What Is Military Necessity?

Two groups of churchmen who have never thought alike about war last week found themselves in agreement. Both had serious objections to the vagueness of "unconditional surrender" and the obliteration bombing of Jap cities.

First to put itself on record was a group prodded by members of the frankly pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. Sixty religious and educational leaders (including Professor Walter Russell Bowie of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, Professor Henry J. Cadbury of the Harvard Divinity School and Professor Rufus M. Jones of Quaker Haverford College) signed a statement describing U.S. raids on Japan as "large-scale massacre ... of defenseless women and children . . . [which] cannot be so 'effective' in military terms as to justify itself in terms of humanity and the future peace of the world. . . . The Japanese are not all entirely evil. . . .

There are millions of men and women of good will in Japan . . . who are a necessary foundation stone in the structure of world peace." To cut the war short of Japan's "utter ruin," the signers asked for "clear and immediate formulation of American objectives [and] conditions of surrender."

The editorial board of Christianity and Crisis, a bi-weekly journal which Reinhold Niebuhr started in 1941 to fight pacifist religious views, came to much the same conclusions: the war might be shortened "if we were to state the conditions of peace, however harsh, in clear terms and thus . . . prevent the militarists from using the fear of annihilation as their final resource of power over the nation. . . .

We accept the bombing of strategic centers and objects as a doleful necessity of modern war [but] we are disturbed by . ., . military strategies calculated to destroy all the great cities of Japan crowded with their helpless populations. ... No military strategist has given the nation proof of the 'military necessity' of unrestricted bombing."

The New York Herald Tribune scowled at the churchmen's "naivete, not to say . . . lack of information." Captain James Vest of New Albany, Ind., a wounded veteran of Bataan, said flatly: "Those ministers . . . didn't see what the Japs did to the Filipinos and the natives of New Guinea. They don't know what the hell the score is."

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