Who’s The Bad Guy?

Who’s The Bad Guy?

Tonight I found a Netflix 5-part series on WWII. I know what you’re thinking, haven’t I had enough of WWII with all the war movies I have watched over the years? Yes, I’ve seen them all, but what I liked about this documentary series was that it used original footage that was colorized and enhanced (which does bring some of that old film to life as Peter Jackson showed us with his WWI movie called They Shall Not Grow Old). THe series was organized in pure chronological order shifting from the European theater to the Pacific and back and forth as events actually occurred. The North African offensive occurring at the same time as the German push into Russia and ultimate defeat at Stalingrad suddenly came into clearer focus and made sense. Watching Italy crumble as Japan was fighting back harshly through all of the South Pacific islands. The documentarians were determined to show the good and the bad on both sides that took place along the way, and there was plenty of it to sort through.

They kept using an aerial map of the world with red indicating the Axis power occupation emanating from Germany and Japan (and a bit from Italy…though somewhat half-heartedly to be sure). You see the blood red map expand to great lengths through Europe, into the north Asia continent and south across the Mediterranean into North Africa. It was an impressive march. In the Pacific the graphic didn’t work as well since the red was in fits of islands spread here and there, but even there the blood red spread through China and Southeast Asia was pretty stark. The story starts with the brutality of the Germans as they advance through Poland and Russia and find the expedient of killing enemy prisoners rather than following the conventions agreed in Geneva for the conduct of a civilized war. But the documentarians made a point of adding to the narration with the words of surviving military and civilian men and women from every country involved in the conflict. It was interesting to hear what sounded like honest perspectives from people who were distanced long enough from that moment to have a willingness to be accurate as to how sentiments were running at those moments from all sides.

The views of German soldiers slogging their way through Russia contrasted by the Russian commentary from those at risk of losing their homeland and fighting desperately to keep what little they had left in the world, a world that was harshly ruled by Stalin and had been for some time already. It ws less surprising to hear people in Southern Italian and Sicilian towns talking about their lack of willingness to stand with Mussolini or Hitler, but to hear a German soldier talk about his unwillingness to follow orders to execute a prisoner and secretly letting him go while a British soldier talks about not feeling good about his assigned mission but feeling that war demanded blind loyalty and a willingness to follow orders at all costs, was all quite eye-opening.

One of the things I learned that I can’t say I knew before was that Churchill made a command decision in 1943 to send over 700 bombers across the Channel to bomb Hamburg, a city that was not really a military target or even a big industrial target at that time. He was specifically firebombing the city to inflict harm on the civilian population so as to turn the German people against their own war machine and the Nazi Party. On that first night of bombing, it was estimated that over 45,000 civilians were killed in this, the second largest city in Germany at the time. The startling fact was that Churchill ordered a second night of bombing of central Hamburg, specifically to take out a symbolic central post office where 60,000 civilians are taking shelter. The British pilots assigned to that second mission showed great hesitation and remorse for their actions. The entire campaign was code-named Operation Gomorrah, which more or less says it all.

Meanwhile, the situation on the Eastern Front with the German SS troops retreating as the Red Army advanced through Poland and towards Germany, was worse by far than the original blitzkrieg advance when Germany took Poland overnight in 1939. It was certainly worse for the German soldiers retreating, but the real price was paid by the Polish civilians, who lost an estimated 180,000 people during the siege of Warsaw by itself. What isn’t clear was how many of those civilians were killed by the retreating Germans and how many were killed by the advancing Russians. In the same way that the brutality of Stalin seemed worse to some than the brutality of Hitler, I’m sure there were lots of Poles who felt that both the Germans and the Russians were equally brutal to their interests. Humanity under duress loses its humanity and resorts to pure survival of the fittest instincts.

The finish line of Berlin, called “the last stand” was a case of arbitraging brutality. From the German civilian perspective, the outcome was inevitable in terms of the war effort, but hardly inevitable in terms of survivability. There were three sources of brutality. Most Germans would argue that the brutality of the Russians was far more harsh than the brutality of the American and British forces advancing over the Rhine. But the lingering German brutality for any Germans unwilling to die for the cause was also a factor since the Fuhrer insisted that all Germans needed to “stand to the death”, no matter their age. By this time after six or more years of war on several continents, everyone had loss and hard feelings about something that could be and was used to justify almost any sort of harsh actions. Just the treatment of German collaborators in Paris after the Allies liberated it were signs that mercy of any sort was in short supply.

Meanwhile, the same things were happening in the Pacific with the Japanese perhaps even more committed as a population than the Germans. I happened to rewatch Oppenheimer last night so I was forced to think again about the terrible moral dilemma faced by the American decision to use their new nuclear capability on Japan, even as victory seemed inevitable. It was viewed by some that the bomb was unnecessary for victory, but battle fatigue and strong resentment against Japan for its unprovoked attack in 1941, gave momentum to the use of the “Little Boy” atomic bomb on Hiroshima (delivered by the Enola Gay) in order to speed Japan towards surrender and thereby save America lives. It killed 120,000 Japanese immediately and many more from delayed radioactive response. But like Hamburg, a decision to drop the second bomb, the “Fat Man” atomic bomb, three days later on Nagasaki, was done supposedly to make sure the Japanese high command understood that we would keep doing this to them if we wanted. That bomb killed 73,000 Japanese civilians and many more in the years that followed.

War is hell and man is, as one American soldier said quite clearly, fully capable of enjoying killing the enemy, however he chooses to define them. When we hear and read about the vents underway in Gaza, we need to understand this history from a mere 80 years ago and the hard sentiments that form on both sides of a conflict and how that plays itself out on what might be called innocent civilians. I am not talking about collateral damage, but rather the purposeful pain inflicted on civilians of a combatant, whether provoked or otherwise initiated. Normal ethical considerations get suspended just when the damage dictates that they are most needed. My only conclusion of all of this is to suggest that knowing who’s the bad guy cannot be determined on the historical facts, but perhaps only in the microcosm of the moment when the shot is fired and heart is either black or white…or perhaps grey.