Looking back on "The Good War'

The Second World War officially ended 70 years ago today, on September 2, 1945, as representatives of Imperial Japan signed the instrument of surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo harbor.

The surrender brought a final end to a cataclysmic conflict.

Americans sometimes refer to World War II as "The Good War." And in the sense that we were fighting the good fight against manifestly tyrannical and brutal regimes, it was a "good war." No one could seriously argue that the world would be a better place living under the bootheel of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan. The remaining veterans who did their bit to defeat those regimes and bring the war to a clear-cut, victorious conclusion are well-deserving of every honor on this day. We salute them.

But it does them and history a disservice to bathe the Second World War in a nostalgic glow. It was a terrible, savage convulsion that has left moral scars on humanity that cannot be erased.

To defeat the dark powers of the Axis, the West allied with the Soviet Union -a regime equally or still more brutal than the enemies we fought. At the expense of some 20 million dead, the USSR emerged from the conflict as a world power, and the nations under its sway passed not from slavery to freedom but from slavery to another form of slavery. And the war opened the road to power for the Chinese Communists under Mao Tse Tung, who established one of the most brutal and bloodthirsty dictatorships in human history.

And the U.S. and Britain acted with extraordinary brutality in this all-out war. Our forces rained fire and terror from the skies upon civilian populations in both Germany and Japan with the express purpose of terrorizing their populations into giving up the struggle. This is not to draw a moral equivalence between the firebombing of Tokyo and the Rape of Nanking or the Nazi death camps. The Third Reich and Imperial Japan called the dance, and the populations that supported those regimes, or simply acquiesced as they were led down a slippery path to hell, had to pay the price. Such is the cruel calculus of total war.

The U.S. and its allies won the war - clearly and definitively. We won it at the cost of blood and treasure and terrible acts that, no matter how necessary they seemed in the throes of combat, we cannot afford to repeat - including the dropping of two atomic bombs.

The kind of absolute, clear-cut victory achieved in the Second World War has proved elusive in subsequent conflicts, in part because we are not willing to exert the extreme brutal force required to utterly destroy an enemy. Nor are we willing to sacrifice our own troops on a massive scale in order to conquer. Oh, we have fought plenty of wars and inflicted plenty of damage - but even at their most intense, no post-World War II conflict has approached the scale and the utter brutality of that struggle.

For some, the elusiveness of conclusive outcomes is frustrating, even a sign of weakness.

Look at it another way. Look at the post-war hesitancy to engage in total war as a moral victory for the men and women who served honorably in the "good war" with the determination to push back the darkness and leave the world a better place.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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