Toward the end of World War II, in the winter of 1945, two momentous events took place simultaneously at distant parts of the earth. It can be safely assumed that none of the participants in either of these grim dramas had the remotest knowledge of the others’ existence. In southern Poland, the army of the Soviet Union had finished evacuating the German concentration camp of Auschwitz. In the Pacific Ocean, eight hundred miles south of Japan, three United States Marine divisions were commencing the invasion stage of one of the bloodiest campaigns ever fought, the battle for the island of Iwo Jima, which would be of critical importance as a way station for the flight carrying the first atomic bomb.
It might be said that the war in Europe and the Pacific conflict took place on different planets. Most servicemen engaged in war against the Japanese gave little thought to remote campaigns like the ones in Italy and France. It was a global struggle too vast to comprehend while it was happening. But when it was over and somewhat more comprehensible, we could see that the war left us with, if nothing else, two prodigious and enduring metaphors for human suffering: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. History has carved no sterner monuments to its own propensity for unfathomable evil.
After VJ Day, there was a space of a year or so when it was truly possible to conceive of a world without war. Progenitors of the baby boom, most veterans were diligently amorous. It may be that the gloom descended soon after Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech. For me the sense of the future closing down permanently came only six years later, when as a Marine reserve I was called up for duty in the Korean War. Back in infantry training again, I had the nightmarish perception of war as a savage continuum, not a wholesale if often lethal adventure men embarked upon, as in World War II, to strike down forces of evil, but a perpetual way of life in which small oases of peacetime provided intermittent relief. In Asia there was an explosion waiting to happen; America stood ready to light the fuse the French had laid down, and in the next decade the sequel of Vietnam came as no surprise.
In that same decade of the 1960s I became engrossed in the issue of racial conflict in America—especially as it was reflected in the history of slavery—and found myself pondering the extent to which race and racial domination played a part in the recent wars. The stunning late-nineteenth-century insight of W. E. B. Du Bois—that the chief problem of the coming century would be that of color—had swiftly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Du Bois was speaking of his own African-American people but his prophecy would embrace the globe. If in the First World War nationalistic ambitions largely fueled the conflict, World War II was the incubator of a poisonous worldwide racism. A poster I recall from the Pacific war was of a bucktoothed and bespectacled rat, with repulsively coiled tail and Japanese army cap; the caption read KNOW YOUR ENEMY.
All Americans fighting in the Pacific were racists. Marines were indoctrinated to regard Japanese soldiers as dangerously rabid animals. The paucity of enemy prisoners taken by our troops was due in part to the Japanese creed of fighting to the last breath, but it was also because of our own policy of extermination, often with an intriguing new weapon, the flamethrower, which roasted our adversaries in their bunkers and burrows. The enemy repaid our racism in kind and generally surpassed us; few people were treated more barbarically than those starving prisoners, many of them European and American but also Asian, who existed amid squalor and privation in the Japanese camps.
Hiroshima had a profound direct effect on my life; Auschwitz would come much later. In the summer of 1945 I was a young Marine officer slated to lead my rifle platoon in the invasion of Japan. Most of us were spunky but scared, and we had much to be scared about. The carnage had reached a surreal intensity. Already on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, 17,000 Americans had lost their lives, including many of our friends. It had been predicted that the invasion would produce over half a million American casualties, while perhaps as many as three times that number of Japanese would be killed or wounded, including countless civilians.
Herman Melville wrote, “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.” I cannot say, from this distance in time, what is more firmly lodged in my memory—the desperate fatalism and sadness that pervaded, beneath our nervous bravado, the days and nights of us young boys, or the joy we felt when we heard of the bomb, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the thrilling turnaround of our destiny. It was a war we all believed in and I'd wanted to test my manhood; part of me mourned that I never got near the combat zone. But Hiroshima removed from my shoulders an almost tactile burden of insecurity and dread. Later I often used the word “ecstasy” to describe my reaction. I used it again only a few years ago in, of all places, Tokyo, when a TV interviewer asked me to express my views about Hiroshima and related matters.
Afterward I had the feeling I'd misspoken badly. But later, at a party, a Japanese man of my vintage approached me, murmuring a little surreptitiously that he'd seen me on television and wanted to tell me something he'd never told anyone before. He said he'd also been a young infantry officer, the leader of a heavy mortar unit training on Kyushu to repel our invasion, when word came of the bomb and the end of the war. We might have blown each other up, he added, and when I asked him how he'd taken the news he said, “I felt ecstasy, like you.”
This brings me to an issue which has incited more controversy than perhaps any other in the writing of the history of World War II; and that is the justification for the dropping of the atomic bomb.
As I’ve said, I belong to that small body of veterans who were headed for the invasion; we're getting smaller each year through obvious reasons of attrition, and many of us remain extremely sensitive to the moral implications of the bomb. We were never a large group, in terms of the general population; there were originally a quarter of a million of us. Perhaps less than 100,000 are left. Despite what I've just said about the lifelong gratitude most of us felt for the bomb and its makers, there are a few of us, I suspect, who wouldn't be troubled if it were never shown conclusively that Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been avoided. Even the most callous exserviceman might be shaken by proof that his own salvation was bought by the needless sacrifice of 200,000 innocent human beings. Therefore, there were more than a few of us who were disturbed by the revisionist view espoused by numerous historians who, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bomb, two years ago, took the occasion of the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution to make what was tantamount to a dreadful accusation: namely, that President Harry Truman behaved in an irresponsible, even criminal, fashion in ordering the bomb dropped when he was aware that the weapon was really not necessary for ending the war. The Enola Gay, of course, was the B-29 aircraft that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The Enola Gay exhibit, many of you will recall, became the focal point of the controversy, and the dispute became nasty when such groups as the American Legion and the Air Force Association protested the underlying assumptions of the display, claiming that it was anti-American, that it muddied the patriotic waters with ambiguities and bothersome questions about the bomb's ultimate worth, as if its use were not absolutely just. Quite simply, the critics of the exhibit wanted a celebration. The Smithsonian backed down, and the exhibit became a tame and harmless sideshow. This was unfortunate since the original text reveals that the questions raised were legitimate. It is still worth pondering, as the Dutch-born historian Ian Buruma has pointed out, “whether [dropping atomic bombs] was an act of racism; whether the bombs were dropped to warn the Soviets, and keep them from invading Japan; whether Truman should have paid more attention to Japanese peace initiatives; and whether there were better ways than nuclear bombing of ending the war swiftly.” But perhaps most importantly the Smithsonian's capitulation to the American Legion sent the wrong message to the Japanese, who have been scandalously negligent in facing up to many of the enormities of their own past. If the Americans can continue to insist on their own righteousness, the Japanese are now able to say: why can't we do the same? I will return to this Japanese historical amnesia in a moment.
One does not wish to regard these revisionist historians with impatience or contempt. They are, by and large, serious and dedicated scholars who have invested much intellectual capital in presenting their theses. One of the best known, Gar Alperovitz, has written hundreds of pages in several books attempting to prove that Truman dropped the bomb to show our supremacy to the Soviet Union. Other critics, notably the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, are convinced that the Japanese would have surrendered anyway, and that therefore Truman, knowing of this, must have possessed the capacity for irrational behavior bordering on madness; in other words, Truman's decision was an act of megalomania. One of the revisionist scholars, Philip Nobile, went so far as to canvass various writers, especially writers who were also veterans of World War II like myself, asking if they would sign a petition to President Clinton, the purpose of which would be that he apologize to the Japanese people. Needless to say, I declined, but in a book he edited, Judgment at the Smithsonian, to which I contributed my dissent,1 he made clear that his own anti-bomb, anti-Truman viewpoint was based largely on moral outrage, on outrage which in turn derived from some religious wellspring: Nobile is an active Catholic layman and often uses words like “atonement,” “repentance,” and “original sin.” As if all this were not enough, an ABC television news special, led by Peter Jennings, a Canadian, was unequivocally slanted against the bomb and Harry Truman.2
Of course, it is entirely understandable that a phenomenon as unique and monstrous as the atomic bomb, and the indescribable suffering it caused, should arouse much soul-searching. And it is doubtless healthy, too. The use of any weapon so terrible, and the political power that puts that use into play, needs vigilant scrutiny not merely now but for generations. Therefore revisionism, puzzling and exasperating as it often has been, is a welcome activity, especially in an America too often blind to its own global propensity for force majeure. One must honor doubts, whether their roots are psychological, political, or religious. Never let it be forgotten that, even as I speak, there are innumerable atomic weapons stashed away all around the world, and that the end of the Cold War did not relieve us from the necessity of constantly pondering their existence. Yet as I reflect on that event of 1945 I can't help being convinced that Truman had no alternative to his decision, and that his choice was the right one, even though its absolute rightness can never really be proved. Its rightness can never be proved, at least to universal satisfaction, because so much of the decision was bound up in the understandably bellicose psychology of the moment. Might not Truman have behaved differently if he, like most of his fellow Americans—especially young marines such as Lieutenant William C. Styron—were not consumed with a need for retaliation and with the savage rage against the enemy that three and a half years of brutal fighting had engendered? It is easy, from the comfortable perspective of hindsight, for a psychiatrist like Robert Jay Lifton, who through no fault of his own did not serve in the war, to confuse such rage with megalomania and to regard the decision to use the bomb as a form of madness. Perhaps only those who literally and truly remember Pearl Harbor can comprehend the national fury.
Yet it is hard to see how even a Harry Truman totally dispassionate and unaffected by rage could have acted in any other way. And this opinion derives from two hard facts embedded in the conduct of the war itself. First, it must be remembered that by the time the first atomic weapon was dropped, in August 1945, the mainland of Japan had been subjected to the most ruthless destruction visited upon a nation in the history of warfare. On a single night in March over 100,000 civilians died when General LeMay's B-29s firebombed Tokyo. The bombs had produced an incendiary storm destroying helpless hordes in heat so violent that those who had sought shelter in underground tunnels suffered an actual liquefaction—not lucky enough to be swiftly incinerated but broiled alive—while people who had tried to find safety in the river shallows were burnt to ashes. I still have a letter from a marine friend of mine who was on the island of Saipan when those B-29s took off, and he watched them in their flight toward Tokyo. “Why I was unable to feel repelled or to be touched by a tremor of pity, I could not say,” he wrote, “even as I gazed through the twilight at the howling monsters speeding northward to drop their cargoes on numberless cowering Yokohama mamas and the toothless slant-eyed old farts in baggy drawers and schoolgirls and roly-poly wee baby-sans. My Presbyterian conscience bade me weep but I was dry-eyed. Which is what war does to you,” he concluded, “it fucks up your heart.”
What my friend was witnessing happened to be a routine example of strategy that began in the 1930s with Japanese bombing of civilians in China, resumed in the Nazi destruction of Guernica in Spain, and continued with the firebombing by the Germans of London and Coventry and Manchester and other urban centers in Britain. Let us not minimize the primitive moral appeal of the question: “Who started it, after all?” Our own evil was bound to follow. The British and Americans’ senseless air attack on Dresden, in which multitudes were cremated, was a horrible amplification of this barbaric custom. Now, there is no moral justification for the destruction of civilians under any circumstance. But it has to be understood that by August, Harry Truman and his advisors saw the dropping of the atomic device as a logical extension of strategic bombing. As the late McGeorge Bundy wrote: “[By the summer of 1945] both military and political leaders gradually came to think of urban destruction not as wicked, not even as a necessary evil, but as a result with its own military value.”3 One need not justify the morality of his decision to understand that Truman regarded the atom bomb as just another, only more effective, weapon in the arsenal of total destruction. In their different ways, Hitler, Stalin, and Churchill would have all approved.
But ultimately the rightfulness of Truman's judgment rests on one crucial question. And that is whether or not the Japanese were ready to surrender. If, as virtually all of the revisionists seem to assume, the enemy was prepared to accept Allied peace terms then indeed the dropping of the bomb was not only unnecessary but morally indefensible. But there is no indication that the Japanese were going to throw in the towel, and this is a matter that the critics refuse to confront, either pussyfooting around such a critical issue or pretending that surrender was imminent, while offering no evidence to support the fact. Ian Buruma, whose analysis of the atom bomb controversy is a model of objectivity, has written: “Closer examination of what went on in Tokyo shows that the Japanese were not on the verge of capitulation before the destruction of Hiroshima. So long as there was no unanimity in the war cabinet and the Emperor remained silent, the war would go on.”4 On a purely military level, too, all indications were that Japan was prepared to fight to the last man and, indeed, the last woman and child; proclamations had gone out to this effect, and if this were not enough there were the recent examples of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where the ferocious resistance of the enemy provided a foretaste of the butchery awaiting both sides when the Americans embarked on their mainland invasion. Suppose, it has been asked, that Harry Truman—for whatever reason behind his caution—had not dropped the bomb, and suppose then that Americans and Japanese had engaged in the predicted battle, a savage struggle which, following the pattern of the bloody stalemate on Okinawa, would have taken months and consumed tens of thousands of lives. Suppose after the inevitable American victory it had been revealed that the President of the United States had possessed all along a weapon that most likely would have ended the war, but had not used it. What would countless bereaved parents have thought about that? What would have been the reaction in America and throughout the world? The question gives rise to such an awesome moment of hushed speculation that one must necessarily end the matter by affirming the truth that for Truman there was no other choice.
A journalist friend of mine who lives in Honolulu has several times interviewed Japanese tourists who visit the memorial site at Pearl Harbor. Japanese tourists are, to say the least, numerous in Hawaii (Japan Air Lines flies an unbelievable seventy-two flights a day from Tokyo) and my friend has buttonholed quite a few of them. Some of the visitors are fairly sophisticated about modern history but most are not; the great majority tell the journalist that America started the war and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in retaliation for our aggression. This is an example of the historical amnesia afflicting the Japanese people which I mentioned earlier. Except among a relatively small group of the intelligentsia it is a national article of faith that the devastation and death wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an evil phenomenon, the result of American inhumanity, with no causation rooted in the Japanese militarism of the 1920s and ’30s. History books at the elementary and high school level avoid mention of the Rape of Nanking or the barbaric plunder of Manchuria. I alluded earlier to the Japanese oppression of prisoners. Nowhere is there reference to the enslavement, during World War II, of hundreds of thousands of Koreans, many of them women forced to serve in Japanese army brothels. The atrocities committed by Imperial troops during the course of the war, from Bataan in the Philippines to the farthest reaches of Southeast Asia, exist in a vacuum, unrecorded. A recent work by an Australian-born scholar, Gavan Daws, called Prisoners of the Japanese,5 has meticulously documented the depredations of the Japanese army in Indonesia and Malaysia; employing new and original research, and interviewing dozens of Australian, Dutch, British, American, and Asian survivors, Daws provides a panorama of butchery and torture far scarier than could have been previously imagined. It shows a deliberate, carefully executed program of slave labor designed to work captives until they died of starvation and exhaustion; it was a technique of total domination every bit as ruthless as that of the Nazis at Auschwitz, and might have been considered genocidal except for the fact that it was even worse; it was panracial, condemning everyone to death without ethnic partiality. The Japanese people today, of course, refuse themselves access to such terrible knowledge, preferring the cultural comfort of timeless victimhood.
Having said this about postwar Japan, I must stress an obvious truth: no nation is without shame, or the stain of past dishonor. To the everlasting credit of the Germans, the horrors of Nazi despotism have been anatomized and dissected until scarcely a personality or event of that era remains unexamined. We Americans have pored over the disgraceful episodes of our past with nearly morbid zeal; slavery, the decimation of our Native Americans, our unconscionable racism, the nightmare of Vietnam—all of these have received our impassioned, sometimes even masochistic scrutiny. But the Japanese have averted their eyes from history, and in so doing have jeopardized their future and perhaps our future, too. People who have no lessons to learn from their past are likely to be extremely dangerous.
I want to close with a few final reflections on racism, and on Auschwitz. When in the mid-1970s I decided to write about another racism—the Nazi racism of total domination—I realized that in dealing with the German mind of that period I had to confront certain exquisite paradoxes. Anglo-Saxons, for example, however bitterly abhorred, did not belong among the despised Untermenschen and were granted a certain provisional respect. A loony relativism at the heart of Hitler's racial policy is demonstrated by the treatment of various POWs. The captured British and American soldiers and airmen were usually confined in a prison where conditions were basically civilized and in fact so comparatively congenial that the farcical image conveyed in Hogan’s Heroes or Stalag 17 is not too far off the mark. It was reputed Nordic identification that prevented all but a small percentage of these prisoners from dying.
In contrast there is the appalling saga of the Soviet prisoners of war, who were, after the Jews, the numerically largest group of victims and whose partial annihilation—over three million, or nearly sixty percent of all Soviet POWs—is commentary enough on the Nazis’ view of the humanity of the Russians and other Slavs. Which brings me to Auschwitz. I was always struck by the fact that the first executed victims of Auschwitz were not Jews but six hundred Soviet POWs. Although the Holocaust was uniquely Jewish, its uniqueness becomes more striking when we can see that it was also ecumenical, but in ways that can only emphasize the peculiar nature of Jewish suffering.
I have been criticized in some quarters for “de-Judaizing” and “universalizing” the Holocaust by creating, in my novel Sophie’s Choice, a heroine who was a gentile victim of Auschwitz. Such was not my intention; it was rather to show the malign effect of anti-Semitism and its relentless power—power of such breadth, at least in the Nazis’ hands, as to be capable of destroying people beyond the focus of its immediate oppression. At Auschwitz, as in the Inferno, Jews occupied the center of hell, but the surrounding concentric rings embraced a multitude of other victims. It would be wrong for them to be forgotten. For years, all of them were largely forgotten, beyond the borders of Jewish remembrance. It wasn't until the late 1970s that the word “Holocaust” fully entered the language; before then, the horror of the camps had a less discernible shape.
As for that other dreadful monolith, Hiroshima, it might be said that the sacrifice of its victims presented an object lesson and perhaps a priceless warning, preventing the future use of the weapon that achieved such destruction. If so, the many deaths and the suffering—the same that assured my probable survival and that of my Tokyo comrade in arms along with legions of others—may be justified, if we who have lived so long afterward are fit to justify such a fathomless event. Certainly the bomb did nothing to eliminate war and aggression, and I am still amazed at the memory of myself, a boy optimist returned home after Hiroshima, firmly convinced—for one brief and intoxicating moment—that the future held out the hope of illimitable peace. Over fifty years after that moment the fratricidal horrors and ethnic atrocities that the world has endured, and still endures, remain at the quivering edge of tolerance and are past comprehension. Yet we go on, the earth turns. If you do what I do, you write—as the canny Isak Dinesen said you must do—you write without hope and without despair.
[Newsweek, January 11, 1993. The magazine text was abbreviated; the full text published here is from Styron's surviving manuscript, among his papers at Duke University.]