eighteen, I read a book by a Hol ywood screenwriter named Dalton Trumbo (jailed in the
1950s for refusing to talk to the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his
political affiliations). The book was cal ed Johnny Got His Gun. It is, perhaps, the most
powerful antiwar novel ever written.
Here was war in its ultimate horror. A slab of flesh in an American uniform had been found
on the battlefield, stil alive, with no legs, no arms, no face, blind, deaf, unable to speak,
but the heart stil beating, the brain stil functioning, able to think about his past, ponder his
present condition, and wonder if he wil ever be able to communicate with the world
outside.
For him, the oratory of the politicians who sent him off to war—the language of freedom,
democracy, and justice—is now seen as the ultimate hypocrisy. A mute, thinking torso on a
hospital bed, he finds a way to communicate with a kindly nurse, and when a visiting
delegation of military brass comes by to pin a medal on his body, he taps out a message.
He says: Take me into the workplaces, into the schools, show me to the little children and
to the col ege students, let them see what war is like.
Take me wherever there are parliaments and diets and congresses and
chambers of statesmen. I want to be there when they talk about honor and
justice and making the world safe for democracy and fourteen points and the
self determination of peoples … . Put my glass case upon the speaker's desk
and every time the gavel descends let me feel its vibration… . Then let them
speak of trade policies and embargoes and new colonies and old grudges. Let
them debate the menace of the yel ow race and the white man's burden and
the course of empire and why should we take al this crap off Germany or
whoever the next Germany is … . Let them talk more munitions and airplanes
and battleships and tanks and gases and why of course we've got to have
them we can't get along without them how in the world could we protect the
peace if we didn't have them… .
But before they vote on them before they give the order for al the little guys
to start kil ing each other let the main guy rap his gavel on my case and point
down at me and say here gentlemen is the only issue before this house and
that is are you for this thing here or are you against it.16
Johnny Got His Gun had a shattering effect on me when I read it. It left me with a bone-
deep hatred of war.
63
Around the same time I read a book by Walter Mil s, The Road to War, which was an account of how the United States had been led into World War I by a series of lies and
deceptions. Afterward I would learn more about those lies. For instance, the sinking of the
ship Lusitania by German submarines was presented as a brutal, unprovoked act against a
harmless passenger vessel. It was later revealed that the Lusitania was loaded with
munitions intended for use against Germany; the ship's manifest had been falsified to hide
that. This didn't lessen the brutality of the sinking, but did show something about the ways
in which nations are lured into war.
Class consciousness accounted for some of my feeling about war. I agreed with the
judgment of the Roman biographer Plutarch, who said, "The poor go to war, to fight and die
for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others."
And yet, in early 1943, at the age of twenty-one, I enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force.
American troops were already in North Africa, Italy, and England; there was fierce fighting
on the Russian front and the United States and Britain were preparing for the invasion of
Western Europe. Bombing raids were taking place daily on the Continent, U.S. planes
bombing during the day, British planes bombing at night. I was so anxious to get overseas
and start dropping bombs that after my training in gunnery school and bombing school I
traded places with another man who was scheduled to go overseas sooner than me.
I had learned to hate war. But this war was different. It was not for profit or empire, it was
a people's war, a war against the unspeakable brutality of fascism. I had been reading
about Italian fascism in a book about Mussolini by journalist George Seldes cal ed Sawdust
Caesar. I was inspired by his account of the Socialist Matteotti, who stood up in the Italian Chamber of Deputies to denounce the establishment of a dictatorship. The black-shirted
thugs of Mussolini's party picked up Matteotti outside his home one morning and shot him
to death. That was fascism.
Mussolini's Italy, deciding to restore the glory of the old Roman Empire, invaded the East
African country of Ethiopia, a pitiful y poor country. Its people, armed with spears and
muskets, tried to fight off an Italian army equipped with the most modern weapons and
with an air force that, unopposed, dropped bombs on the civilian populations of Ethiopian
towns and vil ages. The Ethiopians resisted, were slaughtered, and final y surrendered.
American black poet Langston Hughes wrote,
The little fox is stil —
The dogs of war have made their kil .17
I was thirteen when this happened and was only vaguely aware of headlines: "Italian Planes
Bomb Addis Ababa." But later I read about it and also about German Nazism. John
Gunther's Inside Europe introduced me to the rise of Hitler, the SA, the SS, the attacks on the Jews, the shril oratory of the little man with the mustache, and the monster ral ies of
Germans in sports stadia who shouted in unison: "Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!" Opponents were beaten and murdered. I learned the phrase concentration camp.
I came across a book cal ed The Brown Book of the Nazi Terror. It told in detail about the burning of the German Reichstag shortly after Hitler came to power and the arrest of
Communists accused of setting the fire, clearly a frame-up. It told also of the extraordinary
courage of the defendants, led by the remarkable Bulgarian Communist George Dimitrov,
who rose in the courtroom to point an accusing finger at Hermann Goering, Hitler's
lieutenant. Dimitrov tore the prosecution's case to shreds and denounced the Nazi regime.
The defendants were acquitted by the court. It was an amazing moment, which would never
be repeated under Hitler.
64
In 1936 Hitler and Mussolini sent their troops and planes to support the Spanish Fascist Franco, who had plunged his country into civil war to overthrow the mildly socialist Spanish
government. The Spanish Civil War became the symbol al over the world of resistance to
fascism, and young men—many of them socialists, Communists, and anarchists—
volunteered from a dozen countries, forming brigades (from the United States, the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade), going immediately into battle against the better-equipped army of Franco.
They fought heroical y and died in great numbers. The Fascists won.
Then came the Hitler onslaught in Europe—Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. France and
England entered the war, and, a year after the quick defeat of France, 3 mil ion German
soldiers supported by tanks, artil ery, and dive bombers turned eastward to attack the
Soviet Union ("Operation Barbarossa") along a thousand-mile front.
Fascism had to be resisted and defeated. I had no doubts. This was a just war.
I was stationed at an airfield out in the countryside of East Anglia (between the town
s of
Diss and Eye), that part of England that bulges eastward toward the Continent. East Anglia
was crowded with military airfields, from which hundreds of bombers went out every day
across the Channel.
Our little airfield housed the 490th Bomb Group. Its job was to make sure that every
morning twelve B-17s—splendid-looking, low-winged, four-engined heavy bombers—each
with a crew of nine—wearing sheepskin jackets and fur-lined boots over electrical y heated
suits and equipped with oxygen masks and throat mikes—were ready to fly. We would take
off around dawn and assemble with other groups of twelve, and then these huge flotil as
would make their way east. Our bomb bay was ful ; our fifty-caliber machine guns (four in
the nose, one in the upper turret, one in the bal turret, two in the waist, and one in the tail)
were loaded and ready for attacking fighter planes.
I remember one morning standing out on that airfield, arguing with another bombardier
over who was scheduled to fly that morning's mission. The target was Regensburg, and
Intel igence reported that it was heavily defended by antiaircraft guns, but the two of us
argued heatedly over who was going to fly that mission. I wonder today, was his motive like
mine—wanting to fly another mission to bring closer the defeat of fascism. Or was it
because we had al been awakened at one A.M. in the cold dark of England in March, loaded
onto trucks, taken to hours of briefings and breakfast, weighed down with equipment, and
after going through al that, he did not want to be deprived of another step toward his air
medal, another mission. Even though he might be kil ed.
Maybe that was partly my motive too, I can't be sure. But for me, it was also a war of high
principle, and each bombing mission was a mission of high principle. The moral issue could
hardly be clearer. The enemy could not be more obviously evil—openly espousing the
superiority of the white Aryan, fanatical y violent and murderous toward other nations,
herding its own people into concentration camps, executing them if they dared dissent. The
Nazis were pathological kil ers. They had to be stopped, and there seemed no other way but
by force.
If there was such a thing as a just war, this was it. Even Dalton Trumbo, who had written
Johnny Got His Gun, did not want his book to be reprinted, did not want that overpowering
antiwar message to reach the American public, when a war had to be fought against
fascism.18
If, therefore, anyone wants to argue (as I am about to do) that there is no such thing as a
just war, then World War II is the supreme test.
65
I flew the last bombing missions of the war, got my Air Medal and my battle stars. I was quietly proud of my participation in the great war to defeat fascism. But when I packed up
my things at the end of the war and put my old navigation logs and snapshots and other
mementos in a folder, I marked that folder, almost without thinking, "Never Again."
I'm stil not sure why I did that, because it was not until years later that I began consciously
to question the motives, the conduct, and the consequences of that crusade against
fascism. The point was not that my abhorrence of fascism was in any way diminished. I stil
believed something had to be done to stop fascism. But that clear certainty of moral
rightness that propel ed me into the Air Force as an enthusiastic bombardier was now
clouded over by many thoughts.
Perhaps my conversations with that gunner on the other crew, the one who loaned me The
Yogi and the Commissar, gave me the first flickers of doubt. He spoke of the war as "an imperialist war," fought on both sides for national power. Britain and the United States
opposed fascism only because it threatened their own control over resources and people.
Yes, Hitler was a maniacal dictator and invader of other countries. But what of the British
Empire and its long history of wars against native peoples to subdue them for the profit and
glory of the empire? And the Soviet Union—was it not also a brutal dictatorship, concerned
not with the working classes of the world but with its own national power?
I was puzzled. "Why," I asked my friend, "are you flying missions, risking your life, in a war you don't believe in?" His answer astonished me. "I'm here to speak to people like you."
I found out later he was a member of the Socialist Workers party; they opposed the war but
believed that instead of evading military service they should enter it and propagandize
against the war every moment they could. I couldn't understand this, but I was impressed
by it. Two weeks after that conversation with him, he was kil ed on a mission over
Germany.
After the war, my doubts grew. I was reading history. Had the United States fought in World
War II for the rights of nations to independence and self-determination? What of its own
history of expansion through war and conquest? It had waged a hundred-year war against
the native Americans, driving them off their ancestral lands. The United States had
instigated a war with Mexico and taken almost half its land, had sent marines at least
twenty times into the countries of the Caribbean for power and profit, had seized Hawai ,
had fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos, and had sent 5,000 marines into
Nicaragua in 1926. Our nation could hardly claim it believed in the right of self-
determination unless it believed in it selectively.
Indeed, the United States had observed Fascist expansion without any strong reactions.
When Italy invaded Ethiopia, the United States, while declaring an embargo on munitions,
al owed American businesses to send oil to Italy, which was crucial for carrying on the war
against Ethiopia. An official of the U.S. State Department, James E. Mil er, reviewing a book
on the relations between the United States and Mussolini, acknowledged that "American aid
certainly reinforced the hold of Fascism."19
During the Spanish Civil War, while the Fascist side was receiving arms from Hitler and
Mussolini, Roosevelt's administration sponsored a Neutrality Act that shut off help to the
Spanish government fighting Franco.
Neither the invasion of Austria nor Czechoslovakia nor Poland brought the United States into
armed col ision with fascism. We went to war only when our possession Hawai was attacked
and when our navy was disabled by Japanese bombs. There was no reason to think that it
was Japan's bombing of civilians at Pearl Harbor that caused us to declare war. Japan's
attack on China in 1937, her massacre of civilians at Nanking, and her bombardments of
helpless Chinese cities had not provoked the United States to war.
66
The sudden indignation against Japan contained a good deal of hypocrisy. The United States, along with Japan and the great European powers, had participated in the
exploitation of China. Our Open Door Policy of 1901 accepted that ganging up of the great
powers on China. The United States had exchanged notes with Japan in 1917 saying, "the
Government of the United States recognizes that Japan has special interests in China," and
in 1928, American consuls in China supported the coming of Japanese troops.20
It was only when Japan threatened potential U.S. markets by its attempted takeover of
China, but especial y as it moved toward the tin, rubber, and oil of Sou
theast Asia, that the
United States became alarmed and took those measures that led to the Japanese attack: a
total embargo on scrap iron and a total embargo on oil in the summer of 1941.21
A State Department memorandum on Japanese expansion, a year before Pearl Harbor, did
not talk of the independence of China or the principle of self-determination. It said,
Our general diplomatic and strategic position would be considerably
weakened—by our loss of Chinese, Indian and South Seas markets (and by
our loss of much of the Japanese market for our goods, as Japan would
become more and more self-sufficient) as wel as by insurmountable
restrictions upon our access to the rubber, tin, jute, and other vital materials
of the Asian and Oceanic regions.
A War to Save the Jews?
Did the United States enter the war because of its indignation at Hitler's treatment of the
Jews? Hitler had been in power a year, and his campaign against the Jews had already
begun when, in January 1934, a resolution was introduced into the Senate expressing
"surprise and pain" at what the Germans were doing and asking a restoration of Jewish
rights. The State Department used its influence to get the resolution buried in committee.22
Even after we were in the war against Germany (it should be noted that after Pearl Harbor
Germany declared war on the United States, not vice versa) and reports began to arrive
that Hitler was planning the annihilation of the Jews, Roosevelt's administration failed to
take steps that might have saved thousands of lives.
Goebbels, minister of propaganda for Hitler's Germany, wrote in his diary on December 13,
1942: "At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans are happy we are
exterminating the Jewish riffraff." Goebbels was undoubtedly engaging in wishful thinking,
but, in fact, the English and American governments had not shown by their actions that
they were terribly concerned about the Jews. As for Roosevelt, he shunted the problem to
the State Department, where it did not become a matter of high priority.
As an example of this failure to treat the situation as an emergency, Raul Hilberg, a leading
scholar of the Holocaust, points to an event that took place in 1942. Early in August of that