🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:36:57 +0000 (UTC), Merlin Dorfman
<dorfman@green.rahul.net> wrote:

>In ba.general Hugo S. Cunningham <checkwebsite@cyberussr.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 01:40:40 +0000 (UTC), Merlin Dorfman
>> <dorfman@green.rahul.net> wrote:
>
>...
>
>>>> FDR's sins in WW II were greater than G.W. Bush's in Iraq, but they
>>>> were redeemed by FDR's competent achievement of worthwhile objectives,
>>>> notably the destruction of Nazi Germany.
>>>
>>>     First, I'm curious as to what you regard as FDR's sins in WW II.
>>>I would include the evacuation of Japanese Americans, but they were
>>>not tortured to the best of my knowledge.    What else did you have
>>>in mind?
>
>> Fire-bombing  Japanese cities with callous disregard for hundreds of
>> thousands of civilian deaths (I am not referring to the 2 A-bombings.
>> If someone else wishes to make an issue out of them, however, all the
>> work on developing them took place under FDR.)
>> (The carpet-bombing of German cities [including Dresden]  was more the
>> responsibility of the RAF's Arthur "Bomber" Harris, though the USAAF
>> played a part.)
>
>     You are right that the USAAF tried to limit itself to military
>targets in Germany (albeit with limited success) while the RAF 
>deliberately set out to "de-house" workers, keep them from sleeping
>at night, etc.  In total war, it is difficult to separate the workers
>from the fighters.

I don't quite see the point of your last sentence.  Bomber Harris had
little interest in separating them.

>     In Japan the Marianas were captured and the B-29s deployed at
>incredible cost in blood and treasure.  (Did you know that the B-29
>development program cost more than the Manhattan project?)

No, but it doesn't surprise me.  The historical difference is that the
Manhattan budget was secret, and would have started attracting
attention at the end of the war.

>  And when
>the early raids didn't seem to be accomplishing much, the commander
>(Heywood Hensel) was fired and LeMay was put in place.  He quickly
>found that Japanese cities were tinder boxes of paper and wood, and
>went from high-altitude daytime raids to low-altitude night fire
>bombing.  
>     I'm of two minds about this kind of thing.  How about 
>unrestricted submarine warfare?  We gave the Germans hell about it

in WW I.  In 1940-41, there were some US complaints, but as you note
below they largely stopped when ...

>... right after Pearl Harbor we started doing it ourselves
[against Japan]
>.  Is that
>a war crime?

Admiral Doenitz was able to produce a letter to that effect from US
Admiral Nimitz at the Nuremberg trial.  The ten year prison sentence
he drew (while most of his co-defendants were hanged) was for other
reasons.
 
>  It was very successful--Japan ran out of oil and just
>about everything else due to lack of shipping.

Being burned alive (or badly injured by burns) is substantially more
gruesome than a siege by submarine blockade.

>     And there's a question of how low a tactical level the 
>commander in chief can be blamed for.  Front-line atrocities?  I'm
>not at all sure about that.  Even strategy questions.  If you want
>to call Harris and LeMay war criminals we can have a discussion.

Churchill and FDR knew what Harris and LeMay were doing.  Any guilt we
might have felt about bombing German civilians vanished, however, as
Nazi death camps were liberated at the end of the war.  The Germans
deserved Bomber Harris, and ten times more...
The carpet bombing could be justified even by today's much more strict
modern standards as reprisal to deter the Nazis from deporting and
murdering Jews.  But the USAAF and RAF pilots would not have been
eager to fly on that basis, since they might well have expected worse
treatment if shot down and captured.  As it was, the Germans treated
Allied flyers as PoWs (with some exceptions in the final months of the
war) because German pilots had been doing the same thing over London
in 1940-41.
   The Allied command perhaps would have shunned the "reprisal"
justification for bombing because they did not want to give it up even
if the Nazis were willing to halt the massacre of the Jews.
    They did make a threat of poison-gas reprisals over German cities
if the Germans started using poison gas on the Russian front (where,
as it turned out, Russian preparations were practically useless).  The
Germans refrained, whether because they took the Western threat
seriously, or because Hitler, gassed in 1918, had a personal dislike
for it.
   The cruel standards that seemed justifiable against Nazi Germany
were transferred with less justification to Japan. 

>How about the RAF Air Chief Marshal (can't come up with his name
>right now) or Arnold or Leahy?  What decisions should FDR and
>Churchill have been involved in, or reversed on humanitarian
>grounds?  There are only 24 hours in a day and there were a lot of
>things that absolutely required their attention.

Don't get me wrong.  I am an admirer of FDR,  ranking him "great" with
Lincoln and Washington.

My point was that, in prosecuting a vast and necessary war, he did
worse things than G.W. Bush is accused of.

>> Reciprocal atrocities on the front lines with Japanese troops.  (The
>> USA treated its PoWs better than Japan did, but until surrendering
>> soldiers were accepted as PoWs, anything could happen in a savage race
>> war.)  Both sides pressured soldiers  immediately after capture for
>> intelligence info, though US forces would generally let up before
>> going too far.
>
>> Giving massive aid to Stalin without requiring restraint of his
>> human-rights violations.
>
>     As Churchill said, "If Hitler marched into Hell, I would hasten
>to make an alliance with the Devil."  He and FDR knew which was the
>greatest evil.  Stalin would have rejected any conditions on aid--
>then what?  Allow Hitler to conquer Russia?  Or Stalin would have
>agreed and ignored the agreements, as he did with Yalta etc.; should
>we then have stopped the aid?  War is hell, even for civilian 
>leaders.

I agree with you.  I brought the point up, however, because it has
come up over and over again since 1945 -- should the US ever support
allies with less than pure human rights records?

>> Executing 8 suspected Nazi saboteurs after a farcical, mostly secret
>> "trial."  Bush talks about it, but he hasn't done it.
>
>> Failure to appoint lawyers for all detainees
>
>     There is a bit of historicism here.  Neither the Geneva 
>Conventions nor anything else called for that kind of treatment of
>spies, which is what they were: enemies behind the lines and out 
>of uniform.  If the Germans had been in uniform they would have
>been treated as POWs.  Out of uniform they were spies and lucky
>not to be just shot out of hand.

That tends to be true of Bush's "unlawful combatants" as well, but his
NGO critics don't buy it.

--Hugo S. Cunningham