October 20, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:20 PM EST Alexander Burns posts that he was struck “by this Washington Post article on a group of World War II veterans who interrogated Nazi POWs at Fort Hunt. ‘Back then,’ Petula Dvorak writes, ‘they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.’ Said one former interrogator: ‘We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.’” This struck Mr. Burns “as an incredibly sad illustration of yet another way in which the World War II generation is passing away. Comparing the interrogations at Fort Hunt with those at Guantanamo Bay, it’s hard not to wonder if the 60 years since the Second World War haven’t brought about some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government. It’s a good thing that there are lawyers and legal reporters wrestling with the subject of torture. But there’s something tragic about the fact that they even have to.” I also read the article in the Washington Post, and pondered it a bit. After thinking about it, I am not sure that there has been an unmistakable “decay in the moral compass of the American government,” if that means restraint in what we are prepared to do in wartime. The Bush administration’s insistence on loosening the definition of torture has shocked and disgusted many Americans, but I am by no means certain that we nowadays wage war with much less tenderness and restraint than the World War II generation did. That earlier generation attacked civilian populations on a pretty grand scale, sometimes accepting massive civilian casualties as collateral damage, but sometimes aiming more directly at enemy morale. Our current willingness to kill civilians is significantly less than that shown by our immediate ancestors. I am not saying that they were in this respect wrong, or that we are right, but I doubt that the difference means that we have lost our moral compass, at least in the sense I think Alexander Burns probably means to imply. We certainly seem to treat most Americans of Middle Eastern origin better than we once treated many Americans of Japanese origin (or than we treated some Americans of German origin in 1917 and 1918), and we accord more liberties to citizens who in the mid-1940s might well have been considered enemy Fifth Columnists. When we caught enemy combatants out of uniform in the 1940s, we sometimes simply executed them. How about killing prisoners who surrendered in uniform? We did it during the Second World War, more than we do it now. We did it against enemies who had shown themselves likely to perfidiously feign surrender—the Japanese—and we did it in reprisal against German troops. My father, fighting in the Bulge alongside American paratroopers, watched them shoot a number of SS POWs, then send one back across the lines with the message “tell your friends not to shoot paratroopers when they are caught in trees,” as the SS had done in Normandy. My father reported that he had no passionate objection to this procedure, because it happened right after news of the Malmedy Massacre had gotten out, and as it happens, the 70 American prisoners murdered by the SS at Malmedy had been on their way to reinforce Sankt Vith, where my father was fighting, and reprisals seemed well within the de facto rules of war. We also shot troops who surrendered after fighting to the last round. Our moral compass does not point in precisely those directions today; I have heard the case that it should, at least with respect to reprisals, but it doesn’t. What about torture? The editor of American Heritage recently told me about what he was pretty sure had been the torture of a German U-boat commander taken prisoner in the Battle of the Atlantic. I am not sure how often American troops tortured prisoners during World War II, and I suspect it was fairly rare—but I do know that American interrogators tried to beat confessions out of the men accused of committing the Malmedy Massacre after the war was over, and I have seen similar allegations about similar events. What about other treatment of prisoners that fell short of torture but was not by our modern standards exemplary? I once met a former GI who had helped stop the First SS Panzer Divison in the snows of Belgium, and recollected taking a prisoner, a 17-year-old boy. A Dutch interrogator slapped the boy, stuck a pistol in his eye, and barked out a question, and the boy spat in the Dutchman’s face. The American infantrymen all froze, and then the Dutchman slapped the boy again, knocking him to the ground, and, thankfully, that was the end of it, but it seemed clear that had the interrogator shot the German boy, no one would have been absolutely astonished. “That kid had guts,” the GI observed 60 years on, respectfully, but without agonies of self-reproach. This memory came upon the vet a few hundred yards from a field where the First SS Panzers committed one of 18 massacres with which it is credited in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge. The GI seemed to imply that slapping the boy around, even threatening his life, did not wholly annihilate the moral import of stopping the 1st SS Panzers in its tracks. My guess is that he was right, and I’d also guess that our moral compass, while somewhat different, is not wildly less accurate in 2007 than it was in 1944.
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