War Crimes

War is always ugly – and some aspects are beyond ugly – some aspects of war are evil.  I have three bones in my craw.

Bone #1:  I have long struggled with Grant’s order to Sherman to ravage the land from Atlanta to Savannah during the Civil War.  Sherman created a swath 60 miles wide of total destruction leaving women, children, invalids and the elderly completely destitute.  While General Lee, when invading the north in July of 1863, instructed his men to stay on the roadways and not destroy things necessary for non-combatants.  Sherman’s doings seem an act too far – even in war!  [Read Deuteronomy 20 to know God’s rules for war.]

Bone #2:  February 13, 1945, 1,300 Allied bombers leveled the city of Dresden, Germany.  It was at Yalta on the Black Sea a week earlier that Stalin requested the bombing of Dresden, to which both Roosevelt and Churchill agreed.

On February 13, the barbarian Red Army was advancing on Dresden and driving tens of thousands of refugees into Dresden (the refugees desperately wanted to surrender to the Americans who were much kinder).  The bombing that day was not precision bombing but blanket bombing thus tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly were killed.  Just last week I watched a clip of the lines and lines of bodies gathered on the streets of Dresden after the bombing on that day.  It seems to me that there could be reason to accuse the Allies of a war crime.  Again, war is about death and often death is out of control so that innocents are collateral damage.  Nevertheless, women, children and the elderly should protected if at all possible.

Bone #3:  I struggle with giving Berlin to the hordes from the east who perpetrated great evils on the women and elderly found there.  Yes, the Nazis did horrible – terrible – unbelievably evil things while in Russia, but did that mean vengeance and evil were the right response.  It seems better that Patton and the 3rd Army should have been allowed to take Berlin and bring about a more civil end to the war.  Again, Churchill and FDR giving Stalin the privilege to rape, murder, and destroy women and children – non-combatants – was contrary to Deuteronomy 20.  If we had stopped the Red Army before Berlin, we might have spared Eastern Europe 50 years of severe oppression and spared numerous Christians terrible persecution.

Then this:  A paragraph from the Omaha World Herald article, “References to WWII Surge Worldwide” on page 4A, March 29, 2020: “Entire cities and towns were razed in World War II.  Oradoursur-Glane, France – where the Nazis carried out the worst massacre of civilians on French territory in 1944 – is a ghost town, preserved today in ruin as Nazis left it.  More than 600 people, including nearly 250 children, were slaughtered.”   Surely a war crime!

[I do not struggle with the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki as being over the line (I do struggle knowing that masses were sent to a Christ-less eternity – to Hell).  But, understanding the Japanese mindset of suicide over surrender and the religious devotion to their emperor, it seems that an invasion and a conventional war would have resulted in many more Japanese deaths than were caused by those two bombs.  After all, ceaseless bombing by Superfortress bombers (B-29’s) had not convinced Japan to surrender.  In a sense, those two bombs saved many lives.]

As I said at the top – war is always ugly and often even evil.  I am sure there were many ethical violations by all parties in WWII (and in all wars), yet to not acknowledge clear violations and to not be somewhat incensed, is to not love others.