[lit-ideas] B-29s over Japan
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 15:53:50 -0700
From the introduction to The Soul of Battle by Victor Davis Hanson, 1999:
p. 3: "In revenge for the unprovoked but feeble attack at Pearl Harbor on
their country, American farmers, college students, welders, and mechanics of
a year past were now prepared - and quite able - to ignite all the islands
of Japan. Their gigantic bombers often flew in faster than did the sleek
Japanese fighters sent up to shoot them down. Japanese military leaders
could scarcely grasp that in a matter of months colossal runways had
appeared out of nowhere in the Pacific to launch horrendous novel bombers
more deadly than any aircraft in history, commanded by a general as
fanatical as themselves, and manned by teenagers and men in their early
twenties more eager to kill even than Japan's own feared veterans. So much
for the Japanese myth that decadent pampered Westerners were ill equipped
for the savagery of all-out war. Even I the wildest dreams of the most
ardent Japanese imperialists, there was no such plan of destroying the
entire social fabric of the American nation.
"When the war ended, William Hanson [the author's father] had become a
seasoned central fire control gunner on a B-29, with thirty-four raids over
Japan. His plane and nearly a thousand others had materialized out of
nowhere on the former coral rock of the Mariana Islands, burned the major
cities of Japan to the ground - and in about twelve months were gone for
good. Yet for the rest of their lives these amateurs were fiercely loyal to
the brutal architect of their lethal work, who announced after the inferno
was over, 'I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war
criminal.' Lemay was absolutely right - he would have. My father
occasionally ridiculed LeMay's bluster and his cigar, but it was LeMay
nonetheless whom he ridiculed - and LeMay whom he was proud that he had
served under.
"For much of my life I have wondered where such a murderous force of a
season came from. And how a democracy made a willing killer out of my
father and other farm boys, putting their lives into the hands of an
unhinged zealot like LeMay, who ostensibly was neither emblematic of a
democratic citizenry nor representative of the values that we purportedly
cherish. Or was he? How can a democratic leader brag of such destruction,
take pride in his force's ability to destroy thousands - in short, how can
he be so utterly uncouth? How in less than a year after being assembled can
a motley group of young recruits fly the most lethal bombers in history to
incinerate a feared imperial militaristic culture six thousand miles from
their own home? And how can that most murderous air force in the world
nearly disappear into the anonymity and amnesia of democracy six months
after its victory?
"Those thoughts are the easy anxieties of the desk-bound class. I have come
to realize that both Curtis LeMay and my father are stock types, not
aberrations, of the democratic society that produced them. Democracy, and
its twin of market capitalism, alone can instantaneously create lethal
armies out of civilians, equip them with horrific engines of war, imbue them
with a near-messianic zeal within a set time and place to exterminate what
they understand as evil, have them follow to their deaths the most ruthless
of men, and then melt anonymously back into the culture that produced them.
It is democracies, which in the right circumstances, can be imbued with the
soul of battle, and thus turn the horror of killing to a higher purpose of
saving lives and freeing the enslaved.
"My father knew of that soul long ago, which explains why during these last
fifty years he was proud to have served under LeMay - an authentic military
genius notwithstanding his extremism. Despite his horrific stories of B-29s
overloaded with napalm blowing up on takeoff, of low-flying bombers shredded
by flak and their crews of eleven sent spiraling into their self-generated
inferno over Tokyo, of the smell of burning Japanese flesh wafting through
the bomb-bay doors, of parachuting flyers beheaded on landing, he never
equated that barbarity with either LeMay or himself.
"On the contrary, he seemed to think the carnage below his plane and the
sacrifice of his friends in the air - twelve of sixteen B-29s in his 298th
Squadron, 132 of 176 men, were shot down, crashed, or never heard from again
- had been necessary to win the war against a racist imperial power, and to
save, not expend, both Asian and American lives. Despite his lifelong
Democratic party credentials, my father spoke highly of 'Old Iron Pants'
even in the midst of the general's subsequent entry into controversial
right-wing politics. The bastard shortened the war against evil, my father
told me. You were all lucky, he went on, once to have had angry men like
LeMay and us in the air. We flew into the fire, he said, because we
believed that we were saving more lives than we took. As he aged, all
memories - like childhood, job, family - receded as the recollection of
those nights over Tokyo grew sharper; parties, vacations, and familial
holiday festivities were to become sideshows compared to annual reunions
with his 313th Bomber Wing and 398th Squadron. His last hallucinatory gasps
of July 1998 in death's throes were a foreign vocabulary of B-29 operations
and frantic calls to crew members, most of whom were long since dead.
"Democracies, I think - if the cause, if the commanding general, if the
conditions of time and space take on their proper meaning -- for a season
can produce the most murderous armies from the most unlikely of men, and do
so in the pursuit of something spiritual rather than the mere material.
This book, devoted to infantry, not airpower, tries to learn why all that is
so."
Comment:
Victor Hanson is such a good writer, that I was tempted to let his words
stand without comment, but I was struck here by the contrast between
Hanson's words and the words I recently read by Rick Atkinson (An Army at
Dawn, the War in North Africa, 1942-1943) and Paul Fussell (The Great War
and Modern Memory).
It is easy to see why someone caught up in the aftermath or in the
activities of World War One could be pessimistic and defeatist. If you
aren't particular logical and want to generalize and create principles from
anecdotes you've encountered, there is much to be negative about in that
badly fought war. Alexander Haig remains a mystery to me. If any general
should have been tried for stupidity, it was Haig.
And Atkinson was writing about the early stages of the war in Europe when
the American Army didn't really know what it was doing, whereas Hanson's
father was in the later stages of the war against the Japanese. Also,
Atkinson describes constant conflict between the British, Americans and
French, whereas in the Asian theater the Americans had no one second
guessing them.
My impression is that the Navy and Marines did much better against the
Japanese than the Army did against the Axis powers. Neither the Navy nor
the Marines needed the learning curve that their counterparts in Europe
needed - or so it seems to me now.
Unfortunately, Hanson's book isn't going to be about that. He will be
concentrating upon three Generals, Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton. The
three parts of his book are "Epaminondas's Descent into the Peloponnese,"
"Sherman's march to the Sea," and "Patton's race into Germany." Maybe he
wrote the wrong introduction.
Lawrence Helm
San Jacinto
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