Iwo Jima's Lesson in Empathy
On March 9, 1945, 346 B-29s left the Marianas, bound for Tokyo, where they dropped 1,858 tons of incendiaries that destroyed one-sixth of Japan's capital, killing 83,000. Gen. Curtis LeMay, then commander of the air assault on Japan, later wrote, "We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo ...than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
That was inaccurate -- 80,000 died at Hiroshima alone. And in his new biography of LeMay, Barrett Tillman writes that the general was more empathetic than his rhetoric suggested: "He could envision a three-year-old girl screaming for her mother in a burning house." But LeMay was a warrior "whose government gave him a task that required killing large numbers of enemy civilians so the war could be won."
It has been hotly debated how much indiscriminate killing of civilians in the Asian and European theaters really was "required" and therefore was morally permissible. Even during the war there was empathy for European civilian victims. And less than 15 years after the war, movies (e.g., "The Young Lions," 1958) offered sympathetic portrayals of common German soldiers swept into combat by the cyclone of a war launched by a tyrant.
But attitudes about the Japanese soldier were especially harsh during the war and have been less softened by time than have attitudes about the German soldier. During the war, it was acceptable for a billboard -- signed by Adm. William F. "Bull" Halsey -- at a U.S. Navy base in the South Pacific to exhort "Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill More Japs." Killing America's enemies was Halsey's trade. His rhetoric was symptomatic of the special ferocity, rooted in race, of the war against Japan.
Perhaps empathy for the plight of the common enemy conscript is a postwar luxury; it certainly is a civilized achievement, an achievement of moral imagination that often needs the assistance of art. That is why it is notable that Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" was one of five films nominated for Best Picture....
Read entire article at George Will in the WSJ
That was inaccurate -- 80,000 died at Hiroshima alone. And in his new biography of LeMay, Barrett Tillman writes that the general was more empathetic than his rhetoric suggested: "He could envision a three-year-old girl screaming for her mother in a burning house." But LeMay was a warrior "whose government gave him a task that required killing large numbers of enemy civilians so the war could be won."
It has been hotly debated how much indiscriminate killing of civilians in the Asian and European theaters really was "required" and therefore was morally permissible. Even during the war there was empathy for European civilian victims. And less than 15 years after the war, movies (e.g., "The Young Lions," 1958) offered sympathetic portrayals of common German soldiers swept into combat by the cyclone of a war launched by a tyrant.
But attitudes about the Japanese soldier were especially harsh during the war and have been less softened by time than have attitudes about the German soldier. During the war, it was acceptable for a billboard -- signed by Adm. William F. "Bull" Halsey -- at a U.S. Navy base in the South Pacific to exhort "Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill More Japs." Killing America's enemies was Halsey's trade. His rhetoric was symptomatic of the special ferocity, rooted in race, of the war against Japan.
Perhaps empathy for the plight of the common enemy conscript is a postwar luxury; it certainly is a civilized achievement, an achievement of moral imagination that often needs the assistance of art. That is why it is notable that Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" was one of five films nominated for Best Picture....