Thomas Ferebee was 26 when he pulled a lever and incinerated an entire city. With one flick of his wrist he killed more people than had any warrior in history. He was the bombardier on the Enola Gay when it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Ferebee, who died this March, was the subject of a tribute in World, the Evangelical newsweekly. Novelist J. D. Wetterling participated in a fly-by when Ferebee was laid to rest in Mocksville, North Carolina. He was an observer on a B-1 bomber that “passed over the mourners at a respectfully slow funeral pace—300 knots—with wings spread like a gliding goose.” The pilot “tapped the afterburners, pulled the nose up, banked to the right, and that thoroughly modern Memphis Belle spiraled upward above our departed brother-in-arms as if our supersonic angel were transporting his soul to heaven. Invisible and insignificant as my role was, chills ran up my spine.”
Chills ran up mine, too, as I realized that nowhere in his tribute did Wetterling allude to the morality of what Ferebee had done. Wetterling was satisfied to call Ferebee “an American hero” because the bombing precipitated the end of World War II. Certainly it is a good thing to see a war come to an end, especially an unexpectedly rapid end, but at what cost? The end was good, but were the means justified?
Hiroshima was not a military target. It was a psychological target. The bomb was dropped not to destroy troops or munitions but to instill terror in the populace so that the Japanese Imperial government would be forced to capitulate. Instilling terror in civilians is not something heroes do. It is something terrorists do, which makes the incident all the sadder, because this act was perpetrated by one of our countrymen, not by some stereotyped fanatic from the desert sands.
I would not have been so disturbed by Wetterling’s essay if it had appeared in a secular publication such as Soldier of Fortune or American Heritage. I do not expect to find moral considerations in such magazines. But his essay was featured in a Christian publication and never got closer to Christianity than when Wetterling canonized Ferebee as the B-1 climbed steeply. That said, I do not want to be too hard on Wetterling. I presume he is an Evangelical and wrote as an Evangelical would write for an Evangelical publication. That certainly implies limitations, the relevant one in this case being that Evangelicalism has no analogue to the just war theory.
Evangelicalism is a truncated Christianity. Certain things are missing. Evangelical book stores carry books about prayer, but those books do not remotely approach the level of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and that is because Evangelicalism does not have a theory of spirituality. It cannot talk about what it does not know. If Evangelicals want instruction in how to advance in the spiritual life, they have to read Catholic authors.
Similarly with moral issues. Evangelicalism has no moral theology. It has no unified body of knowledge, worked out over the centuries, built up partly from observation, partly from revelation, partly from consideration of the nature of man and the natural law. Catholic moral thinking, when seen at its best, is impressive and eloquent and satisfying. It prevents us from confusing ends and means—and prevents us from not thinking about means at all.
Wetterling’s tribute to Ferebee was well written, even moving, but it also was ill-conceived, as was the decision of the editors of World to run an essay that cried out for moral balance and received none.