NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The challenges of evaluating the moral complexities of people‘s actions in war – military and civilian – propelled Vanderbilt University historian Michael Bess to write about World War II, a conflict that he said is too often depicted in morally simplistic terms.
With his new book, Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), Bess hopes to provide the reader “a greater appreciation for ambiguity and messy complexity in understanding history.”
Bess, the Chancellor‘s Professor of History at Vanderbilt, began teaching a class about World War II in 1998. He discovered that students were most fired up when discussing the moral aspects of a particular issue. “Did the Allies take the right action? Did our actions harm civilians, and, if so, was it unnecessary harm?” he said.
Bess points out that while some aspects of World War II are unambiguous, such as Germany and Japan being aggressor nations, there are also gray areas where one finds the Allies doing the kind of things they originally said were wrong. For example, thousands of Chinese civilians were killed in 1937 when the Japanese bombed Chinese cities. “The entire world shouted in outrage and condemned the Japanese as barbarians,” Bess said. “Scroll forward five or six years and the Americans and Brits are doing the same thing on a scale that dwarfs what the Japanese did. In Dresden, 60,000 Germans, most of them civilians, killed in one night, and in Tokyo, 110,000 in one night.” Bess said that there was a widespread dehumanization of the enemy that made it possible for decent men to conduct policies that seem atrocious today.
Another example is American soldiers in the Pacific cutting off the heads of Japanese men who had been killed and bringing the skulls home as trophies.
“For some of our soldiers, it took years for them to recover some semblance of normal humanity,” Bess said. “You cannot just plunge people into this hell of violence and expect them to come back as if nothing had happened.”
The longest chapter in Choices Under Fire concerns the Truman administration‘s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Bess looks at what would have been the cost in lives if alternative paths had been followed. “You find that alternative courses become very complicated in a rapidly evolving military situation, with political and diplomatic issues to consider as well,” Bess said. “But in the end, I conclude that this was a clear-cut atrocity that nonetheless shortened the war, and thereby saved between half a million and two million human lives.”
Unfortunately, Bess could not speak with many people who were directly involved in World War II since they have died. Instead, he turned to government documents that provide an archival record of what people were doing and thinking. There‘s also an enormous literature of wartime memoirs. In addition, Bess drew upon the writings of some non-academic historians, such as Richard Frank, who provided analysis of key military aspects around the dropping of the atomic bombs.
The moral dimensions of political and military decisions certainly have not gone away in 2006. That is why Bess believes his book has an important message for today‘s leaders. “The victors in World War II bequeathed to us the United Nations in the hope that it would take us into a new era in which we could avoid interstate warfare,” Bess said. He contrasts the first Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush with the one launched by his son. “The attack under Bush 41 was led by U.S. forces, but he painstakingly cobbled together a very broad military coalition. Bush 43 took a far different course, launching a war in Iraq without significant support except from Britain.”
Bess said that people tend to forget the unanimity with which the world‘s leaders enthusiastically greeted the creation of the United Nations. “The late George Marshall‘s vision was that you cannot rely over time on nations with their own military forces securing isolated national interests without risking another major war,” he said. “Marshall advocated supporting the United Nations and pushing it until there was a complete transformation in world politics. I hope that my book conveys the message of why that remains just as important today.”
More information about Choices Under Fire is available at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/authors/michaelbess.
Media contact: Ann Marie Deer Owens, 615-322-NEWS
Annmarie.owens@vanderbilt.edu