GOOD ENOUGH, BUT WE COULD HAVE DONE BETTER:

How good was the Good War?: On May 8, 1945, the war against Hitler’s Third Reich was won — and some of the victors’ most cherished myths were born (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, May 8, 2005, Boston Globe)

[W]e have all been sustained since V-E Day, 60 years ago today, by what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister of a century ago, once called ‘‘beautiful national legends.’’ By ‘‘we’’ I mean the countries that ended the war on the winning side (the Germans and Japanese have some national legends of their own).

Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.

Other myths about the war have grown up less deliberately. For Americans, the first national legend concerns the very definition of World War II. In recent decades it has come more and more to mean the war against Hitler’s Germany. But for the American people at the time, ‘‘the war’’ meant the Pacific war. That was where the first and last American blood was spilled, where America was engaged in combat the longest, and where Americans for most of the time watched the war unfold.

Funnily enough, when President Bush says that the war on terror, like World War II, began with a surprise attack on America, he is echoing that original perception. To say that the war started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 (which is what he means) will come as a surprise to Europeans and especially the Poles, who have an idea it began on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Wehrmacht invaded their country. And yet Bush is harking back unconsciously to the days when the war for America meant ‘‘The Sands of Iwo Jima,’’ rather than ‘‘Saving Private Ryan’’ and ‘‘Band of Brothers.’’ [...]

[The] fighting spirit of the Germans had another side to it. Hitler ruled by glamour and terror; his soldiers were driven by fear as well as zeal. In a war during which no British soldier, and only one GI, was shot for cowardice, at least 15,000 German servicemen were executed for dereliction of duty.

And that went for the Russians even more so. A heroic Russian narrative of the war, and the memory of the tens of millions of Russian dead, is still potent and plays a part in the sinister nostalgia for Stalin resurfacing in Russia but Russian heroism also has to be qualified.

We now know that in the first winter of the war on the Eastern Front in 1941-42, more than 8,000 Russian soldiers died not in action but shot by their own army for cowardice or desertion. During the battle of Stalingrad alone, another 12,000 men of the Red Army were put to death pour encourager les autres. This was a regime fighting a desperate war that could nevertheless put to death well over a full infantry division of its own men. On the other hand, the Russians relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.

For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways, particularly by the bombing campaign that reduced the cities of Germany to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000 British servicemen killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were numbed the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ but it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.

Nor on the other moral compromises at the war’s end. Great Britain did not go to war to save the Jews from Hitler’s torment (and did not succeed) but to protect the freedom and integrity of Poland, an aim that Churchill, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, abandoned at Yalta.

The issue is not whether it was "good" to get rid of Hitler but whether it made any sense to do so without also disposing of Stalin. As for the casualties we inflicted, it seems a useful and quite democratic principle to hold entire nations responsible for the conduct of the regimes they tolerate.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2005 7:25 AM