deportation of approximately 15,000 Latvian citizens.

Unsurprisingly, given this very recent experience with repression at the hand of the Soviets, a German military campaign to push out the Soviets was by and large quite welcome.[6] Moreover, its tolerant history notwithstanding, Latvia following the experience of Soviet rule had a not insignificant population who were now receptive to the anti-Semitic trope of Judeobolschewismus. While a thorough discussion of the history of this anti-Semitic archetype -- not to mention the history of Bolshevism itself in Latvia, which was not insignificant[7] -- is beyond the scope of this essay, it is nevertheless important to recognize that the year of Soviet rule that Latvians experienced contributed significantly to increased anti-Semitism in the country. While some found the Nazis’ use of the Judeo-Bolshevik threat to be a ridiculous throwback to the Nazi past, others -- particularly PK members who had long argued such a connection – believed the propaganda wholly.

The occupation of Latvia by Germany, beginning in June 1941 as part of the larger Operation Barbarossa, had included anti-Semitism within its larger context. In preparation for a coming clash of ideologies, the Nazis sought to cultivate the cooperation of anti-Soviet activists in the areas to be occupied long before the invasion began, and Latvia was no exception. There was no shortage of populations from which collaborators could be drawn. In addition to several leading figures of the independent Latvian military, who had fled to Germany in the previous one to two years, there was also a large Baltic German population that had only recently be relocated to Reich territory under the Heim ins Reich population transfer program of the SS. Finally, and most relevant because of the pre-existence anti-Semitism of PK, Gustavs Celmins himself had relocated to Germany in 1940 and was joined there by several high-ranking PK members.[8]

Perkonkrusts as a Pre- and Post-Invasion Collaborator

To determine whether PK was a conscious choice of the Nazis for collaborations requires first demonstrating pre-invasion communication between the parties. The assumption of substantial pre-invasion collaboration had always been assumed on the basis of Celmins's arrival in the country one week after the invasion with the Wehrmacht as a Sonderführer.[9] However, despite widespread claims of such collaboration in the secondary literature, documentation of bona fide pre-invasion collaboration has been extraordinarily scarce. Moreover, with PK having been banned by the Nazi occupation authorities in August 1941, less than two months into the occupation, the window of opportunity for collaboration seems to have been quite short.

One important piece of evidence is that the Nazi party was aware of the existence of PK in Latvia in its earlier heyday, as shown by mention of the group in a two-part article published in late 1933 in the party newspaper Ostland, the organ of the Bund Deutscher Osten in Berlin. In these articles, PK is referred to as a possible ally of the Nazis, although its anti-German attitude is criticized and attributed to “a mistaken perception of National Socialism as a danger to the Latvian state.”[10] Nevertheless, it is also presciently noted that, given French cooperation with the Soviets, Latvia and PK would soon have to come to terms with Germany.[11] With PK having been pushed underground the following year, how the organization re-emerged has been difficult to determine.

            Important clarification was offered by Freds Launags, who joined PK at the beginning of the Nazi occupation and collaborated with the SD before eventually joining the anti-Nazi underground, spearheading resistance to the returning Soviets. Launags ultimately emerged in Stockholm after the war, where he volunteered for anti-Soviet intelligence work. He emigrated to the United States and was ultimately cultivated as an operative for the CIA. At a debriefing in the 1950s, Launags clarified the extent of pre-invasion collaboration.[12]

            Launags recounted how, while living under Soviet occupation in 1940, he helped to form a secret anti-Soviet resistance group, posing as a communist in hopes of infiltrating the government to moderate its policies. He went underground when the NKVD cracked down on resistance in early 1941. He claimed to have been recruited for more formal anti-Soviet espionage by a PK member named Feliks Rikards in April 1941, after which point PK contacts with Germany began to arm the underground with smuggled German arms. When the war with Germany broke out, Launags began moving toward Riga, offering assistance in routing out communists along the way. He arrived in Riga on July 4, at which point PK had already been reconstituted and had established an operating office. Gustavs Celmins was at that time in Berlin requesting the formation of a Latvian SS unit.[13]

            Launags’s testimony, while valuable, must be approached with caution. Certainly, were he directly responsible for war crimes, he would have denied any involvement; situating himself within a political, rather than armed, wing of the movement would have sufficiently exculpated him from participating in the extermination of Latvia’s Jews. Nevertheless, his testimony about the creation of subgroups within PK corroborates quite closely and independently several other sources on the topic, none of whom cite Launags.

Perkonkrusts Splits Into Factions 

Launags recounted that PK was being divided into subgroups when he arrived in Riga. One of the groups was Sondergruppe R (for Rikards), to which Launags was attached and for which his chief job was interrogating communists. Sondergruppe R eventually became known as the Latvian Card Index, and it operated throughout the war as an intelligence-gathering arm of the SD targeted against communists. The other, more famous, subgroup was Sondergruppe A, commonly referred to the Arajs Kommando (AK) and named for the Latvian policeman Viktors Arajs, which was deployed against Latvia’s Jews.[14]

Thus, already by Launags’s arrival in Riga, PK was being divided into wings targeting, respectively, communists and Jews – both of which were traditional PK enemies. Although PK would be banned outright in six weeks, the recruitment process for the AK would indicate how important PK was to the persecution of the Jews. Arajs himself seems to have appearance unsummoned at the police headquarters in Riga on July 1, where he met Walter Stahlecker, head of Einsatzgruppe A, which had been attached to Heeresgruppe Nord with the invasion on June 22 to execute political opposition, including male Jews between 15 and 50 years old. Stahlecker authorized Arajs to form a commando, and three days later, the following call was published in Tevija, a nationalist newspaper: “All nationally-thinking Latvians -- members of Pērkonkrusts, students, officers, Home Guards [“Aizsargi”], and others, who wish to take an active part in the cleansing of our country from harmful elements, can register themselves at the Headquarters of the Security Kommando at Valdemars Street 19, from 9-11 and from 17-19.”[15]

Several mysteries surround the appearance of Arajs, as well as his specific mention of PK in his call to arms when it had been banned seven years earlier; in contrast, the Aizsargi had only been banned with the Soviet occupation a year earlier. One possible explanation is offered by Ezergailis, who notes (albeit in a footnote) that a document exists showing that Arajs himself had been a PK member. Ezergailis writes, “Under Ulmanis [Arajs] had to deny this association to keep his position as a policeman […] At the same time, however, we can not [sic] completely eliminate the possibility that the Germans knew of Arajs' early association with the Perkonkrusts and that he therefore was preselected for the job.”[16] It is also possible that, upon the Germans occupying Riga, Arajs simply reported to the police station to determine the situation and volunteered for duty with the Einsatzgruppe. Significantly, Roberts Stiglics, whom Stahlecker appointed police chief in Riga, had like Celmins returned to Latvia with the Germans. It is not outside the realm of possibility that Stiglics and Arajs were acquainted via police work and that the former called upon the latter.[17]

Conversely, Richards Plavnieks protests that Arajs could not have been a PK member. He notes that, while the initial 1975 indictment against Arajs from his trial in West Germany included the charge that Arajs was a PK member, the charge was removed in the indictment’s final form.[18] Moreover, Plavnieks asserts that the mistaken identification of Arajs with PK is largely the result of mistaken testimony from Jewish eyewitnesses, who, while well able to identify their persecutors on a personal level, would have been less able to determine the specific taxonomy of the Latvian far right.[19] However, Plavnieks does not engage the document that Ezergailis uses to substantiate the possibility of Arajs’s membership. As a result, Plavnieks’s claim that, “[b]ecause he belonged to the police force during the Kārlis Ulmanis dictatorship under which Pērkonkrusts was a banned organization, Viktors Arājs incontrovertibly could not have been a member, at least not as of 1934”[20] seems naïve, if not almost quaint.

            Because PK had been divided into Sondergruppen R and A, the ban on the organization in August 1941 had less of an effect than might otherwise be thought. Sondergruppe R, per Launags’s testimony, was subsumed into the SD as the Latvian Card Index, and this information is broadly corroborated by multiple sources. Sondergruppe A, or the AK, would go on to participate broadly in crimes against humanity, targeting mainly the Jews of Riga and the countryside of Latvia. Matthew Kott notes that the Latvian Card Index itself split into wings led by Rikards, who formed the clandestine resistance to the Nazis and subsequently to the Soviets, and Celmins, who was ultimately arrested by the Nazis in 1944 and sent to a concentration camp.[21]

Members of Perkonkrusts Commit Mass Murder

Regardless of whether he was a PK member or not, Arajs nevertheless recruited among PK members, and while the testimony of Jewish survivors might be inaccurate for the reasons noted, other sources substantiate their number among the AK. For instance, Kott notes that PK members “exerted a disproportionate influence on the course of the Holocaust in Latvia,”[22] although he concedes that several sources have likely exaggerated the number. In addition, Katrin Reichelt, while stating that it is “very difficult if not impossible”[23] to prove the number of PK members among participants in the Final Solution, refers to the Operational and Situational Report of Einsatzgruppe A of August 1, 1941, in which Stahlecker favorably describes the organization, calling them “a moral elite, whose attitude is ready for battle thoroughly.”[24]

Among the most prominent PK members who served in the AK was Herberts Cukurs, who distinguished himself in the eyes of several survivors for his cruelty in the ghetto-clearing operation of November 30, 1941 – the first of two dates on which the majority of Jews in the Riga ghetto were shot at Rumbula. Although Cukurs’s PK membership before the war has been a matter of some dispute, several sources attest to his becoming a member in the days following the Nazi occupation. In addition, although there has been some disagreement with regard to Cukurs’s involvement in atrocities, it is unlikely that eyewitnesses would misidentify someone as well known among Latvians as Cukurs. Moreover, even Ezergailis, who has tended to defend Cukurs as condemned on the basis of very little evidence, is forced to concede that, “Although Arajs’ men were not the only ones on the ghetto end of this operation [Rumbula], to the degree that they participated in the atrocities there the chief responsibility rests on Herberts Cukurs’ shoulders.”[25] Finally, the mere association of Cukurs, Arajs, and AK in the two Aktionen at Rumbula demonstrates the participation of PK in the mass murder of Latvia’s Jews.

Conclusion

            In conclusion, PK was a conscious choice of the Nazi leadership generally and the SD particularly in perpetrating the Final Solution in Latvia. Not only can mutual and contacts between the Nazis and PK be substantiated from long before the German invasion of Latvia, but the division of PK under the Nazi occupation along anti-Soviet and anti-Jewish lines, a decision unlikely to have been taken without German approval, indicates an attempt to channel anti-Semitic energies toward a genocidal goal. Finally, although the focus on Herberts Cukurs here due to issues of space precludes a more thorough discussion of PK collaboration, the actions of the airman and his commander Viktors Arajs provide concrete evidence of participation in genocide. Although Ezergailis considered PK to be part of the “missing center” of his book’s title, the benefit of additional sources now indicates just how much of that center PK occupied.

---

[1] Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-1944: The Missing Center (Riga, Latvia: Historical Institute of Latvia, 1996)

[2] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country,” https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005161, accessed November 15, 2016; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Teaneck, N.J.: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 1220; Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Bantam, 1986), 403.

[3] Please note that all diacritical markings of Latvian names and words have been removed.

[4] Matthew Kott, “Latvia's Perkonkrusts: Anti-German National Socialism in a Fascistogenic Milieu,” Fascism: Journal of Contemporary Fascist Studies, 4 (2015), 180-81.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Richards Plavnieks, "Nazi Collaborators on Trial During the Cold War: The Cases Against Viktors Arajs and the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 2013), 31-32.

[7] Among other factors, the Latvian Rifles, a unit of the Red Army, played a decisive role in the Bolshevik seizure of power, and Latvians were the single most over-represented minority among the peoples of the Russian Empire in the Bolshevik Party, ahead of both Jews and Ukrainians. See, e.g., Ezergailis, The Latvian Impact on the Bolshevik Revolution: The First Phase: September 1917 to April 1918 (New York: East European Monographs, 1974).

[8] Kott 188.

[9] I.e., a “special leader”; Ezergailis, ibid, 121-22.

[10] “Das Parteiwesen in Lettland,” Ostland: Wochenschrift für den gesamten Osten 14, no. 44 (October 27, 1933): 471, translation mine.

[11] “Das Parteiwesen in Lettland,” Ostland: Wochenschrift für den gesamten Osten 14, no. 46 (November 10, 1933): 495.

[12] "Biographic Debriefing of Clevland [sic] O. Hahn" (Hahn Debriefing), LAUNAGS, FREDS, Volume 1 (LAUNAGS, vol. 1), Second Release of Name Files Under the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Acts, ca. 1981 - ca. 2002 (Second Release of Name Files), Record Group 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1894 - 2002 (RG 263), National Archives at College Park, MD (NACP), pp. 24-281.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Quoted in Plavnieks, ibid, 35, translation his.

[16] Ezergailis 196.

[17] Ibid, 156.

[18] Plavnieks, ibid, 159.

[19] Ibid, 157-58.

                [20] Ibid.

[21] Kott, ibid, 190-91.

[22] Ibid, 189.

                [23] Katrin Reichelt, “Between Collaboration and Resistance: The Role of the Organization Perkonkrusts in the Holocaust in Latvia,” in The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia, edited by Andris Caune, Aivars Stranga, and Margers Vestermanis (Riga, Latvia: Latvijas Vestures Instituta Apgads, 2003), 285

[24] Quoted in ibid, 286, translation hers.

[25] Ezergailis, ibid, 192.

WWII: Race and the Pacific War

To determine the extent to which racial identity played in a role in combat in the Pacific theater in World War II, it is necessary to examine the question from both sides of the conflict, i.e., from the standpoint of both the Japanese and the Allies. On the latter point, it is necessary to consider not only the racial attitudes of the U.S. military but also those of the British, French, and Dutch colonial authorities, Australian and New Zealand forces, and the Asian and Pacific Islander populations who found themselves under Japanese occupation. The conclusion can be drawn that, while not the primary factor driving the conflict, racial identity was an immensely complicating factor in an already complicated conflict.

From the Japanese side, the rise of ethnic nationalism in Japan has been well attested. Ronald Spector details this ascendance in his book on the Pacific war, referring for example to the concept of kokutai and how it permeated the Japanese military.[1] Assassinations politically motivated by nationalists occurred against the foreign minister in May 1932[2] and the prime minister by likeminded assailants two years earlier.[3] Once the war began, and Japanese ultranationalism was given free rein, its expression took two forms. On the one hand, violence in the form of atrocities committed against non-Japanese enemies, whether Chinese in the Rape of Nanjing or Americans in the Bataan Death March, was a clear enunciation of the superiority the Japanese felt over other peoples. On the other hand, as pointed out by Millett and Murray in the case of the Japanese conquest of Malaya, a British colony, the Japanese could act as "liberators" of fellow Asian peoples by ousting militarily the colonial rulers.[4]

From the Allied side, there was the obvious factor that certain Asian and Pacific populations were eager to collaborate with the Japanese because they were not the traditional colonial oppressor. More importantly, however, was the pre-existing conceptions that American, British, French, Dutch, Australia, and New Zealand forces had of Asian and Pacific peoples. In the case of the United States, these prejudices had been reinforced by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with its subsequent renewal every 10 years until 1942, not to mention the sporadic violence committed against Asian and Asian-American communities along the West Coast of the United States and the internment of Japanese Americans during the war itself. As a result, as noted by Craig M. Cameron, atrocities committed by American soldiers against Japanese surrendering soldiers or POWs was very widespread. In dissecting John A. Lynn's quasi-defense of this behavior, Cameron notes that "the apologist notion that Allied soldiers acted only in response, in retribution, is one of the great fallacies to attaches to racist brutality: the displacement of brutality onto the victim."[5]

Perhaps no point of comparison regarding how race was a factor in the war is that with the European theater, particularly as fought between the Allies and Germany. Whereas Germany fought a war of extermination on the Eastern front, on the Western front, Germany abided by international treaties (with a few notable exceptions) in fighting the British and Americans, and the Allies conducted themselves correspondingly. In the same way that German soldiers felt free to commit atrocities in the east because of racist doctrine, American soldiers felt the same comparative freedom when fighting the Japanese. At least in the case of the Pacific war, race was not the cause of the war, but it was undoubtedly a factor.

=====

     [1] Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (New York: Free Press, 1983), Epub edition, 101-02.
    [2] Ibid, 109
    [3] Ibid, 123.
    [4] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001), 198.
    [5] Craig M. Cameron, "Race and Identity: The Culture of Combat in the Pacific War," International History Review, 27, no. 3 (2005): 558.

Strategic Bombing: A Moral Hazard?

To say that the Allied campaign of "strategic bombing" during World War II was controversial is ans understatement. With the exception of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it might be the single most debated purely military aspect of the war. While the initial reactions to the strategic bombings of Germany might have been quite positive from the standpoint of military assessments, time has tempered this uniform positivity; moreover, the moral aspect of the bombings has continued to be a concern for analysts.

Before the war was even over, proponents of strategic bombing such as J.M. Spaight, a one-time assistant secretary in the Air Ministry of the U.K., were justifying the tactic. In his widely distributed pamphlet Bombing Vindicated, Spaight relies heavily on tu quoque arguments along the lines of "Germany did x, so we are justified in doing y." Strictly from a logical standpoint, his argument therefore is flawed. Nevertheless, the distinctions he attempts to draw between combatants and civilians are important ones, particularly as it regards civilians working in military industries. Spaight writes, "To spare them might mean, however, that the lives of one's own fighting men were sacrificed. It is to save these men's lives to put a war-plant out of operation or to stop a trainload of munitions from reaching the front."[1]

However, this statement fails to recognize a key distinction in international law between combatants and civilians, i.e., that it is an accepted convention of warfare that combatants' lives are more expendable than those of civilians, if only because the first rule of warfare is that combatants will die, whereas only extraordinarily recently has warfare endangered the lives of large numbers of civilians. A moral calculus that states that one's combatants will suffer fewer deaths than one's enemy's combatants is wholly defensible; one that states that one's combatants will suffer fewer deaths by taking the lives of one's enemy's civilian population is less so.

In an assessment of strategic bombing written 40 years after the war was over, Kenneth P. Werrell of the U.S. Naval Institute offered some specifics of the strategic bombing campaign while specifically avoiding a moral justification. He noted that nearly one-quarter of bombs were dropped on non-strategic targets,[2] that the losses suffered by the RAF, particularly of officers, was hard to justify,[3] and that German production actually peaked during the strategic bombing,[4] although the latter point was perhaps a consequence of late full mobilization of the Nazis, which was not until after Stalingrad. The chief benefits, Werrell notes, besides negative effects on morale,[5] were the defeat of the Luftwaffe, the need of Germany to divert forces in response to the bombing, and the economic effects.[6] From his standpoint, the strategic bombing was clearly worth the lives that were lost -- military and civilian included.

That said, I can't help but wonder how assessments of strategic bombing such as Spaight's and Werrell's would have been affected had the Allies not won the war. If the U.K. had lost the Battle of Britain, would Spaight and Werrell justify the Blitz as one of the factors in that defeat? If the Axis powers had won, would Tojo and Momma have put Stimson and Macarthur on trial and hanged them? Certainly, to the victors go the spoils, but the mere fact that some of the people sentenced at Nuremberg committed crimes no more serious than those committed by the Allies (e.g., Doenitz serving 10 years for unlimited submarine warfare) is troublesome. In the end, it seems that, from a strictly military point of view, the strategic bombing campaign was justified, but I don't think it can ever be morally justified.

=====

     [1] J.M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944), 116.
     [2] Kenneth P. Werrell, "The Strategic Bombing of Germany in World War II: Costs and Accomplishments," Journal of American History, 73, no. 3 (1986): 707.
     [3] Ibid, 708.
     [4] Ibid, 711.
     [5] Ibid, 712.
     [6] Ibid, 709.