TheMillerCircle.org

Yesterday Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died at age 84 in his Manhattan apartment. His best known novel, SlaughterHouse-Five was published in 1969 and became his signature work. Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in WW II, held by the Nazis in Dresden Germany in an animal slaughterhouse, which stimulated the title of his novel. He was in Dresden during the period of the fire bombing of the city and was fortunate to survive. When the bombing began Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were herded into a refrigerated meat locker that was two stories below the surface of the open slaughterhouse which helped to insure their survival. When they surfaced after the bombing, the city was gone.

It was during the 1944 to 1945 period that American bombing strategy dramatically changed. Prior to that Americans insisted on targeting military or war-related installations and support, not civilian populations. But that began to change as the inevitable victory was more certain and pressure to shorten the war mounted. Dresden was not a military target. It was by all accounts a shining city of German culture at its best, a city of art and architecture and porcelain factories and beautiful stained glass windows…the Kyoto of Germany. But whereas Kyoto was spared the same fire bombing fate as that of Dresden by interference from Henry Stimpson, Secretary of War who once lived in Kyoto, the city of Dresden had no friends in the European air command of WW II.

Saturation fire bombing of Dresden began in February 1945. The bombing strategy was designed to open the roofs of houses and buildings with one run of bombs, followed by a wave of incendiary bombs to ignite the buildings from their exposed interiors to create a firestorm which would then generate a fire dynamic all on its own. It worked with perfection. During the huge heat-intensive fire that followed the bombing, caught civilians completely unaware of the dangers. Those who were in the open tried to escape the intense heat by jumping into the rivers or lakes and were boiled to death. The death toll from the fire bombing has been estimated at 35,000 to 130,000 as described in James Carroll’s book House of War (pp 85-87) . There were not enough survivors in Dresden to bury the dead.

There were many American officers who were appalled by this shift in tactics, from strategic to civilian targeting, not only because of the issue of humanity and the idea that civilians were to be spared direct, purposeful attacks, but also because destroying cities, homes, infrastructure, food sources and city culture would create a humanitarian disaster for the invading and occupying troops. And of course, that is what happened in occupied Germany immediately after Germany surrendered. The fire-bombing of Dresden was a two-edged sword, one immediate, the other delayed. But a starving German population was acceptable too as a form of punishment to the German people, just like Sherman decided that the South needed to be punished for their autrocities during the Civil War and for the reasons that started it.

The bombing of Dresden shattered all constraints on avoiding civilian targets. It unleased a fury that would also be applied to Tokyo and other targets in Japan. It would thus become the American war machine mantra: the more people you kill, the sooner the war ends. It leads many in the military and their right-wing supporters to say about the war in Iraq today that there are no innocent Iraqis: they are all potential, justifiable targets. It may seem remote and disconnected to the average American that the bombing of Dresden had everything to do with the war policies we have applied ever since, particularly with the Air Force. That is why it is so easy for us to flatten an entire city in Iraq, as we did to Fallujah, when a few Blackwater mercenaries were brutally murdered there: Dresden opened a door that has never been closed. Killing civilians is part of the war strategy, most effectively done through the Air, where a sense of the impersonal and remote enters into the equation.

Odd you say that we can punish low level types involved in ground operation autrocities against villagers, but not even remotely challenge the tactics of the Air Force that purposely drops bombs on civilian targets, where many times the lethality that a single person can deliver on the ground is provided by a single bomb? It’s quite simple, an image of a soldier shooting a family in a face to face confrontation is an autrocity, but a bomb dropped on a civilian target is collateral damage. Different words, different meanings. Then of course, the new smart bombs we have are supposed to cure that problem right? Have you ever seen any objective tests of their accuracy? And what if the target of the smart bomb is a civilian target?

The same sampling methods that have estimated more than 600,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since our invasion in 2003, have estimated that as many as 3 million people died in the Vietnam War, excluding what Pol Pot did in Cambodia (more than a million by most counts). No one in the military and no one in the conventional press are willing to acknowledge this simple fact of American war-making. Only Howard Zinn saw this as a moral failure during WW II when he served on a bombing crew. As long as one can rationalize that hitting civilian targets shortens the war and reduces American casualties, these tactics will remain. They will stop only if and when we stop going to war. But war-making is now our first response to any challenge or any threat: it is our most coherent industry.

This idea is also the twin sister to the logic that we applied in our war against communism. Anything you do to prevent the advance of communism is basically doing God’s good work. Thus, the end can be justified by any means. It doesn’t matter that you sometimes have to invent the communist threat in order to proceed along your chosen path. Given anti-communism as your Holy Grail, with a secret budget, unlimited funds, and a covert army at your disposal, with virtually no supervision or oversight, and you can do a lot, as we surely did. We are in the early phase of the spiral in which the "Blowbacks" we have created for ourselves are going to confront us in many different ways and in many different arenas. How long we can continue to maintain this gigantic, Cold War military machine depends on how successful people like George Bush and Dick Cheney are at convincing us that the world is full of our enemies. Sadly, if true, it’s because we made it that way.