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Zinn: I was 20 years old. I was a bombardier in the 8th Air Force on a B-17 crew that flew some of the last missions of the war out of England. I went in as a young, radical, antifascist, believing in this war and believing in the idea of a just war against fascism. At war's end I was beginning to have doubts about whether the mayhem we had engaged in was justified: the bombing of cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombings I had engaged in. And then I was beginning to suspect the motives of the Allied leaders. Did they really care that much about fascism? Did they care about the Jews? Was it a war for empire? In the Air Force I encountered a young Trotskyite on another air crew who said to me, "You know, this is an imperialist war." I was sort of shocked. I said, "Well, you're flying missions! Why are you here?" He replied, "I'm here to talk to people like you." [He laughs.] I mean, he didn't convert me, but he shook me up a little.
After the war, as the years went by, I couldn't help contemplating the promises that had been made about what the war would accomplish. You know, General Marshall sent me -- and 16 million others -- a letter congratulating us for winning the war and telling us how the world would now be a different place. Fifty million people were dead and the world was not really that different. I mean, Hitler and Mussolini were gone, as was the Japanese military machine, but fascism and militarism, and racism were still all over the world, and wars were still continuing. So I came to the conclusion that war, whatever quick fix it might give you -- Oh, we've defeated this phenomenon, fascism; we've gotten rid of Hitler (like we've gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, you see) -- whatever spurt of enthusiasm, the after-effects were like those of a drug; first a high and then you settle back into something horrible. So I began to think that any wars, even wars against evil, simply don't accomplish much of anything. In the long run, they simply don't solve the problem. In the interim, an enormous number of people die.
I also came to the conclusion that, given the technology of modern warfare, war is inevitably a war against children, against civilians. When you look at the ratio of civilian to military dead, it changes from 50-50 in World War II to 80-20 in Vietnam, maybe as high as 90-10 today. Do you know this Italian war surgeon, Gino Strada? He wrote Green Parrots: A War Surgeon's Diary. He was doing war surgery in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places. Ninety percent of the people he operated on were civilians. When you face that fact, war is now always a war against civilians, and so against children. No political goal can justify it, and so the great challenge before the human race in our time is to solve the problems of tyranny and aggression, and do it without war. [He laughs quietly.] A very complex and difficult job, but something that has to be faced -- and that's what accounts for my becoming involved in antiwar movements ever since the end of World War II.
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