c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ A central theme of the recently concluded Jewish High Holidays is”heshbon ha-nefesh,”Hebrew for”inventory of the soul.”Although that spiritual stock-taking is primarily aimed at personal behavior, it is clear that a national”heshbon ha-nefesh”is currently under way regarding highly questionable American military conduct during wartime.

Newly released evidence points to two incidents only now being revealed a half-century after they took place during World War II and the Korean conflict.

At war’s end in 1945 American troops in Austria intercepted a Nazi train of 24 railroad cars filled with personal possessions the Germans had forcibly taken from the nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews murdered during the Holocaust. The long train of civilian booty contained thousands of gold wedding rings, silver jewelry, oil paintings, antique clocks, china and furs.

Gen. Harry J. Collins, the area’s American military commander at the time, helped himself to the”very best”of the Jewish possessions to furnish his newly acquired villa in Austria. He also apparently condoned the systematic theft by his troops of much of the dead Jews’ possessions. It seems Collins and other high-ranking officers ignored Army regulations requiring the preservation and return of civilian assets and property.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, deputy secretary of the treasury and a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, has called Collins’ action of nearly 55 years ago”a massive exception to the rules … and a dark chapter in our immediate postwar history.” Said Eizenstat,”The United States is willing to hold itself to the same high standard to which it has held others.”A full investigation has been promised by the Army.

The second incident was the alleged murder of many Korean civilians by our armed forces in 1950 during the early days of our military involvement in that country. Because our combat troops were inexperienced and outnumbered by the North Korean army, American field commanders apparently approved the shooting of civilians who were suspected of being involved with the enemy.

To America’s credit, that long-ago incident is also under investigation.

I wonder how many similar incidents are still being kept from public knowledge. When I served as an Air Force chaplain in Asia during the 1960s, I encountered many military personnel who were burdened with guilt for the horrific actions they had committed against civilians in our wars with Japan and North Korea.

The traumatic act of telling a chaplain about killing civilians during wartime was a cathartic experience, a”heshbon ha-nefesh,”for everyone concerned. I strongly believe a full national accounting of wartime illegalities and murders, no matter how painful, is imperative.

Stealing property that belonged to Jewish Holocaust victims and shooting Korean civilians tragically repudiate a popular myth deeply embedded in our national psyche: Our armed forces always behave in an ethical way toward civilians and their property during wartime.

There is little doubt U.S. armed forces genuinely attempt to spare civilians from the brutal destructive power of modern warfare. But even our laser-guided bombs and surgical missile strikes frequently kill innocent civilians, and we must, as a nation, recognize that grim reality of warfare. There is no immaculate, casualty-free military action.

It is now time to permanently bury the myth about our military’s behavior toward civilians because it conveniently overlooks what American Southerners painfully learned first-hand in 1864 from Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman:”War is hell.” Sherman and his army carried out a brutal march from Atlanta to Savannah, Ga., that was filled with civilian atrocities. And those lethal attacks on noncombatants were part of a master plan, approved by President Abraham Lincoln, designed to destroy Confederate morale and end the Civil War. The diaries of Sherman’s troops are filled with bloody accounts of how Union forces deliberately”destroyed all we could not eat … and raised hell generally.” Even though his victims were fellow Americans, Sherman himself wrote that”we are fighting a hostile people and we must make young and old, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war … (the civilian population) must be devastated.” One hopes the investigations of the robbed train and the murdered Koreans will be thorough and honest. Indeed, they must be if Americans seek true healing and closure for ourselves and with our former enemies.

DEA END RUDIN