The Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century

A groundbreaking and controversial look at the question of wartime atrocities, by an all-star group of historians. How do societies remember, or forget, the wartime atrocities their soldiers and citizens may have committed? In The Crimes of War leading historians explore this difficult, troubling question. Offering valuable comparative insight, the book includes original essays on the United States in Vietnam and Korea, the Germans during World War II, and the Japanese in China. Citing recent admissions of the killing of unarmed Koreans by American troops at No Gun Ri, newly unearthed evidence of atrocities committed by German soldiers (who were not affiliated with the Nazi SS) on the Russian front, and a new spate of information on Japanese barbarity in China during World War II, the essays sketch a distinctive, repeated pattern from country to country, which typically includes a half-century of denial before a given society is prepared to confront these kinds of grizzly truths about the behavior of its citizens and soldiers. Sure to cause a stir, The Crimes of War delineates a whole new area of inquiry and reveals fascinating patterns of human emotion and behavior. Contributors include distinguished European and American historians such as Saul Friedländer, Omer Bartov, John Dower, Christopher Browning, and Marilyn Young.