“...If your point is that there is simply no such thing as a war crime...then we don’t have a conversation...
“...If, instead of Dolittle, you were referring to General Marshall, then I would respectfully disagree that his was an off-the-cuff remark. He was speaking at a press conference, and he was providing specific details...
“...While I suppose an attack on an individual’s character is reflexive...the statement about any past shortcomings of his has nothing to do with his position at the time...his position at the time was such that his request had not only been heard by the President, it had been granted by him as well...
“...Either concede my point or else present evidence to support a counterpoint. If you can’t do either, then just walk away. All you have left is the ad hominem attack,..” [Captain Walker, post 154]
Can’t help but notice how dogged you have been. Somewhat in opposition to your ignorance of the mindset of certain military personnel, the functioning of corporate culture in various portions of the military establishment, and your tin ear when it comes to perceiving how the larger civil culture was affected by World War 2 and various world events during the first half of the 20th century.
Moralizers never tire of telling us that their pet preoccupations are objectively real - that they exist outside the minds of people, independent of the society that brought them forth, the culture that acknowledges them and uses them (or violates them).
I’ve never found this to be true. Without people, morals aren’t present. The plants, animals, plankton, fungi, bacteria, viruses don’t know nor do they care. Therefore if the people vanish - as they might after a wartime defeat, say - all talk of morality stops. Together with talk of every other sort.
I’m not privy to the inner consciousness of moralizers, so I’m not perfectly sure why they are so feverish to convince us their schemes are the only game in town and we have no choice but to comply with their orders. Perhaps because they fear we won’t take them seriously if they jawbone us in terms less dire?
All of which is idle speculation. To be honest, I don’t much care if your dogma is true or false. What bothers me, and concerns me more closely, is that people like you have made my job more difficult.
I spent somewhat longer than 28-1/2 years in uniform. Thirteen years of that was devoted to performing operational tests: for those unfamiliar with the term, what it amounts to is performing tests on weapons (and systems, and every other piece of gear the military acquires). My office, and a small handful of other organizations across DoD and related agencies, collected the data that was used by senior leaders, politicians, and other parties to give a thumbs up or down on systems big and small.
So I had to develop a broad knowledge - not only of the systems, but of the psychology inside many military organizations, politics (in and out of the military establishment), physics, and any number of subsections of doctrine. Less pleasantly, insight into the psychology of power players with large egoes was a definite plus when it came to career survival - dealing with generals, navigating deftly around their quirks, was a feature of daily life.
Military establishments do not succeed because the wider society gifts them with a “better” moral code (whatever that is). They succeed because they are better-organized, enjoy lavish allocation of resources, members know trust each other more fully, they work harder to understand their adversaries and to craft their own response. Then they practice a whole lot.
They don’t always get their way, to be sure. Especially when it comes to resources and political game-playing.
In this context, press conferences conducted by George C Marshall, demands for B-17 groups, by Claire Chenault, maps of the relative combustibility of neighborhoods in Tokyo, and alteration of standing orders by Jimmy Doolittle lose some measure of seriousness. Those unfamiliar with the planning process are quite out of their depth when contemplating the existence (or absence) of plans involving specific actions directed against specific entities. In many ways it’s not much more significant than getting everybody’s name into the phone book.
Claire L Chennault really was a washed-up O-3 before heading to China. He had clashed far too often with Air Corps current wisdom and was very undiplomatic about it. He’s remembered by pop-culture enthusiasts as some species of genius who was ignored too often by the power structure - recalls the adage about prophets being without honor in their own country. He was lionized in light of early successes, but once 14th Air Force was created their activities did not differ all that much from other numbered Air Forces, within the limits imposed by what they were allocated, and the adversary they faced.
The illustrations you posted tickled my fancy. Hadn’t seen these specific pictures before, but the construction of mock villages or entire city blocks was not in any way remarkable. It’s been done often, to test effectiveness of a particular weapon against contemplated target complexes.
Western civilization owes its existence to the idea that there is an objective Truth that surpasses our existence; if we reject that concept and approach life and death matters emotionally (and not with the rational mind that a firm belief in this Truth provides), we will find that we can justify pretty much anything, including the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocents who happened to be at home when we dropped incendiary bombs on their neighborhood.
And because we would think about these subjects emotionally, we would lack the consistency even in our thoughts to acknowledge that we would be declaring as war criminals any enemy officers and aircrews who had done the same.