MORAL COMBAT: Focus on Moral Issues in World War Two

MORAL COMBAT: Good and Evil in World War II, Michael Burleigh, 2011, Harper Collins, 650pp, bibliography, photo inserts

It's difficult to bring up the topic of morality in terms of warfare, but then if it wasn't Michael Burleigh wouldn't have been compelled to write this book, I imagine. Besides, he demonstrates clearly it is a fertile ground for exploration.

Good vs Evil

In the broadest senses, the Axis to any surface examination of the war represent unmitigated evil, while the Allies represent qualified good.

In any event, Burleigh delves deeper, discussing the moral issues which arose in the prosecution of history's bloodiest conflict. Even beneath the surface, the Axis remain evil and corrupt to its core, with the author focusing on the overwhelming scale of massacres of Jews, Slavs, gypsies, Russians, and others. The systematic conquest and further destruction and murderous post-conquest "clearing" of Poland for settlement is described in detail.

In their attempt to supplant the Western colonial governments in Asia, the Japanese get attention for their brutality, enthusiastically cultivated by the militarists who controlled the society. The Japanese would have had an easier time succeeding as a benevolent Asian colonial power, through their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, offering leadership to their conquests, had they not casually and repeatedly unleashed their brutality on the people of the countries they occupied.

Little attention is given to Italy, led by Benito Mussolini, who even Italians referred to by derisive nicknames. Not that it matters. From Berlin, Hitler invariably called the shots. The other Axis partners had no input on decisions made regarding direction of the war. As for the Japanese, they would no doubt have been Nazi victims, had they not been of similar outlook, and, more to the point, so distant as to be irrelevant to Hitler's aims.

Allies

On the Allied side, the chief flaw that calls into question their position on the side of good, was that of Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, arguably more murderous than even Hitler, although his ethnic cleansing and just plain slaughter was kept largely within Soviet borders.

Burleigh examines a range of other moral issues including those posed by Allied bombing policy and bombing accuracy, the brutalizing foxhole experiences of soldiers and what it did to them, the shameless appeasement by Chamberlain and the French at Munich where they handed over Czechoslovakia without consulting the Czechs, the treatment of POW's by the Japanese, the rise of the Resistance in the various occupied countries, among many other matters.

A lot more to this in a lot more depth than you would think. An interesting, thought-provoking book.