"A soiled victory"

A propos of the discussion below, historian Niall Ferguson has an op-ed (reg. req’d) in the LA Times about the “moral shortcuts” to victory in WWII.

Specifically he mentions our alliance with Stalin with its concomitant tolerance of his crimes:

Most historians today would give the lion’s share of the credit for the Allied victory to the Soviet Union. It was, after all, the Soviets who suffered the largest number of wartime casualties (about 25 million). That reflected in large measure the appalling barbarity with which the Germans waged the war on the Eastern Front. Yet it also reflected the indifference of Stalin’s totalitarian regime to the lives and rights of its own citizens. It might have been expected that in the crisis of war, Stalin would suspend the terror that had characterized his regime in the 1930s. On the contrary. The lowest estimates for the period (1942-1945) indicate that 7 million Soviet citizens lost their lives via political executions, deportations or death in the gulag system. All of this reminds us that to defeat an enemy they routinely denounced as barbaric, the Western powers made common cause with an ally that was morally little better.

Ferguson also discusses the Allied bombing campaigns, though he does suggest that they may have had more strategic value than previously thought:

For many years it was fashionable to deny that the bombing made any significant contribution to the Allied victory. Certainly, the damage to German and Japanese morale was far less than the prewar strategists had predicted.

But bombing Germany did divert air cover away from the Eastern Front. In the spring of 1943, 70% of German fighters were in the western European theater, leaving German ground forces in the east increasingly vulnerable to Soviet air attacks. Lack of air cover was one of the reasons the German tanks were beaten at Kursk.

Strategic bombing also greatly hampered Albert Speer’s considerable efforts to mobilize the Nazi economy for total war. In January 1945, Speer and his colleagues calculated the damage done in terms of what they couldn’t produce: 35% fewer tanks than planned, 31% fewer aircraft and 42% fewer trucks. The impact of bombing on the Japanese economy was even more devastating.

(We might point out, though, that just because something may have aided the war effort, it may not have been necessary. Surely justice in war may sometimes require taking the less expedient course.)

Nevertheless, says Ferguson

And yet the moral cost of this strategy, whatever its military benefits, was appallingly high. What happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is said to have ushered in a new atomic age. It also represented the extent to which the Allies threw moral restraint aside in their pursuit of victory.

After the war, the charges against the Japanese leaders who stood trial included “the wholesale destruction of human lives, not alone on the field of battle … but in the homes, hospitals, and orphanages, in factories and fields.” Yet this had been the very essence of the Allied policy of strategic bombing. At Potsdam and in the subsequent Nuremberg trials the victors also struck splendidly sanctimonious poses. The leaders of Germany and Japan had “set in motion evils which [left] no home in the world untouched.” Yet the Soviet Union had been on Hitler’s side in 1939 — something the Baltic states invaded by Stalin have not forgotten.

UPDATE: Historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft comes to similar conclusions here:

For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways, particularly by the bombing campaign that reduced the cities of Germany to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000 British servicemen killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were numbed the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ but it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.

Nor on the other moral compromises at the war’s end. Great Britain did not go to war to save the Jews from Hitler’s torment (and did not succeed) but to protect the freedom and integrity of Poland, an aim that Churchill, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, abandoned at Yalta. Worse still was the forcible repatriation of prisoners to torture and death in Russia and Yugoslavia. And yet all this was not simply conspiracy or betrayal: The Iron Curtain, with half of Europe under Soviet rule, was a painful but logical consequence of the way the West had let Russia do most of the fighting.

Was it ‘‘a noble crusade’’? For the liberation of western Europe, maybe so. Was it a just war? That tricky theological concept has to be weighed against very many injustices. Was it a good war? The phrase itself is dubious. No, there are no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one.