The Bad Effects of WWII Mythology

Mary Dudziak wrote in her book War Time that “World War II became for Americans what war should be.” I came across something similar from Kennan’s lectures collected in the volume American Diplomacy. The effect that both world wars had on American thinking is one of the things that disturbed and worried Kennan very much. He wrote:

Both these wars ended in unconditional surrender, encouraging us in the view that the purpose of war was not to bring about a mutually advantageous compromise with an external adversary seen as totally evil and inhuman, but to destroy completely the power and the will of that adversary. In both those wars, but particularly the second, we departed increasingly from the principle, embodied in earlier rules of warfare, that war should be waged only against the armed forces of an enemy, not against helpless civilian populations. And it was by our wholehearted acceptance of the practice of waging war against civilians as well as against soldiers, and especially by our commitment to the so-called area bombings of World War II, that we were led into the terrible bewilderments we are confronting today….Both of these errors—the commitment to unconditional surrender and the commitment to massive civilian destruction—have led us seriously astray. (p. 188)

Americans have enshrined our participation in WWII as the model for how wars should be fought and how they should be ended, but the conduct of the war was in many respects abominable and criminal. The demands for unconditional surrender were more likely responsible for the prolongation of the war and the intensification of resistance, especially in the Pacific theater, and ever since they have set an unrealistic standard for when the U.S. can stop fighting.

Today stopping short of regime change is frequently presented as an unacceptable loss of will, and so each intervention tends to morph into a demand for the destruction of the other government. The same willingness to target an entire population in order to strike at a government is still apparent in the use of broad and crippling sanctions. We put whole countries under siege, and then deny responsibility for the suffering that ensues.

“Limited” interventions rarely stay that way, because the logic of our WWII mythology tells our leaders to press on until the other side completely collapses. It doesn’t occur to these would-be Pattons until later that it might not be such a clever idea to force existing state institutions to fall apart, unless they want to be left picking up the pieces for the next decade. The U.S. has fought many smaller wars with mixed results, and we frequently refuse to end these smaller wars because our leaders will not be satisfied with something less than total victory in conflicts where that is not possible. Because we are accustomed to the myth of total victory, we can’t accept that the other side has legitimate interests that have to be taken into account in any peace settlement.