One notable fact about the death toll of World War II is the astounding number of non-fighting civilians who lost their lives. Eighty percent of the deaths caused by the War were noncombatants. Perhaps one reason Americans can call this a “good war” is that only 1,700 American noncombatants were killed. A high percentage of deaths came to people who lived in nations who were not partisans in the conflict. For example, the number of British, American, and Japanese war deaths combined were fewer the war deaths suffered by Indonesians. India suffered six times the deaths that Great Britain did. Was the alleged good that resulted from this war possibly worth their deaths? How would this be answered from God’s perspective?
Let me very briefly touch on three other costs of this war. The Holocaust was an atrocity totally to be lain at the murderous feet of the Nazis. However, the war itself made the Holocaust possible. This is the conclusion of Holocaust historian Doris Bergen: “War…exponentially increased the numbers and kinds of victims….War provided killers with both a cover and an excuse for murder; in wartime, killing was normalized, and extreme, even genocidal measures could be justified with familiar arguments about the need to defend the homeland. Without the war, the Holocaust would not—and could not—have happened.” Bergen’s assertion cannot be proved—but she reminds us that violent means generally tend to increase the situation’s violence.
Then there was the spread of Communist totalitarianism in Central and Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia. We cannot imagine the creation of the Warsaw Pact and the “Iron Curtain” except for World War II. The U.S. supposedly went to war for the sake of democracy and disarmament. As far as Central and Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia were concerned, in relation to these purposes, the War was an abject failure.
Another cost may be seen in the war’s impact on American democracy. President Roosevelt, in his quest to move the country in the direction he desired, often ignored the will of the people and their congressional leaders. He subverted democracy, engaging ever more in clandestine behavior and public misrepresentation of the facts.
Americans, prior to World War II, would enter a war, mobilize, and then at war’s end demobilize and return to a civilian-centered, more democratic political economy. Not this time. Directly linked with Roosevelt’s desire for more unhindered power, American military leaders desired to leave behind the limits to military power that characterized the U.S. in the 1930s. Due to key unilateral presidential actions that did not pass through the legislative process, and without informing the public, the United States moved seemingly irrevocably from a democracy to a “national security state.”
