Was World War II a “Necessary War”? (Ken Burns film review)

By Colman McCarthy

Somewhere between a mantra and a broken record, “The War,” Ken Burn’s 15-hour PBS documentary, repeatedly stated that World War II was “a necessary war.”

If it was, you’d need to hold that it was necessary for American pilots to firebomb the people of Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfort and other German cities. You’d need to hold that it was necessary to firebomb the people of Tokyo, that it was necessary to incinerate the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, that it was necessary to have a 50 percent civilian death rate, that it was necessary to turn back the 800-plus Jews seeking asylum when their the ship “The St. Louis” dropped anchor off the coast of Florida , that it was necessary to imprison more than 6,000 conscientious objectors to war.

No doubt exists that Americans strongly supported military violence as the only way to save the free world. Nor is there any doubt that believers in armed might were sincere and passionate in their convictions. But there is doubt among some that killing people is the most effective or only way of creating the peaceable society.

That includes those 6,000 imprisoned COs. Why were their stories overlooked by Ken Burns? As many as 50 veterans or members of veterans’ families were included in his film. To ignore pacifists who opposed the war is to prolong the state of denial that has long locked the collective mind of the United States into one way of thinking—the way of the gun and the bomb. It takes nothing away from the sacrifices of World War II warriors to acknowledge that CO’s like Robert Lowell, David Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, J. F. Powers and all those who did time in the Leavenworths, Lewisburgs and Danburys are equally deserving of historians’ praise and acclaim.

Though it received almost no notice and had an advertising budget nowhere near what was splurged on the Burns film, “The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It” is a sterling and compelling documentary about men who said no to military violence. They were jailed and reviled. But as the film-makers, Rick Tejada-Flores and Judith Ehrlich of Independent Television Service in San Francisco assert: “not all the heroes are on the battlefield.”

With both archival film and interviews—the same technique used by Burns—Tejada-Flores and Ehrlich detail the decisions of courage by which a belief in nonviolence was stronger than the fear of jail. The epigraph for the film is a line by John F. Kennedy:

“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

A companion to the film is “A Few Small Candles: War Resisters of World War II Tell Their Stories” by Larry Gara and Lenna Mae Gara (Kent University Press). Larry Gara, who served as a history professor for 40 years after his imprisonment, recalls that his and the others “opposition took the form of open resistance, not evasion….What we did was to light a few candles in the darkness, to keep the ideal of nonviolence alive for use when the world came to its senses.”

Because World War II has been mythologized as the necessary war and because the notion persists that if we didn’t stop the Nazis we’d all be speaking German today, the challenge for pacifists is to offer an argument that goes beyond personal non-cooperation. Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier who later expressed horror at what he had done, argues that alternatives did exist: “Can we try to imagine instead of a six-year war a ten-year or twenty-year period of resistance—of guerilla warfare, strikes and non-cooperation; of underground movements, sabotage, and paralysis of vital communication and transportation; and of clandestine propaganda for the organization of a larger and larger opposition?”

If World War II is hailed as a necessary war, has a nation ever announced it was about to wage an unnecessary war? Which leader has said that we don’t really need to go to war but let’s do it anyway? None that I’ve heard of. Instead, the justifications for war pour forth, piled as high as the mountains of corpses on the battlefields of false honor and presumed glory.