PARTISAN REVIEW
tough air-force general is sending out bomber-missions, beyond range
of fighter-protection, to destroy three jet-plane factories that lie
in
eastern
Germany. This operation, vital to Allied air superiority but entailing
terrific losses on three successive days, is opposed, from self-interested
motives, by a journalist, a staff bigwig, and a Southern congressman,
all of whom are more concerned with public opinion and personal ad–
vancement than with the prosecution of the war. The public will not
stand for these losses, the general is told by his critics, and in deference
to these spokesmen of the public, the general is finally deprived of his
command. The operation, however, is carried through, for the staff
officer who replaces the general is converted overnight to his position;
once he is in the general's place, he sees with the general's eyes. This play,
of course, can be construed as justifying all on-the-spot military decisions;
certainly, it denies the public the right of exercising judgment in an
emergency or protesting the sacrifice of life. Yet the effect of the play
as a whole is not to justify all on-the-spot decisions, but only a par–
ticular one, one, in fact, which is purely fictional and which is ex–
plained by the playwright to the public
in
the fullest detail. There can
be no doubt whatever, if war itself is accepted as moral, that the
stage general created by Mr. William Wister Haines took the correct
course in the stage circumstances Mr. Haines contrived for him. This,
however, leaves General Patton exactly where he was.
Of the hopelessness of drawing moral inferences from any specific
military action,
Command Decision
provides a striking illustration. Mr.
Haines perhaps wished to whitewash some actual general, but this
could only be accomplished by an actual board of inquiry. Killing men
can never be good, and all that can be pleaded in its favor is that there
were extenuating circumstances. There can be no analogues here, for the
act, if it is to be palliated at all, must be seen in its concrete setting;
theft in general is not condoned if a hungry man is pardoned for
stealing a loaf of bread. Moral speculation, in fact, has no place in the
military scene: one cannot say how many lives should be expendable for
the sake of an
x
objective unless one knows precisely what the objective
is worth, what alternative methods there are of taking it, and how
much time there is. But this implies an omniscience that can be only
ex post facto.
Once one accepts the principle that any life is expend–
able, the principle, that is, of war, then no life has an established value,
and everything is tested by results. Humanitarian considerations may be
a factor in a military decision; they cannot, obviously, govern it, for war
is the inhumane. Tenderness for the lives entrusted to him is a good
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