My father enlisted in the Marines right after Pearl Harbor, was a participant in the Battles of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, was promoted for his service to his country and decorated for bravery. The Marines were then and are now rightly celebrated in American lore for their courage and esprit de corps. He, along with millions of others, left the American military for good in 1946. Anybody who knows a Marine won’t be a bit surprised to hear that although I never served in the military, part of my rearing included an imprinting that all branches of the military are to be respected, but at bottom, there are the Marines … and then there’s everybody else.
Even so, but for a couple of humorous stories – mostly about brawls in bars between Marines and sailors while on leave – he never talked about the war. Never. Except once.
I recall him standing in front of our black-and-white TV, watching the network coverage of what is now known as the My Lai Massacre, a March, 1968, incident in which American soldiers commanded by Platoon Leader Lt. William Calley, who had been ordered to undertake a search and destroy mission, killed hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese men, women, and children in the village of My Lai.
As my father stood watching the coverage of the prosecution of Lt. Calley, he was shaking his head in disbelief – I realized not at what had been done to the villagers, but at the Lieutenant’s prosecution. He said in an even tone – not soft, not loud; I think more to himself than to me – “When you’re ordered to clear an area out, you clear the area out.”
Infer from that – and consider whatever you infer from that – as you will. Having never been near a battlefield, I don’t consider my own reflections worth much. During the Second World War, the Marines were engaged in a death struggle against an unyielding enemy to defend freedom. War is messy; there is little time for deliberation; events spin. Were all actions undertaken in that just cause warranted – or at least defensible — or not?
Almost always when I publish a note in these pages, I have concluded – wisely or misguidedly – where I stand on an issue. When it comes to the justification for inflicting civilian casualties as part of a war effort, I am uncertain.
Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 was horrific. (As shocking to me have been the breadth of overt anti-Semitic and Islamophobic sentiments and violent incidents it unleashed around the western world; the attack ripped off a thin veneer of tolerance, exposing a depth of widespread religious bigotry in the democracies that I — clearly living in my own oblivious Ivory Tower — had not recognized.) Hamas must be condemned in the most unequivocal terms; it is a Palestinian terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel, has done little to help civilian Palestinians during its almost two-decade control of the Gaza Strip, and employs Palestinian civilians and humanitarian facilities as shields in its assaults on Israel. Israel has a right to defend its existence and its citizens – which now appears to mean destroying Hamas — and given Hamas’ modus operandi, such Israeli efforts are necessarily going to result in civilian Palestinian casualties. At the same time, Israel has significantly expanded its control over the last 70 years into land intended by the international community to be inhabited and controlled by Palestinians when Israel was founded. Although much of this expansion occurred not because Israel attacked, but because it was attacked, it has maintained its de facto grip over Palestinian lands because … it can, and such has suited Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu’s political purposes. Before the current conflict, human rights groups had been referring to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as apartheid. It is not anti-Semitism to suggest — using the Biden Administration, a clear friend of Israel, as the arbiter — that in its assaults, Israel has not been particularly discriminating about protecting Palestinian civilians.
Our acquiescence to civilian casualties may be determined by our view of the virtue of the cause in which they are inflicted and their necessity to achieve victory. Such does not expunge the fact that cruel and unfair consequences can be inflicted upon noncombatants even in the pursuit of a just cause. Christianity, and likely many other faiths, holds that protection of the innocent is paramount. The reality of the flawed human condition makes clear that always prioritizing compassion would lead to subjugation of more peoples by the malignant – ultimately resulting in the maltreatment of a wider set of victims.
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 “scorched earth” march to the sea was a major part of subduing the South and thus preserving the Union and abolishing slavery. At the same time:
“Sherman had terrorized the countryside; his men had destroyed all sources of food and forage and had left behind a hungry and demoralized people. … Sherman … burned or captured all the food stores that Georgians had saved for the winter months. As a result of the hardships on women and children, desertions increased in Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia. Sherman believed his campaign against civilians would shorten the war by breaking the Confederate will to fight ….”
- Anne Bailey, “Sherman’s March to the Sea,” New Georgia Encyclopedia
Despite Gen. Sherman’s fearsome deeds and reputation, he understood the malign nature of war, but clearly felt that some causes were worth the devastation needed to bring them about.
“War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it … You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it …”
- Gen. Sherman, in a letter to James M. Calhoun, Mayor, E.E. Rawson, S.C. Wells, representing City Council of Atlanta, September 12, 1864.
If there has been a more monstrous atrocity in human history than the Nazis’ systematic slaughter of the Jews, I’m not aware of it. Allied forces were obviously justified in contesting the Nazis and their allies with all of their strength and means. At the same time, a young friend recently reminded me of the American and British bombing of the German city of Dresden in February, 1945, that killed tens of thousands of civilians in a manufacturing city whose resources the Allies believed – in retrospect, apparently erroneously — that the Third Reich could effectively employ to mount a counteroffensive against our D-Day invasion. Were the Allies’ efforts excusable? I would say yes. Were the civilian casualties wrought commendable? Obviously not.
The U.S. military estimated in the late 1940s that over 100,000 people died in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions. Others place the total of dead closer to 200,000. A significant number of these were necessarily civilian. At the same time, President Truman indicated in a letter in January, 1953, that Gen. George Marshall told him prior to dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima “that such an invasion would cost at a minimum one quarter of a million casualties and might cost as much as a million, on the American side alone.” Faced with that kind of an estimate, if advising the President I would have supported using the Bomb. Others would vehemently disagree, then and now.
We condemn the slaughter of Ukrainians civilians in Russia’s war of aggression. At the same time, would we denounce Ukrainian operations against Russian civilians if such losses seemed likely to turn Russian public opinion against Putin’s war? I’ll leave that one to you.
Increasing civilian casualties are a fact of modern war and technological weaponry. They are not going to stop. It is for one to ponder whether — and if so, when, and to what extent — these human tragedies are worth what is gained. Americans should be more aware than they appear to be that they have the luxury – at least at present — of considering such philosophical issues from their armchairs. Much of the world is not so fortunate. It is those fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and sisters and brothers whose lives are collateral sacrifice to the designs of others.
“Abraham drew near and said, ‘Will you destroy the good with the wicked? If there be fifty just men in the city, will you then destroy the place and not spare it for the sake of the fifty just men within it?’ … And the Lord said, ‘If I find that there are fifty just men in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.’”
- The Book of Genesis, 18: 24, 26. It is little noted when this passage and the subsequent exchanges between Abraham and the Almighty are read in Christian churches that although the Lord God did allow the just Lot, his wife and daughters to escape, He ultimately did destroy the city and its inhabitants.
There is obviously no ray of enlightenment in this note.
“All cats are grey in the dark.”
- Musing by the fictional James Bond; Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
McCoy's Noise 