During World War II, my father served in the South Pacific. Whom did he think he was fighting? I know from reviewing his letters back home that it wasn’t “the Imperial Japanese government.” He was fighting “the Japs.”
GIs deployed to Europe, I’m willing to bet, didn’t identify their enemy as the Wehrmacht or even the Nazis. They were at war with the Germans — or the Jerries, or the Huns, or Fritz.
That instinct, to name the enemy as a whole people, is understandable in wartime. It’s also often wrong. If we get it wrong, then it’s to our detriment.
