War, murder, and LeMay: is it ever excusable to intentionally kill non-combatants?

A commonplace view of World War II is that the Allies were right to go to war and acted justly in their fight against the Axis powers. After all, it was the Axis powers who had been the aggressors – Nazi Germany invading Poland, Imperial Japan attacking Pearl Harbor – and who proved themselves frequently merciless in their treatment of enemy soldiers and civilians. But while it may be uncontroversial to claim the Allies were right to go to war, it certainly is controversial to claim the Allies acted justly in their prosecution of the war. This is because a significant part of the Allied war effort was focused not against combatants but instead against non-combatants. In Europe this took the form of a deliberate policy of carpet bombing German population centres so as to break the will of the German people and consequently undermine the Nazi regime from within. The near total destruction of major German cities such as Cologne, Dresden, and Hamburg was the result. In the Pacific theatre the policy led to the devastation of most Japanese cities and, eventually, the deployment of two atomic weapons, with an estimated combined death toll of half a million civilians. Curtis E. LeMay, US Air Force general and architect of the strategic bombing campaign of Japan, freely admitted that if the Axis powers had won the war, he and other Allied commanders would have been tried as war criminals. He nonetheless believed that he was right to fire bomb Japanese cities and kill vast numbers of innocent men, women, and children, since that was the only way, in his view, to bring the war to a swift and successful conclusion, thus sparing the lives of an even greater number of Americans and Japanese.

One way to assess the actions of LeMay is to rely upon the venerable tradition of just war theory. There are two main parts of just war theory. The first, jus ad bellum (‘justice of war’), sets out the principles that determine when it is right to go to war, the most important being ‘just cause’. A prime example of just cause is the right of violent resistance against illegitimate aggression. Many would argue that LeMay acted in accordance with this basic jus ad bellum idea. The second part of the just war doctrine, however, is jus in bello (‘justice in war’), a key principle of which is ‘discrimination’. This is the demand that only combatants can be legitimately killed, a demand endorsed by many religions and enshrined in international law. Clearly, LeMay and others, including Britain’s ‘Bomber’ Harris, were guilty of deliberately and grossly contravening this principle.

If we believe in accordance with jus in bello that it is always wrong to intentionally kill non-combatant men, women, and children, are we not compelled to regard LeMay and Harris, as well as their political bosses who approved the policy of strategic bombing (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman), as murderers who deserve nothing but opprobrium for committing some of the greatest atrocities in world history? This seems the only conclusion you can arrive at if you adhere to the just war doctrine. And yet many refuse to condemn these figures as murderers. Instead, they believe these men acted as they did out of necessity, that their actions may not have been wholly right, since they involved undeniable horrors, but that they certainly were permissible or, at the very least, ‘excusable’, given the gravity of the threat faced by the Allies and the obstinate refusal of the Axis powers to capitulate. But if we endorse this view, should we not then be honest in our assessment of the phenomenon of war and concede that all talk of justice in war is mistaken, that war, as LeMay seemed to presume, is always and unalterably ‘hellish’? Or should we insist that talk of justice in war is appropriate, but take a consequentialist stance and understand our basic moral principles as prima facie principles that may in certain circumstances be overridden, admitting that sometimes worthy ends really do justify horrific means? And if we take this latter stance, are we not saying that what is ordinarily thought of as murder – the wilful violent destruction of innocent human life – is sometimes morally demanded? Is this a defensible conclusion, or is it one which makes a nonsense of our basic moral principles in justifying that which is always unjustifiable?