Sympathy for the Enemy: In Need of Some Restraint

 

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith


Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game


I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank


I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made


So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste

--The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"

Sir Max Hastings wrote a history of the American war against Japan called, exquisitely, "Retribution."

That is what that war was about, at its core. Of course, there were many things that fed into that war, but some wars, like our own Civil War, have one clearly definable cause, which ascends above all others--for the Civil War, it was, as Lincoln famously said, slavery--"These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war." 

For Roosevelt, it was Pearl Harbor. "The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation...No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. [We]will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us."

This, of course, is what the Prime Minister of Israel said after the October 7 attack from Palestinian Hamas warriors. Hamas cannot be allowed to ever endanger us again.

The parallels go further: The Japanese attack was launched after America had embargoed oil and other war materials from Japan, which was in the process of over running China, Indochina and much of the South Pacific. We sought to limit Imperial Japan's ambitions. The Japanese islands had little to no oil, limited capacity to produce food enough to feed itself and a burning ambition to replace European powers as the masters of the Far East. The Palestinians, of course, have been confined to something which conjures up images of the Warsaw ghetto, while Palestinians on the West Bank are expelled from their lawfully owned homes by Israelis who claim that land as Lebensraum, "living space."

In the process of pursuing revenge, the American military effectively strangled Japan for resources. A modestly small submarine force sank enough Japanese transport ships to deny the Empire enough fuel to power its industry, its Navy and its air force.  

Unlike Germany, Japan was safe from American airpower, protected by great distances of the Pacific ocean, and so the Americans embarked on an island hopping campaign to obtain island air bases from which to attack Japan. Iwo Jima was one of those islands. But the Marianna islands, Saipan,  proved all that was actually needed. 

As Hastings sees it, and as many American military and State Department officials said at the time, Japan lost the war as soon as the American blockade tightened.

But the Japanese refused to accept this. And Japan was ruled and motivated by a military class governed by the "bushido" (warrior) code which did not allow for surrender, which generated Kamikaze attacks, which caused civilians, mothers with their children on Saipan, to leap from cliffs rather than surrender to the advancing Americans.

Horrific acts of Japanese brutality, beheadings, immolation of prisoners, were well know to the American public which had no sympathy for that devil.

Japanese routinely shot their own wounded soldiers rather than leave them to be captured by Americans. Cruelties, both individually and by policy, were incomprehensible to Americans and it sparked a ruthlessness which had not occurred in any widespread way in the European theater. 

So the bombings began. Curtis LeMay developed the idea of fire bombing which killed untold numbers of Japanese in their wooden and straw homes, at the very least 100,000 in Tokyo, before the bombs were ever dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hastings' meticulous, detailed descriptions of the results of the fire bombing on Japanese in multiple cities makes John Hersey's famous "Hiroshima" look like bedtime fairy tales. The destruction in Gazza pales next to what the American B 29's did to Japanese cities.

While some American State Department officials and generals questioned whether this wholesale and indiscriminate bombing of Japanese civilians was justified or even necessary, no higher civilian authority, neither FDR nor Truman, ever intervened to stop it.

Hastings found a record of one Japanese housewife, Yoshiko Hashimoto, who, having lost her home and her parents said, "Who did I blame for it all? The Americans? The Japanese had done the same thing to people. It was the war. Mine is the generation which allowed the war. We did nothing to stop it."

In all the reporting from Gazza, I have never seen or heard a single Palestinian say anything of the sort. Every single Palestinian voice and face on American TV claims to be an innocent victim of a ruthless, unwarranted Israeli attack.

After the war, especially after Vietnam, when Americans once again burned babies in villages where the only offense was being Vietnamese in a zone thought to be controlled by the enemy, the next generation of Americans recoiled from the idea of group punishment, of indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians.

Now, we look at what the Israelis are doing in response to a day of infamy and we take the moral high ground. 

But our parents' generation, when faced with that bushido, "warrior" implacable enemy, reacted much as Israel is today. 

The problem of an enemy in tunnels was solved by filling the tunnels with a mixture of salt water and gasoline, then set afire. One wonders if Hamas took hostages to prevent just this tactic.

In fact, after the 9/11 attacks on New York City, Americans were not too fussy about identifying actual culprits but simply invaded an Arab country looking for retribution.

The problem, as Ms. Hashimoto said, is with the whole idea of "war," unrelenting, total war.

Sir Max Hastings

When I emailed Sir Max Hastings asking whether the Israeli response to October 7, the indiscriminate bombings sounded like the American response to Japan he responded: "The same utter ruthlessness in play."