A Humanitarian Moment? The U.S. Military in Europe, 1943–1946

Abstract

The U.S. military is not usually identified as a humanitarian force, and indeed the very concept of military humanitarianism strikes one as a paradox. According to conventional wisdom, at least, modern humanitarianism emerged as a direct response and even an antidote to military violence. As the story goes, Geneva businessman Henri Dunant's efforts to redress the horrors of war after seeing the terrible aftermath of the Battle of Solferino (1859) eventually gave rise to the Geneva Conventions and the Red Cross movement. The two world wars reinforced this violence-breeds-care logic, as the vast scale of wartime suffering generated ever greater humanitarian counter-efforts. By the 1940s, an array of national, international, and supranational organizations increasingly aspired to provide neutral and impartial relief to the victims of war, thereby counteracting, or so they hoped, the violence and partisanship of armed conflict. Even if, on closer inspection, humanitarianism and warfare have always had a more symbiotic relationship—after all, in an era of citizen armies it was only the relative humanization of warfare that guaranteed its survival as an instrument of statecraft—the conceptual divide between the military and the humanitarian remains strong.1