Bad Behavior in a "Good War"

The success of "The Greatest Generation", "Saving Private Ryan", and the recent establishment of the World War II Memorial in Washington DC reflect a great public fascination the American people have with the epic conflict of the 1940s. In part this may be due to its moral clarity. We think of images of clean-cut, honorable, patriotic, and brave American soldiers fighting agianst totalitarians bent on world domination. This image is especially comforting as a contrast to the moral ambiguities and martial disappointments of the Vietnam War (a conflict whose legacy we're still struggling with today, as recent political controversies have shown). It's become common to view World War II as "The Good War".

But there was a darker side to "The Good War" that has largely been forgotten. In "War Without Mercy", John Dower reveals that the War in the Pacific involved some of the most brutal and ferocious warfare in human history. The Japanese commited unspeakable atrocities to the civilian population in Nanking and elsewhere in China. Thousands of Americans starved or were shot on the infamous Bataan Death March. Japanese troops often refused to surrender, sometimes sacrificing their lives in banzai charges and kamikaze missions in order to destroy their Western foes. American prisoners of war were brutalized by the Japanese, and American corpses were defiled.

Dower cites a survey in which one in four US combatants said his primary goal was not to help bring America its victory, but rather to “kill as many Japanese as possible”. There were cases of Japanese POWs being lined up and shot. It was not uncommon (although not the norm) for American soldiers to mail the teeth or ears of a dead Japanese soldier home as a kind of grisly souvenier. Serious military analysts and political commentators declared that every Japanese man, woman, and child would have to be exterminated before the war could be won.

What motivated this level of brutality on both sides? For the Americans, the most obvious motivation was revenge for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. But there was something more to it than that. Dower proves that the Japanese were more despised and hated than the Germans were in wartime America. This is in part because the Holocaust was not widely known to the American public at the time (although heavy German persecution of Jews was common knowledge). However, both Japan and Germany were authoritarian powers who were going to keep on conquering their neighbors until they were stopped. The Germans were clearly the more militarily potent of the two, and thus the greater danger to American security. One would think that they would be more feared and more hated.

But that was not the case. The American media almost always distinguished between those “good Germans” and the “bad Nazis”, but it never had any mention of “good Japanese”. The United States Government placed thousands of Japanese-Americans in internment camps, even though there was no pro-Imperial movement ever present among them. On the other hand, German-Americans were not placed in camps, in spite of the fact that groups such as the German-American Bund were openly pro-Nazi prior to the war.

Clearly another factor is at work here, and Dower identifies that factor as racism. In the American media, reference was constantly made to the physical attributes of the Japanese; they were often called “yellow” and “slanty-eyed” and were always referred to derogatively as “Japs”. Political cartoons often depicted them as monkeys or apes, thus using a classic image created by whites throughout history to represent races considered to be “biologically inferior”. These cartoons, reproduced in Dower’s book, are shocking to the modern eye, given our current concern with equal treatment and political correctness.

One cartoon is particularly revealing about the differing views of the different enemies. It’s a comment on Germany’s destruction of the Czech villages of Lidice and Lezaky, and on Japan’s destruction of the Phillipine town of Cebu. Hitler is shown in the background, stoically standing amidst the ashes of the Czech towns in full uniform. In the foreground, a comical chimpanzee labeled “Japs” is childishly stomping on a miniature city. The heading above the cartoon is “Mimic”. This reinforces the idea that the Japanese were not capable of coming up with any idea of their own, but instead slavishly imitate the actions of whites. The cartoon reflects the idea that the Fascists were evil men who must be stopped, but the Japanese were not even men at all, but beasts, something subhuman. And this cartoon appeared not in some fringe publication but in the respected, liberal “Washington Post”.

Fortunately, Dower’s book is not a one-sided, shrill expose on the racism that lies within the American heart. He also examines the Japanese mindset, and finds that they too were racist in their own way. The Japanese believed their race and culture was morally superior to all others in the world. Their empire, which has the Orwellian title the “Co-Prosperity Sphere”, actually exploited the labor and resources of other Asian peoples for Japan’s benefit. The Japanese looked down upon Westerners as selfish, greedy, and decadent. Lack of individualism, extreme nationalism, and a strong sense of duty made Japanese soldiers particularly willing to risk (or give) their lives in battle in order to kill the enemy.

As a scholarly blockbuster, Dower’s book deserves 5 stars for its fresh approach. But here on Epinions we are an audience that generally reads books for their entertainment value as well as their educational content (personally, I must confess that I read this book for a college course). “War Without Mercy” has its fascinating and shocking moments, but at times it can be dry and repetitive. So for the purposes of this forum I awarded it 4 stars.

Dower’s work does have relevance in our current time of war. The fact that we haven’t interned large numbers of Arab-Americans, despite the fact that there are certainly more bin Laden sympathizers among them than there were pro-Emperor Japanese citizens during WWII, reflects impressive moral progress on our part. However, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shows that the dangers of dehumanizing the enemy are still very much with us today.