Paul Fussell, "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" Mac computer capable with iMovie, Quicktime (for recording and exporting) and Internet access (for high school) Assignment: For middle school students: Have students write a script for a chapter of a hypothetical documentary on the decision to drop the bomb (approximately three pages). Down there, which is where the other people were, is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule. So many dead. Two or three weeks, says Galbraith. David Bentley Hart How to Write EnglishProse, Course Syllabi with Links to Readings and Slides. 2023. Who are the experts?Our certified Educators are real professors, teachers, and scholars who use their academic expertise to tackle your toughest questions. 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. The authors overall purpose in the article is to persuade the audience that the atomic bomb had a negative effect due to the effect it had on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays. On the other hand, John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. . Thats a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. "So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war." Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb & Other Essays 6 likes Like All Quotes Truman was not being sly or coy whenhe insisted that the bomb was only another weapon. History, as Eliots Gerontion notes. Fussell begins by stating that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a necessary evil. 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. They did not know the horrors the soldiers went through. My division, like most of the ones transferred from Europe, was to take part in the invasion of Honshu. It's been for me a model of the short poem, and indeed I've come upon few short poems subsequently that exhibited more poetic talent. To this day, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still a source of pain and shame for those afflicted and for those who survived. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Analyzes how paul fussell, of "thank god for the atom bomb", believes the atomic bombs were necessary and the right course of action in ending world war ii. I believe Dower used these sources to present a shocking and accurate assessment of why battles in the Pacific were often ones of extermination between the US and Japanese forces. . Is he really saying "Thank God for the atom bomb?" 2) Fussell: "The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. We viewed the invasion with complete resignation that we would be killedeither on the beach or inland. . 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. E. B. Sledge, author of the splendid memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, noticed at the time that the fighting grew more vicious the closer we got to Japan,with the carnage of Iwo Jima and Okinawa worse than what had gone before. 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. 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. The first was The Great War and Modern Memory. Still thankful for the bomb By John Rossi Some years ago, Paul Fussell wrote a controversial essay titled "Thank God for the Atom Bomb." In it, he argued that dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan was necessary to end the war in the Pacific. The main argument of the essay is based around social class and personal experience. He also argues that Japan was not close to surrender, and that although the devastation and casualties caused by the bombing were horrific, that opponents of the bomb neglect the equal or greater horrors suffered by the American soldiers, the Japanese civilians conscripted to fight against them, and the prisoners of war. He does agree that the dropping of the bomb was horrific and not morally right, but the bombs were necessary. These leaders concluded that if the war continued without the bombs at least a million, In the 1940s there is no doubt that the United States of America was engulfed by mass anti-Japanese hysteria which inevitably bled over into Americas foreign policy. Hiroshima, he says, was "the most cruel ending of that most cruel war." What role does his own experience of history play in shaping his views as an historian? The combat soldier, he says. He heaps sarcasms on the "sensitive humanitarian" who "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." 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. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The bomb needed to be. atomic bomb, also called atom bomb, weapon with great explosive power that results from the sudden release of energy upon the splitting, or fission, of the nuclei of a heavy element such as plutonium or uranium. he uses statistics to prove that while the bomb killed many japanese lives, it saved many more american lives. Explains that paul fussell's thank god for the atom bomb is one of many essays written in favor of the bomb that aided the ending of world war 2. List Price: $17.95. Therefore, Fussell's argument is twofold: 1) that more Americans would die without the bomb; and 2) that Japanese civilians would be killed in large numbers during the planned invasion, meaning the bomb was instrumental in limiting the loss of human life. The veterans in the outfit felt we had already run out of luck anyway. ) 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? 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 the ethics, if any, of that ghastly affair. It would seem even more crazy, he went on, if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. One of the unpleasant facts for anyone in the ground armies during the war was that you had to become pro tern a subordinate of the very uncivilian George S. Patton and respond somehow to his unremitting insistence that you embrace his view of things. David F. Labaree is Lee L. Jacks Professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and a professor (by courtesy) in history. In an exchange of views not long ago in The New York Review of Books, Joseph Alsop and David Joravsky set forth the by now familiar argument on both sides of the debate about the ethics of the bomb. The experience Im talking about is having to come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your death. For present purposes we must jettison the second line (licking our lips, to be sure, as it disappears), leaving the first to register a principle whose banality suggests that it enshrines a most useful truth. 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). Despite pleas from US President, Harry Truman, for Japan to surrender, the Japanese were intent on continuing the fight. 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. due to the strong beach defenses, caves, tunnels, and numerous Jap suicide torpedo boats and manned mines, few Marines in the first five assault waves would get ashore alivemy company was scheduled to be in the first and second waves. The dropping of the Atom bomb on Hiroshima is an extremely debatable issue with no right or wrong answer. One remembers the gleeful use of bayonets on civilians, on nurses and the wounded, in Hong Kong and Singapore. 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). Scarred by his experiences in France in 1945, Paul Fussell has sought to demystify the romanticism of battle, beginning with his literary study of the Great War. He does agree that the dropping of the bomb was horrific and not morally right, but the bombs . What does this quotation have to do with his argument? 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. In Before Hiroshima : The Path Towards total War ; Ronald Takaki discusses the various reasons on why America decided to drop the atomic bombs on Japan and why they felt like dropping bombs were better than having to invade. . 588 Words. All Japanese must become soldiers and die for the Emperor. Sledges First Marine Division was to land close to the Yokosuka Naval Base, one of the most heavily defended sectors of the island. The marines were told, he recalls, that. Change). Of the two the first was a tighter and better book. . In it, Fussell judges the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary evils. As with theRussian Revolution, there are two sidesthats why its a tragedy instead of a disasterand unless we are, like Bruce Page, simple-mindedly unimaginative and cruel, we will be painfully aware of both sides at once. Source: Paul Fussell, a World War II Soldier, Thank God for the Atom Bomb,1990. A conservative cultural critic with a passion for nude beaches and the Indy 500 . A senior US defense official said Tuesday that Iran could produce enough fissile material for one nuclear bomb in under two weeks. Chapter 9, The Demonic Other, discusses the Japaneses opinions on American racism, and seemed to believe Americans disregarded every other race except their own. That is, few of those destinedto 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. When the war ended, Bruce Page was nine years old. The stupidity, parochialism, and greed in the international mismanagement of the whole nuclear challenge should not tempt us to misimagine the circumstances of the bombs 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 fucked up the works at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc.) And of course the brutality was not just on one side. If the atom bomb was not dropped, many more lives would have been lost. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast . The celebrated author focuses his lethal wit on habitual euphemizers, artistically pretentious. No one who knows what combat is like, he says, would argue that dropping the bomb was unethical.. Understanding the past requires pretending that you dont know the present. 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. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. During this period Japanese people living in both Japan and the United States of America were seen as less that human. Steven Pinker Will ChatGPT Replace HumanWriters? (Pg.26) We all know that all war is cruel. Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Romania, and Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw her troops from This week I re-read Paul Fussell's nerd-famous essay on the ethics of war: Thank God for the Atom Bomb. During the war there were many times for the Japanese to surrender, but it was never done. KILL JAPS! "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. Hiroshima: A Soldier's View," The New Republic (August 26 and 29, 1981), pp. In Scotch, Teacher's is the great experience.". Many of those that say the bomb should not have been used are implying that, according to Arthur T. Hadley, 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. On the tragic day of August 6, 1945, US Air Force deployed the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. 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. The intelligence officer of theU.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? 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. Herseys straight, simple narrative technique presents the catastrophe in its raw form, including the voices of those who experienced the bombing firsthand. tax swerving it director disqualified for 8 years the. 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. ryan on apple books. ISBN-10: 0671638661. . In 1945 Fussell had been a 20-year-old infantry second . The war was over, the story goes, and the US just wanted to demonstrate its nuclear capacity to the world. The first was The Great War and Modern Memory . Likewise, the historian Michael Sherry, author of a recent book on the rise of the American bombing mystique, The Creation of Armageddon, argues that we didnt delay long enough between the test explosion in New Mexico and the mortal explosions in Japan. Why? 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. A deep fake video made by artificial intelligence recently circulated online, showing a fake President Biden announcing a U.S. draft for the war in Ukraine. So many maimed. Anyone who actually fought in the Pacific recalls the Japanese routinely firing on medics, killing the wounded (torturing them first, if possible), and cutting off the penises of the dead to stick in the corpses mouths. 2. His research focuses on the historical sociology of American schooling, including topics such as the evolution of high schools, the growth of consumerism, the origins and nature of education schools, and the role of schools in promoting access and advantage more than subject-matter learning. I believe that the idea of the atomic bomb as something the people would be thankful for is very challenging and yet Fussell, in my opinion, was able to gather all the main ideas behind his argument along with statistics and gave the people a new perspective for the ending of World War II. In light of that, it seems like a good time to revisit the debate about whether this action was justified. Add to Wish List Link to this Book Add to Bookbag Sell this Book Buy it at Amazon Compare Prices. Not so the way the scurrilous, agitprop New Statesman conceives those justifying the dropping of the bomb and those opposing. Fussell is angry. 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. 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! On the contrary, the Americans were also known as demonic. Details; Description; . I was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rifle platoon. Many of the soldiers have remained silent about their firsthand experiences because they were, The soldiers and marines would view the Japanese as subhuman, little yellow beasts and the only approppriate treatment was annihilation. The Americans dehumanized the Japanese people, merely because they were not European. The atom bomb was dropped by an American B-29 Superfortress bomber named Enola Gay and the bombs code name was Little Boy. Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad Ive remembered all this time. The dramatic postwar Japanese success at hustling and merchandising and tourism has (happily, in many ways) effaced for most people the vicious assault context in which the Hiroshima horror should be viewed. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Plenty of Japanese gold teeth were extractedsome from still living mouthswith Marine Corps Ka-Bar Knives, and one of E. B. Sledges fellow marines went around with a cut-off Japanese hand. First, it can display the fineness of his moral weave. Because wed destroyed civilians? So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us. What does Fussell mean when he describes the bombing of Hiroshima as a tragedy rather . That is the reason Fussell said, "Thank God for the Atom Bomb." I am writing about these events neither to justify nor to condemn the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the Enola Gay dropped its package, There were cheers, says John Toland, over the intercom; it meant the end of the war. Down on the ground the reaction of Sledges marine buddies when they heard the news was more solemn and complicated. ISBN-13: 9780671638665. (About 140,000 Japanese died at Hiroshima.) Bottom Line Thank God for the Atom Bomb is my second collection of Paul Fussell essays. ". 209-230. Paul Fussell is a smart man with an abundance of experience. He and thousands of his fellows enfeebled by beriberi and pellagra, were being systematically starved to death, the Japanese rationalizing this treatment not just because the prisoners were white men but because they had allowed themselves to be captured at all and were therefore moral garbage. One young combat naval officer close to the action wrote home m 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 hes talking: its seldom out here. That was Lieutenant (j.g.) People have argued over the years if the atomic bombing was justified or not, and multiple points can be made on both arguments, yet I take it that the bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not justified. that in order to finish with the Japanese quickly, it will be necessary to invade the industrial heart of Japan. The invasion was definitely on, as I know because I was to be in it. What role does his own experience of history play in shaping his views as an historian? Thats a harder thing to do than Joravsky seems to think. The most spectacular episode of Harry Truman's presidency will never be forgotten but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later. From this, one recoils says the reviewer. Fussell argues vigorously and, to my mind, convincingly that the bombing was crucial in cutting short the war and preventing the much greater loss of life that would have occurred as a result of a full-fledged invasion. The entire Japanese problem has been magnified out of its true proportion largely due to the physical characteristics of the people (Martin 31). 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. The Hiroshima bomb, he says, was dropped without any warning. But 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. (A good place to interrupt and remember Glenn Grays noble but hopelessly one-sided remarks about injustice, as well as suffering.). The Alsop-Joravsky debate, reduced to a collision between experience and theory, was conducted with a certain civilized respect for evidence. by Paul Fussell. From his point of view, as someone who served in the infantry during WWII, the bomb saved thousands of lives that would have been lost if there had been a D-Day style invasion of the Japanese home islands. On Okinawa, only weeks before Hiroshima, 123,000 Japanese and Americans killed each other. Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Romania, and [the U.S.] thought it would be very difficult Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. Chapter 10 focuses on the Yamato Race, and explains how Asia as whole could economically come together as a single, Summary Of Thank God For The Atom Bomb By Paul Fussell, In Paul Fussells essay Thank God for the Atom Bomb , he argues the importance of experience when thinking about the use of the atom bomb. I think theres 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. He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. 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. While many citizens of Hiroshima continued to feel a hatred for Americans which nothing could possibly erase, (117) some, like Mrs. Nakamura, remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. (117). Harry Truman . (The earlier landing on Kyushu was to be carried out by the 700,000 infantry already in the Pacific, those with whom James Jones has sympathized.) To experience both sides, one might study the book Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawnby Atomic Bomb Survivors, which presents a number of amateur drawings and watercolors of the Hiroshima scene made by middle-aged and elderly survivors for a peace exhibition in 1975. On August sixth, 1945 during World War two, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world's first atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima and three days later, on August ninth, 1945 the second bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, which forced the Japanese army to surrender.. For a great review of the historiography on the 1945 bombing, see James Banner Jr., The Ever Changing Past (Yale UP, 2021), pp. President Roosevelt approved several orders and committees that specifically targeted Japanese Americans on the West Coast, while war propaganda was created to instill fear and hatred of the Japanese in the American people. My father was born in Hong Kong during the World War II period. But when we meet in Japan proper, our Army will demonstrate its invincible superiority. This possibility foreclosed by the Emperors post-A- bomb surrender broadcast, the shocked, disappointed officers of one infantry battalion, anticipating a professionally impressive defense of the beaches, killed themselves in the following numbers: one major, three captains, ten first lieutenants, and twelve second lieutenants. The debate is framed as binary, invasion or bomb. This book is recommend to any fan of the essay. He begins his essay with a verse: "In life, experience is the great teacher. In speaking thus of Galbraith and Sherry, Im aware of the offensive implications ad hominem. 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. Implacable, treacherous, barbaricthose were Admiral Halseys characterizations of the enemy, and at the time fewfacing the Japanese would deny that they fit to a T. 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