Right Wing Nut House

The Boston Globe’s James Carroll has evidently decided that the conventional history of our effort in the Pacific theater in World War II just doesn’t cut the mustard. He has taken it upon himself to not only invent an alternative history of those events, but to also accuse the troops who fought in that war of being inhuman monsters:

Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war.

To deconstruct such idiocy would require one to ignore the actual history of that “savage” conflict and instead, travel with Mr. Carroll down the rabbit hole of obfuscation and ignorance and emerge in a world where moral equivalency has acheived supremacy over common sense and rational thought.

The theme that Mr. Carroll clumsily tries to advance - that American GI’s in the Pacific were somehow motivated by racism and revenge that led to a “generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war” is breathtaking in it’s discounting of Japanese war aims and the way that the Japanese military waged war.

The militaristic government of Japan launched wars of agression against China, Malaysia, the Phillipines, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Korea, Viet Nam, Singapore, and the United States to name a few. Their purpose was to unite all of east Asia in a “Co-Prosperity Sphere” where Japan would rape those nations of natural resources and use the inhabitants for both slave labor and sex slaves. Without exaggeration, it can be said that the Japanese army raped its way across the continent of Asia.

Only one thing stood in the way of Japan’s dream of empire; the United States Navy. Hence, the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the six months following the Pearl Harbor catastrophe, the Japanese attacked and occupied several island chains that served as forward bases both for defense and for future operations we now know were planned for New Zealand and Australia. In order for the US Military to win the war, it was believed that we would have to invade Japan proper. To do that, we had to defeat the Japanese military who were occupying the island chains that ran roughly southwest to northeast from New Guinuea to Okinawa.

Two things made the island warfare in the Pacific different from the kind of war being fought on the western front in Europe against the Nazis. First, the distances involved were staggering. From Pearl Harbor to the Philipines was 4,500 miles. These vast distances meant that any offensive operations against Japan would be totally dependent on the navy’s ability to carry troops and resupply outposts captured in our drive across the south pacific.

The second huge difference involved the way that the individual Japanese soldier fought. Subscribing to an ethical code known as “Bushido” or “way of the warrior,” these beliefs all but insured that any confrontation with western soldiers would result in combat that would confuse, frighten, and even overwhelm those unfamiliar with the strict tenets of the code’s “moral” precepts. These precepts included frugality, loyalty, mastery of martial arts, and honor to the death.

A perfect example would be the battle for Okinawa. Approximately 25,000 Japanese soldiers faced off against more than 100,000 Americans. Using tactics that disoriented and frightened the Americans - including night ambushes, firing from caves and prepared underground positions, suicide attacks against vastly superior forces, and mass suicide by civilians and military - our soldiers quickly realized that in order to stay alive, it was best to shoot first and keep shooting until all the Japanese were dead. Out of 25,000 Japanese troops engaged at Okinawa, 129 surrendered. The rest either committed suicide or died in combat.

How to deal with such fanaticism? Is it racism to kill an enemy before he kills you? There’s no evidence that Japanese POW’s were treated with any more malice than German POW’s. There were a heck of a lot fewer of the former for reason’s I’ve described. And as far as the “savage air war” that was carried out one has to look at the Japanese war industry and how they had made workers’ houses the hub of industrial activity that kept that Japanese war machine in business. By locating factories in residential areas, the Japanese military planners were able to disperse industrial production so that workers’ dwellings became mini-workshops contributing to the factory’s productivity. The only way to effectively bomb the factories was to destroy the housing for the workers as well.

All of this information is not a secret. It’s not locked up in a closet somewhere and guarded by CIA agents. The fact that Mr. Carroll didn’t bother giving any perspective to his screed cannot be due to a lack of available information. One must surmise it was a deliberate omission.

The racial overtones to the war in the Pacific were contained in the propoganda fed to the American people and soldiers who fought in that theater. But to say that the soldiers themselves were motiviated by racisim and revenge is ridiculous. One would have to be a psychic to be able to glean those kinds of intentions from our military.

Were some individual soldiers racist? Obviously yes. But to tar and feather the millions of fighting men who fought in the Pacific theater with such a baseless charge is either a sign of complete ignorance or of a virulent anti-Americanism that ignores history and circumstance and descends into hyperbole.

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which explanation illuminates Mr. Carroll’s motives.

UPDATE

I came late to this party. Here’s Jeff Godlstein’s excellent takedown:

Leaving aside the idiocy of a formulation that insists that because war itself is hell, all those involved in fighting it are equally deserving of both its glories (such as they are) and its shames, Carroll’s real rhetorical transgression here—over and above the shots he takes at veterans—is to insist, against all reason and in the face of the billions of words spilled in its defense, that no one is able to say why we are fighting in Iraq. Which, like the rest of his piece, is utter nonsense.

And Ace weighs in with this:

There is a certain sort of person whose intellectual vanity causes him to reject what he considers the low-class and uneducated “standard” form of patriotism exhibited by his cutlural and moral inferiors. It’s the impulse to differentiate oneself from one’s (putative) lessers and thereby elevate oneself into the ranks of the elite.

The same shallow impulse that causes eggheads to reject good movies, such as Dumb & Dumber, because they’ve got mass appeal.

Paul Geary at The New Editor:

This isn’t even moral equivalence with fascists. At least they killed for a reason. We’re worse.

Why write this for publication on July 5? Why not publish this on Memorial Day, when we hapless Americans are busy honoring our dead non-hero racist savages who make war for no reason?