For this was hell, the soldier goes on. Thank God For The Atom Bomb4 Pages886 Words. 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. 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. The ad consisted of two eleven-syllable lines of verse, thus: In life, experience is the great teacher. The debate is framed as binary, invasion or bomb. Thousands of British assault troops would have been destroyed too, the anticipated casualties from the almost 200,000 men in the six divisions (the same number used to invade Normandy) assigned to invade the Malay Peninsula on September 9. John F. Kennedy. Our code of conduct toward the enemy, he notes, differed drastically from that prevailing back at the division CP. (Hes describing gold-tooth extractionfrom still-living Japanese.) His premise is that absent those horrific shocks, Japan would have never surrendered without a bloody invasion. When the atom bomb ended the war, I was in the Forty-fifth Infantry Division, which had been through the European war so thoroughly that it had needed to be reconstituted two or three times. David Joravsky, now a professor of history at Northwestern, argued on the other hand that those who decided to use the A-bombs on cities betray defects of reason and self-restraint. It all neednt have happened, he says, if the U.S. government had been willing to take a few more days and to be a bit more thoughtful in opening up the age of nuclear warfare. Ive already noted what a few more days would mean to the luckless troops and sailors on the spot, and as to being thoughtful when opening up the age of nuclear warfare, of course no one was focusing on anything as portentous as that, which reflects a historians tidy hindsight. Fussell foregrounds the difficulties of weighing the lives of allied soldiers against those of their enemies. The veterans in the outfit felt we had already run out of luck anyway. . They would have annihilated the lot of us., The Dutchman Laurens van der Post had been a prisoner of the Japanese for three and a half years. Thank God For The Atom Bomb essays. The audience is the readers of the New Republic magazine. These bombs were thought to end the war between Japan and America before other countries could get involved. His essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" tells us why the United States needed to drop the atomic bomb and provides quotes from people with experience from the war to back up his claim. 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. In general, the principle is, the farther from the scene of horror the easier the talk. The aim of war is to destroy an enemy who is trying to destroy you. Thank God for the atom bomb. The material covered is Fussells experience in the infantry, contrasted with that of people who have no such experience. Someone, please. As Samuel Johnson said of thesmothering of Desdemona, the innocent in another tragedy, It is not to be endured. Nor, it should be noticed, is an infantrymans account of having his arm blown off in the Arno Valley in Italy in 1944: I wanted to die and die fast. Summary Of Thank God For The Atom Bomb By Paul Fussell 499 Words | 2 Pages. Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war I had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. 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. TNR's The Book page reposted this "classic" piece by George Kennan on Americans and Russians rather than repost the very famous essay that became the basis for Fussell's Thank God for the . 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.) 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. As I said, I am a peace-loving guy, a pacifist at heart but a realist in real life. Truman was not being sly or coy whenhe insisted that the bomb was only another weapon. History, as Eliots Gerontion notes. 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. If it is argued that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima was necessary to shock the Japanese to surrender, how does one justify the hasty bombing of Nagasaki only Indeed when the bombs were dropped he was going on eight months old, in danger only of falling out of his pram. 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. 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. What did you do in the Great War, Daddy? The recruiting 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. During the war in Europe Gray was an interrogator in the Army Counterintelligence Corps, and in that capacity he experienced the war at Division level. Despite mixed reactions of the people of Hiroshima themselves, never does the author condemn the decision to drop the bomb, nor does he condone. Over the years, opinion has shifted sharply toward the position that dropping the bomb both incredibly cruel and totally unnecessary. When the war ended, Bruce Page was nine years old. In general, the principle is, the farther from the scene of horror the easier the talk. Of the two the first was a tighter and better book. (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.) 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 . The Japanese folk tale was found in magazines, cartoons, and films and had several versions of the story for all ages. 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.. (LogOut/ Heres a link to a PDF of the original. Mr. We thought the Japanese would never surrender. 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. Rooting them out became a bloody business which reached its ultimate horrors in the last months of the war. (New York: Ballentine Books, 1990), 1-22. . In Scotch, Teachers is the great experience. 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. 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. Paul Fussell is a smart man with an abundance of experience. What role does his own experience of history play in shaping his views as an historian? They would have annihilated a lot of us Fussell. General Hap Arnold explaines his point of view on why he thinks using atomic bombing in war should be used only in the proper way. The war was over, the story goes, and the US just wanted to demonstrate its nuclear capacity to the world. 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. 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. Before Fussell concedes the brutality of the bombings, he takes a fairly one-sided position. Keep in. Most historians now agree with Fussell. 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 . When the A-bombs were dropped, van der Post recalls, This cataclysm I was certain would make the Japanese feel that they could withdraw from the war without dishonor, because it would strike them, as it had us in the silence of our prison night, as something supernatural.. This book is recommend to any fan of the essay. They did not know the horrors the soldiers went through. Customer Book Reviews. #4. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Having read the two I count myself a fan of Paul Fussell. On the contrary, the Americans were also known as demonic. Bottom Line Thank God for the Atom Bomb is my second collection of Paul Fussell essays. 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. Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad Ive remembered all 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. thank god for the atom bomb and other essays google play. 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. In speaking thus of Galbraith and Sherry, Im aware of the offensive implications ad hominem. KILL JAPS! Part III, The War in Japanese Eyes, allows the reader to receive a Japanese perspective and also grasp how devastating the results of war were. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. But thank God that did not happen. Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays. Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Romania, and Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw her troops from asset . Again, the Japanese had no knowledge of the bombs, causing even more devastating casualties. But whats at stake in an infantry assault is so entirely unthinkable to those without the experience of one, or several, or many, even if they possess very wide-ranging imaginations and warm sympathies, that experience is crucial in this case. The Japanese believed their culture was unique, and spent this period of time during the war focusing on themselves and their race. Bottom Line Thank God for the Atom Bomb is my second collection of Paul Fussell essays. Paul Fussell appeals to Pathos Reasons that he appeals to pathos is by including the audience in his speech. The readers of the war ended, Bruce Page was nine years.... And films and had several versions of the New Republic magazine division CP was! 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