Hiroshima

The book of WW2 journalism ends with John Hersey's short book, Hiroshima, which was first published as a single issue of The New Yorker. It is odd not to end the book with V-J day, which as it is gets very little mention in the book, unless the editor is making a moral comment on the Good War. Expecting moralizing and not really looking forward to it, I almost did not read it. Instead, it proves to be astounding, powerful and understated, honest and horrifying. Only an ignorant fool would conclude from it that the bombing was manifestly impermissible, yet equally only the most callous could be left with any pride in it. And at the time, there were a great many who were proud of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the one point where it is easiest to hate the U.S. for its decision is when as the wounded are still dying in the fires the U.S. propaganda broadcasts boast on and on about how only the U.S. could have organized so expensive and difficult a scientific and military invention. Hersey's understatement slightly falters there, saying the voices on the radio were "shouting," but you understand why he would lose control there.

It took me two days to read it, though it is hardly 80 pages (in this closely typeset edition), because very suddenly I would find I had taken on as much horror as I could stand; an almost physical sensation somewhat like the visual numbness produced by five or six hours in an art museum. It is beyond belief that people could live on with that in their past, and yet they did. Of the six survivors Hersey follows, none is wholly wrecked in the disaster. One young woman becomes a nun; she was crippled by a collapsing building, her leg badly twisted and shriveled, and abandoned by her fiance, a soldier who survived the war but never returned to her. Japanese Christians have always been rare; her conversion in the hospital and her discovery of a vocation are distressing indications of her desperation. Even so she turned her disaster to something brave and praiseworthy. The other five were less wounded, but the degree to which they lived full lives afterward is hard for me to comprehend.

Hersey does not hesitate to show how ruinous invading Japan was going to be--the hillsides around Hiroshima were being heavily dug in even as the bomb fell--and how to the bombed the atomic bomb did with horrible novelty what had been done to many other Japanese civilians by incendiaries and HE. Because the Japanese did not know how to interpret a daytime flight of just three bombers, and so gave the all-clear before the bomb fell, it is likely that the atomic bomb maimed and killed a great many people, especially children, who would have escaped a conventional bombing. On the other hand, it was widely thought that Hiroshima was coming due for a severe bombing, since it was the mainland military's headquarters and mostly untouched. The Japanese had already evacuated about a third of the city for that reason. The U.S. could have lessened some of the misery by warning more clearly beforehand and by broadcasting whatever was known about the risks of radiation afterward, but the one would risk a shoot-down or even a capture of the bomb and the other supposes more knowledge than the U.S. had.

In the end, the only two moral conclusions to be reached are still either grim relief that the atomic bombings prevented many hundreds of thousands of deaths in a longer war, or Richard Weaver's conclusion that the war should never have been pressed to that point. Perhaps the Japanese military would not have accepted terms that left the island and its closest possessions intact, but the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender made it certain that massive bombings and eventually a mainland invasion would be needed, in the absence of the atomic bomb. Unconditional surrender is a startling demand, and possibly, though I doubt it, one day it will be clear that it is always immoral, as the civilized world has come to accept that rape and pillage, once the natural prizes of victory, are always immoral.

I cannot really believe it made a difference in this case, however; it was not going to be politically, or indeed morally, possible to leave Japan with Manchuria, for instance, and they were at least as attached to it as Germany was to Alsace-Lorraine. Moreover in everyone's mind was Germany's surrender at its borders in 1918, and the disaster that followed. Twenty years after Armistice, Germany was again attacking the world, even more savagely than before; twenty years after Hiroshima, Japan was foremost among the peaceful nations, a bulwark against aggressive neighbors with global ambitions. Perhaps the Japanese military would have accepted defeat gracefully, surrendered Manchuria, and never again tried to build a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but it beggars belief. Would it really then be the moral choice, to prepare the ground for another terrible war? Even if it were to prove safe, could anyone at the time, as Europe still smoldered, believe that?

The bombings, atomic and conventional, were evil things; if they were not, it is hard to think what is. But so were the horrific landings at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Peleliu; so were the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking; so were the enslavement of Korea and the Philippines; and what good actions were there that would counter those evils and more like them? It is the end of morality, if evil is permitted against evil, but there is often no good, nor is it always possible even to know what is good or evil, and if it should happen to be known, still often the best path was lost long before the crisis, sometimes by men acting for the best. Weaver would unwind three or four generations to find the right path in 1945; but what use is so hypothetical a moral theory?

Italian bravery

The Italians are very strange. They have not fought a war well or bravely in at least 400 years, but individually they often retain more of the old virtus or pride in manly excellence than any other Europeans. So Quattrocchi told his Islamist tormentors "I'll show you how an Italian dies," ensuring that he would not suffer an ignominious beheading by short blade. And in Germany in World War 2, Janet Flanner describes a similar instance:

Below the Gestapo office was a small sub-basement cell where, the Klingelputz prisoners said, the Gestapo had hung other prisoners six at a time by crowding them a row, standing them on stools, dropping nooses around their necks from an overhead bar, and then kicking the stools out from beneath their feet. One Italian became a legend by kicking his stool loose himself and shouting, as his final strangled words, "Viva l'Italia! Viva la liberta!"

How is Italy often so inspiring at the level of individual men and, once for a century or so, at the level of cities, but so pathetic as a nation? They are getting on to 140 years of governing themselves, more or less, but only recently have had any success, in the implausible form of Berlusconi. It would take most Western nations 140 years to decline to the point where Berlusconi would be welcomed for his good governance.

Not that I am inciting anti-Italian bigotry; I am a quarter Italian, have met my Italian relatives, love Italy, and admire ancient Rome without wanting Italy to be Roman. Even so, it is a remarkably incompetent nation-state.

These Terrible Replays of War

World War 2 video games have always bothered me. Not ludicrous games like Castle Wolfenstein 3D or any of the other Nazis-as-demons fantasies, but highly detailed games like Call of Duty and even Squad Leader felt like an exploitation of appalling pain and horrifying bravery. Then again I thought perhaps I should think of them as celebrations of that bravery, though it still seemed a frivolous way to do it. Reporting World War 2: Part Two American Journalism 1944-1946 has a short article by James Agee of The Nation, titled "These Terrible Records of War," in which he praises two newsreels about Iwo Jima, but goes on to say something that felt just like what I had incoherently tried to work out:

Very uneasily, I am beginning to believe that, for all that may be said in favor of our seeing these terrible records of war, we have no business seeing this sort of experience except through our presence and participation.... Since I am reviewing and in ways recommending that others see one of the best and most terrible of war films [the Paramount Iwo Jima newsreel], I cannot avoid mentioning my perplexity.... If at an incurable distance from participation, hopelessly incapable of reactions adequate to the event, we watch men killing each other, we may be quite as profoundly degrading ourselves and, in the process, betraying and separating ourselves the farther from those we are trying to identify ourselves with; none the less because we tell ourselves sincerely that we sit in comfort and watch carnage in order to nurture our patriotism, our conscience, our understanding, and our sympathies.

The newsreel after all would then be followed by some comedy or melodrama. And if that is a problem, surely playing out the war's worst battles hundreds of times is far more of a problem.

Since he recommended it, I looked it up. The corny newsreel voice and music add a very unfortunate silliness to it, though it is still interesting to see that with its tank-slit view, aerial views, frequent lack of music, and tanker intercom recordings it anticipates the modern style of war reporting. At other times the old-timey style increased the sense of distance so it was hard to remember these men really were killing and dying, but the sight of dead soldiers did prompt the familiar helpless confusion of conscience. I wonder how often civilians' hatred of the enemy is an attempt to feel something, anything simple and complete in such confusion.