After some weeks of presentation there appears to me still a dearth of left criticism regarding Ken Burns television series, “The War.” Whether this is because the program is considered too unimportant to merit serious concern of because something in the content is sufficiently touching, the absence of such analysis seems to me unfortunate.  “The War” is deeply troubling ideology and needs to be situated as such.

 

Of course there is a great deal in this very selective “documentary” that proves to be a  moving, emotional, graphic presentation of America in World War II at home and on the battlefields of Europe, Africa and Japan.  It is impossible not to be affected by the terror, grief, pathos, sacrifice, longing, love, pity and sheer ecstatic transcendence of the vicissitudes of ordinary experience that make up the phenomonology of the war as it is represented. For war appears to deal in ultimate realities while the life which soldiers leave behind is more likely to remembered for its dull routines and uninspired banalities. And it is precisely this quality of heightened feeling which is the film’s strength and even more significantly, its basic weakness; that is, its capacity to engage us in the horrors of the conflict and simultaneously to mislead us regarding the meaning of many of the most significant events being depicted.

 

I will focus attention on several specific instances which are dealt with in the film. The larger failures, such as the lack of any historical context in which the origin and the political strategies of the War itself can be made intelligible and the absence of any appropriate understanding of the contribution of the Soviet Union to the conflict need to be examined at some later date.

 

The first instance I choose to note is the bombing of Hamburg ; and while citing the account offered by Burns, and holding as close to the actual text as I can,  I will also make reference to the very different presentation of  W.G. Sebald whose short essay in the New Yorker of November 4, 2002 under the title of “A Natural History of Destruction” (included in a paperback book of the same title) will serve to introduce us to a lifetime of his  reflection on the nature of slaughter and the consequent loss of collective memory.

 

Burns tells us that since 1939 British bombers had been attacking Germany‘ industrial targets, first during daytime with a very heavy loss of aircraft and then at night. But the night bombing was ineffective. Churchill ordered a halt to the bombing raids and appointed a new commander, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, known to his airmen as “Bomber” or “Butcher” Harris, not for the violence he inflicted on the enemy, but for the great number of his own airmen who died under his command. The Americans would bomb German defense industries while the British would carry out raids on the civilian populations of cities such as Kassel, Wurzburg, Darmstdt, Hilbronn and Hamburg, which was bombed by by the R.A.F., supported by the United States Eighth Army Air Force in the early morning hours of July 28th, 1943. At least 40,000 German civilians died.

 

Burns does refer to the fact that the bombing set off a “whirling firestorm that burned or asphyxiated at least forty thousand German civilians in and around Hamburg (Sebald’s figures are higher) taking almost as many lives in one week as the German Luftwaffe had taken in eight months of bombing Britain.” A woman who had been fifteen at the time recalled:

 

“Four-story-high blocks of flats were like glowing mounds of stone right down to the basement. Everything seemed to have melted and pressed the bodies away in front of it. Women and children were so charred as to be unrecognizable; those that had died through lack of oxygen were half-charred and unrecognizable. Their brains had tumbled from their burst temples, and their insides form the soft parts under the ribs. How terribly these people must have died. The smallest children lay like fried eels on the pavement.”

 

And what was the aim of the new bombing campaign?

 

It was, as set forth in a secret British and American secret memorandum, “to undermine’ the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.’” (This strategy was countenanced by governmental decision in February, 1942; Sebald) Or to state the matter in other portentous phrases, to “break the spirit of the people,” and “to destroy the morale of the enemy civilian population and, in particular, of industrial workers.”  It is irrelevant to the terrible immorality of the situation that the strategy not only failed to accomplish this end, but produced its very opposite.  In other words, it was an attack upon civilians, the very crime that had so repelled the world when the Germans bombed the Spanish town of Guernica for the sheer purpose of displaying their power to destroy.

 

This fact is not mentioned by Burns.

 

It further needs to be noted that the policy of mass civilian destruction was “vigorously debated from the first in Great Britain;” so, the decision was self-consciously undertaken, and was continued even after the Allies has developed the technology that permitted far greater accuracy and the ability to destroy selective targets such as ball-bearing factories, railway junctions and oil and gas facilities. Albert Speer noted in his memoirs that such operations would have paralyzed the entire system of production. Nor should it be overlooked when registering the irrationality that occurs within the context of moral insanity, that as the Nazis wasted resources in the establishment of their concentration camps and furnaces, the Allies permitted the Germans a longer period of productivity by countenancing “area bombing,” which was, by all accounts, less effective than the precision bombings of German war facilities would have provided.

 

February 4, 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta to determine the future of the war and its aftermath.  Burns notes that two significant decisions were made: the first was the result of the conviction of American commanders that an invasion of the home islands of Japan would be extremely costly in American lives, a consideration which strengthened their conviction that if Stalin could be persuaded to enter the Pacific War once Germany was defeated, the effect might well be a decision by the Japanese to surrender and make the American invasion unnecessary. The second decision was instigated by Stalin who asked for a designated bombing line to protect Soviet troops moving through Germany and for “Air action … to hinder the enemy from carrying out the shifting of his troops …” and a stepped up attacks on” railroad stations and marshaling yards in the hearts of cities… As an example, a Soviet officer suggested, ‘ we want … the Dresden railway junction bombed.’”

 

A few days later the Targets Committee of the British Air Ministry sent the recommendation that “The following targets have been selected for their importance in relation to the movements of evacuees from, and of military forces to, the Eastern Front.”  Berlin was the first target chosen; Dresden was second. Through Dresden German refugees escaping the Russians and German troops moving in the opposite direction were passing each other. On February 13th and 14th (Ash Wednesday) British and American bombers struck Dresden with the intention of setting fire to the city “… in hopes of deliberately setting off the sort of firestorm they had first achieved accidentally in Hamburg nearly two years earlier.”

 

It must be remembered, however, that even if the sort of results the Allies had intended to achieve with the bombing of Hamburg did not include fire bombing, it certainly did include the intention to “… break the spirit of the people.”  The fire bombing, which lasted fourteen hours, succeeded, horribly killing anywhere from 35,000 to 60,000 inhabitants of the city, who were incinerated, blown apart or asphyxiated. Once again, however, it seems clear that it failed to break their will, though according to Sebald, it succeeded for a very long time in destroying their memory of the event and so, their capacity to articulate and utilize the meaning of their experience. The horror of the civilian bombings of Germany produced a citizenry who in the great majority seemed to believe they had no right to criticize the British and Americans since they themselves had certainly initiated the war and ruthlessly bombed England with the intention of killing British citizens and breaking their will.

 

It may well have taken more than half a century before this phase of German unconsciousness or self-restraint came to a public end with German opposition to the American invasion plans of Iraq during the debates which took place at the United Nations in the months preceding March 2003. It is not possible to prove this contention, but it is plausible to consider that beyond its actual “real politic” motives for wishing to prevent the United States from acquiring Iraqi resources Germany took this occasion to finally brand the United States as an aggressor nation, an act it long hesitated to initiate given its initiation of the horrors of WWII.

 

“Bomber Harris,” who directed the bombing, was criticized in Parliament and the British press for the brutality of the bombing of Dresden responded that since Britain had intentionally starved several hundred thousand Germans by a naval blockade from 1914 to 1918, there was little moral difference between that particular case and the attack on Dresden and admitted furthermore that he carried out the raids “not because he had to, but because he could.” (National Post, September 6, 2006). Burns presents the Dresden bombing as a murderous event but once again does not raise the question of the morality of the act nor, particularly does he put the question of whether it was in fact a war crime; although how a “fire bombing” ingeniously crafted to cause excruciating suffering to a civilian population with little or no practical military advantage (it had not been previously bombed during the war) in a historical moment in which the Luftwaffe had been all but destroyed does not qualify as a war crime is difficult to understand.

 

Of course possible counter arguments that can be presented on behalf of the validity of the bombing, but it remains true that before the mission bomber crews were not given any specific instructions as to targets and that the temperature within the city reached an anticipated 1500 degrees centigrade, an occurrence seemingly irrelevant for any military purpose. According to Kurt Vonnegut, speaking on National Public Radio in 2003 “…. it was a military experiment to find out if you can burn a whole city down by scattering incendiaries all over it.” (GLW 19 September 2007)

 

On the evening of July 16, 1945, Burns informs us, “President Truman received the word he’s been waiting for …. a test of a plutonium implosion device in the New Mexico desert had proved a spectacular success …. it had such potential destructive power that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos bomb laboratory, was reminded of a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” On July 26 Truman and Churchill, meeting with Stalin at Potsdam, called for “the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces” and warned the Japanese that the only alternative was “prompt and utter destruction.” On August 6th at 8:15 in the morning, with Hiroshima laid out six miles below, the Enola Gay dropped a bomb which detonated above the city instantly killing at least 40,000 people. Within days one hundred thousand more would die of “burns and radiation.”

 

On August 8th Stalin made good his promise to enter the war and sent hundreds of thousands of troops into Japanese occupied Manchuria. The Japanese Supreme Council continued to debate the issue and on the morning of August 9th, at 11:02, another atom bomb destroyed the city of Nagasaki. Later than night Hirohito accepted the American proclamation provided he be allowed to maintain his prerogatives “… as a Sovereign Ruler.”

 

Burns comment on the situation is very instructive:

 

“Over the half century that followed the war, the motives and methods of the men who finally ended it have been examined and reexamined to see if there hadn’t been some other path to peace than the brutal one they chose to follow.  Some of the questions raised can never be answered satisfactorily. But only two mattered to most Americans at the time: Did the bomb shorten the war? And did it save American lives? The answer to both questions was yes.”

 

This last categorical affirmation epitomizes the failure of Burns’s film, its malignant patriotism masquerading as simple, decent objectivity. Burns first asks if there was another path to peace than the admittedly “brutal” one chosen. Then, after recognizing the complexity of the issue, (‘questions never answered’) he changes the subject. We are no longer concerned with such issues as the motives of the men who decided on this brutal alternative but only the two questions that concerned most Americans: Did the bomb shorten the war and did it save American lives? These are credible questions but they are not the only or necessarily the most relevant questions. For example, if American lives would have been lost by some other procedure for ending the war but at the expense of many fewer Japanese deaths, would the bomb still have been the moral alternative? What, in fact, was the justification for the fire bombing of Japanese cities that preceded the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and prepared the way for the final catastrophe?  After all, most of the cities destroyed and vast populations incinerated were not military targets. And if this were the case, as seems clear, what is the difference between these savage attacks and war crimes which under more just circumstances should have led to indictments of the American leaders who planned these attacks.

 

It is very well known by all who have given even the most cursory attention to these issues that the desire to intimidate the Soviet Union was a consideration of those planning the air attacks and the use of the atom bomb. I am not arguing here that such considerations were the whole reason the bomb was used, but only that it is a consideration that must be examined. Burns does not raise this issue. He does not raise any issue that would lead to the moral and possibly judicial indictment of the political leadership of the United States. It never seems to enter his mind that the death of an enormous civilian population is unjustified. He does not consider the death of Japanese civilians a fact on the same moral plane as the death of American soldiers. Their lives do not seem relevant in the equation he articulates. So, he expresses no hesitation in reducing the issue to the questions that “mattered to most Americans at the time.”

 

But this is simply to legitimize the moral judgment of “most Americans.” And what establishes their right to determine the final verdict on an act, which in less than a week killed by horrible incineration 200,000 Japanese civilians? The internment of the Japanese at the beginning of the war was not only acceptable to the majority of Americans but was also acceptable to a unanimous Supreme Court. Does this establish that the act was right and not worthy of moral reconsideration?  In fact, the great majority of Americans knew very little of their own history, very little of the extent to which the Pacific War was a combat between rival colonial powers. (See Stephen Shalom, New Politics, Summer 1996, “The Obliteration of Hiroshima” and numerous other accounts of the real material interests behind the war.) But, again, Burns is not interested in historical causality. He is quite content to languish in the sentimentality of “the good war,” offering an account we can all identify with as it presents us as righteous in our destruction, perhaps the only time such a claim can be made for American military ventures for  the last hundred years.

 

The personalized history for which Burns is often commended suffers precisely from the failure to place those personal lives in the larger social, political and economic tendencies of the time.  What Americans do not know of themselves and the manner in which they have been made to become themselves, is doubly hidden. First, it does not occur in ordinary American experience; and then, it does not occur again the  presentation of that experience.

 

There is pathos in the recounting of American heroism, the acts of sacrifice for one’s comrades, the grim determination to persist in the face of suffering, death, brutality and misery. And there is a genuine pleasure in viewing citizens at home, even as we see them dreading “the telegram,” carrying out their tasks in the face of potential loss and even imaginable defeat. These are feelings we are familiar with and The War takes us back to these feelings and immerses us so fully in them that we feel that we know who we were and why we were so during this Great War. It is this constricted political aesthetic that permits Burns to establish his popularity with the American public. He does not disturb our equilibrium with difficult questions. He does not force us to ask questions that are profoundly disturbing. Our acts of mass murder are not explored.  We are free to go about our lives without concern.  We know that something terrible has happened, but we are comforted by the sense that it was inevitable and we are not responsible.

 

There is a great deal to be learned in this regard from the theatre writings of Bertolt Brecht. Though he begins by noting that the function of the theatre is to give us pleasure he immediately adds that there are simpler and more complex pleasures; the latter are “more intricate, richer in communication, more contradictory and more productive of results.” (A Short Organum for the Theatre.)  In the bourgeois theatre it is necessary for the characters to be so portrayed “that the onlooker can identify himself with them … so that everyone can say at once: that is how it is …. the one important point for the spectators … is that they should be able to swap a contradictory world for a consistent one….” “How much longer are our souls, leaving our ‘mere’ bodies under the cover of the darkness, to plunge into those dreamlike figures up on the stage, there to take part in the crescendos and climaxes which ‘normal’ life denies us.?”  Of course theatre is not television, but the primary point remains.

 

We enter a visual presentation – theatre, film, video – bearing the stamp of our social alienation.  The presentation can replicate and enhance the effects of this alienation or it can alienate our alienation, that is, it can force us to stand back from the nature of our dehumanization and experience the most compelling question: “why are these events happening; could they have been different?” As Brecht write of the mesmerized viewer, “To transform himself from general passive acceptance to a corresponding state of suspicious inquiry he would need to develop that “detached eye” with which the Galileo observed a swinging chandelier.”

 

The initiation of wars may at some point in time pass from possibility to necessity, but the underlying social circumstances that create the original conditions are not beyond human control, particularly in a democracy, however pallid, class dominated and opaque.  Some possibility remains if the whole historical context can be grasped. This is not a simple task for a distracted and afflicted populace, but on the brink of a catastrophe such as a possible strike against Iran, there is more to be done than is currently in process.  “The War” does not help us in this regard; it settles us into patterns of familiarity, even if that replication is of horrendous suffering.  It is not the degree of pain and misery that determines the value of a presentation about war but the perspective within which that suffering is made “intelligible.”

 

Neither the ultimate circumstances that led to the war nor the immorality of the allied terror and mass slaughter are made intelligible. The presentation remains, despite all the grief and decimation it portrays, unlikely to move us to examine our role in the catastrophe, and in this regard at least, it fixes us more deeply in those tendencies which move us to passive acceptance of the criminality that remains ever potent in the arsenal of the state.

 

Richard Lichtman Director, Graduate Degree Program in Critical Theory

 

[email protected]