Warbirds

 

Seattle Times

Monday morning on Lake Washington, the weekend visiting B-29, "Doc", came up the lake south to north just as our crew was launching. What a thrill for me, a nine-year old would-be airplane spotter in the waning days of WWII; it had been decades since I had seen one in the air. An hour later, Doc came over the trees right at us at about 1,500’, passing directly overhead. The Doc is one of only two B-29s still flying anywhere in the world. It was thrilling for that ten-year-old warbird nut imbedded in me. I’ve been in 17s, 24s, and a 25; a third B-29 Superfortress is nearing completion of its restoration at Boeing Field; I plan on not missing that one when it’s ready.

But now, in my 88^th lap around the sun, though the 10-year-old is thrilled to see those powerful instruments of democracies’ collective defeat of fascism, the old skeptic is painfully aware that they also were machines used to destroy civilians, civility, and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,  a civilization.

Mariupol, 2022

We castigate Russia for attacking civilians, both in Ukraine and Syria, smugly superior in our righteousness. We are shocked by the destruction, glued to network and cable news coverage, and moved by Twitter and Facebook and Instagram feeds of anguished people on the ground. 

But what of Dresden and Tokyo and Berlin? We non-combatants were then shielded in our innocence and isolated in our patriotism, assured the raids were “strategic” and on essential military-industrial targets. Had we had a Facebook or a CNN reporter on the ground, would we have been so self-satisfied?

Nuremberg, 1945

All out war was an invention of the 19thC. Von Clausewitz justified war waged on civilians. Sherman’s march through Georgia focused on destroying food supplies and infrastructure, burning farms and fields and towns, destroying bridges and roads and rails to “make young and old, rich and poor feel the hard hand of war.” Our attacks on Philippine villages in early 20thC, our fire-bombing of Tokyo, burns of Vietnamese villages later-on, were these not wars made on civilians? If General Dvornikov and his boss, Putin, are war criminals, what of Bomber Harris and his boss, Churchill? What of Hap Arnold and George Marshall and Roosevelt? And Sherman and Lincoln? 

Atlanta, Leipzig, Yokohama, Palermo, Hanoi – the list is endless.

I am not acquitting Putin. I am not indicting Churchill. I’m just asking are our hands clean? Man becomes a war criminal when s/he enters a state of ardent patriotism and smug certainty about “the enemy". Is the widow in Kharkiv any more or less human than the five mothers of a Russian tank crew incinerated in their tin can of a tank by a Lockheed/Raytheon Javelin missile made by nice folks in Troy, Alabama?

The days of mano a mano are long gone; no bare-chested Putin will be arm wrestling a Ukrainian, Jewish comedian for the Donbas. All war is total war; all war is on civilians, on civility, on civilization. Are we not all war criminals?   

How does one not become a war criminal? By not making war. 

Richmond, 1865