“Thank God For the Atom Bomb”
Reading Paul Fussell’s 1981 essay and wishing he was still a professor today at UPenn so he could blast away at current campus nonsense
On Fussell’s desk at Penn, he had a rock that said “Bullshit Detector,” which he’d turn to face his student, in this case my brother Daniel whose reaction was “Gulp.”
Fussell heard that a junior Penn professor-–my friend Al–– was planning to teach a course on the literature of the Holocaust. Al was summoned to Fussell’s office to face a stern reprimand for daring to tackle the topic. Instead, Fussell presented Al with a crosshatch of wire that Fussell had cut from a fence at Auschwitz.
In addition to being the terror and delight of UPenn’s English Department in the 1980s, Paul Fussell (1924-2012) was many things:
a professional curmudgeon and a snob of the old school–––see his books “Class” and “B.A.D.”;
a celebrated writer of literary criticism and memoir about 20th century war––see his book “The Great War and Modern Memory” ;
a badly wounded soldier of the European front line in World War Two, moved in 1945 to the Pacific in preparation for the invasion of Japan.
But most of all, he was America’s answer to George Orwell. Like Orwell, he despised cant, hypocrisy, and careless thinking, especially about war.
“Thank God for the Atom Bomb” was Fussell’s response to those who argued that it had been wrong to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the way to end the war against Japan. In the background, the Allied war machine was gearing up for the alternative, a massive invasion of the Japanese homeland.
The arguments against using the bombs came in two different flavors. One was that the use of these new and terrible weapons of mass destruction against civilians was immoral; the other was that if America had been patient for a while longer, the Japanese might have surrendered on their own without either the bombs or an invasion.
Fussell starts from a viewpoint that in writing about war, there is no substitute for
“the importance of experience, sheer, vulgar experience… of having to come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your death.”
And not just your destruction, but your torture and mutilation as well.
The essay contains a great deal of “unspeakable savagery.” Gold teeth are wrenched from still living Japanese soldiers, marines slide pell-mell down hills of mud and dysentery shit into piles of maggot-ridden corpses, severed penises are stuffed in the mouths of American corpses.
An American soldier screams in unrelieved pain while he stares at the
”bloody mess that was once my left arm, its fingers and palm turned upward, like a flower looking to the sun for its strength.”
Fussell’s purpose is to show that “one’s views about that use of the atom bomb” generally turned on whether or not one had lived through the otherwise unimaginable, hellish dystopia of the front line.
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith asserted that the Japanese would have surrendered without the bomb’s use, maybe “in two or three weeks.”
Fussell disagreed. He believed that the Japanese had no plans to surrender, and, if invaded, were prepared to fight for every inch. The planned invasion had a timeline of a year to complete with an estimate of one million Allied casualties.
All of that is speculation, however, because it dealt with the unknowable future of history.1 What the American government knew at the time was that the Japanese government had asked every Japanese adult to give their lives if necessary to resist an invasion. Fifty million kamikazes using any weapon at hand.
What we also knew was that in the weeks before Hiroshima, “Allied casualties were running to 7,000 per week.” Galbraith’s three weeks of patience meant 21,000 more Allied deaths.
In fact, Allied deaths continued unabated in the interim between the dropping of the two atom bombs. It was in that pause, for example, that the Indianapolis was sunk, leading to the deaths by explosion, drowning, and sharks of nearly 1,000 American sailors. 2
Galbraith, advocate of patience until the Japanese discovered the virtues of peace on their own, served in Washington at the Office of Price Administration, a position Fussell doesn’t necessarily disparage:
“I don’t demand that [Gallbraith] experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn’t.”
This follows Fussell’s general principle that “the farther from the scene of horror, the easier the talk.”
There was a class issue as well. The men at the very tip of the spear, the enlisted men, were generally from the lower classes, thus not the best educated or the most articulate, so the least likely to write the influential histories of the war.
But Fussell found a few of the “rough diamonds”–––certainly he was a diamond himself–––who saw the worst and had the chops to write about it. For example, Pfc. E. B. Sledge3 who was essentially given a death warrant when told he would be part of the first invasion wave in which “few marines would get ashore alive.”
Fussell recalls his reaction, and that of Sledge and his fellow grunts, upon learning of the Japanese surrendered after Nagasaki:
“for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy.”
And what of the morality of killing the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Fussell points out that such moral questions had already long been decided during the course of the war. The civilian bombing campaign against Germany had killed about 500,000 people and the bombing of Tokyo had killed about 100,000. The two atomic bombs killed about another 100,000 people. 4
Fussell’s stronger answer is that the only morality associated with war is to end it as quickly as possible, because war itself is the very absence of morality. Fussell quotes Patton:
“War is not a contest with gloves. It is resorted to only when laws, which are rules, have failed.”
If Fussell were still a professor at Penn today observing the costumed protesters, their slogans, banners, and flags, the torrent on social media of wild words, the snap of closed checkbooks and ultimatums from entitled donors, I think he would be scathing in his critique of everybody’s sententious acts of performance.
I believe he would dismiss as poppycock the pronouncements of those in America offering facile advice about the very real and brutal war going on in the Middle East, or for that matter, about the almost forgotten, no less dreadful war in Ukraine, seemingly no longer interesting enough to hold America’s fugitive attention. 5
Fussell might see in all this a particularly modern American sign of folly and decay to indulge ourselves in bloodless, fickle passion while others shed real blood. And not just folly or decay, but a lack of humility to understand how far removed we are from the front lines, a lack of humility to understand what we cannot possibly know. 6
A little more of Fussell for those who want it
All quotes from Doing Battle (1998)
About “Thank God For the Atom Bomb”
“[The essay] was not innocent of a desire to make trouble.
“I knew that the [essay], although gratifying to the aging ex-infantrymen, would annoy pacifists, certain social scientists, international reformers, and others ignorant of the ugly physical and psychological details of the war they had little intimate knowledge of.”
About Penn’s Wharton School of Business (Undergraduate) from which I (David Roberts) graduated.
“I’d never taught before at an institution where the studies aiming to stretch the intellect and make real the whole course of human history seemed to take second place to those designed to help students make lots of money.”
About Penn
“ ‘A bit of a troublemaker––so I was designated by the President of the University of Pennsylvania after I’d published the view that intellectually pretentious universities would do well to scale down, if not abandon entirely their high-powered athletic programs, which seem, when you think about it, to have little to do with their proper (their only?) business, the development of intellect, so sorely needed in the United States.”
Joshua Doležal is a kindred spirit in this regard. Read his take on sports taking over colleges
A theme about history I have mentioned before, which Fussell beautifully summarizes as:
“The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned.”
This clip from the movie Jaws has Quint (Robert Shaw) recount the Indianapolis tragedy in spellbinding fashion.
Private First Class E. B. Sledge wrote the memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa
Numbers like these ought to be stated as broad estimates and recognized as definitionally difficult. Does one count the deaths of German civilians from starvation to which the bombings contributed or the deaths from cancers and radiation sickness that the atom bombs ultimately caused? The point is that halved or doubled, the numbers are always going to be horrible beyond imagining.
Below from the New York Times, November 13th, in an article about the war in Ukraine hidden near the very bottom of the digital edition.
“Indeed, little ground has changed hands in Ukraine this year despite intense fighting and substantial casualties on both sides, and Russia still retains control over around one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory.”
I am disturbed about waning public interest in and support for Ukraine. This recent Gallup Poll tells the story. One highlight (or lowlight) is that a plurality of Americans and a majority of Republicans now believe that we are giving too much aid to Ukraine. Abandonment is a real risk.
Pictures and videos are no substitute for experience.
John Keegan, the greatest military historian of modern times, begins the book that made his career, The Face of Battle, with these words:
“I have not been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath.”
Keegan then describes the facsimiles of battles he’s seen in film, on TV, in photos, in conversation, etc. He ends his introductory remarks:
“And I grow increasingly convinced that I have very little idea of what a battle can be like.”
It’s worth noting that for almost thirty years, we will not have had a president who fought in a war, the last being George H.W. Bush, a pilot in the Pacific Theatre of WW2.
The Great War and Modern Memory is a good book to have on your bookshelves, most particularly because it reminds everyone that living is done in the present tense.
As the great David McCullough once said: the people of the past had no idea they were living in the past.