Fairness, Savagery, Delight, Trauma, and Vice

I. Th e Fair and the Savage Americans fought two distinct wars between 1941 and 1945, wars separated not only by geography but also by the most basic assumptions of moral behavior. In terms of battlefi eld conduct, the war that Americans fought in Europe was not markedly diff erent from the Napoleonic wars. But the war in the Pacifi c was revolutionary, a plunge into brutality and race hatred with seemingly no bottom. More than any other single factor, the diff erences between these two wars were rooted in the ways the enemies regarded each other.