Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

by Howard Zinn

  in prisoner's clothing, with a denim jacket and a number on the back. The

  shame and humiliation just broke her down… . Right after that day she got

  very il and contracted tuberculosis. She had to be sent to a sanitarium… .

  She was there til she died… .

  My father was transferred to Missoula, Montana. We got letters from him—

  censored, of course … . It was just my sister and myself. I was fifteen, she

  was twelve … . School in camp was a joke … . One of our basic subjects was

  American history. They talked about freedom al the time. (Laughs.)49

  In England there was similar hysteria. People with German-sounding names were picked up

  and interned. In the panic, a number of Jewish refugees who had German names were

  arrested and thrown into the same camps. There were thousands of Italians who were living

  in England, and when Italy entered World War II in June of 1940, Winston Churchil gave

  the order: "Col ar the lot." Italians were picked up and interned, the windows of Italian shops and restaurants were smashed by patriotic mobs. A British ship carrying Italian

  internees to Canada was sunk by a German submarine and everyone drowned.50

  72

  A War for Democracy?

  It was supposed to be a war for freedom. But in the United States, when Trotskyists and

  members of the Socialist Workers party spoke out in criticism of the war, eighteen of them

  were prosecuted in 1943 in Minneapolis. The Smith Act, passed in 1940, extended the anti-

  free-speech provisions of the World War I Espionage Act to peacetime. It prohibited joining

  any group or publishing any material that advocated revolution or that might lead to refusal

  of military service. The Trotskyists were sentenced to prison terms, and the Supreme Court

  refused to review their case.51

  Fortunes were made during the war, and wealth was concentrated in fewer and fewer

  hands. By 1941 three-fourths of the value of military contracts were handled by fifty-six

  large corporations. Pressure was put on the labor unions to pledge they would not strike.

  But they saw their wages frozen, and profits of corporations rising, and so strikes went on.

  There were 14,000 strikes during the war, involving over 6 mil ion workers, more than in

  any comparable period in American history.

  An insight into what great profits were made during the war came years later, when the

  multimil ionaire John McCone was nominated by President John F. Kennedy to head the CIA.

  The Senate Armed Services Committee, considering the nomination, was informed that in

  World War II, McCone and associates in a shipbuilding company had made $44 mil ion on an

  investment of $100,000. Reacting indignantly to criticism of McCone, one of his supporters

  on the Senate committee asked him:

  Sen. Symington: Now, it is stil legal in America, if not to make a profit, at

  least to try to make a profit, is it not?

  McCone: That is my understanding.52

  Bruce Catton, a writer and historian working in Washington during the war, commented

  bitingly on the retention of wealth and power in the same hands, despite a war that seemed

  to promise a new world of social reform. He wrote:

  We were committed to the defeat of the Axis but to nothing else … . It was

  solemnly decided that the war effort must not be used to bring about social or

  economic reform and to him that hath shal be given… .

  And through it al … the people were not trusted with the facts or relied on to

  display that intel igence, sanity, and innate decency of spirit, upon which

  democracy … final y rests. In a very real sense, our government spent the

  war years looking desperately for some safe middle ground between Hitler

  and Abraham Lincoln.53

  Dresden, Hiroshima, and Royan

  It becomes difficult to sustain the claim that a war is just when both sides commit atrocities,

  unless one wants to argue that their atrocities are worse than ours. True, nothing done by the Al ied Powers in World War II matches in utter viciousness the deliberate gassing,

  shooting, and burning of 6 mil ion Jews and 4 mil ion others by the Nazis. The deaths

  caused by the Al ies were less, but stil so massive as to throw doubt on the justice of a war

  that includes such acts.

  Early in the war, various world leaders condemned the indiscriminate bombing of city

  populations. Italy had bombed civilians in Ethiopia; Japan, in China; Germany and Italy, in

  the Spanish Civil War. Germany had dropped bombs on Rotterdam in Hol and, on Coventry

  in England, and other places. Roosevelt described these bombings as "inhuman barbarism

  that has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity."54

  73

  But very soon, the United States and Britain were doing the same thing and on a far larger scale. When the Al ied leaders met at Casablanca in January 1943, they agreed on massive

  air attacks to achieve "the destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point

  where their capacity for armed resistance is fatal y weakened."55 Churchil and his advisers

  had decided that bombing the working-class districts of German cities would accomplish just

  that, "the undermining of the morale of the German people."

  The saturation bombing of the German cities began. There were raids of a thousand planes

  on Cologne, Essen, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. The British flew at night and did "area

  bombing" with no pretense of aiming at specific military targets.

  The Americans flew in the daytime, pretending to precision, but bombing from high altitudes

  made that impossible. When I was doing my practice bombing in Deming, New Mexico,

  before going overseas, our egos were built up by having us fly at 4,000 feet and drop a

  bomb within twenty feet of the target. But at 11,000 feet, we were more likely to be 200

  feet away. And when we flew combat missions, we did it from 30,000 feet, and might miss

  by a quarter of a mile. Hardly "precision bombing."

  There was huge self-deception. We had been angered when the Germans bombed cities and

  kil ed several hundred or a thousand people. But now the British and Americans were kil ing

  tens of thousands in a single air strike. Michael Sherry, in his study of aerial bombing, notes

  that "so few in the air force asked questions."56 Sherry says there was no clear thinking about the effects of the bombing. Some generals objected, but were overruled by civilians.

  The technology crowded out moral considerations. Once the planes existed, targets had to

  be found.

  It was terror bombing, and the German city of Dresden was the extreme example. (The city

  and the event are immortalized in fiction by Kurt Vonnegut's comic, bitter novel,

  Slaughterhouse Five.) It was February 1945, the Red Army was eighty miles to the east and

  it was clear that Germany was on the way to defeat. In one day and one night of bombing,

  by American and British planes, the tremendous heat generated by the bombs created a

  vacuum, and an enormous firestorm swept the city, which was ful of refugees at the time,

  increasing the population to a mil ion. More than 100,000 people died.57

  The British pilot of a Lancaster bomber recal ed, "There was a sea of fire covering in my

  estimation some 40 square miles. We were so aghast at the awesome blaze that although

  alone over the city we flew around in a st
and-off position for many minutes before turning

  for home, quite subdued by our imagination of the horror that must be below."

  One incident remembered by survivors is that on the afternoon of February 14, 1945,

  American fighter planes machinegunned clusters of refugees on the banks of the Elbe. A

  German woman told of this years later: "We ran along the Elbe stepping over the bodies."58

  Winston Churchil , who seemed to have no moral qualms about his policy of indiscriminate

  bombing, described the annihilation of Dresden in his wartime memoirs with a simple

  statement: "We made a heavy raid in the latter month on Dresden, then a centre of

  communication of Germany's Eastern Front."59

  At one point in the war Churchil ordered thousands of anthrax bombs from a plant that was

  secretly producing them in the United States. His chief science adviser, Lord Cherwel , had

  informed him in February 1944: "Any animal breathing in minute quantities of these N

  [anthrax] spores is extremely likely to die suddenly but peaceful y within the week. There is

  no known cure and no effective prophylaxis. There is little doubt that it is equal y lethal to

  human beings." He told Churchil that a half dozen bombers could carry enough four-pound

  anthrax bombs to kil everyone within a square mile. However, production delays got in the

  way of this plan.60

  74

  The actor Richard Burton once wrote an article for the New York Times about his experience playing the role of Winston Churchil in a television drama:

  In the course of preparing myself … I realized afresh that I hate Churchil and

  al of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of

  endless power al through history… . What man of sanity would say on

  hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac

  prisoners of war, 'We shal wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women,

  and children. There shal not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth'?

  Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but

  reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.61

  When Burton's statement appeared in the "Arts and Leisure" section of the New York Times, he was banned from future BBC productions. The supervisor of drama productions for BBC

  said, "As far as I am concerned, he wil never work for us again… . Burton acted in an

  unprofessional way."62

  It seems that however moral is the cause that initiates a war (in the minds of the public, in

  the mouths of the politicians), it is in the nature of war to corrupt that morality until the rule

  becomes "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," and soon it is not a matter of equivalence, but indiscriminate revenge.

  The policy of saturation bombing became even more brutal when B-29s, which carried twice

  the bombload as the planes we flew in Europe, attacked Japanese cities with incendiaries,

  turning them into infernos.

  In one raid on Tokyo, after midnight on March 10, 1945, 300 B-29s left the city in flames,

  fanned by a strong northwest wind. The fires could be seen by pilots 150 miles out in the

  Pacific Ocean. A mil ion people were left homeless. It is estimated that 100,000 people died

  that night. Many of them attempting to escape leapt into the Sumida River and drowned. A

  Japanese novelist who was twelve years old at the time, described the scene years later:

  "The fire was like a living thing. It ran, just like a creature, chasing us."63

  By the time the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and another on

  Nagasaki (three days later), the moral line had been crossed psychological y by the massive

  bombings in Europe and by the fire bombings of Tokyo and other cities.

  The bomb on Hiroshima left perhaps 140,000 dead; the one on Nagasaki, 70,000 dead.

  Another 130,000 died in the next five years. Hundreds of thousands of others were left

  radiated and maimed. These numbers are based on the most detailed report that exists on

  the effects of the bombings; it was compiled by thirty-four Japanese specialists and was

  published in 1981.64

  The deception and self-deception that accompanied these atrocities was remarkable.

  Truman told the public, "The world wil note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on

  Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar

  as possible, the kil ing of civilians."65

  Even the possibility that American prisoners of war would be kil ed in these bombings did

  not have any effect on the plans. On July 31, nine days before Nagasaki was bombed, the

  headquarters of the U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces on Guam (the take-off airfield for the

  atomic bombings) sent a message to the War Department:

  Reports prisoner of war sources not verified by photo give location of Al ied

  prisoner-of-war camp, one mile north of center of city of Nagasaki. Does this

  influence the choice of this target for initial Centerboard operation? Request

  immediate reply.

  75

  The reply came, "Targets previously assigned for Centerboard remain unchanged."66

  The terrible momentum of war continued even after the bombings of Hiroshima and

  Nagasaki. The end of the war was a few days away, yet B-29s continued their missions. On

  August 14, five days after the Nagasaki bombing and the day before the actual acceptance

  of surrender terms, 449 B-29s went out from the Marianas for a daylight strike and 372

  more went out that night. Altogether, more than 1,000 planes were sent to bomb Japanese

  cities. There were no American losses. The last plane had not yet returned when Truman

  announced the Japanese had surrendered.

  Japanese writer Oda Makoto describes that August 14 in Osaka, where he lived. He was a

  boy. He went out into the streets and found in the midst of the corpses American leaflets

  written in Japanese, which had been dropped with the bombs: "Your government has

  surrendered; the war is over."67

  The American public, already conditioned to massive bombing, accepted the atomic

  bombings with equanimity, indeed with joy. I remember my own reaction. When the war

  ended in Europe, my crew flew our plane back to the United States. We were given a thirty-

  day furlough and then had to report for duty to be sent to Japan to continue bombing. My

  wife and I decided to spend that time in the countryside. Waiting for the bus to take us, I

  picked up the morning newspaper, August 7, 1945. The headline was "Atomic Bomb

  Dropped on Hiroshima." My immediate reaction was elation: "The war wil end. I won't have to go to the Pacific."

  I had no idea what the explosion of the atomic bomb had done to the men, women, and

  children of Hiroshima. It was abstract and distant, as were the deaths of the people from

  the bombs I had dropped in Europe from a height of six miles; I was unable to see anything

  below, there was no visible blood, and there were no audible screams. And I knew nothing

  of the imminence of a Japanese surrender. It was only later when I read John Hersey's

  Hiroshima, when I read the testimony of Japanese survivors, and when I studied the history of the decision to drop the bomb that I was outraged by what had been done.

  It seems that once an initial judgment has been made that a war is just, there is a tendency

  to stop thinking, to assume then that everything done on behalf of victory is moral y

  acceptable. I ha
d myself participated in the bombing of cities, without even considering

  whether there was any relationship between what I was doing and the elimination of

  fascism in the world. One of my bombing missions had been on the city of Pilsen (now

  Pizen) in Czechoslovakia. The inhabitants were Czechs—the very people who had been

  among the first victims of Nazi expansion—yet we were dropping bombs on them. I don't

  remember being conscious of that irony, or questioning our mission.

  After the war I looked up the official Air Force history and found this description of the

  Pilsen bombing:

  The last attack on an industrial target by the Eighth Air Force occurred on 25

  April, when the famous Skoda works at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, received 500

  wel -placed tons. Because of a warning sent out ahead of time the workers

  were able to escape, except for five persons."68

  In 1966, I encountered two Czech citizens who had lived in Pilsen at that time, and they

  told me that several hundred people died in that bombing raid.

  76

  There was another mission I flew, again unthinking and unfeeling, like a programmed robot.

  This was the bombing of the little French town of Royan, on the Atlantic coast near

  Bordeaux. The Al ies were wel into Germany, and it was clear that the war was almost over

  (it ended three weeks later). There was no reason for bombing Royan. True, there were

  several thousand German soldiers stationed outside the town, left behind by the Nazi

  retreat from France, but they were just waiting for the war to end.

  Our raid was reported in the New York Times:

  More than 1,300 Flying Fortresses and Liberators of the U.S. Eighth Air Force

  prepared the way for today's successful assault by drenching the enemy's

  positions on both sides of the Gironde control ing the route to Bordeaux with

  about 460,000 gal ons of liquid fire that bathed in flames the German

  positions and strong points.69

  This was one of the earliest uses of napalm in modern warfare. It may wel be that one of

  the reasons for the raid was to try out this new weapon. Also, there were al these planes

  and al these wel -trained crews, and here was something for them to do—not an unusual

  motive in war. Stil another reason: the French military leaders on the ground were aching

  for some glory before the war ended.