A BOMBARDIER SHOOTS AT THE $64 QUESTION
Jr, Lt. L. E. Shuck
A Bombardier Shoots At The $64 Question How Can We Best Achieve The Lasting Peace For Which We Fight? By Lt. L. E. SHUCK, Jr. THE statement that a soldier's primary worry is to remain alive, stay...
...Its only offensive weapon is Reason...
...Not only must we support democracy as a logical culmination of our fight for democracy...
...The most important question in one's mind is, Why did that happen...
...Human beings cannot be convinced by force...
...Part of this is wondering how another war can be prevented...
...The other bloc believed that the highest goal of the state is to insure the maximum of physical, mental, and moral comfort to its individual citizens within a peaceful society...
...But we want to further democracy and we want to insure the peace of the world, and those goals are not compatible with a peace of lust and revenge...
...as a struggle between the so-called "haves" and "have-nots...
...We can make democrats out of our enemies only by example...
...and fights its enemies by setting an example...
...Either democracy must be given every assistance or totalitarianism will remain in one form or another...
...Democracy must be made real in Europe, in Japan, in China, in India, and sometime in Africa too...
...The Allies cannot now divide up the world and rule it for their selfish purposes...
...But that's the reason our soldiers are fighting, or allow themselves to be made to fight...
...A popular remark is "Those blankety-blanks at the peace table better make a real peace this time...
...Yet anyone who avers that Germans and Japanese can be transformed into democrats by force may not have seen the obvious...
...There is room in this small world for no other ideal of government...
...Before we can hope for lasting peace we must guarantee that the ideal for which we are fighting will be the governing ideal in each country...
...Within the societies of our defeated enemies we must begin democratic governments...
...We don't have to ponder too strenuously to realize the importance of America's part in the war—casualties, resources, money, human values, social and economic dislocations...
...We must institute democracy in the countries of our enemies because we don't want a third world war within a few years...
...Use any words that sound better—or more definite —if you wish...
...changes which will bring democracy to those countries...
...A man wants a reason for the regimentation, discomfort, danger, and life-disruption which he is going through...
...We shall have answered oppression and tyranny in kind and, therefore, we shall have repudiated our own avowed belief in democracy...
...We can't forget, either, that she has paid —and plenty...
...We can impose democracy by education and by example: hardly by oppression...
...But the fact that this is true is insufficient reason for the United States to become an oppressor and to deny democracy to the defeated in this war...
...It's just a question of how to do it...
...Most soldiers with whom I've talked feel that America must keep her hands on the wheel after this war...
...What human advancement will come out of all this agonv...
...I say begin because democracy is an expanding process, a growing attitude of mind, and not only a system of government...
...This war is being fought to determine which ideal is to become the world ideal...
...We pushed ourselves —and were pulled—into the driver's seat in order to preserve democracy and to fight against totalitarianism...
...But it is not unanswerable...
...With each passing day of the "New Order" the resistance movements became stronger...
...In the interests of the future, we cannot deny it to law abiding and cooperative Germans, Japanese, or Italians...
...We cannot limit it to the white race...
...We are democrats and have advertised ourselves as the protagonists and the propagators of an enlightened form of representative democracy...
...We desire it as a working fact for Americans and for other peoples...
...The aim of our peace treaty, however, must not be to exact vengeance...
...To advance and strengthen democracy after the war we must give it a chance to take root in enemy countries...
...Will all this lead to semipermanent peace or is it just a cycle which will, as a bi-product of human stupidity, recur periodically and claim another set of victims in another generation ? It has been my experience [Lt...
...Before this war is over Germany and Germans will have received that destruction back, and with interest...
...Vengeance Is Out Many of the discussed plans for chopping up and virtually destroying the enemy countries are so totalitarian and despotic that they might well have originated in Tokyo, Berlin, or Rome...
...I realize that too many civilians are concerned mainly with jobs, inflation, and food points...
...The primary demand is a form of society capable of recognizing our social errors and of preventing any more murderous wars...
...Certain peoples cannot be expected, because of lack of opportunity and conditions of previous servitude, to start from scratch with a form of government as advanced as we believe our own to be...
...The people we rule, meanwhile, will begin to organize their own underground resistance movement with its aim of overthrowing our oppression and continuing the cycle of wars...
...Nor does the soldier want to spend a part of his postwar life as a garrison soldier in a conquered country...
...Our latest historical proof of this is the effort of the Germans to convince Europe of the value of their "New Order...
...We cannot convince them of the satisfaction in living our way if we use their methods of "conviction"—force...
...And even such a thought as...
...What is the best possible way to achieve this great goal...
...Ask anyone who has seen Aachen, for instance...
...It is spread by practice...
...we've spent lavishly of all we have...
...Rather we must strengthen ourselves to do our duty as the leading national example of our preferred way of living...
...But the most important thought is more fundamental...
...Another Siegfried— or Hitler—will soon be found to set German minds as solidly as ever against the world and sell them the idea of their "unique" position...
...We can't relinquish our leadership and take a chance on being led by the collective nose into another great Saving Operation...
...Though they may not have been politically-minded or "socially conscious" before they were in battle, they tend to become so after they are relieved...
...To follow up our defense of democracy on the battlefields we must retain our social and political leadership in the postwar world...
...It is granted that not all persons in the United States and certainly not all persons in any given country have become as enlightened as they should be efficiently to exercise their rights and to perform their duties as citizens of a free democracy...
...Nevertheless they have every right to start, with a form of representative government, democratic in principle, of their own choosing...
...We want democracy to become more than a vague ideal...
...Hollywood offers the general impression that soldiers want only a girl, a hamburger, a milkshake, a juke box, and a steak...
...Germany must be made to pay—to the extent of her ability to do so—for the destruction her armies have brought upon Europe...
...Neither country will represent intellectual or moral vacuums...
...To be consistent with our war aims, to do justice to the men who have died for the ideals involved in this war, it is our duty to establish that peace which will best spread the doctrine of democracy and in so doing destroy the efforts of the totalitarians...
...We fought because the world is not large enough to contain two blocs of powers representing standards of political and social values diametrically opposed one to the other...
...When the man next to you is torn in half by shrapnel or mortar blast, other things become important...
...I think only the most simple-minded can see a friend killed or maimed or go through a "close one" himself without wondering if it is really doing any good...
...One bloc was dedicated to the proposition that conquering military power accompanied by rigid superimposed social discipline embody the ultimate good of the modern state and the individual citizen existed solely to further this distorted "good...
...Ask anyone who has watched from the air as Germany burned...
...This is difficult, of course, but not impossible...
...The Germans, the Japanese, and our lesser enemies must be given every opportunity to begin democracy in their own countries...
...Surely we can't lose our faith in ourselves and in our ideals and become an oppressor...
...We should be demonstrating to the German people and to the small nations that Hitler was right after all and that might alone defends truth and is the dominant force in life...
...We should then occupy in Europe the same position Germany fought to occupy...
...Unless democracy is born and nourished, unless the peoples learn to think and act democratically, we may well fight another war, and soon...
...Only in that fashion can we be most certain that we shall have done all at the moment possible to lay the groundwork for permanent peace...
...Our task, then, is much more difficult than exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth...
...This war, as well as the last, was fundamentally a clash of social ideals...
...The future peace of the world depends upon our ability to lead and guide them into democracy...
...THE statement that a soldier's primary worry is to remain alive, stay in one piece, and return home can't be challenged...
...That is certainly the current $64 question...
...We must punish fully the war criminals of Germany and her allies...
...Shuck is a bombardier with 35 flying missions over Germany] that men who have been shot at adopt a very serious point of view on this score...
...Democratic society demands full punishment for criminals...
...It is manifestly impossible to force them into a democratic way of living...
...The Hitler youth allegedly planning to go to the mountains will be furnished a banner around which to rally millions of other Germans...
...That's a universal feeling all right, at least in moments of stress...
...We are defending democracy against the self-styled Herrenvolk—white and yellow—who wished to take over our rights and rule us as their subordinates...
...There seems to be no answer, then, but consistency...
...It's time that hoary insult to a soldier's intelligence is forgotten...
...When the war is over, Germany will still be populated by over 80,000,000 Germans, Japan by over 80,-000,000 Japanese...
...I repeat the obvious...
...To make democrats out of our enemies we must convince them of the efficacy of our own way of living...
...While the movies imply that the average soldier wants to come home and grow large batches of children in a vine-covered cottage, something else is more accurate...
...The soldier wants a world wherein his children will have the best possible opportunity to avoid going to war— to avoid being put in the Army, too...
...Nor can the bandit nations keep any of their stolen property...
...It is over-simplifying to describe these wars as purely economic...
...His main serious and thoughtful consideration, however, is probably concerned with the future...
...What are we doing here...
...Our Only Offensive Weapon By using the German and Japanese method of spreading our beliefs, we may prove to have lost rather than won the ideological part—the all-important part—of the war...
...That is what the soldier wants from victory...
...Our enemies may well deserve such treatment on the basis of their actions during the last decade...
...Strengthening Democracy Contrary to popular opinion, I've known few men who are only interested in killing Germans and Japanese...
...We've worked and fought hard...
...I do not, of course, advocate letting the war criminals go free...
...We must work toward a world peace, organization whose purpose it will be not to perpetuate power politics and imperialism, but to protect and further the democracy for which we have fought...
...Our task is to encourage necessary changes in German and Japanese thinking...
...First Of A Series Under The General Title: 'A Gl Peace...
...Perhaps the soldier returned from combat takes the war more seriously...
...Something so essential to the future peace of the world cannot be thought of as being impossible...
...A vindictive peace will lead to a third world war...
...A Working Fact If the American ideal of enlightened democracy is to be truly accepted, it must be applied to the entire human race...
Vol. 9 • May 1945 • No. 19
