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. Educators go through a rigorous application process, and every answer they submit is reviewed by our in-house editorial team. . 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. 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. The war was over, the story goes, and the US just wanted to demonstrate its nuclear capacity to the world. 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. One does, doesnt one? 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. 2) Considering Fussell's. He does agree that the dropping of the bomb was horrific and not morally right, but the bombs were necessary. 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.) These troops who cried and cheered with relief or who sat stunned by the weight of their experience are very different from the high-minded, guilt- ridden GIs were told about by J. Glenn Gray in his sensitive book The Warriors. Why does Fussell "thank God" for the atom bomb? 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. Whereas yellow was the color of illness and treason and the Japanese were usually referred to as yellow, the color white symbolized purity which stood for the American race. would be a ghastly bloodletting. These Japanese-Americans were pulled from their jobs, schools, and home only to be pushed to, Its August sixth, 1945. Add to Wish List Link to this Book Add to Bookbag Sell this Book Buy it at Amazon Compare Prices. 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. The intended audience of Fussell's essay is peoplesuch as John Kenneth Galbraith (whom the author names in his essay)who believe that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II was not necessary. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. 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. Question: 1.) The warning from US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin . Despite pleas from US President, Harry Truman, for Japan to surrender, the Japanese were intent on continuing the fight. Bottom Line Thank God for the Atom Bomb is my second collection of Paul Fussell essays. Americans started saying Once a Jap, Always a Jap (Martin 23). They did not start the war, except in the terrible sense hinted atin Frederic Mannings observation based on his front-line experience in the Great War: War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. During this period Japanese people living in both Japan and the United States of America were seen as less that human. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. 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. His sources supplement his arguments, none more so than John Tolands The Rising Sun: the, Dennis Kucinich, a representative from Ohio, in the persuasive text titled We didnt need to drop the bomb, posted online in 2015, addresses the topic of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. . It would shock the American public and the world. Why? 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. Its initial publication intheNew Republic, a liberal magazine that describes itself as "tailored for smart, curious, socially aware readers",suggests that Fussell is writing mainly for an upper middle class, highly educated, and politically liberal audience. It was not theoretical or merely rumored in order to scare the Japanese. 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. 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. The author, Kucinich, also adapts an informative tone because he states facts and evidence to support his claim that the bomb was not needed to win the war. 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. 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. 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. If around division headquarters some of the people Gray talked to felt ashamed, down in the rifle companies no one did, despite Grays assertions. Japanese-Americans living on the west coast were savagely and unjustifiably uprooted from their daily lives. 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. "This is not a book to promote tranquility, and readers in quest of peace of mind should look elsewhere," writes Paul Fussell in the foreword to this original, sharp, tart, and thoroughly engaging work. Who is the intended audience? The assault troops were chosen and already in training, Jones reminds his readers, and he illuminates by the light of experience what this meant: What it must have been like to some old-timer buck sergeant or staff sergeant who had been through Guadalcanal or Bougainville or the Philippines, to stand on some beach and watch this huge war machine beginning to stir and move all around him and know that he very likely had survived this far only to fall dead on the dirt of Japans home islands, hardly bears thinking about. 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. What role does his own experience of history play in shaping his views as an historian? English assignment help 24447 ) Why does Fussell "thank God" for the atom bomb? on Paul Fussell Thank God for the AtomBomb, Follow David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing on WordPress.com, Paul Fussell Thank God for the AtomBomb, The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in theUS. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. 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. Q. ., I was horrified indeed at the sight of a stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeball in his palm. 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. On the contrary, the Americans were also known as demonic. 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. Division headquarters is milesmilesbehind the line where soldiers experience terror and madness and relieve those pressures by crazy brutality and sadism. Again he writes: We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines . In general, the principle is, the farther from the scene of horror the easier the talk. 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 . has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. In 1945 Fussell had been a 20-year-old infantry second . Relatively inarticulate, most have remained silent about what they know. The "we had no choice but to use the bomb" argument is most strongly presented in Paul Fussell's (in)famous essay, "Thank God for the Atom Bomb.". 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. Already a member? He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. Of course few left. The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war. Hes not the only one to have forgotten, if he ever knew, the unspeakable savagery of the Pacific war. In this essay I will describe both sides to the argument then conclude using my final opinion on whether I am for or against the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. On July 14, 1945, General Marshall sadly informed the Combined Chiefs of Staffhe was not trying to scare the Japanesethat its now clear . knew war, and he knew better than some of his critics then and now what he was doing and why he was doing it. Fussells point is that personal experience changes how we understand the decision to use the bomb against Japan. He does agree that the dropping of the bomb was horrific and not morally right, but the bombs . Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. Hiroshima, he says, was the most cruel ending of that most cruel war. He reminds us of what war is like for those who are actually fighting it as oppposed to theorizing about it after the fact. In the article by Paul Fussell "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," Fussell illustrates his views on the dropping of the atom bomb. Basically, Fussell contends that the atomic bomb was deserving of gratitude to God in view of the lives it spared. Thank God for the Atom Bomb, and Other Essays. 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. During the time of World War 2, as the bombs were being dropped on different parts on the country, they were not only killing the men that were fighting in the war, but also killing innocent civilians. )What was one of the major concerns of the American leaders and military during this time? Kucinich supports the claim that the bomb was not needed to end the war, although some may disagree. I yelled for medics, because subconsciously I wanted to live. We would have been murdered in the biggest massacre of the war. 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! . 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. Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese pre-invasion patriotic song, One Hundred Million Souls for the Emperor, says Sledge, meant just that. Universal national kamikaze was the point. The first was The Great War and Modern Memory. This is the basis of his argument, that those who did not experience . This post is a stunning essay by Paul Fussell published in The New Republic in 1981. germany gives greece names of 10 000 citizens suspected of. Many of those who were not on the front lines disagreed with the decision to drop the bomb. is this passage of Manchesters: After Biak the enemy withdrew to deep caverns. But thank God that did not happen. 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 . Momotaro was a well-known Japanese folk tale, which focused on the Japanese being superior to the white imperialists. tempt us to infer retrospectively extraordinary corruption, imbecility, or motiveless malignity in those who decided, allthings considered, to drop the bomb. ISBN-10: 0671638661. "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. (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. ". By that time, one million American casualties was the expected price. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. 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. Its been for me a model of the short poem, and indeed Ive come upon few short poems subsequently that exhibited more poetic talent. 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 Hiroshima, he says, was "the most cruel ending of that most cruel war." Everyone blew everything out of proportion. Have the . Why have historians chosen it, and is it appropriate?3) What has been the impact of the atomic bomb on U.S. history?4) What function does morality play in historians' views of the past? To conclude, Paul Fussells essay is very convincing. 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. In Scotch, Teacher's is the great experience.". 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. 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. Copyright 2023 IPL.org All rights reserved. And not just a staggering number of Americans would have been killed in the invasion. He looked to be in great pain but there was nothing that I could do for him. What did he do in the war? Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Before Fussell concedes the brutality of the bombings, he takes a fairly one-sided position. Not so the way the scurrilous, agitprop New Statesman conceives those justifying the dropping of the bomb and those opposing. 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. So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us. Download the entire Thank God for the Atom Bomb study guide as a printable PDF! His latest book is about American. 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. In Its clear the US should not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he tries to persuade the audience that the atomic bomb should have never been dropped. 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. 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. (LogOut/ 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. A professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania whose speciality is the eighteenth century, Paul Fuss View the full answer 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 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. Textual evidence suggests that Fussell expected most of his readers to think that the American decision to drop the two atom bombs on Japan, landing in the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II, was ethically wrong. 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. Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was wrong seem to be implying that 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. People holding such views, he notes, do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots. And theres aneloquence problem: most of those with firsthand experience of the war at its worst were not elaborately educated people. by Paul Fussell. . I will let God be the Judge of that. A remoteness from experience like Galbraiths and Sherrys and a similar rationalistic abstraction from actuality, seem to motivate the reaction of an anonymous reviewer of William Manchesters Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War for The New York Review of Books. 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 . When a neutron strikes the nucleus of an atom of the isotopes uranium-235 or plutonium-239, it causes that nucleus to split into two fragments, each of which is a nucleus with about . We were going to grow to adulthood after all. Having found the bomb, he said, we have used it. (About 140,000 Japanese died at Hiroshima.) 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? Why not blow them all up, with satchel charges or with something stronger? 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. 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. In Scotch, Teachers is the great experience. This is the basis of his argument, that those who did not experience the war firsthand could not understand. It didnt know then what everyone knows now about leukemia and various kinds of carcinoma and birth defects. There was much sadism and cruelty, undeniably racist, on ours. 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. When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that Operation Olympic would not, after all, be necessary, when we learnedto our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. He states in the book that He did not want to violate the widely held American moral view that war should be fought against soldiers, not civilians. Understanding the past requires pretending that you dont know the present. Having read the two I count myself a fan of Paul Fussell. In the poem, Hiroshima Exit by Canadian Writer Joy Kogawa presents a flash back of these events that occurred during World War II. 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). Dower crafts his argument using a variety of scholarly sources. asset . To intensify the shame Gray insists we feel, he seems willing to fiddle the facts. 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. One remembers the captured American airmenthe lucky ones who escaped decapitationlocked for years in packing crates. The Leatherneck in may 1945, was the expected price found the bomb Million Souls for the Atom bomb be! Use the bomb against Japan use the bomb, he seems willing to fiddle the.... 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