From today’s obituaries in the Tampa Tribune:
So was this guy a true pacifist?
In the interests of disclosure, my father was in a similar situation; he wouldn’t fight in WWII but was willing to build fighter planes.
That depends on whether he was truly Scottish.
Norden Bombsight. Norton makes antivirus stuff.
There’s nothing so arcane that there’s not a law or regulation about it somewhere. And this one happens to be within my field of expertise as a Selective Service local board member.
Pacifists generally, in time of war, apply for conscientious objector status. The local board must examine the candidate and determine the nature of his beliefs and determine what service would be appropriate for him to perform.
The categories in question are:
1-O Conscientious Objector- conscientiously opposed to both types (combatant and non-combatant) of military training and service - fulfills his service obligation as a civilian alternative service worker.
1-A-O Conscientious Objector - conscientiously opposed to training and military service requiring the use of arms - fulfills his service obligation in a noncombatant position within the military.
Many medics and drivers over the years have been conscientious objectors, and many of them have performed heroically under fire.
Others have done vital work in defense industries during wartime.
Mr. Duket’s work, one notes, makes bombing more accurate, reducing the numbers of bombs needed to take out a target. This can only lessen collateral damage. This means that he undoubtedly saved many civilian lives that would have been killed, given iron sights.
This is a pretty good rationalization, but by the time a few groups of a 500 plane raid have dropped their bombs the ground is so obscured by dust and smoke that the following groups can’t see anything.
It’s a little late for philosophy, or indeed semantics, but I suppose it depends on how you define {or how he defined} pacifism - some CO’s refused to have anything to do with anything relating to the war effort, and in NZ at least, were often imprisoned and suffered greatly for their beliefs: I suppose you could call them “true” pacifists.
Others, as Mr Moto pointed out, refused combatant duties, but served as medical personnel or worked within the defence industry: I suppose it’s possible to laud the former as humanitarian while criticising the latter as hypocritical, but then what do you make of the ambulance driver who carries wounded soldiers to hospital knowing that once recovered they will be sent back into combat to kill again? Is he {or she} a “true” pacifist? How long is a piece of string?
Good point. I would say that it is the soldier’s responsibility to decide whether he is going to kill again. If the pacifist has faith in humanity (and why wouldn’t he – what’s the point of being a pacifist if he doesn’t?) he will be OK with leaving that decision to the soldier. A lot of guys, especially in WWII, made it a point not to shoot to kill. The pacifist’s goal (I suppose) is to preserve life.
You seem to attribute a lot of personal moral initiative to the soldier: combat personnel don’t really have the luxury of deciding whether they’re going to kill or not. And I’d be interested in a cite that many WW2 soldiers made a point of not shooting to kill - nothing I’ve read suggests this, and any combat soldier who made this decision would be an immense liability not only to himself but to his unit.
I’ll have to ask for the cite of a properly designed survey that proves this to be true.
Can Handle The Truth, you may be confusing your world wars. Richard Dawkins in an interesting chapter on Game Theory in The Selfish Gene discusses unofficial non-aggression pacts in WW1 trench warfare:
“A senior British officer, on a visit to the trenches, is quoted as being astonished to observe German soldiers walking about within rifle range behind their own line. ‘Our men appeared to take no notice. I privately made up my own mind to do away with that sort of thing when we took over; such things should not be allowed. These people evidently did not know there was a war on. Both sides apparently believed in the policy of “live and let live”.’”
Such a forgiving strategy might work well in static and stalemated WW1 trench warfare, where there was no ground to be gained or lost apart from in “the big push” following an artillery barrage; on the fluid and mobile battlefields of WW2, it would be suicidal.
And yet it’s now believed by more than a few that the Norden bombsite was something of a hoax. It was probably better than other designs, but wasn’t anywhere near as accurate as its supporters claimed. Indeed, there’s a contention that some of them knew its true capabilities and deliberately distorted them, by way of encouraging US taxpayers (and Allied bomber crews) to believe in the value of what were expensive, dangerous and not very effective missions.
I suppose that adds a further twist to the OP: was Mr Duket a “true pacifist” if he didn’t carry a gun but helped build to more effective weapons which turned out not to be as effective as advertised? I’d measure my piece of string, but it’s the only thing between my pants and gravity.
Under the right conditions the Norden was accurate. Given a bomb with the correct aerodynamics, i.e. those that had been programmed into the sight, a stable bombing platform, little or no wind, sufficient time to stabilize the sight, a pilot and bombardier who were operating under test conditions, and maybe some other conditions that I haven’t thought of, the Norden sight gave excellent results.
These conditions were seldom met in operations. The inflation of the Norden capabilities resulted from people not understanding that it was just one element in a complex system including the weather, the bomb, the airplane, the pilot or the aircraft autopilot, the bombardier and so on. One exeedingly serious problem was that of target identification. The bombardier had very little time to identify the correct target and one of the tricks of camouflage artists was to dress up a nearby feature so that it was easily mistaken for the target. If the weather was marginal it just made the target identification worse, and later groups in the bombing chain were presented with a target that was at least partially obscured by smoke and dust.
For example the post-raid report on my group’s (I wasn’t there at the time) second D-Day raid was a total miss distance of about 3000’ bombing from an altitude of about 5000’. The weather was terrible with the group going in and out of scattered clouds on the bomb run and the bombardier obviously chose the wrong target.
The taxpayers might have been fooled, but that really doesn’t make a bit of difference since they had no say in the matter anyway. Bomber crews might have been fooled in the very beginning but it didn’t take long for the true nature of the situation to become crystal clear to them.
Strategic bombing of production facilities turned out to be relatively ineffective sans nuclear weapons. Tactical bombing of transportation facilities in direct support of ground operations was effective and general attacks on the transportation network late in the war after the stratospheric command levels caught on to it was exceedingly so.
My cite for the info I posted is the book On Killing : The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.
Quotes from reviewers:
Perhaps I have been monumentally whooshed or am suffering form Monday slowness of brain, but the meaning of that post passed me by. Explain?
No True Scotsman Fallacy
http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/No_True_Scotsman
I don’t think it fits the case, but I suppose that’s what he had in mind.
It couldn’t possibly have fit the case when I posted it, because no case yet existed–it was the second post.
It was more of a prediction: When you ask whether someone is or is not something, it’s very important to have a concrete definition of “something.” I don’t think pacifism has such a definition, so a debate like this is ultimately going to boil down to tenuously defined subjective personal definitions.
If it doesn’t get hijacked into an (interesting!) discussion on how effective a WWII-era bombsight was, that is. 
thanks, Rune and Metacom - so I don’t have to be worrying about possible odd reamrks about Scots.
To all others, I apologise for the mini-hijack but I truly was mystified.
Sounds like an excellent idea for a new thread!