The War: Episode 6

Ruins in Dresden 1945 (Photo: Gerhard Gronefeld)

The historical bloopers were coming fast and furious in Episode 6. It was sort of like one of those games that people play on long drives to combat boredom (or at least did in the days before SUV DVD players): counting hawks or pickups or whatever. It was so much a matter of blatant mistakes as of a number of places where I found myself thinking, "Wha...?" Maybe "groaners" would be a better word that "bloopers".

In the opening segment, one of the interviewees from Connecticut, Joseph Vaghi, tells about talking to a German prisoner in his mid-20s who asked him where he was from. As they talked, the German knew geographical details of the area that surprised the American. As they were talking, I thought about how my father as a young man worked in Connecticut in the summers during the late 1930s tapping maple trees to collect syrup. He said that there were some Germans working there who had to go back to Germany at some point to enter the service. (All young German men were subject to the draft.) So I thought, oh, maybe this guy was working in Connecticut before the war.

Oh, no, the German told the American that he knew all that because he had been trained in a school for administrators of future American "territories". Say what?!?

Now, there is an awful lot about the Third Reich I don't know. And I would be curious if anyone has some more specific reference about such a thing. But I have read a fair amount about German policies toward administering conquered territories and also about their Fifth Column (espionage) efforts in the United States. And it just seems unlikely in the extreme that there was any program to train "administrators" for future American "territories".

This is where a little bit of analytical commentary would have been useful if they were going to use stories like that, because many viewers hearing that will assume it's a fact. I'm tempted to quote Rummy on "unknowns" here, but I would be astonished to find out that any such thing existed in any form. Hitler envisioned making America a subordinate power, at the least, in a future world run by the Axis. But he was far to fixated on conquering Russia and killing Jews in Europe to worry about designing territorial administrations for North America.

There are several possibilities for that tale, which I would list in order of descending probability as follows: the German soldier had actually been in Connecticut (the American said he spoke "accent-free" English); the German had been trained in intelligence operations for possible infiltration to the US; the American had mixed his memory of the conversation with reports about the "geopolitical" studies in Germany, featured in one of Frank Capra's wartime "Why We Fight" films; the German had studied geography in college; and, he was actually being trained as an "administrator" for conquered Connecticut.

Certainly this kind of obscure claim is something that requires further explanation than just to be tossed out there into the stream of war folklore.

Some other historical bits that bothered me in Episode 6:

The narration says that in late 1944, Americans were "growing weary" of the war. Exactly what does that mean? I posted back in July about polling data from the US during the war. In that post, I quoted Josh Marshall:

The key point is that many polls were taken during the war. And approval of the president's conduct of the war, understanding and belief in the goals of the war and other similar measurements all remained constant at very high levels or in some cases actually went up. One key data point you can see on the chart is the number of Americans will to make peace with Hitler - that is, an negotiated end to the war rather than the unconditional surrender which was a key allied war demand. The number was under 10% for most of 1942 and 1943. Then it briefly surged up to just over 20% in early 1944 (roughly the time of the invasion of Italy) before falling back down to about 15% for duration of the war in Europe. (my emphasis)

As I recall, the documentary's narration just said "1944" for when people were getting weary of the war. But the context and the comment by interviewee Katherine Phillips accompanying it definitely made it sound like late 1944. Did anyone bother to check this stuff before they broadcast it?

Ray Leopold, a Jewish medic fighting in Europe, heard a rumor that he took seriously that if the Germans captured an American and found out he was Jewish, he would be killed. That he heard such a rumor is entirely plausible. And Lord knows that the Germans, including the Wehrmacht, were willing to kill Jews. But I've never heard of any systematic practice of Germans executing American POW's because they were Jewish.

On the subject of prisoners-of-war more generally, this documentary like most war documentaries does a very superficial job on treating the subject. It's understandable, because in general it's just a much more dull subject than battles and the shooting war and the high politics. You can go in most any bookstore and find all sorts of books about the Second World War. Try looking for one dealing with POW issues in that war the next time you walk by the war section in a large bookstore.

This documentary mentioned the Malmedy massacre, in which German soldiers murdered several dozen American prisoners. This was a significant event and caused great resentment among Americans. I don't believe they mentioned that it was Waffen-SS troops that committed the massacre, but that one incident created an especially negative image of the Waffen-SS in the United States. Joe McCarthy, the notorious alcoholic demagogue from Wisconsin, made his first national stir in the Senate by expressing his passionate outrage over the fact that the US Army had prosecuted the Waffen-SS perpetrators who had massacred those American prisoners at Malmedy for war crimes. Yes, you read that right. He was outraged that the Army took action against them. McCarthy is still a hero to many Republican rightwingers. No wonder Rush Limbaugh in trashing our soldiers today with his "unpatriotic" insults, to quote the world Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used in a Senate speech Monday. Old Joe would have related to that just fine.

But in general, both Germans and Americans did a reasonably good job of following the Geneva conventions with each others prisoners. The practice on both sides on the Eastern Front were radically different. Millions of prisoners died on the Soviet and German sides. Telford Taylor, who was a chief counsel for the US at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials wrote about that in his 1970 book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy as an example of why international law on treatment of captives is so necessary:

It is only necessary to consider the rules on taking prisoners in the setting of the Second World War to realize the enormous saving of life for which they have been responsible. Millions of French, British, German and Italian soldiers captured in Western Europe and Africa were treated in general compliance with The Hague and Geneva requirements, and returned home at the end of the war. German and Russian prisoners taken on the eastern front did not fare nearly so well and died in captivity by the millions, but many survived. Today there is surely much to criticize about the handling of prisoners on both sides of the Vietnam war, but at least many of them are alive, and that is because the belligerents are reluctant to flout the laws of war too openly.

Given the Cheney-Bush administration's policy of treating the Geneva Conventions as toilet paper, a little more decent background on the treatment of prisoners in the Second World War would have been very appropriate and timely. But then Burns might not have had time for the anecdotes from the guy who was a newspaper delivery boy in Sacramento all during the war.

The one story about an officer ordering the murder of German prisoners was an intense one. The interviewee claimed to have have objected to the officer that this was an illegal act and indicated that a number of soldiers wouldn't participate in the shooting. Here again, some effort at verification or some background on this practice would have been helpful. Some such shootings no doubt occurred; I'm not sure what kind of formal actions were taken against Americans involved by the services. The narration also mentioned that some officers gave a "take no prisoners" order during the Battle of the Bulge. To quote Taylor again:

Perhaps the most important of all the laws of war is the rule that an enemy soldier who surrenders is to be spared further attack and, upon being taken prisoner, is to be conducted, as soon as possible, to safety in the rear of the capturing force. It is "especially forbidden" under the 1907 Hague Convention "to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of self-defence, has surrendered at discretion." It is equally forbidden "to declare that no quarter will be given." And under the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, they "shall be evacuated, as soon as possible after their capture, to camps situated far enough from the combat zone for them to be out of danger." (my emphasis)

I realize that for today's Republicans, such considerations are "quaint" and even downright contemptible. But they still are law in the United States and the world. In the Second World War, the highest officials of the US government still respected those laws. After the war, German and Japanese officers who violated them were tried and convicted of war crimes, some of them sentenced to death as a result. But war crimes trials and all they involved don't lend themselves easily to homey stories about how much fun it was to be a paper delivery boy back in the good old days.

I've posted more than once on issues relating to air warfare. So I won't go into much detail here. But the reporting on the air war was superficial to the point of being bad. I've paid particular attention to the story of the Dresden bombing. I went to Dresden on my honeymoon trip, so I do have some fond memories of the place. But that's not why I've focused attention on the Dresden bombing. It's because the Dresden bombing plays a particular role in the Holocaust-denial narrative. For more on that angle, see my post The bombing of Dresden 02/07/05.

The documentary makes it sound like the bombing of Dresden was Stalin's idea. It's true that Soviet pressure for greater Allied pressure on Germany was part of the calculation. There is certainly a legitimate case to be made that bombing Dresden was a case of bad judgment. But the city was a legitimate military target under the theory of "strategic bombing" being used in Europe. Again, it's not that The War says something wrong. But on a topic with continuing strong symbolic resonance, it didn't help the viewers to understand much about it. I noticed that they used the conservative figure of 35,000 deaths for the Dresden bombing. That's the high range of the realistic estimate. (Thirty-five thousand deaths is horrible by any measure; but the Holocaust-deniers obsess over that number for reasons discussed more at the link above.)

One of the bits of contemporary documentation they mention called even more for explanation. The narration cited a pamphlet issued by the 5th Air Force that said of Japan that "the entire population is a legitimate target ... For us, there are no civilians." To put it mildly, that was not national policy. Again, there is a lot to criticize about the morality and the effectiveness of the strategic bombing in both Europe and Asia in that war. But it was not official American policy to deliberately kill civilian noncombatants. That needed more explanation, definitely.

Particularly given the iconic role the Second World War plays in American national mythology, the bombing issues needed to be treated in more depth. A lot of viewers will take away from that episode a "lesson" that goes something like this: "Americans deliberately killed large numbers of civilians in the Second World War and there's no problem with that. They should have overthrown their own dang governments and surrendered if they didn't want civilians slaughtered."

A couple of other moments in Episode 6 also grated on me a bit. A minor one was a typical good-ole-boy story about Gen. George Patton stopping in the middle of a bridge crossing the Rhine river and saying that he had always wanted to piss in the Rhine, and proceed to unzip and do so in front of his soldiers. Now, I know Patton committed far more consequential indiscretions. His friend and admirer, Gen. Omar Bradley, wrote that if Patton hadn't been killed in an auto accident, he would have wound up badly damaging his own reputation by his own lapses in judgment. But I do wonder exactly what the regulations were about generals exposing their ding-dongs in public in front of their officers and men at that time.

Finally, Katherine Phillips of Mobile tells a story about she and two of her friends going to the train station one evening with sandwiches, donuts and coffee for soldiers on the train. She told it as a funny story and a fond memory. But what she described was having been terrified. A bunch of Marines jumped off the train whooping and started toward them. She and one of her friends tossed their sandwiches and donuts away, ran into the canteen at the station, locked the door, and hid under the counter in fear. That's what she described, even though she was laughing at it. The third girl was surrounded by Marines who kissed her repeatedly and left dirty hand prints all over her coat. There was a weird disconnect between what she described and the upbeat affect she displayed in telling it.

Episode 6 presented some good moments showing the grim side of war. But the defects and gaping omissions are so significant that it makes it difficult to trust the narrative. Some of the historical commentary is just sloppy.

Tags: dresden, dresden bombing, ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two