LETTER: U.S. should admit own guilt in war

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by Joseph Wilson

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When the atomic bombs were dropped, I was a 16-year-old freshman at Rice (we had year-round classes during the war).

At the time, I and everyone else were glad the bombs had ended the war. I don't know when I first heard the proposition that the atomic bombs had saved perhaps a million lives, but I suppose I may have uncritically accepted it, as everyone else seemed to.

However, I have long since rejected that perverse reckoning.

Unfortunately, while we continue to call for our former enemies to publicly admit their guilt, our own possible guilt is not even up for discussion, at least not in the public arena.

The evils committed by our enemies' leaders and armies were horrible, but they did not justify the barbaric air warfare, "conventional" as well as atomic, against the innocent people in German and Japanese cities.

And the fact that we had already killed hundreds of thousands of civilians with fire-storm bombings does not excuse the atomic bombs; all such bombing was wrong. The atomic bombs were just the climax of the horror.

Let us pray that our own cities are never attacked in such a manner, "conventionally" or otherwise.

The argument that killing several hundred thousand people actually saved lives is ghastly.

If Japan or Germany had won the war, they could have made the same perverse calculation, claiming the slaughter of the Jews, for example, had somehow hastened Germany's victory and thus saved millions of lives.

Obviously, we would never accept such an argument. And indeed, even the common calculation of saving lives with the bombing is based on the assumed necessity of the invasion and total house-by-house conquest of Japan, which in turn is based on our refusal to consider any surrender but unconditional surrender.

Like Germany at the time of the bombing of Dresden, Japan's war-making powers in mid-1945 were essentially destroyed, its navy and airforce almost totally annihilated.

We could have offered a negotiated surrender, such as at the end of World War I and every previous war. We did not have to have an unconditional surrender, and we did not have to invade Japan.

Consequently, any calculation of "lives saved" is without basis.

Some of the horrors of Vietnam (the bombing of cities, the use of napalm and Agent Orange) were a continuation of the same kind of mistakes.

If we continue to refuse to even discuss such problems of the conduct of war, and refuse to admit that our government also has made tragic mistakes, we cannot expect others to admit their guilt and try to work with us to prevent such horrors in the future.

Joseph Wilson

Professor

Department of German

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the September 22, 1995 issue.

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