The Best of I.F. Stone
Page 37
We must recognize [it says] that an overt act of war has been committed by an enemy when that enemy builds a military force intended for our eventual destruction, and that the destruction of that force before it can be launched or employed is defensive action and not aggression. . . . As a nation we must understand that an overt act of war has been committed long before the delivery of that first blow and that the earlier such an overt act is recognized the more effective the defense can be.
Then U. S. Army Infantry Major, now Colonel Lawrence J. Legere, Jr., to whose unpublished 1950 Ph.D. thesis we owe this revealing quotation, comments, “Whatever this unique concept is, it is not international law. It may be an example of the kind of reasoning Hitler used to justify his wars of aggression.” It is also the rationale for the kind of “preventive” blow at China and its nuclear installations LeMay and the Air Force favor. McNamara’s warnings to last December’s meeting of the NATO Council about China’s coming nuclear power may give them new support. McNamara, like Stimson, could find his military instruments running away with him.
The pages in Mission with LeMay which discuss preventive war against Russia verge on self-caricature in their light-minded shallowness. LeMay says that there was a time in the period before the Russians got the Bomb and their achievement of a stockpile, when we could have destroyed all of Russia “without losing a man to their defenses. The only losses incurred would have been the normal accident rate for the number of flying hours which would have been flown to do the job.” This assurance that we would not have lost a single plane begins to sound like something out of Doctor Strangelove. So does LeMay’s idea that America could then have said to Russia, “’Here’s a blueprint for your immediate future. We’ll give you a deadline of five or six months’—something like that—’to pull out of the satellite countries, and effect a complete change of conduct. You will behave your damn selves from this moment forth.’” It is hard to believe that this is not satirical fiction: General Turgidson at work and play.
All through the years to which LeMay refers, he was sounding the alarms on Capitol Hill; we were in danger of being overrun by Russian hordes; we were woefully short of bombers and later of missiles. He and his supporters were the ultimate source of the imaginary bomber gap and the equally imaginary missile gap. Now he tells us we could have smashed all Russia even before the missile age without losing a single plane. He even says one “might argue whether it would be desirable to present such a challenge to the Russians, even at this [1965] stage.” Obviously he thinks we have enough now to put Russia in the reformatory by ultimatum.
The strangest aspect of LeMay’s story is his detachment. While he is ready to bomb almost anybody, he really seems to hate almost nobody—nobody, that is, among America’s national enemies, past, present, or future. Their destruction is his job, the occasion for demonstrating his abilities. This is no winged warrior, with blood-lust in his veins, as in the ancient Sagas; no young Mussolini thrilling to the red flowers that spring from the Ethiopian earth as the bombs fall from his plane. He even has words of praise for Mao Tse-tung and his ready cooperation in helping U.S. fliers downed over Chinese Communist territory during World War II. If he ever gets his chance to blow Mao to Kingdom Come, it will be with no hard feelings whatsoever.
What LeMay really hates, with an abiding and never slaked passion, is first and above all the U. S. Navy. If war were the product only of hate and not of institutional patterns, it is the Navy the Strategic Air Command would strike some black night in swift preventive action before those “web-footed” (a favorite phrase of LeMay’s) so-and-so’s could get more money out of Congress for contraptions the Air Force regards as useless and competitive. Russia is a necessary anti-hero in the Air Force’s dramaturgy, but the Navy is Enemy No. 1 from of old. This sibling feud began with the bomber vs. battleship controversy; one of its earliest episodes was the trial “bombing” of the battleship Utah three years before World War II. LeMay’s account hints darkly at “perfidious tactics” in the War Department through which enemy spies, naval spies that is, obtained advance information on the Air Force’s plans in that test. Hate and suspicion of the Navy appear and reappear as the darkest thread in his story. This is because, short of abolishing the Navy altogether, it has to have its own aircraft in support of its traditional functions. Planes must protect surface ships, provide them with reconnaissance, supply them with firepower in battles against other ships, hunt out submarines and lay mines. The Army, too, could use its own tactical air forces; both the Russians and the Germans, in different ways, effectively provided close support planes under the direction of the ground commander. But the U.S. Army gave up its fight to control its own tactical arm long ago and clings only to its helicopters. The Navy, on the other hand, not only refused to throw in the sponge but hit the Air Force an unforgivable blow in developing the carrier, a floating air base with its own planes. This ended the Air Force dream of controlling all military aviation, and made peaceful coexistence between Air Force and Navy unthinkable.
LeMay’s other unforgivable enemy is McNamara. For LeMay no ideological difference could be deeper than their dispute over the manned bomber. But the inexorable logic of industrial society and the airpower it spawned are against LeMay. The rise of airpower has from the beginning injected the idea into warfare that the machine was more important than the man. And the supersonic speed and enormous complexity of modern combat airplanes have reduced the pilot to a relatively minor cog in a machine. As McNamara said in giving the death blow three years ago to LeMay’s last great bomber project, the B-70, the bomber has become a manned missile with “none of the advantages or flexibility generally attributed to manned bombers.” Their flight has to be directed from the ground in “pre-planned attack against previously known targets,” a mission better performed by the swifter and simpler unmanned missile. LeMay, by the strange reversal of events, has come to seem a Don Quixote in his old age, as he has seen more and more of his airmen go underground like moles to tend missiles. Billy Mitchell envisaged pilots as a new chivalric order of the air; they have instead become sitters for panels of pushbuttons. Yet while LeMay despises McNamara as a factory manager, he himself reveals throughout his story the attitudes not so much of a warrior as of a great industrial expert, albeit in demolition. The machine molded him and the machine threatens to replace him—and the machine, like the policies he advocates, lacks mind and heart.
But this tough old troglodyte is not through yet. The whole Air Force drive in Vietnam is to transform the war we can’t win to a war we might; from a war for the loyalties of the Vietnamese people into a war to destroy them; this is giving the obsolete B-52 its last murderous gasp over South Vietnam’s jungles and rice paddies. There is also China, weak and with only a few atom bombs. The Air Force recognizes the mutual stand-off in its relations with the Soviet Union, but its Strategic Air Command hungers for a last chance against China. LeMay in retirement, unmuzzled, could be more dangerous than when he was Air Force Chief of Staff. The delusion of an easy victory-by-airpower may yet bog us down like the Japanese in endless land war with mankind’s most numerous and enduring people. This is the danger.
* * *
*In Mission with LeMay. 326
*This and the two previous references are from Giovannitti and Freed’s fascinating recent account, The Decision to Drop the Bomb.
*Marshall Andrews, Disaster Through Air Power, p. 39.
*Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, p. 106.
†The U.S. Air Force in Korea, 1950–53, by Futrell, Moseley, and Simpson.
*Speech to the Detroit Economics Club, December 6, 1965.
*The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey was established by Stimson in 1944. Franklin D’Olier was the chairman; George Ball, J. K. Galbraith and Paul Nitze served as officers.
Epilogue:
For a Universal Day of Atonement
The final word: a reflection on the tragic nature of twentieth-century history,
occasioned by the guilty verdict pronounced on December 11, 1961, on Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi mass murderer sometimes called the “Chief Executioner” of the Third Reich.
. . .
December 18, 1961
WALKING AROUND EAST BERLIN IN 1959, I wandered into a theatre where a movie was playing called Sterne (Stars). The stars were the stars of David the Jews wore in the Hitler period. It was a Bulgarian–East German film about a Jewish concentration camp girl with whom a Wehrmacht officer falls in love. Later he joins the Partisans after she is packed into the freight cars for Auschwitz. When I heard that the Eichmann verdict had finally been handed down in Jerusalem, I remembered a scene in that film when the concentration camp inmates first heard rumors that the Germans were burning up people in crematoriums. They went to their leader, an old Jewish doctor, and he reassured them saying, “Aber die Deutschen sind auch Menschen” i.e., “The Germans are also human.” He feels no human being could possibly do anything so wicked; the rumors couldn’t be true.
In that darkened movie house, amid all those Germans, I cried, remembering the survivors with whom I travelled as a reporter from Poland to Palestine in the spring of 1946, and the stories they told me. I haven’t had the heart to follow the Eichmann trial. This one man in the dock is too trivial beside the mountainous toll of humiliation and death he symbolized. Whether sincerely or not, the picture he drew of himself was a picture likely to appeal to many Germans as guilty as he—the picture of the fussy bureaucrat who only did his duty, a cog in a machine. How easily the Germans excuse themselves.
But we learn nothing by blaming them. Events since the war have prepared greater crematoriums. Everywhere men excuse themselves the same way. We dropped “little” bombs on the innocent in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now we and the Russians together are prepared to drop bigger ones. The issues have become blurred. And these dreadful truths have become stale and futile commonplaces we all ignore.
I don’t know what the verdict will be on Eichmann. I don’t care. But it would honor world Jewry if the judges were to refuse even in his case, with all it implies, to impose the death penalty Israel abolished. It would be a noble rebuke to an un-Christian Christian world and to a still brutal Russian communist world of death sentences for minor offenses—to two worlds which share the poison of anti-Semitism still despite the Gospels they respectively proclaim and the horror to which Hitler showed it could lead. Let Eichmann live on like Cain, with the Mark upon him.
It is more important to recognize that the Mark is on all of us. What good is it for Moscow to accuse Heusinger of war crime when Khrushchev himself threatens it on a greater scale, and we do likewise? Would an extraterrestrial tribunal after a new war distinguish between Russians and Americans and Germans? Is mass murder justified for any reason whatsoever? Is not every national leader a war criminal if he does not recognize that no dispute justifies risking the future of our common human species?
I would proclaim a day of meditation on the crematoriums a universal Day of Atonement. I would remember that we all marched with Eichmann to the prison or the gallows. Whether it was the human incinerator or the H-bomb, we built it. To be human is to be guilty. No other message has the dimensions to match what Eichmann’s trial recalled.
INDEX
Abdel-Kader, A. Razak
Acheson, Dean
Advertising
Advisory Commission of the Council for National Defense
African Americans, Americas failure to respect rights of
Air Campaigns of the Pacific War
Aleichem, Sholom
Alexander I
AlMirsad
Alperovitz, Gar
Alsop, Stewart
American Liberty League
American Mercury
American Society of Newspaper Editors
Andrews, Marshall
Anti-missile missile, mythology of
Anti-Semitism
Arab Communist party
Arab-Jewish conflict
Biblical perspective on,
in Palestine,
Armed Services Committee
Arms race
between Egypt and Israel
Army Board of Inquiry, on Pearl Harbor
Army-McCarthy hearings, Stone s appraisal at start of
Aryanization of the Jewish State, The (Selzer)
Ashkenazi Jews, in Israel
Atomic bomb
dropping of, on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam
(Alperovitz)
Atomic Energy Commission
Atomic war, as national suicide
Atomic weapons
Attlee, Clement
Austin, Kenneth L.
Australia
Avnery, Uri
Baader, Franz
Bache, John Franklin
Baldwin, Hanson W.
Balfour Declaration (1917)
Ball, George
Baltimore Sun, The
Bao Dai
Barnes, Joseph
Bar-Zohar, Michael
Bates, Daisy
Batista, Fulgencio
Bay of Pigs invasion
Belfrage, Cedric
Bender, George H.,
Ben Gurion, David
Benson, Ezra Tart
Benziane, Tahar
Beria, Lavrentia
Bethe, Hans
Bevin, Ernest
Bey, Azzam
Bickel, Alexander
Bidault, Georges
Birch Society
Bismarck, Otto von
Black, Hugo
Black-Jewish alliance, in New York City politics
Blackmun, Harry
Black revolutionists
Blackstone, Sir William
Blossom, Virgil
Bolivia
Bolshevik Revolution
Bourguiba, Habib
Boyer, Charles
Braden, Anne
Braden, Carl
Bradley, General Omar Nelson
Brandeis, Louis
Brazil
Brennan, Justice William
Bridges, Harry,
Britain, Palestine and
Brown, John
Brown v. Board of Education,
Bryant, Roy, acquittal of
Buber, Martin
Bundy, McGeorge
Burden of Blame, The
Burger, Chief Justice Warren
Burke, Admiral Arleigh
Burma
Burton, Justice Harold
Byrd, Robert C
California Eagle
Cambodia
Camden Courier-Post
Campbell, Leslie
Campus rebels, during Vietnam War era
Capa, Robert
Castro, Fidel ,
Catledge, Turner
Censorship
Chaplin, Charlie
Chiang Kai-shek
Chicago Tribune Childers, Erskine B.
China
Choice, The (Shub)
Christian Science Monitor, The
Churchill, Winston
CIA ,C.I.O.,
Civil disobedience
Civil rights, Eisenhower and
Civil rights movement,march on Washington (1963)
Clark, Justice Tom
Campbell
Clay, General Lucius D.
Cleveland, Harlan
Clos, Max
Cold War ,
Colliers weekly, blueprint for U.S. war against Soviet Union in
Communism,
Communist party, in Israel
Communists, McCarthy and
Comprehensive Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty (1999)
Congress, during World War II
Conscience of a Conservative, The (Goldwater)
Conspiracy theory of history
Cooke, Jerry
Cooper, John Sherman
Counterattack
Courtney, Kent
Courtney, Phoebe
&
nbsp; Crossroads to Israel: —48
(Sykes)
Crum, Bartley
Cuba
Cuban missile crisis
Cuban Revolution
"Culture war" in U.S., early
version of (1970s)
Daily papers, maverick
Daily Review of Soviet Press,
Daily Worker
Davis, Elmer
Dayan, Moshe
D-Day
Deane, John R.
Decembrists
Decision to Drop the Bomb, The (Giovannitti and Freed)
Democrats, during World War II
Design for Survival (Power)
Dewey, Thomas, Stone’s sketch of
Dialogue
Diem, Ngo Dinh
Dies, Martin Dies committee,
Dirksen, Everett "Disarmament—A Blueprint for Surrender" (Courtney and Courtney)
Disaster Through Airpower (Andrews)
Dissent, importance of
Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak)
Dominican Republic
Donohue, Libby
Douglas, Justice William O.
Douhet, Giulio
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick)
Due process, failure to honor protections of
Dulles, Allen
Dunaway, Edward
Eastland, James
Eckhardt, Bob
Economic justice
Egypt
Eichmann, Karl Adolf trial of
reflection on trial of
Einstein, Albert
McCarthyism and
Stones tribute to
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
Bangkok plan and
civil rights and
McCarthyism and
school integration and
Eisenhower administration
land reform in Vietnam
and
Zwicker affair and
Ellender, Allen J.
Ellsberg, Daniel
Employment, postwar
Enright, William J.
Erasmus
Face the Nation
Fall, Bernard
Fascism
Fast, Howard
Faubus, Orval
FBI, Federal Communications
Commission
Fifth Amendment