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World War II Veteran: "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."
May 17, 2005 12:16 PM
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I posted this a couple years ago over at the US History board. Since the leftist crowd of revisionists are at it again, I thought I'd re-post it.
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Paul Fussell, a former soldier, who fought in the Pacific during WW2, wrote "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."
Considering the article is pretty lengthy, I'm only going to type a few paragraphs. However, it was a truly amazing article, written in 1981. If others are interested in reading the entire thing, it is in "The Norton Reader," the tenth edition.
So, here goes:
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I bring up the matter because, writing on the forty-second anniversary of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I want to consider something suggested by the long debate about ethics, if any, of that ghastly affair. Namely, the importance of experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one's views about the use of the atom bomb.
The experience I'm talking about is having to come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your death. The experience is common to those in the marines and the infantry and even the line navy, to those, in short, who fought the Second World War mindful always that their mission was, as they were repeatedly assured, "to close with the enemy and destroy him." Destroy, notice: not hurt, frighten, drive away, or capture. I think there's something to be learned about that war, as well as about the tendency of historical memory unwittingly to resolve ambiguity and generally clean up the premises, by considering the way testimonies emanating from real war experience tend to complicate attitudes about the most cruel ending of that most cruel war.
"What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?" The ecruiting poster deserves ridicule and contempt, of course, but here its question is embarrassingly relevant, and the problem is one that touches on the dirty little secret of social class in America. Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was "wrong" seem to be implying "that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs." People holding such views, he notes, "do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots." And there's an eloquence problem: most of those with firsthand experience of the war at its worst were not elaborately educated people. Relatively inarticulate, most have remained silent about what they know. That is, few of those destined to be blown to pieces if the main Japanese islands had been invaded went on to become our most effective men of letters or impressive ethical theorists or professors of contemporary history or of international law.
......On the other hand, John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese would have surrendered surely by Novemeber without an invasion. He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, "a difference, at most, of two or three weeks." But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk, and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week. "Two or three weeks," says Galbraith. Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you're one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed(heads chopped off);the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk; the destroyer Callaghan wnet down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the Destroyer escort Underhill was lost. That's a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don't demand that he experience having his axx shot off. I merely note that he didn't.
In general, the principle is, the farther from the scene of horror, the easier the talk. One young combat naval officer close to the action wrote home in the fall of 1943, just before the marines underwent the agony of Tarawa: "When I read that we will fight the Japs for years if necessary and will sacrifice hundreds of thousands if we must, I always like to check from where he's talking: it's seldom out here." That was Lieutenant John F. Kennedy. And Winston Churchill, with an irony perhaps too broad and easy, noted in Parliament that the people who preferred invasion to A-bombing seemed to have "no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves."
The dramatic postwar Japanese success at hustling and merchandising and tourism has effaced for most people the vicious assault context in which the Hiroshima horror should be viewed. It is easy to forget, or not to know, what Japan was like before it was destroyed, and then humiliated, tamed, and constitutionalized by the West. "Implacable, treacherous, barbaric"- those were Admiral Halsey's characterizations of the enemy, and at the time few facing the japanese would deny that they fit to a T. One remembers the captured American airmen-the lucky ones who escaped decapitation-locked for years in packing crates. One remembers the gleeful use of bayonets on civilians, on nurses and the wounded, in Hong Kong and Singapore. Anyone who actually fought in the Pacific recalls the Japanese routinely firing on medics, killing the wounded, and cutting off the penises of the dead to stick in the corpses' mouths. The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with the lack of information about the Pacific war.
Why not? Why not just blow them all up, with satchel charges or with something stronger? Why not, indeed, drop a new kind of bomb on them, and on the un-informed ones too, since the japanese government has announced that women from ages of seventeen to forty are being called up to repel the invasion? The intelligence officer of the U.S. Fifth Air Force declared on July 21, 1945, that "the entire population of Japan is a proper military target," and he added emphatically, "There are no civilians in japan." Why delay and allow one more American High School kid to see his own intestines blown out of his body and spread before him in the dirt while he screams and screams when with the new bomb we can end the whole thing just like that?
Shocked, OK, but why ashamed? Because we'd destroyed civilians? We'd bee doing that for years, in raids on Hamburg and Berlin and Cologne and Frankfurt and Manheim and Dresden, and Tokyo, and besides, the two A-bombs wiped out 10,000 Japanese troops. The purpose of the bombs was not to "punish" people but to stop the war. The Hiroshima bomb wasn't dropped "without warning." Actually, two days before, 720,000 leaflets were dropped on the city urging everyone to get out and indicating that the place was going to be(as the Potsdam Declaration had promised) obliterated. Of course few left.
(Fussell speaking about an author, Glenn Gray)The future scholar-critic who writes The History of Canting in the Twentieth Century will find much to study and interpret in the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness of the A-bomb droppers. He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First, it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not socially so unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces, where he might have had to compromise the purity and clarity of his moral system by the experience of weighing his own life against someone else's. Down there, which is where the other people were, is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule. When the young soldier with the wild eyes comes at you, firing, do you shoot him in the foot, hoping he'll be hurt badly enough to drop or mis-aim the gun with which he's going to kill you, or do you shoot him in the chest, and make certain that you and not he will be the survivor of that mortal moment?
The stupidity, parachialism, and greed in the international mismanagement of the whole nuclear challenge should not tempt us to misimagine the circumstances of the bomb's first "use." Nor should our well-justified fears and suspicions occasioned by the capture of the nuclear-power trade by the inept and the mendacious(who have screwed up the works at Three Mile Island, Chernobly, etc.) tempt us to infer retrospectively extraordinary corruption, imbecility, or motiveless malignity in those who decided, all things considered, to drop the bomb. Times change. Harry Truman knew war, and he knew better than some of his critics then and now what he was doing and why he was doing it. "Having found the bomb," he said, "we have used it...We have used it to shorten the agony of young Americans." The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.
------------------------------The END
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(2 of 6)
Re: World War II Veteran: "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."
May 17, 2005 12:36 PM
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The decision is personal for me.
My Dad was a bombardier on a B-29 out of Saipan (The Battlin' Betty III) Can you guess what happened to Battlin' Bettys I and II?
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(3 of 6)
Re: World War II Veteran: "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."
May 17, 2005 12:38 PM
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It's personal for me as well, Major. My grandfather was a Marine sniper who served in Leyte Gulf, Guam, etc. He would have definitely been part of the invasion of Japan.
Take care.
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(4 of 6)
Re: World War II Veteran: "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."
May 17, 2005 6:11 PM
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bump
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(5 of 6)
Re: World War II Veteran: "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."
May 18, 2005 5:21 AM
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>>>Allied casualties were running to over 7000 per week
Amazing Mario. Now lets hear more of the left telling us that it was hundreds of thousands of Allied deaths was just "speculation."
I swear these people are wearing blingfolds.
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Posts:
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(6 of 6)
Re: World War II Veteran: "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."
May 18, 2005 9:47 AM
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Wearing blindfolds?
No, bb; they're just morons.
Later.
"Liberals don't mind discussing who is more patriotic if patriotism is defined as redistributing income and vetoing the Pledge of Allegiance. Only if patriotism is defined as supporting America do they get testy and drone on about 'McCarthyism.'"--Ann Coulter
"Here the country had finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism and they don't want to fight it. They would have, except it would put them on the same side as the United States."--Ann Coulter
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