Disney in the Classroom
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Propaganda is an effective and necessary tool in times of war. The people of a nation at war must be convinced of the need to fight the enemy; and they must be given hope that the fight will result in victory. If a nation's people do not believe in the necessity of a war there is little chance they will win that war. So Disney's Wartime Cartoons provided a great service. However, any type of propaganda is dangerous, and the more effective the propaganda the more dangerous it is.
A good example of this principle is the Walt Disney feature, Victory Through Airpower. This film (based on the book by Major Alexander de Seversky, who also narrated the picture) argued that to win the war we needed to build long-range bombers and then use them to destroy the enemy's factories and infrastructure. While the movie was a box office failure there is evidence that Roosevelt and Churchill used it to justify adopting much of what the Major suggested.
Bombing the enemy's country directly meant that civilians would die. This had previously been an unthinkable concept. However, the Axis powers had already opened this Pandora's Box with atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking and the direct bombing of London and other British cities. So it was less difficult to justify bombing Axis cities directly, especially since at the beginning of the bombing campaigns only factories and infrastructure were targeted.
However, by 1945 hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers had died, and Germany was still fighting even though its defeat was inevitable. This caused considerable popular pressure to end the War immediately. So the direct bombing of cities began. This culminated in the fire bombings of Berlin and Dresden in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died.
The cities of Japan suffered the same fate. Churchill stated that Japan was being "ground into powder". As we know the Japanese bombing campaign ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombs alone caused the deaths of at least 200,000 civilians.
So was the killing of millions of civilians justified? It was certainly necessary to destroy Germany and Japan's capacity to wage war. Both societies were committed to war as a way to become strong nations. The German government would not surrender until Germany was completely destroyed. Japan's government planned to use human waves of civilians to resist an allied invasion. So destroying factories, infrastructure, and adult civilians was necessary to end the War.
However, nothing justifies killing children, and that's exactly what happened when we bombed cities directly. Of course, the Germans and the Japanese killed millions of civilians, including children, long before they were attacked. So it was easy to justify killing German and Japanese civilians, including children, to end the war. We can judge our ancestors for doing this, but we weren't there. They had to face the reality that hundreds of thousands of young men would never come home again. It was also widely known that an invasion of Japan would cause many more American casualties. (Estimates are that a million American soldiers would have been killed or wounded, and that as many as 15 MILLION Japanese would have suffered the same fate.) I'm sure nothing seemed more important than ending the War immediately.
When I first taught and discussed this era with students it wasn't difficult for me to justify the allied bombing campaigns. If we had not won the War the world would be a dark and horrible place so the killing civilians was tragic, but necessary. I also used the fact that the bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of Japanese civilians' lives. However, when you have exchange students from Hiroshima and Berlin it changes your perspective. I can't justify, anymore, the direct bombing of civilians. There is no doubt that we had to bomb Axis factories, infrastructure, and soldiers to end World War Two. However, I wish we had avoided the direct bombing of cities. I don't have an answer for what we should have done instead, but I can no longer justify acts that killed innocent children.
The exchange student's, from Hiroshima, representation of the Japanese Americans'
Interment
As you can see this is a difficult issue to teach. I have students watch clips from Victory Through Airpower, Education for Death, and Commando Duck to see how propaganda dehumanizes the enemy. This dehumanizing is probably necessary to enable soldiers to fight a war. However, this type of attitude is what justified the killing of "enemy" children through long-range bombing and in our own country justified such actions as the Internment of loyal Japanese-American citizens. I discuss with students that the leaders of the Allies must have felt that had little choice except to act as they did, but that we need to learn from their mistakes. If we do evil to stop evil, eventually we will become evil. Fortunately after the War the Allied Nations realized what they had done. This led to the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, to their establishment as democratic nations, and to an effort to use modern military technology to avoid civilian casualties. So despite the fact that mistakes were made the Allies' victory in World War Two was a victory for all of humanity. Imagine what the world would be like if the Allies had lost the War.....
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-- Lee "MouseBear" Suggs
Lee Suggs is a history teacher in Northern California.
The opinions expressed by Lee Suggs, and all of our columnists, do not necessarily represent the feelings of LaughingPlace.com or any of its employees or advertisers. All speculation and rumors about the future of Disneyland and the Walt Disney Company are just that - speculation and rumors - and should be treated as such.
-- Posted September 9, 2002