The Good War That Wasn't—and Why It Matters

World War II's Moral Legacy

Ted Grimsrud

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630876289
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A war is always a moral event. However, the most destructive war in human history has not received much moral scrutiny. The Good War That Wasn't--and Why It Matters examines the moral legacy of this war, especially for the United States.Drawing on the just war tradition and on moral values expressed in widely circulated statements of purpose for the war, the book asks: How did American participation in the war fit with just cause and just conduct criteria?Subsequently the book considers the impact of the war on American foreign policy in the years that followed. How did American actions cohere (or not) with the stated purposes for the war, especially self-determination for the peoples of the world and disarmament?Finally, the book looks at the witness of war opponents. Values expressed by war advocates were not actually furthered by the war. However, many war opponents did inspire efforts that effectively worked toward the goals of disarmament and self-determination.The Good War That Wasn't--and Why It Matters develops its arguments in pragmatic terms. It focuses on moral reasoning in a commonsense way in its challenge to widely held assumptions about World War II.

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Introduction: The United States and the Myth of Redemptive Violence

Taking the Measure of the War

World War II was big, maybe the biggest event in human history. During the six years of what became an immense global conflict, as many as eighty million people lost their lives. That’s more than the entire population of most countries. Many times more people had their lives profoundly traumatized. Uncounted millions were displaced. The earth itself suffered immense damage. The War’s1 impact remains present and alive throughout the world. It has shaped the morality of all subsequent generations. For many, especially in the world’s “one superpower,” the United States of America, World War II remains the historical and moral touchstone for understanding the necessity and even moral “goodness” of military force.2

My own life, in ways typical for Americans of my generation, has been shaped by the War. Both of my parents served in the U.S. Army. My father, Carl Grimsrud, enlisted in the National Guard in 1941. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), he was pressed into active duty. The Army placed him in eastern Oregon to guard against a feared Japanese invasion; there he met my mother, Betty Wagner. In time, Carl was shipped to the South Pacific, where he spent three intense years—he was wounded, he killed, he contracted malaria, but he managed to survive, even to thrive. He received a battlefield commission and reached the rank of captain. As the Army later demobilized, he was asked to stay in and make a career of the military, with the promise of further advancement. He said no, not because of any negative feelings about “the Service,” but because he had made a commitment to Betty to return to Oregon and establish a life together. While Carl served in combat, Betty worked as a military recruiter, gaining the rank of sergeant prior to her discharge.

My father never talked with me about his experience. (Actually, there was one conversation. When I was seventeen, he told me how meaningful his experience was in the context of encouraging me to consider applying to one of the military academies for college. When I showed no interest, he dropped the subject.) He did share one important part of his experience, though. He had a close friend in the Army who died in combat. His name was Ted.

There was another way the War impacted my life. I was born in 1954, my parents’ fourth child. Their mixture of blood types made me an “Rh factor” baby. For the mother, this condition gets worse with each pregnancy. By the time I came along, it was bad enough that if left to my own devices as a newborn, I would not have been able to create my own blood and I would have perished. Medicine was learning how to combat this condition, and one type of intervention that met with success was total blood transfusions for the baby. Few pediatricians had yet mastered the procedure—mainly those who had served in the War and learned about blood transfusions through working on severely wounded soldiers. It happened that in our small hospital in Eugene, Oregon, we did have one such doctor, who saved my life with this new procedure.

So, World War II brought my parents together, it provided my name, and it made the medical intervention that saved my life possible. But the War also shaped me as an American in other ways. It provided a mythology of the redemptive possibilities of violence. It was a “good war” that defended the American way of life and defeated forces that were clearly evil. As such, it set the tone for belief that America was a force for good in the world, that America’s ongoing military actions were in continuity with the Good War, and that just as my parents served this good in the world with their military service, so should I be ready to do the same.

I’ll say more later in this chapter about how I personally came to disbelieve in the redemptive possibilities of violence (what I will call “the myth of redemptive violence”). However, I have been unusual in my disbelief. Perhaps in large part because Americans mostly experienced the benefits of being on the winning side of World War II without much of the cost of destructive side of the War,3 it was easy for young people growing up in the 1950s and 1960s to accept without much dissonance the idea that war can be a good thing, that at times it is necessary, and that Americans in particular almost always fight in good wars.

The U.S. war on Vietnam created significant disillusionment concerning America’s wars, and subsequent military actions have also contributed to serious doubt about their goodness by some in our society. Nonetheless, the general orientation I grew up with concerning the positive value of preparing for and when necessary fighting in “good wars” and certainty about America’s goodness in her wars has remained widespread. Witness the almost complete unanimity in the U.S. concerning the attacks on Afghanistan following the trauma of September 11, 2001. Witness also the sacrosanct character of the U.S. military budget that dominates federal spending even in times of budget crises and spiraling national debt (and that nearly matches the total military spending of all the rest of the world combined).4

I encounter this positive orientation toward America’s war fighting preparations and history of good wars regularly—and I usually see it overtly linked with U.S. involvement in World War II. As a convinced pacifist who teaches college classes in ethics, I make a point to introduce students to the ideals of principled nonviolence. The most instructive encounters with students generally come in my introductory ethics course, which is required for a cross section of the students at our college. Many of these students have never heard of pacifism before. Quite a few of them come from families with long histories of participation in the military.

Time after time, year after year, students are taken aback by my principled opposition to war. They quickly evoke World War II, the need to defeat Hitler and the Nazis, and the lack of any other viable alternatives to stop such overwhelming evil. One student spoke for many others in class in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001: “Why would they be attacking us? We’ve never done anyone wrong. The U.S. stands for freedom, democracy, and against tyranny. Look what we did to stop Hitler.”

Not only conservatives and strong believers in the virtues of the American military evoke the battle against Hitler and the Good War as the definitive refutation of pacifism. Even progressive do it. Katha Pollitt, a decidedly leftist columnist for the politically progressive and antimilitarist magazine The Nation,5 attacks pacifism in her sharply critical column on Nicholson Baker’s book on World War II, Human Smoke. Pollitt begins her column by stating that after reading Baker’s book she “felt fury at pacifists” and concludes that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill “got it right” when they realized that only massive violence could stop the Nazis.6

Such evocations of World War II seem to make war in general seem more acceptable. If we have a clear case of a necessary and, to some extent, redemptive war in history, we more easily imagine war being necessary in the future. And because war may be necessary in the future (as it was in the past), it is necessary now to prepare for war by devoting massive resources to the military. That is, when we sustain the myth of redemptive violence in relation to World War II, we will find it much more difficult not to accept that myth in relation to our current cultural context.

So, my concern in this book ultimately is with our current cultural context, the ways that wars and preparation for wars are tolerated, even embraced. I want to examine one key element of America’s toleration of present-day militarism—the belief that America’s military involvement in the greatest event of human history (World War II) was necessary, good, and even redemptive.

In this book, I offer an essay in moral philosophy with historical illustrations. I do not make any claims to originality in my use of the historical cases. I will rely on the work of historians, political thinkers, and moral philosophers. Perhaps my synthesis of their ideas and application to my own agenda will be distinctive, but my main goal is to raise questions, not to provide new information. I will raise questions that are not often asked. And I will offer responses to those questions that I believe could help free Americans from the spiral of violence heightened by acceptance of the myth of redemptive violence.

I have three sets of questions and issues I will engage. First, I will look at the War itself through moral eyes and ask whether it had just causes and employed just means. Second, I will consider the aftermath of World War II, especially as the American experience of the War has shaped U.S. foreign policy in the years since. The sum of my examination of these first two sets of questions and issues will be a sharp critique of the mythology that World War II and its legacy have had a redemptive impact on the world. This critique will lead to the third set of questions and issues: are there viable nonviolent alternatives to seeking human well-being in the face of tyranny and aggression?

Looking at World War II “through moral eyes” puts the ethical criteria that make up “the just war theory” on the table. As a pacifist, I do not see the just war theory to be an adequate moral response to the question of support for war. However, in ways that pacifism can’t (since it does not reason about war’s bases and conduct so much as simply deny the moral validity of all wars), the just war tradition offers us a framework for evaluating the morality of particular wars. So I will have in mind various just war criteria as they apply to the actual war we call World War II. Along with the more abstract traditional just war criteria, I will also seek to use as bases for moral evaluation the stated ideals that American leaders and their allies used to justify involvement in this war. I will summarize these in the next section of this Introduction.

I will reflect on the legacy of the War using moral criteria that can help us discern whether it was a “good” or “just” war. I do this in order to ask our moral reasoning to “have teeth.”7 I challenge those who think of World War II as a “good war” (with the recognition that the notion of “good” here is a moral notion that implies not all wars are “good” and we have some bases for determining what is “good” and what is not “good”) to think more carefully about that assignation. Further, I hope to show that if “goodness” is our fundamental criterion, we in fact should rethink our affirmation of World War II. And if World War II does not actu...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction: The United States and the Myth of Redemptive Violence
• PART ONE: Total War
• Chapter 2: Why Did America Go to War?
• Chapter 3: Was America’s Conduct in World War II Just?
• Chapter 4: What Did the War Cost?
• PART TWO: Aftermath
• Chapter 5: Pax Americana
• Chapter 6: The Cold War
• Chapter 7: Full Spectrum Dominance
• PART THREE: Alternatives
• Chapter 8: No to the War
• Chapter 9: Social Transformation
• Chapter 10: Servanthood
• Chapter 11: Conclusion: World War II’s Moral Legacy
• Bibliography