Anti-war Propaganda: ...Who Needs Enemies?

The Bombing and Negotiated Peace Questions—in 1944

by James J. Martin

Late in 1967 there appeared a "Negotiations Now" movement in the United States attempting to influence government policy to the end of seeking a negotiated peace in the war in Vietnam. Related to this was the existence during the whole year of several spirited protests from many sources against the American strategic bombing of its North Vietnamese enemy. One would never know from exposure to the country's mass communications of all kinds that there were interesting ancestors of both these gestures during the closing years of World War II. the electrifying "Peace Now Movement" of 1943-1944, under the leadership of George W. Hartmann, and the even more aggravating effort during the same time to halt strategic or "area" bombing of Germany by the Royal and American Air Forces. This latter was under the direction in England of Vera Brittain and the Bombing Restriction Committee, and fronted in the United States by a variety of notables in literary and clerical circles. Though both these campaigns excited a large contemporary literature, they have disappeared almost without a trace from works dealing with those times, and it is a rare moment when either of them is recalled. This to some extent is due to ignorance on the part of contemporaries, who imagine they are the first people in

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history to become involved in efforts of this kind, victims of what Pitirim Sorokin calls the "Columbus complex." But there undoubtedly is an element of studied fastidious oversight on the part of many of the elders taking part in today's activities, who prefer to have the past effectively forgotten, especially insofar as it involves situations of this kind.

The separate campaigns carried on by Vera Brittain and George Hartmann stand out as about the only humanitarian protests against an all-out war against civilians fought by armies that had lost their horror of horror, and led by politicians who had done so as well. The negotiated peace and anti-strategic bombing efforts caused more than a ripple in England and the United States, though they were doomed from the start. The communist tactic of enrolling the civilian community in the war in Russia, China, and the various western countries occupied by the German armies by way of their underground "resistance" fronts, had long before destroyed the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Saturation bombing of the civilian sectors of cities hundreds of miles from the scene of active fighting was so thoroughly a part of the new barbarism by late 1943 that it now seems to have been undue caution to conceal until recent years that the deliberate annihilation of congested urban districts had been a plan from early in the war. Charles P. Snow's revelation, nearly twenty years later, somehow lost much of its striking power. The ability on the part of many to react had been destroyed long before by a steady barrage of words and photographs which had so cheapened human life that even by the end of the war in 1945 nothing could shock the blood-soaked populaces out of their semi-coma other than the fear of atomic disintegration, and even this was a modified reaction.

The liberal Catholic weekly Commonweal, hardly a pacifist organ, early in 1944 denounced the policy of strategic bombing as "the murder of innocent people and the suicide of our civilization."¹ It was one of the few expressions of concern over what the dulling of sensitivity was doing to the future of the world. But the biggest loudspeakers of the printed and spoken word were quite unmoved, and did their best to show that most others were similarly indisposed to react to such appeals favorably. The New York Times reported comfortably that the Hartmann and Brittain campaigns were opposed by reader response at a ratio of fifty to one. There were hundreds of

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attacks in the magazines, newspapers, and on the radio for each defense; those in such journals as the American Mercury, the New Republic, Life, and the New York Herald-Tribune were particularly noteworthy in their ferocity. In the latter, William L. Shirer, emerging in five years from journalistic obscurity to a front-page celebrity status, and whose opinions by then even drew attention as news events, volunteered that the anti-strategic bombing protests of the Bombing Restriction Committee and the Fellowship of Reconciliation were evidence that they had become mere dupes of the German national socialist propaganda chief, Dr. Joseph Goebbels.²

Efforts to stop the war at this moment were premature; a great number of the propaganda commandos had not yet drawn their sufficient measure of gore prior to joining in the great wailing over the threats to our "Judeo-Graeco-Christian civilization" in the years subsequent to 1945. In one instance, there was an ironic parallel incident to the denunciation of the anti-war and anti-bombing propagandists; Life, at the height of its vituperation against the Hartmann and Brittain enterprises, ran one of its most adversely commented-on specials, a photographic account of a fox hunt in Ohio in which 600 people eventually cornered one small tired animal, which was then beaten to death by a child with a club. That there were many people who saw nothing praiseworthy in such a caper and wrote at length in horrified tones marking it as an act of barbarity, was grounds for hope of a sort, but the massacre of non-combatant human civilians of enemy states in distant locations aroused no such general response.

The objections to halting the war or interfering with the bombing of non-combatant targets were many, ranging from the ingenious to the devious. Typical of the "practical" kind were those of the Christian Century,³ America's outstanding voice of liberal Protestantism and the New Yorker,⁴ the weekly journalistic paragon of American sophistication. In their view it was too late to make "ground rules." The idea was to prosecute the war in full savagery until victory was achieved, after which it would then be proper to dream up restraints on future behavior in war, while nobody was doing anything.

Peace Now had few defenders, but Miss Brittain enrolled a goodly brigade. One of the most formidable was the Rev. James M. Gillis, editor of the monthly Catholic World, held in substantial respect by

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members of this faith despite his persistent and unwavering opposition to the war ("Father Gillis is by all odds the ablest Catholic editor of our time," wrote the fiercely pro-war Catholic professor Theodore Maynard late in 1941⁵). In the late spring of 1944, Rev. Gillis wrote the most devastating indictment of Miss Brittain's attackers in the press and pulpit, the most thorough exposure of the utter moral bankruptcy of her antagonists.⁶ The largest and fairest coverage of both the Hartmann and Brittain movements took place in the weekly Christian Century, however. They were the only widely read journal in the country to give Peace Now a chance to make an extended statement of their contentions, objectives, and recommendations, possibly because the editors were more inclined to be influenced by the Brittain appeal, since her first widely circulated publication, Massacre by Bombing, contained a preface signed by twenty-eight Americans, many of them Protestant clergymen of national and even international repute.

Trygve Lie, the Norwegian socialist politician who became the first secretary general of the United Nations from 1946 to 1953, declared, shortly after World War II ended, that an armistice could have been negotiated a number of times between the "allies" and the "axis," but that nothing was allowed to interfere with the winning of a lasting victory.⁷ That this "lasting" triumph lasted less than six months is perhaps peripheral to this account, but it suggests that terminating the war on a basis short of the obliteration of the enemy could hardly have become the prelude to a worse "peace" than has prevailed since 1945.

Talk of possible negotiations between one or another party of both sides involved in the war was part of political gossip at various times during hostilities. Perhaps both the Germans and Japanese would have been willing to call fighting to a halt were some some kind of tolerable conditions made available, even as early as the spring of 1943. The very largest part of the loss of life and property in the war would have been prevented had the war ended then. But the unconditional surrender dictum of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, acceded to by Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, made such an end impossible, and guaranteed the long, grinding struggle which left much of Western Europe and Eastern Asia a vast rubble strewn

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with the corpses of millions, a mutual achievement of the various belligerents.

A hint as to the likely acceptability of terms occurred at about the time Mr. Churchill was about to leave London to meet with Mr. Roosevelt at a conference at Quebec late in the summer of 1943. A reporter for Time wrote, "Everybody laughed over a gag credited to Churchill before he left England. Interviewer: 'Will you offer peace terms to Germany?' Churchill: 'Heavens, No! They would accept immediately.'"⁸ This was considered a humorous political incident, but there probably were a number of discussions going on of ways to bring about the end of the war short of "total victory." Rumors of this kind flew around the world on various occasions, and the most alarming and disturbing was that of late January, 1944, launched by the Soviet news organ Pravda. Two stories actually were loosed in America, both involving the British and Germans. In one, the communist publication charged that two British representatives had met with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, to discuss a separate peace in Spain, while the other alleged that the British and German foreign ministers had conferred in Cairo on the same subject. The Soviet never apologized about it, the British never admitted it, and the Germans remained non-committal. But for a moment, a fluttering occurred in Anglo-American circles such as had not been seen for a long time.⁹ Even if utterly false, the story did much damage to the glowing picture which had emerged from the famous Anglo-Russo-American gathering at Teheran November 29-December 1, 1945, at which time the celebrated participants, apparently pledging eternal love and mutual cooperation, had fashioned the framework for a vast eon of internationalist political bliss which was to follow as soon as the enemy was drowned in blood and hot metal. The American periodical press worked overtime on the populace for weeks with what was sometimes humorously described as the "oh-gawd-let's-avoid-the-creation-of-suspicions" line, and to keep up the belief in the indivisibility of peace and the great dividends sure to follow from collective security pacts with the Stalinists, even

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though the faintest admirers of collective security were more and more convinced that nothing had been agreed upon at Teheran except military commitments.

The fact that the uneasy "allied" partners ultimately did not adhere to unconditional surrender as a practical policy—the Russians in dealing with the regimes of Eastern Europe which they overran, the Anglo Americans in dealing with conquered Italy—indicates that it might also have been dispensed with in the cases of Germany and Japan, both of which were clearly beaten in mid-1948 at least, thus saving the blood and lives and treasure frittered and dissipated away in the following eighteen months. Whether such turnabouts might have been politically possible or feasible in view of the hate propaganda which had been so generously employed to whip up popular support for war against the Germans and Japanese is another matter.

No good study of domestic war propaganda in the United States during World War II has ever been published, as against the output which stands on World War I. It is unlikely that one will be for generations to come, and one that is critical may never appear, since it seems likely that World War II, barring a catastrophic realignment in world politics, may become as formalized a story and as unsusceptible to revision, alteration, or reassessment as the ancient account of the struggle between the Hebrews and the Philistines. For a vast multitude it is the One Good War, rejoiced in and defended vociferously by even a large majority which now finds the current war in Asia so heart-rending and indefensible. Contemporary accounts might induce visitors from another planet to think that it was the only war ever fought between humans and some variety of lesser creatures on the evolutionary scale, so vicious and inflammatory was the portrayal of the enemy, in which enterprise the prize must go to the scribes and mouthpieces of the ultimate victors, as it surely did to the same forces during the struggle of 1914-1918.

Said a Life editorial in the fall of 1942, "Despite the diplomats and the secret talks and the intrigue, opinions held by the run of the citizenry are largely responsible for what is done in the field of foreign affairs."¹⁰ These opinions are also responsible for what is not done, and they had much to do with the abuse, denunciation, and repudiation of Peace Now and the Brittain campaign against strategic bombing of non-combatants.

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It is possible to argue that, after all, the massacres of civilians in Germany and Japan did not approach by a wide mark n what civilian propagandists had called for as a proper fate for these lands. Bernadotte E. Schmitt, professor of modern history at the University of Chicago, in a speech before the twenty-first annual meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies in Indianapolis on December 1, 1941, before the United States was even an official belligerent, advocated, among other things, for Germany, a reduction of its population by thirty million, method of disposal unspecified but starvation indicated, since he also recommended the country's reduction and confinement to a strictly agricultural economy. "Since there are only 45 million Britons, 45 million Italians, 40 million Frenchmen, and 80 million Poles, as opposed to 80 million Germans, the equilibrium of Europe would be more stable if there were only 50 million Germans,"¹¹ Schmitt concluded. However, he did not disclose how many Russian communists were too many Russian communists for Europe's welfare and stability.

Few Germanophobes subsequently approached Schmitt's standard, though a few months before, it was exceeded by one Theodore Newman Kaufman, who published a book Germany Must Perish!¹², a plea for sterilizing the entire adult German population, a project which he calculated might be achieved in about three years. Though privately published, this book received an amazing amount of attention in the spring of 1941, including a major uncritical review in so widely dispersed a journal as Time.¹³ Strangely enough, two years earlier Kaufman, as chairman of the American Federation of Peace, had suggested sterilization for all adult Americans should Congress permit the United States to become involved in another European war.

Once American participation in the war which began in 1939 became a reality, hate literature directed against the enemy became a major industry, and a large contingent became specialists in it The full story will surely be a multi-volume effort, and can only be mentioned in passing, though it was the major obstacle which stood in the way of acceptance of appeals for negotiated peace and a halt to "area" bombing In wars between modern national states,

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there are experts in hate found in all groups, classes, and interests, though some may be more accomplished than others. In the United States, the sector of liberalism's spokesmen who advocated war-breeding policies for many years before they bloomed into reality led the field in zeal for the big bloodletting of 19421945. Their bellicose admonitions flamed from the pages of even the multi-million circulation family magazines, and their voices were heard on the radio by tens of millions. Lack of devotion to spreading interest in the arts of killing is a charge which can never be placed on their doorstep. It is worth noting, however, their amazing conversion to peace, coexistence, the beauties of negotiation and compromise, even pacifism, in the period from 1945 to the present, in the case of those who are still active merchants of the printed and spoken word. Their pious early postwar books such as Lead Kindly Light and biographies o$ such peace figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer, their whole literature of mercy and compassion, while figuratively still knee-deep in German blood and Japanese radioactive ashes, stand out as still another of history's great contradictions. One cannot accuse them of inflexibility.

Charles E. Montague, in his little post-World War I book, Disenchantment, made a classic comment on the home-front literary and microphone warriors whose martial chores consist of verbal weaponry: "Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant."¹⁴ In the United States a large number of persons would be competitors for the civilian who most closely fitted Montague's general observation. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, might have been a strong contender early in the war, but the ferocity of several other journalists soon relegated him to the rank of moderates in this venture. His outstanding achievement was his famous defense of the necessity of deep, burning hatred of the enemy in order to fight effectively, in "The Time for Hate Is Now," published July 4, 1942.¹⁵ But others came along who were somewhat more effective and frightening than Cousins, particularly Rex Stout and Clifton Fadiman of the War Writers Board, an adjunct of the Office of War Information, the wartime government's principal propaganda agency. Stout, a famous writer of detective fiction, and Fadiman, a prominent New York

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literary figure and among other things a book reviewer for the New Yorker, were two of eighteen members of the WWB, described at one time as "the semi-governmental agency that serves as a clearinghouse for writers willing to work for the war and government agencies needing specific writing jobs done."¹⁶

Fadiman was regarded by some as the most towering Germanophobe throughout the war, while others had as their outstanding figure in this field of action such as Lord Vansittart of England, and such Americans as Shirer, Kaufman, Quentin Reynolds, Walter Winchell, Ben Hecht, Stout, Louis Nizer, and Henry Morgenthau, though a full roll-call would number in the hundreds. The most explosive incident involving exhortations for mass hate occurred at the meeting of the famous literary organization, the P.E.N. Club, at the Ambassador Hotel in New York City on October 28, 1942. On this occasion Stout and Fadiman made spirited calls for indiscriminate hate of all Germans (for some reason the Italians and Japanese were slighted by neglect) in such incendiary tones that they were reproached by literary friends who really did not lack interest in a tooth-and-claw struggle. Stout's insistence on "the need for a propaganda of hate" and Fadiman's "sweeping indictment of the German people" (" 'The only way to make a German understand is to kill him, and even then he doesn't get the point' "),¹⁷ drew reproaches from such eminents as Henry Seidel Canby and Arthur Garfield Hays, and ultimately an editorial scolding from Cousins, who was clearly outclassed as a hate-monger in this encounter.¹⁸ But Cousins in turn was chastised by a correspondent who said in conclusion, "What we need in this country are more good haters like Mr. Fadiman." The P.E.N. meeting got completely out of the control of its president, Robert Nathan, and ended in an angry, noisy hubbub. But Mr. Fadiman was unruffled by the experience and repeated his dictum verbatim on the need for killing all Germans as a means for expanding their understanding, in a review of John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down in the New Yorker a few weeks later.¹⁹

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Bemadotte Schmitt also came to Fadiman's defense, attacking Cousins for deploring Fadiman's hate-Germans propaganda. And Fadiman went on for years developing his thesis of the ageless criminality of the entire German ethnic stock. We even find during this same time a revival of the recommendation of mass sterilization of Germans, this time by no less than Ernest Hemingway m the preface to the collection of short stories titled Men at War. "Germany should be so effectively destroyed that we should not have to fight her again for a hundred years, or forever," said Hemingway, though his suggestion was specific compared to Kaufman's, confined just to the membership m Hider's party organizations,²⁰ most of whom were civilians even then. Apparently Hemingway did not think the German Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, navy, and general staff of much consequence as fighters, only Hitler's home-front storm troopers and secret police. Nor was Stout quiet or disengaged in subsequent months. His famous article, "We Shall Hate or We Shall Fail," was given prodigious exploitation in the New York Times in 1943, and through the spring of 1944 he was pushing a vigorous hate program in the pages of the Times through his organization. His main opposition by this latter date was largely furnished by clergymen, particularly those connected with the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace of the Federal Council of Churches.

By this time the hate campaign had formidable aid from England in the form of the contributions of Lord Vansittart, whose books Black Record and Lessons of My Life contained the most highly refined and sophisticated Germanophobic literary poison yet seen originating in the English tongue. Actually, Vansittart's participation in the fashioning of hate literature aimed exclusively at the Germans preceded the war's outbreak but the period of hostilities was a time of exceedingly favorable circumstances for maximizing production, and he wasted no time, as the printed record testifies. For an American market he prepared a famous twelve-point program for dealing with the Germans in toto which must have warmed the hearts of such simpaticos as Stout, Fadiman, and Schmitt, to mention just a few of the major participants. It was given top billing in an issue of the New York Times magazine in January, 1944, and subsequently

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given further publicity in abbreviated form by Time.²¹ By this time there were many contributors to the plans for what-to-do-with-Germany; Vansittart's fell somewhere between that of Schmitt at the beginning of the war and that attributed to Henry Morgenthau toward the end, which latter appears to have been the working model which functioned in large part as the program of the "liberators," at least in the non-Soviet-occupied portions of German territory, between 1945 and 1948. Vansittart's message encountered a small amount of reservation in the United States, though about the only specific rejoinders at that moment were those by Francis Neilson in his Hate the Enemy of Peace: A Reply to Lord Vansittart,²² and by George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw, on being asked for his views on a postwar plan for the permanent disablement of Germany at this same time, exploded in anger, denouncing it as "cowardly rubbish," "impudent and pretentious and so deliberately wicked that if it were not fortunately quite impossible to put it into practice it would justify a holy alliance against any power giving the slightest countenance to it." Shaw was a little too optimistic, in view of the subsequent enforcement of the Morgenthau Plan in postwar West Germany, abandoned after it threatened not only to make the area a howling wilderness but to make possible its dropping into the lap of Stalin as the early Cold War took shape.

The concurrent propaganda of Japanophobia was of a different order, featured by a variety of racist venom which still is in a class by itself in the history of such matters. Here the success of the hate builders was an unqualified success compared with the program directed at the other enemy peoples. For all practical purposes the Japanese were reduced below the human level, and there undoubtedly existed the notion in most circles of lowest intellectual attainment in this country that American armed forces were actually engaged in a struggle against a lower species. No special literature was needed to achieve this end, and the task seemed to be handled most adequately by the radio, moving pictures, and oral folk-lore.

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The segregation of the resident mainland Japanese population in special concentration camps, mainly in the West, was the most striking evidence of an attitude in this country based on the theory of special, and lower, creation in their case. Though news from the Pacific war fronts was expertly and severely filtered for the home audience, and though evidence seemed to suggest that Americans were at grips with a tough, intelligent, resourceful enemy possessing a technical facility of a high order, it was still possible to broadcast a propaganda suggesting that they were barely above the level of insects. An indication of the nature of the fighting was suggested in the news early in 1944 that after over two years of combat, American forces had taken less than 300 Japanese as prisoners of war.²³

Though all this is but an inkling as to the real dimensions and proportions of the state of mind prevailing at the midway point of the war, it is necessary to be aware of this when examining the incipience of the negotiated peace and anti-strategic bombing movements of that time.

The Peace Now Movement was launched in Philadelphia on July 11, 1943, at a time when the war had taken a decisive turn in favor of the Anglo-Russo-American "allies," what with the turning back of the German armies in Russia, after the German disaster at Stalingrad, the defeat of the Germans and Italians in North Africa, and the overwhelming of the Japanese navy in the Pacific. The invasion of Sicily by American and British forces was a day old when Peace Now began its official existence. Quakers and other peace figures were the principal elements involved at the beginning, though adherents and supporters were gradually attracted from many persuasions, which had much to do eventually with the violent attack directed their way from the preponderant supporters of a war fought to "unconditional surrender" of the enemy.

One of the chief organizers and ultimately the principal spokesman for the PNM was George W. Hartmann, professor of educational psychology at Columbia Teachers College at the time the war broke out, and serving in the same capacity at Harvard when this venture was initiated. Hartmann, associated with the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas for some time, and its candidate for mayor of New York City, had been in the news on two other occasions prior to emerging as a prime worker in fashioning Peace Now. His part in opposing the infiltration of the Teachers Union in New York by the

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Communist Party had earned him much publicity, little support, but the profound hostility of the CPUSA, and CP publications and their satellite journalists in the left-liberal sector of the newspaper and periodical press, who had a big part to play in the smearing of Hartmann and Peace Now; undoubtedly they had this score to settle with him still on the agenda when he surfaced on the national scene in this new capacity. Hartmann, along with Clyde R. Miller, also on the Columbia Teachers College faculty and director of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, had further excited publicity because of their anti-war stands and their subsequent departure from there after challenging Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler, a major Francophile and proponent of interventionism in the war in the period shortly prior to American involvement.

Hartmann, a handsome man with the physique of a professional football player, was an attractive chairman and chief speaker. He was also responsible on at least one occasion for putting the objectives of Peace Now in the fewest words. "The advocates of Peace Now," he said, "want the United States to proclaim fair and reasonable peace terms at once as a basis of an immediate armistice and simultaneously invite representatives of all nations without discrimination to a world conference for achieving these conditions."²⁴ This statement was made in May, 1944, after the PNM had been under a specially hostile publicity barrage from the entire American political spectrum for six months because it called for the declaration of political war aims to supplement the military course of action, and embarrassed many war supporters, since there really never had been any such pronouncements, at least from the American and English leaders, other than an intention to fight to "victory." The more idealist supporters of the war had suffered much heartburn over this from the very beginnings of the war. While the political objectives of Stalin's Russia were overt and obvious, it was becoming increasingly plain that Stalin's partners had none of any significance. Fritz Sternberg, a Marxist economist whose views were regularly proclaimed in the weekly Nation in the war years, put it very bluntly at about this time, when he commented, "The Anglo-Saxon powers have no positive program in Europe; the destruction of the Nazi state is their only clear aim."²⁵

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The late winter and early spring of 1944, when Peace Now began to make its only serious impact, was a time when numerous pathetic and querulous calls were leaking into the American and English press, seeking to learn what it was all about. The London Sunday Observer sponsored one late in February, 1944, which condensed the whole literature on the subject, titled "What Are We Fighting For?" The editors, tiring of five years of what they called " 'win-the-war-first-and-find-out-afterwards' propaganda," wanted some tangible political proposals:

War is politics. We fight for principles or war is madness. If we deny this, we deny all that the war has cost us and our Allies; we ought never to have begun....²⁶

But by this time, a national exposure to the war aims of Peace Now had occurred, and they had stirred up a mighty storm. It was not until a meeting sponsored by PNM which took place in New York City's Carnegie Hall the evening of December 30, 1948, that more than local attention to the organization and its aims was gained, and the very largest part was fiercely hostile. First to hit PNM was the communist weekly New Masses, in a two-page editorial five days

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later, titled "Hitler's Doves."²⁸ The communists, thanks to wartime partnership with Stalin, "wrapped so tightly in the American Flag," as one ironic observer had noted, "that the hammer and sickle were barely visible," sounded precisely like a post-war anti-communist right-wing organ, used the same language, and recommended the same action. PNM's program was described as an "incitement to sedition and treason," and the communists urged the Department of Justice to investigate it. Hartmann was blasted as a "red baiter" leader m the Teachers' Union,²⁹ demonstrating that they had not forgotten his part in that pre-war imbroglio. A series of later editorials in this journal dwelled on the same theme, that of a month later selecting the Peace Now Movement as best typifying a spreading "intellectual 'left' defeatism," "steeped in hatred of Russia and the Teheran program."³⁰ The New Masses recommended Hartmann's dismissal from Harvard and his indictment for sedition.

This latter recommendation had apparently already been done, by Life magazine. In its story on the Carnegie Hall meeting, accompanied by the most unflattering pictures of the proceedings they were able to select, the editors delayed publication for three weeks after the event, and ran it back-to-back with a similar lurid spread on the people just indicted for sedition by the Justice Department for conspiracy to violate the Smith Act.³¹ A banner one-fourth of an inch over Hartmann's picture read "U.S. Indicts Fascists." Hartmann wrote a short but heated letter to Life over their smear, and pointed

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out that "such old-established societies like the National Council for the Prevention of War, the War Resisters League, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation are also vigorously pushing a Wage Peace Now campaign," but that Life had pointedly omitted paying any attention to them. Life apologized lamely for the juxtaposition of the lurid headline and Hartmann's picture, offering the preposterous excuse that it was all a "typographical error," but concluded, "Life believes that, at this critical time when united effort is necessary to gain a worthwhile victory and a worthwhile peace, 'Peace Now' is not only dangerous but subversive to that end."³² Life did not meet Hartmann's challenge to discuss the other peace groups and their demands for a negotiated peace, but did show that as far as Peace Now was concerned, they agreed with the New Masses on what subversion was. They also admitted indirectly that of all these campaigns, they considered that of PNM most formidable.

However, they had plenty of company in this venture. The New York Post was one of the leaders in imputing that the leaders of Peace Now were little more than subversive and the Saturday Evening Post published a vigorous editorial some two months after the Carnegie Hall meeting, repudiating the PNM.³³ The liberal weeklies, both running high fevers over the war and entertaining fervent proStalinist sympathies, both launched ugly attacks on Hartmann and Peace Now, that in the New Republic being especially offensive. Being "a tool of axis diplomacy," a vicious guilt-by-association, content-analysis charge, was the kindest accusation leveled against it. The editors hoped Peace Now was being investigated by the FBI, and that it would be destroyed regardless of what the investigation revealed.³⁴ So spoke one of the traditional voices in defense of minority views and a grand champion of free speech and the diversity of opinion in a democracy.

On the subject of government investigation of PNM, the liberal weeklies were divergent. The Nation, famous for its many bellows of pain about the Dies Committee and this House of Representatives agency's periodic invesffgation of communists and other favored leftists, thought that this committee's announced intention of investigation of Hartmann and Peace Now was quite fine, and accorded

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its approval.³⁵ But the New Republic sniffed editorially, "Peace Now has already been 'investigated' and completely discredited."³⁶ Apparently the editors spoke too soon, since the movement gained attention rather than lost it, and they soon followed with a ferocious special dispatch of some length by their Washington correspondent, Helen Fuller,³⁷ which quoted at length from an attempt at literary assassination of Peace Now by M. M. Marberry of the New York afternoon tabloid, PM, referred to by wags as "the uptown edition of the Daily Worker." Ever since the Life pictorial adventure and a long and fairly restrained commentary in Newsweek,³⁸ Peace Now's national press coverage had spread widely and rapidly, although the stir in the New York City daily press was probably the wildest, and a new tack was being taken in the war of innuendo on the organization. The Fuller vignette was in the main a personal attack on the founders, Hartmann, and the executive secretary of PNM, Bessie Simon, who had connections in both the organized pacifist and pre-Pearl Harbor anti-war organizations, principally the America First Committee. But the emphasis now was swinging away from the reprehensibility of Peace Now's negotiated peace objective to an ad hominem denigration of specific people known for or suspected of having become affiliated, but only those of conservative reputations, the casting of suspicions as to the sources of their funds, and allegations of guilt by association with such organizations as the Christian Front and America First, even though the latter no longer existed.

There was little doubt by the spring of 1944 that, even if the Peace Now Movement had not yet made any appreciable impact on policy makers, they surely had made their mark upon the opinion makers. A torrent of incensed and infuriated print had flowed from coast to coast, and though PNM claimed to have members in nearly every state at the beginning of their national notoriety, which may have been doubtful, there were few areas which could claim to know

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nothing about it by the end of the spring of 1944. Those most firmly devoted to the unconditional surrender doctrine as the ultimate in war aims were by far the most hostile, and to them Hartmann and his associates, whether from the Friends, the Catholic Worker, the Socialist Party, surreptitious supporters from other peace organizations, or the lately-defunct America First Committee, were as bad if not worse than the alleged seditionists, whose Washington trial was going on simultaneously. The conservative Saturday Evening Post, the American Century press of Henry Luce, Eugene Lyons' fiercely anti-Soviet American Mercury, the pro-Stalin but anti-CPUSA Nation and New Republic, and the Stalinist American organs, the Daily Worker and New Masses, all had something in common in the period ending with the Anglo-American invasion of France: a generously-proportioned and nearly identical antipathy toward George Hartmann and the Peace Now Movement.

Of singular significance was the effect upon, and the response from, the organized peace forces in the United States. Of the mass of periodical publications in the country the only one of national repute which gave Peace Now serious and dignified attention and permitted its spokesman to explain their position at length was the Christian Century, and its editorial position was not friendly toward pacifism. The editors gave Peace Now publicity but did not support it, and argued against all pacifist and peace organizations, PNM and the older ones alike. They spent most of the spring of 1944 in making ironic sallies at the expense of the established peace groups, which without exception shied away from Hartmann and his associates as if they were leprous. Their particular target was A. J. Muste, a repeated attacker of Peace Now, whose main objection was that the organization was not selective about who were permitted to join it, and accepted anyone who was against the war and wished it brought to an end through a negotiated peace. In this tack Muste was following a rather generalized and ceremonial anti-war leftist response. Granted that the communists and the vast majority of liberal-left forces in America were in firm support of the war, and probably would have favored its prosecution far beyond the time it did take to bring it to a halt, a significant part of the peace societies and pacifist organizations also consisted of those of left-wing persuasions. Since it was part of their dogma that it was almost impossible for a non-leftist to be for peace, it followed that the membership of peace groups, whether actionist or not, had to be screened with great thor-

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oughness in order to maintain ideological purity, and that anyone without impeccable leftist credentials seeking to join a peace organization was obviously a likely agent-provocateur or trying to attain sinister and ignoble goals of a selfish and personal order. It was impossible to be a conservative or other non-leftist and be sincerely interested in peace.

Muste was firmly captured by this form of conspiratorial suspicion, and responded in the expected conditioned reflex when allegations began to be made (mostly in circles just as hostile to Muste on account of his general anti-war stand) that Hartmann and his associates were attempting to find financial support in unorthodox places and from people who lacked the patina of established pacifist respectability. Muste began to repeat these charges, accompanied by warnings to his own Fellowship of Reconciliation, and to other older organizations, that they stay away from Peace Now and all its works and pomps. Far better was it to let the war go on than to cooperate in bringing about its cessation through the media of such auspices as these.

In mid-March, 1944, the Christian Century, a major editorial Pacifists Want Peace—But When?" took Muste and other critics of Hartmann and Peace Now to task in rather stringent fashion. "Nothing illustrates the political naivete of American pacifists better than their current embarrassment over what is called the 'Peace Now Movement,' " it led off, and flayed Muste for his attacks on PNM and his denunciation on the grounds it "was receiving the support of 'reactionaries' and possibly other rather dubious characters." The implication to the editors was that "pacifists should decline to associate with such people when they advocate peace, even though pacifists are supposed to stand for peace, first, last and all the time." The editors also included a solid rebuke to the Socialist Party for its hasty scurrying from association with Hartmann, once a candidate for office by their nomination. They reminded the SP that their memories were deficient. "The Socialists seem to have forgotten that their party, which was then stronger than it is today [1944], held to the position in the First World War which Dr. Hartmann takes now." It was a mark of political ineptness of a high order to the editors for all the veteran peace organizations to shun Peace Now, in the hope that the same thing might be done by themselves somehow, while at the same time maintaining their innocence. "The pacifist in time of war lives in a dream world," they concluded. "Their present effort to put

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as much distance as possible between themselves and 'Peace Now'" "provides another proof of their own political incompetence and irrelevance."³⁹

The Christian Century was not registering pique over pacifist rejection of Hartmann and the PNM, but merely demonstrating that to achieve peace was, in wartime, a political affair. The older groups, by shunning PNM (which was obviously trying to influence policy), because it had mobilized people the established peace elements considered impure in their motives, were voluntarily approving of the war continuing because it could not be ended in their way with their kind of political solution, proving that they really were not for peace under all circumstances. When Dorothy Detzer, national secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, one of the most respected of the older peace organizations, admitted in a comment on the editorial that "all the old established peace organizations have withheld cooperation from the Peace Now Movement as an organization," while sturdily maintaining that there was still "political relevance" to pacifism, the editors responded,⁴⁰

The Christian Century has not challenged the political relevance of pacifism in peacetime—as an effort to prevent war. It challenges its relevancy only in the midst of an actual war. Every pacifist and every pacifist organization, including Peace Now and "all the old established peace organizations," are working for either victory or defeat in this war—there is nothing else they can do.

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Muste promptly returned to the dispute with another elaboration on the reason why he was against a negotiated peace, maintaining that such a settlement would stabilize the "existing power relationships" between the two combatant combinations of states then fighting, which "would contain within itself the seeds of World War III."⁴¹ The editors promptly took after him again, and demonstrated to their satisfaction that Muste was no pacifist in this war, that he was for "active participation" in it; "Mr. Muste wants to see his country victorious and makes a strategic suggestion to that end." They were referring to Muste's hope for civil war breaking out in Germany and Japan, with the rebellious element bringing about the end of fighting after overpowering the regimes prosecuting the war, a finale strongly suggesting Lenin, the Bolsheviki, and the Russia of late 1917, though the Christian Century made no point of it. Muste "plainly prefers the continuance of the war to any attempt in the name of peace to 'stabilize the existing power relationships' between the belligerents," the editors remarked in closing.⁴² He was for a different kind of political situation, and preferred struggling and hoping for this even if the war had to go on indefinitely.

Muste was back with a two-column letter in rejoinder the next month, trying to elucidate further on the veteran pacifist organizations and why they took the position they did on Peace Now, but it added up to about the same as before; PN contained people Muste and the others of traditional pacifism disdained to work with. All the while he insisted that the latter were for "peace now" and had been "constantly working for that," even though rejecting the possibility of working to that end "with a specific organization named Peace Now."⁴³

The editors then gave Hartmann space to comment on what had been said on the subject over the previous ten weeks. He scolded those who had backed off from working for Peace Now "merely because some wholly respectable conservative non-pacifists also endorse it for good rational, humanitarian, patriotic or even 'selfish' motives." He also reproached those pacifists who preferred "armed revolution or civil war among the enemy peoples" to negotiated peace. "A pacifism that does not mean peaceful social change comes dangerously near to meaning nothing."

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Hartmann then addressed himself to the assertion, made directly in a number of quarters, and by inference in the Christian Century, that Peace Now was essentially in favor of the "Allies" suffering military defeat. Said Hartmann,⁴⁴

The charge that the Peace Now Movement is "defeatist" is faulty. All we assert is that there is no decent national objective that could not equally well be reached by group negotiation in place of combat to the death. It is wholly unscientific to say it can't be done until we try—and we haven't tried. Since when is it more democratic or Christian to seek certain worthy goals—incidentally, what are they?by clubbing another into submission because one is stronger? Factually our administration's demand for the unconditional surrender of the foe also includes the unconditional surrender of the American citizen, who is asked to sign an international blank check, pledging his blood and treasure in behalf of commitments he knows nothing about, and might not approve of if he did.

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in the Atlantic Charter, promptly formulate fair and reasonable peace terms and invite her allies and her enemies to negotiate for peace on this basis at once," she declared. "It is the contention of the Peace Now Movement that such an immediate peace proposal is a practicable and honorable alternative to the indefinite prolongation of the war," and one "which could be made only by a nation which is sure of victory but whose consciousness of superior strength is tempered by a realization of the material and spiritual cost of a complete military triumph and by a sense of responsibility, before God, for the welfare of mankind."⁴⁷

"Like a mouse transfixed by the paralyzing gaze of a snake, the American Christian watches the relentless approach of D-Day," the Hutchinson statement went on. "In dumb horror he sees at least half a million of America's sons groomed for sure death in the bloodiest invasion of history because he sees no honorable alternative to the continuation of the war." "It is to such agonized souls that the Peace Now Movement offers its alternative to the anguish of war and the disillusionment of victory," this long manifesto's concluding appeal, was already by-passed by the course of the war, for D-Day was already a week in history when the document appeared in print. It was possible to object that Dr. Hutchinson had anticipated a somewhat larger loss of life than actually took place, in the invasion of western Europe in June, 1944, but there was little to quarrel with other than that, and least of all her prediction of "disillusionment" with the "victory," for no war in history has produced such a mountain of print and length of talk complaining of the vast hiatus between expectation and realization, though no war in history has also known so many who found every moment of it high adventure, who relished it with savor and glee, and who regretted profoundly its termination. For all who contemplated the saturation of Europe with war in June, 1944, with"dumb horror" there probably was an equal number which waited for it in high anticipation.

But the vast spread of the war and the preponderant part in this spread played by Americans wiped out the discussion and writing on the merits of negotiated peace as a substitute for one following "victory." Of the world's notables only Pius XII called for what Peace Now campaigned. In a speech delivered to the College of Cardinals on June 2, 1944, just as the Anglo-American armies were about to enter Rome, the Pope called for "a speedy opening of peace

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negotiations," predicting the enormous increase of death and destruction in a war prolonged "endlessly and senselessly," "a war whose economic, social and spiritual consequences threaten to become the scourge of the age to come."⁴⁸

The Peace Now Movement quietly disappeared from view, most of the calamities they predicted came true, and a large part of the citizenry which looked upon them and pronounced them good for a few months, has been wailing about their evil consequences ever since. Before sagging out of sight under the weight of the massive spreading of the war in June, 1944, it was subject to a savage attack in the American Mercury by two vigorous pro-war propagandists, who summarized what had been said in denigration of PNM in all circles for the previous six months, and succeeded in sounding like the Stalinist press at its worst in an organ devoted to anti-Stalinism.⁴⁹ Unfortunately, the article was loaded with factual errors, but if its object was the portrayal of the personalities of the movement as psychotics and lightheaded traitors, it was possible to consider it a success. (The authors were especially delighted in the infiltration of the PNM headquarters by an employee of the pro-war leftist New York Post, and its subsequent publication of correspondence which was filmed on the sly. In a time of national sanity Peace Now might have sued the Post successfully for heavy damages for perpetrating this stunt.)

Hartmann responded with a long letter to the Mercury the following month deploring this marathon performance of "name-calling distortions." "For sheer cruelty to harmless individuals and for crude misrepresentation of a humane outlook, your May article on 'Peace Now' takes the prize," said Hartmann in reproach. "It is a repugnant model of totalitarian intolerance toward minorities which should cause authentic liberals some severe conscience pangs."⁵⁰ But not

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right away. The war was the great totalitarian liberal triumph, and no incidentals were to stand in their way in enjoying it to the full, while they showed the enemy how "total war" was really supposed to be fought. The grieving and anguish over being the victims of the treatment accorded Peace Now was to come their way in the first decade of the Cold War, when it became totalitarian liberalism's turn to plead for the consideration of the value of negotiated peace.

The most vicious of all the smears of Peace Now came, strangely enough, over a year after the war had ended, in the anonymously-written book The Plotters,⁵¹ an account which glowed with simulated indignation and bogus patriotism, and gave indication of having been written while the war was still in progress, in what might be described as Teheran-era Daily Worker "unity" style. As far as its relevance for that moment, the fall of 1946, was concerned, the publishers might just as well have included as many pages concerning the menace of the Seljuk Turks.

The tens of thousands of lives expended and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the last score of years trying to repair the consequences of the "victory" which seemed so much better than a termination of the war short of such a conclusion is another story. Raymond Aron, in his The Century of Total War, in 1954, came up with a fitting epitaph to it all when he pointed out, "The goal that Western strategy has set itself in Japan as well as in Germany is not very different from the situation that would have arisen of its own accord if peace had been concluded before the entry of Soviet troops into the Reich and Manchuria, and before complete destruction of both armies and countries. We are trying to efface the consequences of a too complete victory, and get back to a victory compatible with the resurrection of the vanquished." What Aron is lamenting is that the war was not brought to an end by a negotiated peace, though it would seem that the easy part has been the achievement of the objective he described; the undoing of the profound dislocations which

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remain as unaltered today as they did more than twenty years ago is an achievement no one alive will live to see. "The war is the peace," enthusiastically proclaimed the New Republic's editor Michael Straight, in his book Make This the Last War, published late in 1948. World War II will undoubtedly be the last war of its kind; we have reverted to guerrilla war and civil war, the most primitive and brutal kinds of war, respectively, as General J. F. C. Fuller maintains.⁵² But the significance of Straight's dictum, anticipating the famous commandment of 1984 society in George Orwell's novel, is what is most compelling. His calling attention to the simultaneous construction, step by step, of the world to come while the war destroying the previous one was in progress, long ago deserved attention from the numerous clan who believe war is a means of preserving a status quo, when it is unmatched as machinery for effecting change, profound, sweeping, irrevocable, and invariably degenerative.⁵³

Walter B. Pitkin, in his A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity, suggested that "not all the discoveries and inventions of mankind since the close of the Pleistocene age have benefited the race as extensively or as intensively as the war morons and war maniacs have harmed the race."⁵⁴ It was obvious he was not referring just to professional soldiers, few of whom have ever expressed any great zeal over the beauties of war, particularly if they had ever done any fighting. The civilian politicians, zealots, vengeance-seekers, propagandists, and the army of the ignorant taxpayers and supporters with their single-hypothesis theory of the origins of war, had their way. The Peace Now adherents were able to take comfort, if they wished, in the many rueful indirect testimonials to the correctness of their assertions when it was all over. On the last day of 1945, Time's commentary on a goalless war began, "World War II had ended badly." "Except on the military side, where allied might and allied generalship were crushing and supreme, it had never been fought well. The why of the fighting had

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never been adequately spelled out."⁵⁵ This latter remark was at the core of Hartmann's position throughout the brief day of Peace Now; no one seemed to know what the war was being fought to achieve. A year later, the U.S. News published an even bleaker summary of the existing anti-millennium the political and ideological warriors in mufti had never contemplated as the sum total of all their efforts:⁵⁶

The world's worst war is being followed by the world's worst peace. The present peace the elementary details of which have not been framed a year after the cessation of fighting in Europe, is not a peace at all. It is a dismal orgy of violence, looting, oppression, of slave labor and starvation, of mutilation of historic ethnographic frontiers and of defiance of natural economic law.

Unlike Peace Now, the campaign against obliteration bombing of the enemy's cities began in England, a logical development, since England was the place where obliteration bombing was first shaped into a practical policy. From there it filtered to the United States, and created a stir of about the same duration as Peace Now and at the same time. To some extent the people involved also came from the same general sector of the community, with the exception that there were more personalities from the clerical world involved in the protest against the bombing of the enemy cities.

Like Peace Now, the protest against aerial massacre of enemy civilian urban populations had to struggle against a hostile public opinion of many years' standing, and a mixture of ignorance of what was going on and an obtuseness toward brutality which were objectives of propagandists seeking to firm up home-front support for about anything which may have been decided was a "military necessity." (The senseless, pointless and fruitless destruction of the

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Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy by American and British bombing planes and artillery in January-February, 1944, is a case in point, as General Fuller put it, "not so much a piece of vandalism as an act of sheer tactical stupidity.")⁵⁸

Aneurin Bevan, wartime Labor Party member of parliament and subsequently minister of health and housing in the British government in 1945, once declared, "Remember that when you put a man in uniform, you reduce his intelligence by fifty per cent."⁵⁹ But in view of the political decisions made during the war, there were grounds for suspicion among strictly military men about the amount of intelligence existing among the decision makers, even assuming they were not subject to any subsequent reduction at all after election to office. And one of the decisions made was the "military necessity" of area bombing.

No account of the reasons for the grudging bit of headway made by the campaign to halt this program in 1944 is understandable without some knowledge of the success of popular, but not official, Anglo-American propaganda in convincing the vast majority that, even if the results of strategic bombing, particularly of Germany, were dubious, at least it was justified because the Germans had commenced it all, and therefore this was justifiable retaliation, a primitive level of rationalization where most of the talk and print on the subject stayed. A well-exploited saga of the early war years was the German bombings of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry, and Stalingrad, even though the first, second, and last of these cities were under assault and also were defended, and the activities of the German air force were tactical operations in conjunction with ground fighting in a war zone. London and Coventry were strategically bombed by the Germans in 1940-1941, and the issue as understood by almost all at the time plainly depended on a propaganda insisting that in all cases unprovoked attacks had been made on these communities, and that therefore what was to happen to some seventy German cities of 100,000 population or higher was at worst only retribution.

Rotterdam, attacked in the second week of May, 1940, as German armies were beginning their sweep of the Low Countries, was the first to be exploited. A certain amount of attention to the German attack on Warsaw had preceded the whole affair, in September,

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1939. British apologists for their subsequent demolition of Germany frequently cited this as the precedent for their action, rather than what the Germans inflicted upon English towns in the spring of 1940 and thereafter, again daintily avoiding the distinction between the bombing of cities under direct attack and the bombing of cities hundreds of miles behind the fighting lines, the concentration of fire upon military objectives as against the annihilation of whole communities as policy, with hardly any pretense of special attention to targets of military importance.

But Rotterdam received the first major publicity, and the numbers game properly begins here. Over two months after the attack, the Royal Netherlands Legation in Washington with casual aplomb announced to the world via the New York Times that German air attackers had killed 30,000 people in seven and one-half minutes. Americans in particular were horrified by this story, and it became part of the folklore in Anglo-American circles, and has actually been little jarred by the research of a quarter of a century, though David Irving, while writing his The Destruction of Dresden, obtained figures from Rotterdam authorities in 1962 that the verifiable loss of life was 980, not 30,000 and that most of these persons were killed in fires which were set by the bombing, which was to prove to be the case in German cities also in subsequent years. As Irving says, "Dramatic exaggerations die hard—not least those that are generated in the.dire necessity of war-time morale-boosting."⁶⁰

In the summer of 1940 came the German attacks on England, particularly the blows struck to London and Coventry. In the case of the latter city, from the popular press stories and radio broadcasts which blanketed America, one might have gathered that the Germans had bombed this place only to destroy its cathedral and its civilian population. Again the account suggested immense loss of life, while it turned out that a total of 380 persons were killed Almost always unmentioned was that Coventry was a major center of vital war production industries, many of which were destroyed or damaged, including twelve which were engaged in military aircraft manufacturing.

In the case of London the volume of reportage was astounding and Americans in particular were able to start off each day listening to the sepulchral voice of Edward R. Murrow, describing new de

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struction day by day, with the impression being gained by most listeners that hardly anything of the town existed by the end of 1940. One would never have known that at the same time the Germans were making nightly visits to bomb London, similar excursions by the Royal Air Force to Italian but principally German cities were taking place, but the last thing available to the yet-uninvolved Americans was a correct picture of the total situation. Nor would one have guessed that the exaggeration of the damage was on a scale just short of breath-taking.

Especially interesting in connection with this was a report made in the Saturday Review of Literature late in 1943 by one of its house book reviewers, Henry C. Wolfe, just back from a visit in London. "If you go to London," revealed Mr. Wolfe, "you will not find a city in ruins. You can walk from Picadilly to Oxford Circus without seeing a building that shows marks of the blitz. Or from Trafalgar Square to the House of Parliament and hardly come across a reminder that the Luftwaffe has been over London."⁶¹ This was rather strange news for a recent eye-witness to be relating, while still trying to tell an American reading public that England was under "concentrated devastation."

As for the total damage achieved in England by the Germans, as compared to that achieved in Germany, the summary by Allen A. Michie, a one-time Time-Life reporter, in the Reader's Digest in the summer of 1945, is particularly dramatic and succinct: "The combined damaged areas of London, Bristol, and Coventry and all the blitzed cities of Britain could be dumped in the ruins of just one medium-sized German city and hardly be noticed."⁶² Coventry was many times cited in the popular propaganda as the excuse for obliteration strategy applied later on in Germany. Michie estimated that by comparison Berlin suffered 863 Coventrys; Cologne, 269; Hamburg, 200; and Bremen, 187. Few believed that this was an excessively weighted retaliation, or that such prodigious damage was not absolutely necessary.

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In the case of Stalingrad, here we have a prime instance of the diligence and assiduousness of Soviet and pro-Soviet word merchants. In a city fought for block-by-block and even house-by-house, the damage is bound to be utterly appalling, but most Americans went through the war believing the destruction was a malicious product of German air attack, and inclined to forget that the Red Army had anything to do with a goodly share of the wreckage. In such circumstances it is conventional to blame it all on the enemy. The exploitation of it for propaganda purposes was almost fulsome, and tended to be brought up every time there took place a discussion of the part played by the Soviet in the war against Hitler Germany. And the objective was well reached before deflation of the legend took place. William L. White, one of America's most prestigious reporters in World War II, is principally responsible for the deflation. As a traveling companion to Eric Johnston, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce, on the latter's celebrated tour of Stalinist Russia in the second half of 1944, White was permitted to see a number of things barred to other American correspondents, who themselves read about the war in Soviet newspapers, and wrote the stories they filed to America and England from their hotels in Moscow, not from the front, where most readers thought they were. One of White's treats was an air tour of Stalingrad, a long, narrow community winding mostly along one bank of the Volga. The purpose was obvious, to impress White with this destroyed place, and thus get more wordage placed before American readers. White, who had been in London during the German bombing of 1940-1941, and thought that was considerable, soured on Stalingrad as a site of vast destruction. Said he with a sniff in his subsequent book Report on the Russians, on what he was shown, "If you coiled [the ruins of] Stalingrad up and set it down in the ruins of London there would still be plenty of room for Stalingrad to rattle around."⁶³

So we have some interesting wartime eyewitness stories on the relative damage of air attacks: Stalingrad a bagatelle compared to London; London and the entire damaged areas of all Britain combined virtually nothing compared to any one of seventy German cities alone, and one interesting traveler who hardly was able to find any

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damage in parts of London he visited at the very height of the war. The Anglo-American propaganda picture of this interesting business was just about the reverse.

But who had started it? This was an important question, because at the core of what might be called vulgar propaganda, whichever side "started" any particular maneuver (be it explosive bullets, gas warfare, tanks, submarine attacks, and the like, as has been seen prior to this time) was sure to be blamed by the later side on the scene, not only for its prior actions but those of its antagonists in similar enterprise later on. Another standard staple, particularly of the ex post facto vulgar propaganda, was the self-righteous claim that the area bombings were retaliation for German concentration camp excesses, as though the people killed in these massacres from the air were the same people in charge of the concentration camps.⁶⁴ One of the repetitious charges used to counter Vera Brittain, particularly in England, her home, when she headed up the critique of allied area bombing, was that those whom she sought to be spared had undertaken this policy first Public opinion was prepared for years to support such action, and nothing ever came up which diverted the English and American policy makers from it. But it was a false charge.

There is no doubt of the English origin of both strategic bombing, directed ostensibly at military objectives, and area bombing, a variant of this, in which the goal was to destroy as much of the enemy's civilian housing and as many inhabitants as possible, both these kinds of targets being far behind the fighting lines, if any. Many printed sources by important participants and functionaries who figured in the decisions exist, in which the authors boast of their deeds. General Fuller has pointed out that a form of area bombing against the villages of rebellious natives of Waziristan in Northwest India was carried out by the Royal Air Force as far back as 1925,⁶⁵ even though a ruling established at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments of 1922 had stipulated, "Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring

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non-combatants, is prohibited." (The English did not adhere to this ruling, nor did the French, who repeatedly bombed the Syrian city of Damascus in 1925 and 1926. )

A book which appeared early in 1944, by J. M. Spaight, principal assistant secretary of the Air Ministry, Bombing Vindicated, was the first inkling for many that such a policy was of English origin. Mr. Spaight, who launched the incredible slogan, "The bomber is the savior of civilization," dated the decision to engage in such warfare from May, 1940, and bluntly declared, "We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland." This is a historical fact which has been publicly admitted. Spaight went on to explain why it had been suppressed from general news so long: ". . . because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision [of May, 1940] the publicity which it deserved. That surely was a mistake. It was a splendid decision."⁶⁶

But Spaight was far from alone, nor was he first As far back as September 13, 1941, in the London New Leader, the celebrated military analyst B. H. Liddell Hart had the following to say:⁶⁷

On May 10, 1940, the German offensive in the West was launched and the Royal Air Force in natural reply, launched attacks on the communications of the invading enemy, first in the invading territory, and then extending into Western Germany.

On the night of May 17, the policy of confining air operations to what might be roughly described as the battle zone was abandoned, and air attacks were made against targets at Hamburg and Bremen; on the following nights targets at Hannover were attacked. This new policy of attacking military objectives in the interior of Germany was continued in the weeks that followed.

On May 24, the Germans dropped their first bombs on English soil, although only a few of them, at scattered places on the East Coast. This was not repeated, however, until British night raiding had been in process for a further three weeks.

On the night of June 17, the first considerable German air raid on England took place and then continued nightly, although on a moderate scale, and with evident care to confine the aim to military objectives. In August the massed German daylight air offensive was launched and defeated.

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Just how careful either the German or English air forces were in their discrimination is not just a matter of opinion, for hitting specific targets from great altitudes at night was exceedingly difficult throughout the war, and rarely more precise in daytime, and under some situations the aim was made even worse by the increasing speed of the aircraft. The mutual bombings of London and Berlin were so unsuccessful in this respect that one English observer suggested ironically that it would have been simpler to have the opposing air forces stay home and bomb military objectives in their own cities; in that way there would be a much higher degree of accuracy and far less punishment meted out to men, women, and children noncombatants, on both sides.⁶⁸

One need not belabor this matter; there is a substantial literature which is no longer squeamish about the issue, and it is freely discussed. Spaight's book; Bomber Command by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris; Liddell Hart's The Revolution in Warfare; F. J. P. Veale's Advance to Barbarism; General Fuller's history of World War II;

Irving's book on the bombings of Dresden, and many other books by

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English writers go into various phases of this early English strategic or "precision" bombing and the nature of the German retaliation. The wonder is that there is so little general admission of it even in the most advanced intellectual centers in the United States; it is to be assumed that the mass of the citizenry will continue to incubate the same old fables, mainly as a consequence of having them drummed home weekly via repeated showing of twenty-five-year-old propaganda moving pictures on television.

Mr. Spaight told the world about the "splendid decision" of May, 1940, in England to engage in strategic "precision" bombing, in 1944. It took somewhat longer for other Englishmen to reveal when the decision was made to move on to the far more comprehensive "area" bombing. There was little doubt the "precision" stage of bombing was "a grotesque failure," in the words of General Fuller, if the object was the ruination of German war industry. The index of combat munitions output (including aircraft, ammunition, weapons, tanks, and naval construction) by German industry shows a steadily rising curve reaching a high point in mid-1944, and maintaining a very high level into the last four months of the war; at the moment of defeat it was still well above anything in 1941 and equal to most of 1942.⁶⁹ Hence, the move to area bombing, to destroy the homes and if possible the persons and families of industrial workers in Germany, was fully as much a failure if set against persisting production of the means whereby to fight. But one must credit the program with awesome success if the standard is the demolition of the built up centers of major cities and the massacre of civilians; General Fuller described them as "appalling slaughterings, which would have disgraced Attila." It is interesting to note how the top radio, newspaper, and magazine propagandists in the United States, who took such delight in reporting all this destruction and carnage and gloried in it as evidence of American "might," shuddered so violently at the end of 1945 over the possibility of a new war resulting in the "destruction of civilization." Apparently they looked on the tens of millions killed and mutilated, and the hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage of 1939-1945, as not having resulted in the slightest in the "destruction" of civilization, but in its saving (vide

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Spaight and the role of bombing planes). By such standards, a third World War could only "save civilization" that much more.

"Area" bombing also had another goal, the undermining of German morale, in the hope that subsequent disaffection would encourage various forms of breakdown leading to collapse and surrender.⁷⁰ Various staff papers and directives on the subject were filed in 1941, and a number of separate investigations into possibilities of maximizing personnel injury by bombing were conducted, the best known being those of Professors Solly Zuckerman, P.M.S. Blackett, and F. A. Lindemann. Zuckerman and Blackett were both pessimistic about the possibilities of causing any formidable degree of harm to the German populace via area bombing. But Prime Minister Churchill turned for advice to Professor Lindemann, who, according to Irving, "was asked to propound a bombing policy by which Britain could effectively assist her ally in the East," Stalin. It is instructive to note that the Earl of Birkenhead's special plea in defense of Lindemann, The Professor and the Prime Minister,⁷¹ makes no reference to this. However, Churchill had taken the initiative in pushing through as policy a twenty-year treaty of amity and alliance with Stalin, and was under some pressure to create a second front in Europe against Hitler, pressure which grew to immense proportions later in 1942.

The Lindemann report, filed on March 30, 1942, as Irving puts it, "suggested that there was little doubt that an area bombing offensive could break the spirit of the enemy provided it was aimed at the working-class areas of the fifty-eight German towns with a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants each."⁷² As things turned out, Lindemann's prediction of the number that area bombing would kill or leave homeless was remarkably close to what was to transpire.

When this report, and the gruff controversy which it provoked, principally between Lindemann and Sir Henry Tizard, was disclosed by Sir Charles P. Snow in his Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1960, subsequently published as Science and Government,⁷³ it was a revelation which produced widespread shock. Undoubtedly both the Earl of Birkenhead, in his official biography of Lindemann (and

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the Times Literary Supplement, also defensive of Lindemann), had a point in taking Snow to task for his account of the fight, in which Lindemann came out a sinister villain and Tizard some kind of hero. "Both men were avid for power, but in the eyes of Snow that was fitting in the case of Tizard, but reprehensible in that of Lindemann." Actually the two men were not supporters of vastly different approaches to the subject; "there was far less difference between the views of Prof (sic) [Lindemann, as he was known to intimates] and Tizard on strategic bombing than Snow would have us believe," asserted Birkenhead. Sir Charles Webster, one of the co-authors of the official British history of strategic bombing, also came forward with the declaration that Tizard "did not disagree fundamentally" with the bombing policy recommended by Lindemann. If anything it was a violent personality conflict and a struggle for power. As Birkenhead admitted, "Both men were intensely ambitious to dictate the scientific policy of the country, and, in their grapple for power, there was room for only one at the summit." Lindemann won.⁷⁴

And this was the policy adopted by Churchill, and with modifications became general "allied" policy after the January, 1943, Casablanca meeting, while official propaganda fed to the British (and of course American) publicity organs of all types insisted in highly moral terminology that only military targets were being attacked, and all others scrupulously avoided, even in 1944 and 1945. And Irving points out that the Churchill government was "able to safeguard its secret from the day that the first area raid had been launched," "right up to the end of the war."

Probably the only serious regret the authors and executioners of the area bombing policy had concerned the failure to involve the Stalin regime in support of our collaboration with it. No attention was ever called to a Soviet strategic bombing attack on a German city during World War II, and there was no indication that one ever took place, other than nuisance raids conducted by one or two planes.⁷⁵ One of the few times the subject ever was mentioned occurred late in the war, in the House of Commons on March 6, 1945 when M. P. Richard Stokes conducted an incensed attack on the Churchill government for the Dresden holocaust, in which he pointed

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out the Soviet was. not conducting such "blanket bombing" destruction of German cities, and would very likely make expert political capital out of it after the war ended, a remarkably astute prediction.⁷⁶

The failure of the so-called "responsible" communications media in the United States to discuss at any time the political consequences of the no-bombing policy of the Russians is indeed impressive. In fact, there can be found numerous complaints in American papers criticizing the Reds not only for abstaining from these big bombing runs, but also for their refusal to cooperate with the RAF and USAAF by not allowing them to use bases in Russia, and later in Poland and other captured areas as the Red Army rolled West. So permitted they might conduct shuttle raids, hitting the German towns on eastward flights, refueling and reloading in areas under Russian control, striking the same or other targets on the way back, to maximize use of the aircraft, which had to fly back empty on unproductive return flights A particularly heavy flurry of wistful hopes began to appear in the American press in the fall of 1943 when the Red Army moved westward to within 450 miles of the big industrial cities of both Germany and Italy. Again it was felt that the Soviets would allow American and British bombing attacks from these closer Russian bases, and apparently the idea had traveled about in Anglo-American circles that the Reds were in full harmony with mass bombing policies. Some RAF-AAF bombing flights to East Prussia and western Poland had already taken place, and the returning fliers expressed wonder that no Russian fighter escorts had risen to defend the bomber fleets.⁷⁷

It was part of the propaganda of May-June, 1945, to proclaim with great force and velocity the delicious sense of comradeship prevailing betvveen American and Soviet troops following their meeting in Germany in the closing days of the European war, Fellow traveler and communist fable-makers extended themselves to the limit in publicizing these capers, but paid no attention whatever to the fact that Red and American soldiers had already enjoyed three and a half years of intimate contacts in their joint activities on the supply routes of the Persian Gulf Service Command in Iran. Sidney W. Morrell, former London Daily Express war correspondent, who spent a substantial period of time in the Near East on various special missions, in his Nation article "Iranian Checkerboard" (December 29, 1945), pp. 733-735, said, "One would like to think that in this zone where the American, British, and Russian armies first met, there was fraternization among the troops." "Unfortunately, however, there was nothing of the kind.... Fraternization between Red Army troops and either Americans or British was almost nonexistent." Morrell expanded on this in his book Spheres of Influence (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), which failed to charm Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. In the latter's review (in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review for August 25, 1946, p. 10 ) Schlesinger complained of the "distortions" caused by Morrell's "boiling anti-Soviet emotions."

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What the English-speaking world in alliance with "Stalin the Great,"⁷⁸ as he was once toasted by Churchill at a banquet, did not know was that not only did the Russians apparently want no part of this program, but they had systematically interned fliers of the "allies" who had inadvertently wandered across Soviet frontiers and landed there, either mistakenly or because of being disabled. Information of this sort was as systematically and effectively suppressed as the policy of area bombing, and only in the budding Cold War days did it also leak out, to join the mass of other disheartening evidences of wartime bad faith. Americans had to escape from Soviet internment camps in about the same manner that they made their getaways from German prisoner of war camps. The American public did not learn anything about this until the publication of General John R. Deane's The Strange Alliance (New York: Viking, 1947), subtitled The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia. General Deane, the chief liaison negotiator in Moscow from October 1943, to the end of the war, in this book detailed among other things the struggle to get American airmen who made forced landings in Soviet territory released from internment by their "gallant Red allies."

There is no point in trying to set the stage any further at the time the protest made by Vera Brittain stirred up its little storm in England and the United States. The heaviest part of the area bombing damage in Germany had already been achieved by the early months

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of 1944; the centers of scores of old German cities had been gutted and hundreds of thousands of people already killed or injured, though most important German industry had hardly been hit, war production was still rising to new peaks, and no sign of civilian morale breakdown was surfacing, despite the wishful thinking. There was evidence only that the war was being stretched out, not shortened. But the citizenry at large knew none of these things in either England or the United States; a combination of the propaganda of the enemy and their own had succeeded in masking the very largest part of the real situation, making discriminating judgments virtually impossible Most people still believed military and industrial tar.gets were the sole striking points of the air arm of the "allies."

The reprinting of the Italian General Giulio Douhet's l921 classic, The Command of the Air, in England late in 1943,⁷⁹ with its enthusiastic message of mass bombing of cities to ruin morale and destroy industries, and Spaight's book a few months later, announcing to Britain's home front that they could rest assured that this was all being done in generous fashion, in addition to the Air Ministry's tireless propaganda, were enough for most, even though they were contradictory. The attempt to tell people that multitudes of German non-combatants, half of them women and children, were dying in fire-storms in bombed cities, where temperatures approached 1500° Fahrenheit, and the scores of other revolting consequences, was bound to encounter open-mouthed stares of disbelief. Furthermore, the demands of wartime partisanship upon the news dispensers resulted in preposterous non-sequiturs being used to divert attention from the main issue. When the official Stalinist photographic agency Sovfoto supplied American papers and magazines with pictures of dead Russian civilians, these were published here and invariably accompanied by charges or imputations that the dead were victims of German "atrocities." But when a German picture arrived here in September, 1943, of a vast collection of bodies of women killed in an allied air raid on Cologne, laid out in rows to facilitate identification by surviving relatives, it was disparaged as an example of the "lengths to which the Nazis have gone in building up the horror

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aspects of the allied bombing offensive against the Reich" (Newsweek, September 20, 1943, p. 38). Apparently the experiencing of "horror" by the enemy was possible only as a by-product of propaganda.

The first influential voices raised in England against the area bombing of civilian targets in Europe by the RAF Bomber Command were those of Dr. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, and Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the House of Lords early in February, 1944.⁸⁰ Dr. Bell had learned of the frightful fate of Hamburg and the full horror of the raids on the other big German cities from neutral sources while in Sweden on a visit. Their denunciation of these achievements of course produced only public scoffing and scorn, for the official releases of Sir Archibald Sinclair's office in the Air Ministry adhered tenaciously to the line that military targets alone were being bombed, and these releases were what was available in the form of "reliable" information.⁸¹

A month after the protests by these famed English churchmen came the alarming arraignment of bombing policy, Massacre by Bombing,⁸² by Vera Brittain. First published in the United States in the February, 1944, issue of Fellowship, the organ of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, it actually had first appeared in London under the title Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means.⁸³ It was an essay of about 20,000 words, prepared in a non-emotional style but packed with facts and revelations which soon showed, by the fantastic volume of extreme attacks upon it, that it was a formidable and upsetting surprise. The author of this little literary ambush was the wife of a well-known professor and author, George E. G. Catlin, and a writer and lecturing personality in her own right, as well as being a veteran participant in peace society activism. Though her plea for a major protest against area bombing fell mainly on the unheeding and the hostile, it shattered the wall of silence which wartime censorship had been able to prop up against such reports to that moment. Its distribution in a ten-cent reprint began its

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period of national attention, at about the time its publisher's chairman, A. J. Muste, was mounting his campaign against cooperation with George Hartmann and Peace Now, which helped to complicate the scene somewhat.

Part of the reason for the sober attention Massacre by Bombing received in the United States was due to the preface, consisting of a statement graced by the signatures of twenty-eight prominent American writers and clergy, a testimonial to their belief in the Brittain message and an affirmation of their conviction that obliteration bombing was a barbarian enterprise and should be abandoned at the earliest opportunity. Among these signers were Allen Knight Chalmers, J. Henry Carpenter, Harry Emerson Fosdick, John Haynes Holmes, Rufus Jones, Kenneth Scott Latourette, Clarence Pickett, Edwin McNeill Poteat, and Oswald Garrison Villard.

As Newsweek described it, "The reaction was immediate and one-sided."⁸⁴ Attacks on Miss Brittain occurred from coast to coast by the hundreds in every imaginable medium of communication; the printed condemnations alone would have filled a number of volumes. The New York Times reported its mail running fifty to one against it, and notables entered the arena repeatedly. Because so many of the signers of the preface of Massacre by Bombing were renowned Protestant clergy, it appeared as though there were a compulsion on the part of those clergy of similar faith supporting the obliteration bombing to come out immediately in rejection of Miss Brittain and her small company of supporters. Famed Episcopal Bishop William T. Manning denounced Miss Brittain in a letter to the New York Herald Tribune, and the Rev. Daniel A. Poling, editor of the quarter-of-a-million circulation Christian Herald, a major in the Army Chaplain Corps and president of the International Christian Endeavor Society, was especially bitter, charging the entire group involved in the protest against bombing with "giving comfort to the enemy," which turned out to be a common, expectable, and widespread charge. Still another national figure, Bishop Garfield Bromley Oxnam, leader of the Methodist Bishops' Crusade, rose to the counterattack, incensed at the prominent part played by Methodists in the protest. He was given a choice launching platform, no less than a

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major radio spot on the "March of Time" program;⁸⁵ (there was little doubt where the sentiments of the Luce empire lay).

One of the gems in the pro-bombing array which came from the clergy was sent in protest to the Christian Century by Rev. Paul Koslowski, rector of the Polish National Catholic Church of New Britain, Connecticut, who was especially incensed at the Brittain message. "There is no other way but to attack these beasts in their lairs—that is, in the German cities—where they plan further mass murders of innocent people," thundered Rev. Koslowski. "Christ's saying, 'If one smite thee on one cheek, give him the other,' is a beautiful theory, but not with human beasts, drunk with vengeance and conquest."⁸⁶ A generous sample of other blood-curdling attacks on the Brittain group was assembled by Rev. Gillis, editor of the Catholic World and an opponent of strategic bombing; it was one of the most ferocious samples of opinion from the followers of the Prince of Peace since Ray H. Abrams had produced his Preachers Present Arms, the saga of clerical belligerency during World War I. Rev. Gillis was appalled by the ethics of nearly all the critics and characterized that and their logic succinctly: missionaries should eat cannibals because cannibals eat missionaries.⁸⁷

Rev. Poling's A Preacher Looks At War (New York: Macmillan, 1943) received an ample and sympathetic review in Time (July 5, 1943), pp. 44-45. In this book he denoumced pacifism as "immoral and un-Christian and listed a number of "holy causes" for which war should be fought.
86 Letter, Rev. Koslowski to editors, Christian Century (March 22, 1944), p. 372.
87 See note 6. Another contemporary critic of obliteration bombing, in addition to his opposition to Vansittartite Germanophobia, was Francis Neilson, especially useful are his wartime diaries, published contemporaneously (The Tragedy of Europe: A Day by Day Commentary on the Second World War, 5 vols., Appleton, Wisconsin: C. C. Nelson Pub]ishing Co., 1940-1945).

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The New York Times and Herald Tribune both condemned the Brittain group editorially, and an especially outraged statement was issued by the formidable propaganda front, Freedom House, which numbered among its signatories Bishop Henry Hobson, Wendell Willkie, and Dorothy Thompson, grimly announcing its support of "all available means" to defeat the enemy, an echo of Churchill's famous declaration, "There are no lengths of violence to which we shall not go," and his Minister of Information Brendan Bracken's "bomb, burn, destroy" dictum issued at the 1948 Quebec Conference. A denunciation was even obtained from Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the President The attitude of the two most prestigious voices of liberalism in those times, the New Republic and the Nation, was what might be expected from such concentrations of civilian battlers. On March 13 the latter discounted the whole endeavor, making the usual plea of military necessity and denying that area bombing, as far as its editors were "aware," was taking place, embellished with the propaganda rhetoric of the day, such as "Those who take up arms to end aggression by others against humanity must do what is necessary to win." The New Republic concluded, "It is late in the day to appeal to the codes of warfare appropriate to the romantic times when war was a sort of game carried on by professional soldiers and 'noncombatants' had no part in willing the war, in carrying it on, or in willing its end." The editors, snugly secure in their New York offices from any possible retaliation in the form of German bombing attacks, obviously felt that there no longer were any "non-combatants." The Nation came up with a remarkably restrained critique of the Brittain statement, but complained that it was "hardly objective or reliably documented" (though in retrospect these were the least vulnerable aspects of the entire publication). Nevertheless, the editors supported Bishop Oxnam's position that obliteration bombing was "a revolting necessity," and concluded, "Deprived of the weapon of mass bombing our armies might easily be so handicapped that the war might be stalemated. That, perhaps, is what the protesters have in view, for what they are really attacking is not a weapon of war but war as a weapon." And if there was one thing the left-wing liberal warriors had in common with their Tory-warrior contemporaries and colleagues, it was their determination to saturate

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the planet with unlimited and endless war, in order that "victory" be realized.⁸⁸

On Good Friday, in April, Cyril Foster Garbett, Archbishop of York, in a New York City interview, countered the views of his counterparts in England by supporting the urban bombing of Germany.⁸⁹ There were many expectable retorts to the opponents of obliteration bombing, and some quite ingenious; probably first in this class was that of Royce Brier of the San Francisco Chronicle, who doubted that any obliteration bombing had occurred, and implied that the Brittain pamphlet was a hoax.⁹⁰

One of the most lyric defenses of the bombing was by Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, though his eloquence was largely spent in embellishing the crude schoolboy argument that the enemy "started it" (citing Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and Coventry as examples of communities devastated by obliteration strategic bombing), and that what was happening in Germany now was merely just retribution. On April 80, 1944, on the prestigious "Town Meeting of the Air" radio program, Cousins and the military analyst Major George Fielding Eliot defended the affirmative against Norman Thomas and C. G. Paulding of the liberal Catholic weekly Commonweal, on the question, "Should We Continue Mass Bombings of Enemy Cities?" For material Cousins depended upon his five-column SRL editorial critique, "The Non-Obliterators."⁹¹ His main counts against the Brittain group were, "They would like to mark out sanctuary areas which would receive immunity from our fliers," and "We fail to see how anything short of a negotiated peace itself could bring about the type of agreement necessary to enforce such a plan." For Cousins, the Hartmann and Brittain programs

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were complementary. After the atom bombing of Hiroshima, one of the most terror-stricken voices in the English-speaking world was that of Norman Cousins.

One of the things which most offended American enemies of the anti-strategic bombing was Vera Brittain's reproduction of many shocking reports on the destruction of German cities by thousand-plane attacks and the annihilation of women and children which had appeared in the neutral press from their eye-witness reporters; the stories of contemporary bombing damage in North Vietnam are pallid child's play by comparison.⁹² But its was not just the Germans who were suffering from obliteration bombing. Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times soon was in competition with her descriptions of the flattening of a long string of Italian communities, as the Anglo-American forces began their move up the peninsula, and protests began to file in from prominent churchmen in Belgium and France. Rev. John L. Bazinet of St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore acted as the agent for Cardinal Van Roey, Archbishop of the Belgian city of Malines, in presenting to the New York Times his protest against Anglo-American mass bombing of Belgian and other European cities, in May, 1944, though the Times quietly rejected it for publication.⁹³ On the heels of this came the May 14, 1944, Paris and Vichy radio broadcasts of an appeal to the Cardinals and Archbishops of the Catholic Church in the United States and the British empire to intervene against indiscriminate bombing of French and other European cities. The appeal came from Cardinals Lienart of Lille, Suhard of Paris, Gerlier of Lyon, and Archbishop Chollet of Cambrai. Not long after, Paulding in Commonweal engaged in a recital of Belgian and French cities from one-third to one-half destroyed by area bombing.⁹⁴ Of course the appeal of the churchmen

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in question received very little attention here, despite their eminence; after all, they were dignitaries associated with the church in regions controlled by the enemy, and the war was demonstrating that though Maxim Litvinov's bromide, that "peace is indivisible," was possibly so, the divisibility of Christianity definitely was so.

The most careful and unimpulsively-indignant considerations of the Brittain message and its implications were to be found in the voices of liberal Catholicism and Protestantism, Commonweal and the Christian Century. The former devoted its entire front page on March 17, 1944, to an evaluation; after disavowing pacifism, the editors suggested that although the great majority of the clergy signing the preface were Protestants, "they are thinking, perhaps, more in terms the Pope is thinking in." They went on to deliver an ironic definition of area bombing: "the precision bombing of entire inhabited areas." The military analyst Hoffman Nickerson a decade later was to dub strategic bombing "scientific baby-killing."⁹⁵ In conclusion, Commonweal's policy-makers declared, "This policy, which Mr. Churchill announces will not be abandoned by the United Nations, is in our opinion murder and suicide. It is the murder of innocent people and the suicide of our civilization."⁹⁶

The Christian Century's five-column editorial five days later was fully as sober and ruminative. "If the war goes on, with obliteration bombing continuing to wipe out whole regions and populations, it is quite possible that in the hour of triumph the victors will find that they have created so much destruction, so much hate, so much misery, so much despair that the very well-springs of Occidental life have been poisoned not only for the vanquished but for the victors also." Their parting suggestion was, "The question which Miss Brittain's pamphlet raises in the mind of every thoughtful reader is as to whether victory won in this fashion is worth having."⁹⁷ But the editors still thought it was too late to do anything about it.

Each weekly numbered one tenacious opponent of the bombing, Paulding in the pages of Commonweal, Oswald Garrison Villard, one of the signers of the Brittain preface, appearing in the Christian Century. Paulding scolded both the New Yorker and the Christian Century for suggesting that limitations on bombing constituted the

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making of "ground rules" and that it was impossible to do things of this sort, since the war was long under way and was running on an impulse and momentum of its own. Paulding called this "escapism" and "surrender to automatism" and retorted, "We might as ,well give up thinking about the purpose of the war—stand stupid and silent and with our eyes shut, until someone tells us that we may come out and play again, play at making rules." There was plenty of time to do something about bombing, "for it is when you are doing something that you must watch what you are doing."⁹⁸ Late in May, he noted that the writing, speeches, and debates on obliteration bombing had had one big effect; the newspapers had stopped talking of the effects of bombing on the civilians. And when the famous SHAEF communique in February, 1945, admitted terror bombing as a policy, Paulding had the quiet satisfaction of vindicating himself at the expense of those who had been calling him a liar for a year.⁹⁹

Villard, in a denunciation of all bombing in the summer of 1944 including the new desperation rocket bombing of England by the Germans, established a record of some sorts by reviewing at length Spaight's book boasting of England's priority in beginning strategic bombing of non-combatants, one of its few notices in America. But the defenders in general won the day.¹⁰⁰ The main escape they employed was the plea that surely "military necessity" warranted all these bombings, and that the continuation of the program would surely "hasten the end of the war." (A small library of works exists which agree that area bombing not only did not shorten the war a day but probably stretched it out considerably, in addition to failing to effect any substantial damage to German war industry, break the morale of their civilians, or contribute in any appreciable manner to the "allied victory." Some three-quarters of wartime German in

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dustry was not eliminated by bombing; it was made ineffective by dismantling by the victors after the war. )

In the late spring, Miss Brittain's first effort, Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means, made its tardy debut in London, and received an almost universal slight in the conventional press. The Times Literary Supplement probably spoke for all in scoffing at her "rebellion" against government policy and correctly predicted her campaign would gain little ground in Great Britain. Said the TLS in lofty disdain, "Miss Vera Brittain maintains in this book that unrestricted bombing will make peace impossible for a very long time. She disregards the instructions given to bombers to aim only at targets and does not suggest what we should do to win the war if we desisted from destroying these targets."¹⁰¹ It is hard to believe so sophisticated a source as this could have been so naive, and so unaware or unheeding of what was on the record for them to see, available in the copious reports of the neutral press witnesses alone. The absence of a peace treaty with Germany twenty-four years after her prediction suggests some commentary on her prowess as a seer, though this situation results from complications even beyond her analysis at that time. It has been remarked that self-delusion is the cardinal English weakness, but Vera Brittain demonstrated her immunity.¹⁰²

The most striking aspect of the campaigns against obliteration bombing and for negotiated peace was the marked absence of young people from both. This was not entirely a consequence of the enrollment of America's youth in warring enterprise by the millions all over the world; by the time of the Hartmann-Brittain gestures, well over five million American males alone had been rejected for military service on various grounds, and individuals from this sector might have engaged in such efforts, without fear of the ordinary retaliatory ceremonials of the state. The reasons for abstention are

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many and complex; the capacity of modern totalitarian nationalist wars to accentuate the sheep-like traits of the race is just one of them.

A full-page advertisement by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in the U.S. News for January 7, 1944, featured this opening sentence: "One thing distinguishes American democracy most sharply from other forms of government—and that is its regard for human life." The copy writers apparently did not realize that their masterpiece was quite equivocal; excluding all considerations involving the national murder rate, the victims of American strategic bombing in the enemy countries in the last two years of World War II might have agreed, adding only that the question was whose lives were being regarded, and how they were being regarded.

The American press carried vast spreads on the exploits of the United States Air Force in Europe from 1943 on; its participation as a partner to the RAF in the massive bombing raids on Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden¹⁰³ have been documented in profusion. It is for this among other reasons that some observers thought there was something peculiarly anticlimactic when the New York Herald-Tribune and other papers published on Sunday, February 18, 1945, less than three months before the end of the war in Europe, a dispatch from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Paris announcing that "the allied air chiefs have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Adolf Hitler's doom."¹⁰⁴ One might have been led to wonder that if "terror bombing" was next, what possibly might be the name for what had already taken place, and whether making sure of the doom of additional hundreds of thousands was necessary in order to make sure of Hitler's.

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Most Americans, living anywhere from four to eight thousand miles from where the bombs were falling, had no conception of what area bombing was like, and still do not, with the exception of those who have taken part in it or who were able to see the stunning mass of wreckage in Europe at war's end. (Postwar tourists fortunately were spared the death and carnage. ) What Vera Brittain was trying to do was as incomprehensible to the vast majority as an attempt to establish the reality of science fiction. This cannot be laid entirely to remoteness from the field of action; the English, already bombed and always in the line for more, were scarcely more moved by the Brittain appeal than were Americans. However, the feeling of relative immunity from any substantial retaliation surely had a part to play in the complacency. The progressive dulling of the public conscience with daily drippings of horror throughout the war such as newsreel episodes of Japanese flushed from caves with flame-throwers, with clothing and hair on fire, was hardly conducive to the development of public conscience against the savagery of distant, impersonal aerial bombing carried out against women and children. The 40,000 killed in Berlin in a single daylight raid, the 60,000 to 100,000 in the July, 1943, week-long raids on Hamburg, the 100,000 to 150,000 killed in Dresden in one raid in February, 1945, were all as hard to conceive as the most incredible of fairy tales, and undoubtedly still are. As Stuart Chase summarized it, while reviewing Donald M. Nelson's Arsenal of Democracy, the wars in Europe and Asia were won, "not by superlative generalship, courage, or cunning, but by literally overwhelming our enemies with shot and shell, a rain of steel and lead more dreadful than anything hitherto known. Where they sprinkled it on us, we let loose a continuous cloudburst on them."¹⁰⁵ Indeed, to compare anything achieved in aerial bombing by the Germans with what later befell them is a travesty, English and American bombers dropped 315 tons of bombs on Germany for every one Germans dropped on England.¹⁰⁶

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The atomic bombing of Japan in August, 1945, broke through the general reverie for the first time, and modern protests against bombing have their intellectual and literary roots in this event and the vast attention it received. Such works as John Hersey's Hiroshima¹⁰⁷ received a wide audience and immense publicity, with the attention always being directed to the horror and loss of life. Yet the stories about the conventional bombing of Hamburg, which terminated in a fire-storm six miles square with flames leaping 15,000 feet into the air, dwarfing that of Hiroshima, drew little more than a yawn. It was also strange that neither Hersey nor any other exploiter of Hiroshima fashioned a dramatic report about the B-29 raid on Tokyo six months earlier (March 9), where fire-bombs and a favorable wind burned to death or injured 185,000 people, and built a circle of fire within the city so high and hot that crews of later waves of bombers reported smelling burning human flesh at altitudes of two miles.¹⁰⁸ It is little wonder that Norman Thomas was moved in April, 1945, to describe the American conduct of the Asian War as "an organized race riot" and "a wholesale slaughter of women and children to a degree which ancient Assyrians could not match."¹⁰⁹

It is hard to figure out whether the universal paralyzed shock over Hiroshima was due to amazement at how many were killed in such a brief moment, or whether it resulted from a realization that a weapon now existed capable of visiting annihilation upon one or all. But it really was a technical problem of magnitude, guaranteeing

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to achieve in minutes what it had taken hours to accomplish in Hamburg. Surely the residents of this latter community who died the slow, excruciating, fiery deaths inflicted by phosphorous bombs¹¹⁰ endured as much as if not more than those snuffed out at Hiroshima, or who died the slow, lingering way of radiation burns.

Loss of life alone cannot explain it. The piecemeal, unspectacular death of hundreds of thousands of Americans in accidents of all kinds during the war years of 1941-1945 produced hardly any notice. When the America Fore Insurance and Indemnity Group, an association of insurance companies, in a safety appeal at the end of 1944, announced that 97,900 Americans had been killed and 10,000,000 injured in industrial and other home-front accidents in 1943, and that 50,000,000 work days had been lost in production, it drew barely a glance.¹¹¹ According to a New York Times calculation two months after the end of the war, American loss of life in military operations during the entire war totaled 262,000 while accidents in the United States took the lives of 355,000; the logic of this suggested that the American civilian scene, even without bombing, was somewhat more dangerous than the armed services, averaging in all combat losses.

The insensitivity to misery and disaster befalling an enemy in wartime,¹¹² which formed the vast reef of unconcern on which Peace Now and the Brittain appeal to halt strategic bombing ran aground in 1944, is a constant in the wars of barbarian antiquity and the religious and politico-moral crusades of modern times alike. Political efforts among the publics of ostensibly winning sides to end wars short of victory or to modify their conduct are increasingly inhibited and thwarted to the scope and degree of the victory which is impending. Such efforts may run smoother when no clear triumph is discernible, and a stalemate is looming, though concern for humanitarian considerations is as dimly registered then as at other times when mercilessness is considered to be an irreducible factor and an in

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dispensable agent, primarily responsible for the predicament of the enemy.

It is obvious that decisions to stop fighting and end wars are political to the same degree that the decisions to start fighting and persist in prosecuting wars are political, and the employment of more or less terror is of little significance here. History is filled with the accounts of hopelessly beaten sides continuing to fight indefinitely. Even the atom bombing of Japan and its subsequent swift surrender does not constitute an exception; it is simply a case of a new catastrophe hurrying the decision to quit on the part of a regime which had long before decided to do so, and which had been desperately trying to arrange such a conclusion for many months without previous success. But efforts on the part of civilian non-combatants to influence such policy alterations stand much better chances of making headway in struggles fought with considerably less vindictive ferocity and fixed retributional obsessions than was true in the Second World War.

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