Autumn 1995
American Purpose
Issue 3, Volume 9

Publication Date: September 1, 1995
Posted: Friday, September 9, 1995

This issue includes 'In Remembrance of Things Past: V-E Day, V-J Day, and All That'; 'Making Sense of the Madness'; 'Forgetting God'; 'The Revenge of the Revisionists'; 'Blaming Harry'; 'The Smithsonian Confusion'; 'Vulgarizing Bad History'; 'Hiroshima: The Moral Argument Revisited'; 'The Policy and the Options'; and 'Rights, Wrongs, and Responsibilities'.


In This Issue :

In Remembrance of Things Past
V-E Day, V-J Day, and All That
To many millions of Americans—most particularly, veterans and their families—it remains a noble enterprise. As indeed it was, that necessary, dirty business of defeating Nazi totalitarianism and Japanese militarism. Nothing is ever simple, including World War II: the United States was tardy in taking the measure of the threat posed by Hitler's Third Reich; the unsatisfactory endgame of the war consigned east central Europe to the empire of another totalitarian power with which we were in uneasy alliance; the Cold War followed. But when all the "buts" have been considered, the fact remains that World War II had to be fought. And it was a very good thing that the United States and Great Britain won, and that Germany and Japan lost. [More]

Making Sense of the Madness
Because it was the first truly global war, and because its effects continue to be felt in world politics, the causes, conduct, conclusion, and consequences of World War II have been deeply, and sometimes bitterly, disputed for fifty years. One classic interpretation of the war was fixed early on, with the publication of The Gathering Storm, the first in Winston Churchill's six-volume history The Second World War. According to Churchill, World War II was "The Unnecessary War": stupid Allied peacemaking after World War I, followed by pusillanimous Allied policy, led to the second phase of a new Thirty Years' War. But while Churchill held the negotiators at Versailles and the British and French leadership of the 1930s responsible for egregious errors of commission and omission, he was also certain that the Second World War would not have happened absent "a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast—Corporal Hitler." [More]

Forgetting God
On the other, other hand, there is the argument advanced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (and seemingly shared by Pope John Paul II) that World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—the collapse of the old order in Europe in 1914-1918, the rise of communism and then fascism, the latter's defeat in World War II and the former's in the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War—are best understood together as a civil war of European civilization. In his 1983 Templeton Prize Lecture, delivered at the height of the agitations over the Reagan/Thatcher rearmament of the West, Solzhenitsyn had this to say about the pattern of twentieth-century history: [More]

The Revenge of the Revisionists
It is a measure of how quickly and completely the Cold War (to say nothing of its roots in 1945 or 1914) has dropped off the American radar screen that at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day earlier this year there was no real argument about the endgame of World War II in Europe. [More]

Blaming Harry
The Svengalis at fault are those usually dubbed the "revisionist historians" of the Cold War. These are the folks, many of them protégés of the late Wisconsin historian William Appleman Williams, who came to prominence in the late sixties by arguing that Harry Truman started the Cold War. This, in turn, became the revisionist rationale for a policy of detente, even appeasement, toward the Soviet Union. All the unpleasantness was, after all, our fault. The USSR, fearing encirclement and scared out of its wits by American saber-rattling, was a defensive power that posed no threat to the West. If we would only disarm and negotiate, Moscow would quickly follow suit. [More]

The Smithsonian Confusion
This fantastic exhibit plan, which featured forty-three photographs of Japanese suffering during World War II as against three photos of American wounded and dead, soon drew the ire of various veterans' organizations, whose protests in turn alerted a number of commentators in the national media. John Leo of U.S. News & World Report correctly noted that "the Enola Gay controversy at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington is no isolated incident, just the most publicized example so far of the politically correct make-over underway at various museums of the Smithsonian Institution." Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post wondered when the Air and Space Museum had "become not merely a museum of technology but also a forum for the enlightenment and conversion of the politically and morally obtuse." The museum, after all, was an agency of the United States government. By what authority, Yardley asked, did it "engage in what can fairly be called anti-American propaganda"? [More]

Vulgarizing Bad History
The ripple effects of the "Enola Gay" controversy continued to work their way through American culture this past summer. In the week before the Hiroshima anniversary, Peter Jennings of ABC-TV broadcast a ninety-minute program that Washington Post reviewer Ken Ringle acidly described as "an ingénue’s stroll down the narrow tunnels of academic revisionism with only occasional intimations that larger truths may lie outside." On Jennings's telling of the tale as summarized by Ringle, Harry Truman was "not the 'buck stops here' Missourian who . . . never looked back but... an intellectual and moral dwarf, propelled by ambitious militarists and politicians to a nuclear slaughter of the innocents." Given the ubiquity of the revisionists in the academy, this was not, shall we say, an original argument. But it was the first time, Ringle noted, that a major network had "so emphatically divorced itself from the perceptions of historians and journalists who experienced the war years firsthand." Thus Jennings, who walked through this difficult and complex terrain "with the telegenic innocence of a golden retriever in his first wading pool," gave "short shrift ... to the fighting in the Pacific and to the bitter intransigence of the Japanese in the face of the Allied demand for unconditional surrender" (which Jennings mistakenly described as an American, rather than Allied, initiative). Little wonder, then, that Jennings concluded his program with a complaint about the "bullying" of the Smithsonian by veterans' organizations. [More]

Hiroshima
The Moral Argument Revisited
It is impossible to make a morally and politically serious assessment of President Truman's decision to use the atomic weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki without reviewing in some detail the course of the Pacific War from mid-1944 on. [More]

The Policy and the Options
All of this sheds important light on the question of whether the Allied demand for "unconditional surrender" helped prolong the war.  [More]

Rights, Wrongs, and Responsibilities
In these circumstances, which were the real world circumstances of the time, the use of atomic weapons seems far less a deliberate atrocity than a tragic necessity.  [More]

Endnotes
Click here to view the endnotes. [More]