front of my feet. I shied back but then, when I was ready to jump over it, it was whirled away by a ghostly hand. The sheets around me acted as sails and I had the feeling that I was being carried away by the storm. I reached the front of a five-story building… which… had been bombed and burned out in a previous raid and there was not much in it for the fire to get hold of. Someone came out, grabbed me in their arms, and pulled me into the doorway.
Seventy thousand died at Hamburg. Eighty thousand or so died in 1945 during a similar firebombing in Dresden. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand died in firestorms over Tokyo as a result of only two firebomb raids. When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, seventy thousand died. Throughout World War II bomber crews on both sides killed millions of women, children, and elderly people, no different from their own wives, children, and parents. The pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners in these aircraft were able to bring themselves to kill these civilians primarily through application of the mental leverage provided to them by the distance factor. Intellectually, they understood the horror of what they were doing. Emotionally, the distance involved permitted them to deny it. Despite what a recent popular song might tell us, from a distance you don’t look anything like a friend. From a distance, I can deny your humanity; and from a distance, I cannot hear your screams.
In 689 B.C. King Sennacherib of Assyria destroyed the city of Babylon:
I leveled the city and its houses from the foundations to the top, I destroyed them and consumed them with fire. I tore down and removed the outer and inner walls, the temples and the ziggurats built of brick, and dumped the rubble in the Arahtu canal. And after I had destroyed Babylon, smashed its gods and massacred its population, I tore up its soil and threw it into the Euphrates so that it was carried by the river down to the sea.
Gwynne Dyer uses this quote to point out that although more labor intensive than nuclear weapons, the physical effect on Babylon was little different from the effect of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima or firebombs at Dresden. Physically the effect is the same, but
No personal accounts of this horror have lasted through the ages, but we can see an echo of murder on such a scale in the accounts of survivors of Nazi atrocities. In
We climb inside [a railroad car]. In the corners amid human excrement and abandoned wrist-watches lie squashed, trampled infants, naked little monsters with enormous heads and bloated bellies. We carry them out like chickens, holding several in each hand.
…I see four… men lugging a corpse: a huge swollen female corpse. Cursing, dripping wet from the strain, they kick out of their way some stray children who have been running all over the ramp, howling like dogs. The men pick them up by the collars, heads, arms, and toss them inside the trucks, on top of the heaps. The four men have trouble lifting the fat corpse onto the car, they call others for help, and all together they hoist up the mound of meat. Big swollen, puffed-up corpses are being collected from all over the ramp; on top of them are piled the invalids, the smothered, the sick, the unconscious. The heap seethes, howls, groans.
In Babylon someone had to personally hold down tens of thousands of men, women, and children, while someone else stabbed and hacked at these horrified Babylonians. One by one. Grandfathers struggled and wept as screaming grandchildren and daughters and sons were raped and slaughtered. Mothers and fathers writhed in their dying agony as they watched their children being raped and butchered. Again, Borowski captures a faint timeless echo of this mass murder of the innocent in a terse paragraph telling of the murder of a single lost, confused, frightened little Jewish girl:
This time a little girl pushes herself halfway through the small window [of the cattle car] and, losing her balance, falls out on the gravel. Stunned, she lies still for a moment, then stands up and begins walking around in a circle, faster and faster, waving her rigid arms in the air, breathing loudly and spasmodically, whining in a faint voice. Her mind has given way… an S.S. man approaches calmly, his heavy boot strikes between her shoulders. She falls. Holding her down with his foot, he draws his revolver, fires once, then again. She remains face down, kicking the gravel with her feet, until she stiffens.
Exchange the revolver for a sword, and then multiply this scene by tens of thousands, and you have the horror that was the sack of Babylon and a thousand other forgotten cities and nations.
Borowski knew that with these Jewish victims of a later-day Babylon “experienced professionals will probe into every recess of their flesh, will pull the gold from under the tongue and the diamonds from the uterus and the colon.” History tells us that in Babylon and other such situations the victims were held down while their bodies were slit open to determine if they had swallowed or secreted valuables, and then they were often left to die slowly as they crawled off with their torn intestines and stomach dragging after them.
Even the Nazis usually segregated sexes and families and could seldom bring themselves to individually bayonet their victims. They preferred machine guns upon occasion, and gas chamber showers for the really big work. The horror of Babylon staggers the imagination.[14]
I could not visualize the horrible deaths my bombs… had caused here. I had no feeling of guilt. I had no feeling of accomplishment.
What is the difference between what happened in Hamburg and in Babylon? There was no distinction in the results — in both, the innocent populations involved died horribly and their cities were destroyed. So what is the difference?
The difference is the difference between what the Nazi executioners did to the Jews and what the Allied bombardiers did to Germany and Japan. The difference is the difference between what Lieutenant Calley did to a village full of Vietnamese, and what many pilots and artillerymen did to similar Vietnamese villages.
The difference is that, emotionally, when we dwell on the butchers of Babylon or Auschwitz or My Lai, we feel revulsion at the psychotic and alien state that permitted these individuals to perform their awful deeds. We cannot understand how anyone could perform such inhuman atrocities on their fellow man. We call it murder, and we hunt down and prosecute the criminals responsible, be they Nazi war criminals or American war criminals. And by prosecuting these individuals we gain peace of mind by affirming to ourselves that this is an aberration that civilized societies do not tolerate.
But when most people think of those who bombed Hamburg or Hiroshima, there is no feeling of disgust for
