WARS do not occur in a vacuum. To a large part, they are based on the cultures of the countries at war.

 

World War II in the Pacific laid bare the inherent racism of Western colonizers. Racism thrived enough to ensure that in the United States and Britain, the Japanese were more hated than the Nazi Germans.

 

The Allied Forces played the race card to the hilt using many propaganda methods. They were goaded by a growing Chinese lobby and vocal American trade protectionist businessmen who feared the entry into the U.S. of inexpensive Japanese goods.

 

As time passed, the intense propaganda campaign eventually helped cajole the American public into a pro-war, anti-Japan position. By 1939, historian Michael C.C. Adams writes, polls showed that more Americans favored military aid to China rather then to Britain or France.

 

The Japanese had become the villain of choice for Westerners.

 

Writer John Dower notes that during that time, publications that regularly featured Japanese atrocities gave little coverage to the genocide of the Jews. In fact, the Holocaust was not even mentioned in the "Why We Fight" –the (film) series Frank Capra directed for the U.S. Army.

 

Dehumanizing the Enemy

 

Japanese soldiers –and sadly also all Japanese—were commonly referred to and depicted as subhuman: insects, monkeys, apes, rodents, or simply as barbarians who had to be wiped out or exterminated.

 

American Legion Magazine's cartoon of monkeys in a zoo who had posted a sign reading, "Any similarity between us and the Japs is purely coincidental" was typical.

 

In 1943, a U.S. Army poll found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese on earth before peace could be achieved. Their superiors appeared to agree. Generals like the Australian Sir Thomas Blamey informed his troops that, "Beneath the thin veneer of a few generations of civilization, (the Japanese) is a subhuman beast."

 

We all know Dr. Seuss as the genius who wrote The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish – the books that teach our children to read, and to love to read. But the esteemed doctor also had a darker side, depicting Japanese as half animal creatures in his political cartoons, done during World War II.

 

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa291.htm

 

 GOADED by the propaganda, by December 1943 there were more troops and equipment in the Pacific than in Europe. Historians have also estimated that as much as 1,589 artillery rounds were fired to kill each Japanese soldier.

 

As a December 1945 Fortune poll revealed, American feelings for the Japanese did not soften even after the war. Nearly 23 percent of those questioned wished the U.S. could have dropped "many more (atomic bombs) before the Japanese had a chance to surrender."

 

This virulent brand of genocidal hatred resulted from a massive public relations effort to demonize the enemy in the Pacific and thus justify anything in the name of victory. One good example is when the New York Times (the newspaper of record) ran an ad that showed a flamethrower being used to kill Japanese. The ad bore the headline:

"Clearing Out a Rat's Nest."

 

Race antagonisms and ignorance culminated in the Allied forces acting out their predetermined role in a self-fulfilling prophecy: If a subhuman will fight to death like an animal, those fighting on "the side of good" were simply left with no alternative but to slaughter them unmercifully. Since Japanese soldiers were under pressure not to surrender and were often killed when they did, this became a self-fulfilling prophesy.

 

General Blamey later told the New York Times: "Fighting Japs is not like fighting normal human beings. The Jap is a little barbarian… We are not dealing with humans as we know them. We are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin." This was quoted by the Times on the front page.

 

 

Eugene B. Sledge, author of "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa," wrote of his comrades "harvesting gold teeth" from the enemy dead. In Okinawa, Sledge witnessed "the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war" –when a Marine officer stood over a Japanese corpse and urinated into its mouth.

 

Depiction of Japanese rat caught in a trap, from Josh newsletter, no. 12 by the Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate, India, April 1944

(LHCMA Heard collection)

 

HORROR STORIES about Japanese atrocities abounded, and these fueled further the animosity. A large part of the stories were true, too: Of the 235,473 U.S. and U.K. prisoners reported captured by Germany and Italy combined, only 4 percent (9,348) died. In contrast, an astonishing 27 percent of Japan's Anglo-American POWs (35,756 of 132,134) did not survive.

 

Indeed, with the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, and incidents such as the time when the marines on Guadalcanal were ambushed by Japanese soldiers pretending to surrender, the list of Japanese war crimes was long and did not have to be embellished to stir up Allied fury.

 

At the same time, the Japanese themselves wrestled with their own brand of racism. They felt superior, and believed that they were tasked with elevating the "Yamato race" the "pure race", the "leading race" –unique among the races and cultures of the world. They also believed that this uniqueness made them superior.

 

Certain visual images, such as the sun, sword, cherry blossom, snow-capped Mt. Fuji, and abstract "brightness" and auspicious colors like red and white, were used as symbols of the purity of the Japanese spirit. Such intense cultural fixations on the notion of purity and the self contributed to a wartime record of extremely harsh and brutal behavior toward non-Japanese.

 

Still, in many ways the behavior of Allied soldiers fighting the Japanese and even of those rooting for them back home was the anticipated outcome of the deadly campaign to manipulate the feelings against the Japanese. But while predictable, the results were no less appalling.

 

In April 1943, Dower reports about a American mother who had petitioned authorities to permit her son to mail her an ear he had cut off a Japanese soldier in the South Pacific. She wished to nail it in front of her door all to see.

 

Life magazine even printed a photo of this brutality in its May 22, 1943, issue, showing a young American woman with a boiled Japanese skull sent home to her by her boyfriend overseas.

 

A former war correspondent in the Pacific, Edgar L. Jones, put it best when he asked in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly: "What Kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/06/wjap06.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/08/06/ixportal.html

 

Based on Myths

Even the official word was equally repugnant: Elliot Roosevelt, the president's son and confidant, told Henry Wallace in 1945 that America should bomb Japan "until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population."

 

Paul V. McNutt, chairman of the War Manpower Commission, went a little further when he advocated to a public audience in April 1945 the "extermination of the Japanese in toto." Secretary of War Henry Stimson concurred, stating that, "to get on with Japan, one had to treat her rough, unlike other countries."

 

Because of these sentiments, U.S. bombers killed four to five times as many civilians in the last five months of the Pacific war than in three years of Allied bombing in Europe combined. And then there was the man who'd eventually give the order to drop the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians:

 

"We used (the bomb) against those who abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare," U.S. President Harry Truman later explained, justifying his decision to nuke people that he termed "savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic."

 

Racist feelings were encouraged by three basic myths:

 

The "suicide psychology" involved the myth that since the fanatical Japanese would rather die than surrender, they "invited destruction."

 

The second rationalization had its roots in World War I and the treaty that ended it. "Anything less than a thoroughgoing defeat would be "incomplete" and invite the Japanese to use peace as a chance to prepare for war…as the Germans did between World War I and II.

 

Finally, there was the myth that Japan needed a "psychological purge," and that they needed to be castigated in the form of "great destruction and suffering." As Algar Hiss explained at the time, "( Japan's) entire national psychology (must) be radically modified."

 

Strangely, these premises are all inherently racist. Worse, these rationalizations are just too similar to those used for the extermination of Native Americans, or the enslavement of Africans in the 15^th century, or even the slaughter of innocents in our very own Balangiga, by American colonizers at the turn of the 20th century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read more at:

http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfib/courses/Fussell.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugs_Bunny_Nips_the_Nips

 

Source: "There is No Good War: The Myths of World War II" (Vox Pop). Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at mickeyz.net.

 

 

 

 

The 21st Century's Two Greatest Anti-War Poems.

(A comparative analysis of the poems "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" using the elements of poetry)

The poems “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by American poet Randell Jarell and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by English poet Wilfred Owen are arguably the most powerful poems condemning two of the most brutal and devastating events in human history—the two world wars of the 20th century.

In their sheer power, symbolism, dramatic imagery and masterful use of metaphor, the two poems are strikingly similar. This, on top of the fact that they share the very same theme and were written in the same historical epoch–the decades after the Industrial Revolution that saw the new industrial powers struggle against each other for world power and thrusting the innocent world into wars that were, for the first time, worldwide in scale. (Keylor, 2005)

As such, both poems deal with the fears and moral struggles of soldiers, and with such consummate poetic skill and brilliant use of words. How could this not be, after all? With both poets enlisting as soldiers during their own times, it is only expected that they each themselves suffered these fears and moral qualms that they wrote so profoundly of. Jarell had enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps in 1942, the very year that World War II broke out. Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, in turn, was able to closely observe the trench wars and chemical warfare of World War I, later on going on to become known the greatest of all British First World War poets. He died in action.

In both poems, the accurate descriptions of soldiers are mere helpless boys forced into the unbearable darkness of war, evoke feelings that are dark and immeasurably sad: “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is only five lines, but it describes both accurately and powerfully the feelings of disorientation and vulnerability suffered by the ball turret gunners of World War II. As Jarell himself explains in a note accompanying the poem, the ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of the B-17 or B-24 bomber planes –such as the one used to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This small sphere was shared by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man –the shortest and smallest man that could squeeze into the small space. Jarell writes: When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb.

As for Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est”, even the very first lines conjure bleary images of the trenches, evoking in the reader a deep sadness: Bent double, like old beggars under sacks / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge / Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs / And towards our distant rest began to trudge. / Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots / But limped on, blood-shod. / All went lame, all blind;/ Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Jarell's five line-poem, in turn, brings vividly to mind the image of “the nightmare fighters” attacking the cold, miserable gunner as he crouches upside-down in his lonely turret. Both poems awaken a very primal response in the reader.

It is in theme, however, where the two poems are so essentially and profoundly similar. For sure, Owen relies more on irony, but his subject is no different than that of Jarell's. Both poems are clear and unwavering cries against war. Whether dwelling on a group of soldiers or a single soldier, Owen always displays, in Lorrie Goldensohn's words, a "brooding care for the dead, the mutilated, and the mutilated dead of war," including the enemy. (Goldensohn, 2004) In an early poem, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” Owen asks “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?” In “Dulce et Decorum Est” he writes his own searing riposte, “Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” The poem includes a haunting description of a gassed soldier's dying convulsions—“If could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” and ends with a caustic citation of a Horatian maxim, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori. (translated, “sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country”). What more fitting denunciation of the patriotic blather so common during World War I, touted at that time as “the war to end all wars” (Keylor, 2005) –the war “sold” by governments of that time to young men as a patriotic adventure of their lives.

Owen's sensibility is echoed in Jarrell's “Death of a Ball Turret Gunner”. A sergeant in the Army Air Force from 1943 to 1945, Jarrell trained pilots in air navigation at bases in the United States. Most of his poems deal with pilots, soldiers and prisoners, and thus have a social perspective that is broader than Owen's, insofar as they tackle with the culpability of soldiers for war's violence. But at their core is that very message of Owen: that soldiers are victims of the bullet, the shell and the entire sadism of military life. Like Owen, Jarrell dwells on the fact that the soldiers are not men but boys, and that they are forced to fight. They are less players in the war, but mere pawns. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is probably the most powerful portrayal of this.

To convey their urgent message, both poems make excellent use of simile, metaphor and symbolism to evoke powerful feelings: Owen's first lines, Bent double, like old beggars under sacks / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, are fitting comparisons of soldiers with beggars and hags—implying the powerlessness, poverty and vulnerability of old women. Further on in the lines, Dim through the misty panes and thick green light / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning, the reader is cast helplessly into the feelings of a drowning man.

But it is Jarell who succeeds more, using the barest minimum of words and powerful symbolism, in creating a very moving image and sending his message straight to the heart: From my mother's sleep I fell into the State/ And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters/ When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. Such is his vivid symbolism of a helpless fetus unleashed suddenly from the warmth of its mother's womb into the dangers of the world.

It is only in rhythm, meter and rhyme where the two poems differ: Some rhythm and meter are evident in Jarell's poem, through lines 1,2 and 4. Line 3 seems to be slightly off in this respect, but it adds a nice touch to the poem. In these lines the author has used a falling meter where the first segments of each line are stressed more than the latter. The first segment contains the primary thought, while the second segment supports or qualifies it. In contrast, Dulce et Decorum est is a 28-line poem written loosely in iambic pentameter, as expected of an English poet of that literary period.

But these are only minor differences. All in all, the two poems are so strikingly similar in theme, symbolism, genius use of words and power-- they are the two greatest anti-war poems of the 21st century.

Goldensohn, Lorrie. (2004) Dismantling Glory. Irvington, New York. Columbia university press.

Keylor, William R. (2005) . The World Wars. In Twentieth-Century World: An International History (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Revised 5th edition.