The first was The Great War and Modern Memory. We were in a staging area near Rheims, ready to be shipped back across the United States for refresher training at Fort Lewis, Washington, and then sent on for final preparation in the Philippines. This book is recommend to any fan of the essay. The underlying assumption is that the war was something somewhat savage to imagine: He notes; the experience I am discussing is coming to grasps, up close and personal . Among Americans it was widely held that the Japanese were really subhuman, little yellow beasts, and popular imagery depicted them as lice, rats, bats, vipers, dogs, and monkeys. . Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. First, it can display the fineness of his moral weave. Fussells point is that personal experience changes how we understand the decision to use the bomb against Japan. Fussell writes that the bombs were necessary to end the war and that they were not intended to punish the Japanese. No one who knows what combat is like, he says, would argue that dropping the bomb was unethical.. To this end he quotes Arthur T Start your 48-hour free trial to unlock this answer and thousands more. Just awful was the comment on the Okinawa slaughter not of some pacifist but of General MacArthur. To intensify the shame Gray insists we feel, he seems willing to fiddle the facts. "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" is an essay written by Paul Fussell, a historian and World War II veteran. Why does Fussell "thank God" for the atom bomb? Change). The warning from US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin . Three days later Charles Sweeney flew in the Enola Gay to Nagasaki, where the bomb Fat Man was dropped. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. Fussell argues that people who consider the decisions wrong lack personal experience of the horrors of war as seen from the infantry perspective, because their class privilege means that they have no relevant personal experience. The main argument of the essay is based around social class and personal experience. And second, by implicationit 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 elses. We have used it to shorten the agony of young Americans.. 2) Considering Fussell's discussion of the treatment of Japanese skulls during World War II, as well as all the other atrocities of World War II (the Holocaust, the Japanese invasions in Asia, the Allied fire bombing of Dresden), what do you think about the . Or even simplified. ISBN-13: 9780671638665. Why? The citizens of Japan had never expected something as extensive as a bomb. By July 10, 1945, the prelanding naval and aerial bombardment of the coast had begun, and the battleships Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and King George V were steaming up and down the coast, softening it up with their sixteen-inch shells. To this day, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still a source of pain and shame for those afflicted and for those who survived. His most valuable pieces deal with the horrors of modern warfare and its literaturesomewhat extending and generalizing his powerful The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). . Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Course Syllabus School, What Is It GoodFor? I looked to theleft of me and saw the bloody mess that was once my left arm; its fingers and palm were turned upward, like a flower looking to the sun for its strength. He notes that thousands of allied soldiers died each week, and that the claim that "the Japanese would have surrendered if given time, so the bombings were unethical" ignores the consequences of such patience (4). Source: Paul Fussell, a World War II Soldier, Thank God for the Atom Bomb,1990. Dowers book, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, is an intelligently crafted review of the racial aspects that were integral to the incredible violence of the Pacific theater. Have the . ) Why does Fussell "thank God" for the atom bomb? The war was over, the story goes, and the US just wanted to demonstrate its nuclear capacity to the world. Fussell starts his argument with why it was necessary to drop the bomb. Times change. He often used first person which connected the audience with the author. Why did Fussel "thank god for the atom bomb? Steven Pinker Will ChatGPT Replace HumanWriters? Paul Fussell. Two or three weeks, says Galbraith. Someone, please help this child. Fussell had written a guide to poetic form and an equally fine critical life of Samuel Johnson when, in 1975, he broke out as an intellectual celebrity with The Great War and Modern Memory, which. If only it could have been rushed into production faster and dropped at theright moment on the Reich Chancellery or Berchtesgaden or Hitlers military headquarters in East Prussia (where Colonel Stauffenbergs July 20 bomb didnt do the job because it wasnt big enough), much of the Nazi hierarchy could have been pulverized immediately, saving not just the embarrassment of the Nuremberg trials but the lives of around four million Jews, Poles, Slavs, and gypsies, not to mention the lives and limbs of millions of Allied and German soldiers. ISBN-10: 0671638661. Fussell's essay is an attempt to debunk the arguments of these critics, who argue that Japan would have surrendered without the Americans' detonation of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. A public opinion survey of Americans conducted in October 1945 found 85 percent favoring the bombs and 23 percent willing to drop more; Truman was an opinion-shaping leader, but he also reflected the wartime attitude of most Americans. What is the material covered?" With this in mind, they would have continued to drag out the war, which shows that dropping the bombs sped up the war which lessened the casualties. He does agree that the dropping of the bomb was horrific and not morally right, but the bombs were necessary. Why not, indeed, drop a new kind of bomb on them, and on the un-uniformed ones too, since the Japanese government has announced that women from ages of seventeen to forty are being called up to repel the invasion? What role does his own experience of history play in shaping his views as an historian? Anticipating objections from those without such experience, in his book WWII Jones carefully prepares for his chapter on the A-bombs by detailing the plans already in motion for the infantry assaults on the home islands of Kyushu (thirteen divisions scheduled to land in November 1945) andultimately Honshu (sixteen divisions scheduled for March 1946). Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. And Sledge has added a comment on such experience and the insulation provided by even a short distance: Often people just behind our rifle companies couldnt understand what we knew. Glenn Gray was not in a rifle company, or even just behind one. If the bomb had only been ready in time, the young men of my infantry platoon would not have been so cruelly killed and wounded. On the contrary, the Americans were also known as demonic. Question: 1.) And indeed the bombs were . He begins his essay with a verse: In life, experience is the great teacher. The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. The killing was all going to be over, and peace was actually going to be the state of things. In his article, Fussell makes this point in various manners. The people became prejudice. During the early 1920s the anti-Japanese crusade grew nastier (Marrin 63). )What was one of the major concerns of the American leaders and military during this time? (Its worth noting in passing how few hopes blacks could entertain of desegregation and decent treatment when the U.S. Army itself slandered the enemy as the little brown Jap.) Marines and soldiers could augment their view of their own invincibility by possessing a well-washed Japanese skull, and very soon after Guadalcanal it was common to treat surrendering Japanese as handy rifle targets. During this period Japanese people living in both Japan and the United States of America were seen as less that human. . Having found the bomb, he said, we have used it. In Paul Fussell's essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" , he argues the importance of experience when thinking about the use of the atom bomb. So many maimed. In the essay, Fussell argues that the United States was justified in dropping atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Fussell's argument resembles the standard defense of the bombings: dropping atomic bombs on two cities forced Japan to surrender without a costly US invasion of Japan and thus supposedly saved more American and Japanese lives than were lost in the bombings. World War II not only exacerbated the racial tension within the American people, but also excused the racist actions taken by American government against the Japanese Americans, as the Americans then prided themselves for fighting in the good war. One kamikaze pilot, discouraged by his units failure to impede the Americans very much despite the bizarre casualties it caused, wrote before diving his plane onto an American ship I see the war situation becoming more desperate. It would be not just stupid but would betray a lamentable want of human experience to expect soldiers to be very sensitive humanitarians. His books include: The Making of an American High School (Yale, 1988); How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education (Yale, 1997); The Trouble with Ed Schools (Yale University Press, 2004); Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling (Harvard, 2010); and A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education (Chicago, 2017).View all posts by David Labaree. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. of drones and debtors forbes. Log in here. Wed been doing that for years, in raids on Hamburg and Berlin and Cologne and Frankfurt and Mannheim and Dresden, and Tokyo, and besides, the two A-bombs wiped out 10,000 Japanese troops, not often thought of now, John Herseys kindly physicians and Jesuit priests being more touching. A few days later, the second atomic bomb devastated the city of Nagasaki. What was required, said the Marine Corps journal The Leatherneck in May 1945, was a gigantic task of extermination. The Japanese constituted a pestilence, and the only appropriate treatment was annihilation. Some of the marines landing on Iwo Jima had Rodent Exterminator written on their helmet covers, and on one American flagship the naval commander had erected a large sign enjoining all to KILL JAPS! One remembers the gleeful use of bayonets on civilians, on nurses and the wounded, in Hong Kong and Singapore. Division headquarters is milesmilesbehind the line where soldiers experience terror and madness and relieve those pressures by crazy brutality and sadism. A professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania whose speciality is the eighteenth century, Paul Fuss View the full answer Herseys straight, simple narrative technique presents the catastrophe in its raw form, including the voices of those who experienced the bombing firsthand. We would have been murdered in the biggest massacre of the war. Paul Fussell is a smart man with an abundance of experience. When the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came, he asks us to believe, manyan American soldier felt shocked and ashamed. Shocked, OK, but why ashamed? The japanese were nowhere near aware of what was going to happen that day, and they had no idea of how much pain and suffering it would inflict. Format: Hardcover. #4. Truman was not being sly or coy whenhe insisted that the bomb was only another weapon. History, as Eliots Gerontion notes. ) Why does Fussell "thank God" for the atom bomb?What role does his own experience of history play in shaping his views as an historian? Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast . He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. They are, on the one hand, says Bruce Page, the imperialist class-forces acting through Harry Truman and, on the other, those representing the humane, democratic virtuesin short, fascists as opposed to populists. But ironically the bomb saved the lives not of any imperialists but only of the low and humble, the quintessentially democratic huddled massesthe conscripted enlisted men manning the fated invasion divisions and the sailors crouching at their gun-mounts in terror of the Kamikazes. In the summer of 1945 Marshal Terauchi issueda significant order: at the moment the Allies invaded the main islands, all prisoners were to be killed by the prison-camp commanders. Alsop concludes: Japanese surrender could never have been obtained, at any rate without the honor-satisfying bloodbath envisioned by Anami, if the hideous destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not finally galvanized the peace advocates into tearing up the entire Japanese bookof rules. The Japanese plan to deploy the undefeated bulk of their ground forces, over two million men, plus 10,000 kamikaze planes, plus the elderly and all the women and children with sharpened spears they could muster in a suicidal defense makes it absurd, says Alsop, to hold the common view, by now hardly challenged by anyone, that the decision to drop the two bombs on Japan was wicked in itself, and that President Truman and all otherswho joined in making or who [like Robert Oppenheimer] assented to this decision shared in the wickedness. And in explanation of the two bombs, Alsop adds: The true, climactic, and successful effort of the Japanese peace advocates did not begin in deadly earnest until after the second bomb had destroyed Nagasaki. He begins his essay with a verse: "In life, experience is the great teacher. Thats a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. The atom bomb was dropped by an American B-29 Superfortress bomber named Enola Gay and the bombs code name was Little Boy. what we had experienced [my emphasis] in fighting the Japs (pardon the expression) on Peleliu and Okinawa caused us toformulate some very definite opinions that the invasion . Theres no denying that Grays outlook on everything was admirably noble, elevated, and responsible. by Paul Fussell. When the young soldier with the wild eyes comes at you, firing, do you shoot him in the foot, hoping hell be hurt badly enough to drop or mis-aim the gun with which hes going to kill you, or do you shoot him in the chest (or, if youre a prime shot, in the head) and make certain that you and not he will be the survivor of that mortal moment? Summit Books, $17.45 (298pp) ISBN 978--671-63866-5. [Every Japanese] soldier, civilian, woman, and child would fight to the death with whatever weapons they had, ride, grenade, or bamboo spear. Chapter 8, The Pure Self, Dower explains the Japanese traditions and culture, along with the humiliation and discrimination the Japanese received. The Glenn Grays of this world need to have their attention directed to the testimony of those who know, like, say, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, who said, Moderation in war is imbecility, or Sir Arthur Harris, director of the admittedly wicked aerial-bombing campaign designed, as Churchill put it, to de-house the German civilian population, who observed that War is immoral, or our own General W. T. Sherman: War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. Lord Louis Mountbatten, trying to say something sensibleabout the dropping of the A-bomb, came up only with War is crazy. Or rather, it requires choices among crazinesses. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss atleast half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime. Knowing that unflattering truth by experience, soldiers have every motive for wanting a war stopped, by any means. thank god for the atom bomb and other essays google play. What had I done to deserve this? Jane Runyon stated that some civilian leaders even declared the bombs a good thing. Paul Fussell, "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb," Thank God for the Atomic Bomb and Other Essays. Rhetorical Questions Its not hard toguess which side each chose once you know that Alsop experienced capture by the Japanese at Hong Kong early in 1942, while Joravsky came into no deadly contact with the Japanese: a young combat-innocent soldier, he was on his way to the Pacific when the war ended. The testimony of experience has tended to come from rough diamondsJames Jones is an examplewho went through the war as enlisted men in the infantry or the Marine Corps. The quality of the deep fake video isn't THAT spectacular (you've probably seen more convincing ones), but it could still fool some Americans, Glenn says, especially those not . Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Romania, and Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw her troops from Americans started saying Once a Jap, Always a Jap (Martin 23). Planners of the invasion assumed that it would require a full year, to November 1946, for the Japanese to be sufficiently worn down by land-combat attrition to surrender. 4 Paul Fussell, who faced death in combat, articulately and forcefully states this view. As William Manchester says, All who wore uniforms are called veterans, but more than 90 percent of them are as uninformed about the killing zones as those on the home front.Manchesters fellow marine E. B. Sledge thoughtfully and responsibly invokes the terms drastically and totally to underline the differences in experience between front and rear, and not even the far rear, but the close rear. Although Fussell admits that the bomb was a "most cruel ending to that most cruel war", and that those who claim that the use of the atom bomb was wrong are simply attempting to "resolve ambiguity" concerning the ethics of war, he believes that the bomb was . The celebrated author focuses his lethal wit on habitual euphemizers, artistically pretentious. It would shock the American public and the world. "A conservative cultural critic with a passion for nude beaches and the Indy 500 auto race, Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) explores some of his pet topics in this miscellany of essays and articles. The dropping of the bombs were necessary and fair due to the refusal of the Japanese to surrender, the millions of lives saved by a quick end to the war, and the warnings given to the Japanese. But no answer came. To begin, the Japanese soldiers have it ingrained in their brains that it is dishonorable to surrender. Who is the intended audience? The headline of this column is lifted from a 1981 essay by the late Paul Fussell, the cultural critic and war memoirist. For someone of his experience, phrases like imperialist class forces come easily, and the issues look perfectly clear. These bombs were thought to end the war between Japan and America before other countries could get involved. "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" The New Republic - August 1981 by Paul Fussell Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad I've remembered all this time. You think of the lives whichwould have been lost in an invasion of Japans home islandsa staggering number of Americans but millions more of Japanese and you thank God for the atomic bomb. Fussell is even keener on exposing the euphemisms and illusions of others. Fussell is writing for an audience (readers of the New Republic magazine) that quite likely was born after World War II and has no direct experience with the war in the Pacific, or in later wars such as Korea or, more significantly, Vietnam. asset . He believes that those who argue that the atomic bombs were not necessary are too far removed from the savagery of the war in the Pacific theatre during World War II. The A-bomb, came up only with war is crazy of others all to. Gigantic task of extermination why did Fussel `` thank God & quot ; for the atom?. A verse: & quot ; thank God & quot ; thank for. God & quot ; thank God for the atom bomb the world the! 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