The Irony of War

“There’s an osmosis in war, call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the trappings of the loser.” -Norman Mailer. I interpret this quote to mean that the people who win a war always end up becoming the people who they conquer by acting and doing as they had. In WWII, both sides of the war did terrible things to the other. Both the Allies and Axis armies killed innocent civilians and burned down whole cities that really didn’t need to be burned down to win the war. Contrary to how many people think in America, the Allies were not just the good guys striving heroically to destroy the mighty hold of the Axis powers. Instead, they committed many atrocities themselves acting like their once thought vicious enemy by doing things that didn’t need to be done to win the war. Many people still think that the Allies did what they had to and nothing else to save the freedom and integrity of the world.

During WWII, the Allied forces committed atrocities that seem unthinkable as to having been done by such great heroes. It was not just Germany that used the air-raid part of the blitzkrieg strategy on cities and during the Battle of Britain , but the Allies too. The Allies made the fire-bomb , which when dropped on a city exploded in flames and burned down the city while killing its inhabitance with extreme heat. We used this fire-bomb on such cities as Tokyo in Japan, and in Hamburg and Dresden in Europe. It was not just the Axis who killed civilians like in Hitler’s Final Solution called the holocaust. I am by no means saying that the Allies sunk down as low as the Axis by committing a holocaust, but they did kill many innocent civilians in cities using the fire-bomb and Atomic-bomb . Many others were seriously injured and are still suffering from their injuries today.

Many of the acts of crime that the Allies did which mimicked those of the Axis didn’t even have to be done to win the war. The fire-bombing never had to be done because we could have just sent troops to take over the cities. The civilians probably weren’t going to fight back, so didn’t need to be killed. Worst yet, the Atomic-bomb never had to be used. By the time the U.S. used the atomic-bomb, Japan was already retreating and was contemplating surrender. The U.S. just decided that it would be very cool to show off its new toy that they had developed not thinking of all the people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima who were killed or injured.

Many people still don’t think the Allies committed any war crimes. They believe that everything the Allies did to win the war was very important, needed to win the war, and was nowhere near as bad as what the Axis powers were doing. Some believe that the a-bomb was needed to end the war with Japan. They think that the Japanese had so much honor in fighting to the death like the kamikazes , who would crash their planes into enemies in order to help Japan, that the a-bomb would be the only thing to stop the war. This is wrong because the Japanese were already retreating from their attack at Pearl Harbor after we beat them at Midway and other sites and were no longer that much of a threat. We could have made peaceful negotiations at that point but instead we dropped the a-bombs.

Both the Allies and Axis committed many war crimes during WWII that were unnecessary although many believed it never happened. The Allies did just as many terrible things in the war that the Axis did. Hollywood may portray the Allies as great heroes, but at the end of the war, the Allies were no better than those they had defeated.