by Roger Angell
Post, July, 2011
—
Memory of this sweet Fourth of July morning, now almost four years past, remains clear, but the questions it raises and almost answers about “the Greatest Generation”—my generation, that is—may be slipping into irrelevance. We veterans of the Second World War are about to disappear. Eight hundred and fifty-five thousand of us remain, out of the original sixteen million, and five hundred of us are dying every day. We’re the last five per cent; next year, two per cent. With an effort, I can bring back a memory of myself, at fourteen, watching a few bent, white-haired veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic turned out in their shabby blue uniforms for another Memorial Day in the mid-nineteen-thirties; I can’t recall anything I felt about them. The two distances—each a seventy-year removal from a famous bloodletting—are identical, and there’s barely the shadow of a difference between us now: wasn’t I at Antietam?
When my war comes up in a conversation, people around me seem startled if I say that I was in it, I took part; then they smile and look at me benignly. I am great and somehow good, they’re thinking. The talk shifts and goes elsewhere, but I am a little uneasy now. You’ve won, Tom, and thank you: yes, mine is the Greatest Generation, but despite the compliment, the people who are really feeling good about that aren’t us old guys, I notice, but everybody else, anybody who’s younger. If we’re great, then they’re a little great, and America itself is great all over again.
Something’s missing here, and it eats at me, and may explain why thoughts about my own war have been persistent. In March, 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, I wrote a New Yorker Comment piece in which I named more than a dozen friends or school or college classmates of mine and told how they had died in my war and how and where it happened, and listed some others who had been wounded, and still others I knew who were killed in later wars. I mentioned a brother-in-law, Neil MacKenna, now deceased, who got blown up at Belfort Gap, in eastern France, and walked with a cane after that; later in his life he needed two canes. I also wrote about a close friend, Gardner Botsford, also departed, who as an infantry officer landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, fought in Normandy and at the Bulge and Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest, was twice wounded, and received numerous decorations, including the Croix de Guerre. He remained silent about all this until his seventies, when he wrote a memoir that touched on some of it but never with pathos. “He is suave and unflappable,” I went on, “but when there’s a thunderstorm passing over his house in the Berkshires he turns pale and wears a different look.”
Later on, I noted, “The slim roster of people I’ve known who died or nearly died in old wars is not something I run over in my mind, any more than I make myself think about the much longer list of strangers far away (it’s up in the millions) who have died or suffered in wars in my lifetime, but these old names have come back. Sometimes I think it’s wrong to mention the friends I had who have died in the service, because I was luckier than they were and had an easy time of it, all in all; my list is only a sliver compared with ones that could be drawn up by combat veterans of my age. But then there’s a shift and I feel that as long as I can hold on to these names and glimpsed faces, their bearers will not be relegated to the abstract status of heroes or the honored dead. Maybe some of them were heroes, but what I feel toward them, I find, is an extreme civility due them because they have stayed young.”
I was back on my case the following year, with a Comment piece about Errol Morris’s riveting documentary “The Fog of War,” a feature-length interview or history lesson or moral travelogue by the documentarian, who previously gave us “The Thin Blue Line” and “Mr. Death.” In it, the eighty-two-year-old former secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara is rarely off-screen, stubbornly vis-à-vis in a close-up that stops at the knot of his necktie. He is still energized by war, gesturing and jabbing his finger at us, then pausing with jaw ajar as he contemplates what he must next bring forth about the Cuban missile crisis or the firebombing of Tokyo or the Quaker protester Norman Morrison, who immolated himself outside McNamara’s Pentagon office (he was there) in 1965, in reaction to the escalating American devastation of the Vietnamese countryside.
For older audiences, among which I place myself, McNamara’s testimony cuts deepest when he goes back to the Second World War firebombing of Tokyo by the American Twentieth Air Force, whose high-altitude B-29 bombers, redeployed at five thousand feet, rained down incendiaries that killed at least eighty-five thousand civilians on that single night. The relentless subsequent B-29 bombing campaign, which was continued almost in secrecy against lesser targets, is accompanied here with a thrumming score by Philip Glass. Morris transforms the clustering names of the burnt-down wooden Japanese cities into equivalent American towns, with the percent of residents killed attached: thirty-five per cent of Chicago, fifty-eight per cent of Cleveland, ninety-nine per cent of Chattanooga, forty-two per cent of Toledo, and so on. Sixty-seven Japanese cities were firebombed by the B-29s in the spring of 1945 and three hundred and fifty thousand civilians burnt to death—and the war in effect won—well before Hiroshima. McNamara, then an Air Force colonel and the chief statistician to General Curtis E. LeMay, the superhawk commander of the campaign, almost puddles up when he talks about the tactic, then recovers to say, “I was part of a mechanism that in effect recommended it.” He quotes LeMay’s perception that both of them would be prosecuted as war criminals if the war were to be lost. The age-freckled McNamara stares out at the camera and into himself through all this while he talks about the hundred and sixty million people who died in wars during his lifetime. He is less the star than the soul of “The Fog of War,” and he sweeps us into his anxious, reconsidering purview.
As I’ve been saying, that war has almost slid out of memory, and it takes an unexpected work of art like this to look at it head on, even for one who was around at the time—I was an editor with a G.I. Air Force weekly in the Pacific which reported extensively about the B-29s and their work. And who among us can remember, before that, a world where such a war could not have been imagined? Today, thanks to our sleek modern weaponry, Americans will probably never again have to kill civilians in indiscriminate numbers in wartime, and can despise and fear enemies who hold to the idea that anyone can be targeted for death in the name of a fervent cause, even while we do the same thing, in our own more technical fashion and from a safe distance. What is disquieting about old Robert McNamara—who at times appears to stand in our path with the bony finger and crazy agenda of a street saint—isn’t his conscience, which he keeps private, but his consciousness, which we share and would just as soon do without.
One of The New Yorker’s greatest war accounts was a three-part Reporter at Large story by St. Clair McKelway, “A Reporter with the B-29s,” that ran in the magazine starting on June 9, 1945. It’s a vivid, first-hand, inside account of the entire B-29 program, from its beginnings to its massive and then still ongoing huge daily fire-bombing raids on Japan. It’s the magazine’s single greatest news-beat and the strangest New Yorker story ever. McKelway, an upper-level editor and then a notable writer of Profiles and fact pieces for the magazine, had joined the Air Force as a captain in 1943, and was soon made chief public relations officer of the budding B-29 program. It was a significant post, in which he rose to the rank of colonel and, once in the Marianas, became an intimate daily companion of the Twentieth Air Force’s top generals—Major General LeMay, Brigadier Generals Emmett (Rosy) O’Donnell and Haywood S. (Possum) Hansell, and some lesser brass. He had been on overseas duty for twenty-three months and would have still been there, hard at work, had he not suffered a jarring mental breakdown that suddenly had him firing off cables from Guam that accused Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, then the commander of all Pacific operations (including the Twentieth Air Force), of treason and attempted obstruction and sabotage of the B-29 campaign. McKelway, who had suffered from bouts of manic depression in civilian life, had flipped out. He was relieved, and, gently taken in hand, sent back to
Washington, where he received a brief medical examination and was given an extended furlough. He hurried to New York, took a room at the Ritz Hotel, and, still on his bipolar high, wrote the twenty-thousand-word piece in less than two weeks.
In an article I wrote about all this for the magazine in 2010, I said that Mac’s writing (everyone called him Mac) in that series was not crazed or rushed but seizes the reader with its energy and precise presentation of events. There was also a glow of romance that surrounds McKelway’s war, and shows itself in his heroic portraits of the Twentieth Air Force’s commanders and in his longing for the pioneering early days and sights on Saipan in the campaign’s début. There are moments when he describes the B-29s’ “red and green flying lights” as “those colored necklaces of faraway railroad trains that run through American childhood.”
But something even more bizarre comes over Mac when he writes about the ground personnel closely involved in LeMay’s campaign and its rush of successes. He mentions the sleeplessness that accompanies the days and nights of hard work of those times, and a tenseness and quickening of tempo in the performance of tasks. Messengers walk faster, jeep drivers take care of their jeeps and never run out of gas. For all of them, whether airmen or ground crews or adjutants and their clerks, “the mind, the body, the spirit, the whole being seemed free and ready for anything and confident of success. It was not elation so much as it was a knowledgeable acceptance of maturity…. Good men were better. Men who had seemed mediocre became good.” Describing LeMay himself (the two are sitting in a jeep, waiting for the B-29s to return from their enormous Tokyo raid), he says, “Here was a representative, I thought, of a great many men in all ranks who are better men than they have ever been before.”
McKelway loses his perky tone when he writes about the first time he got to look at the intelligence photographs, back from Tokyo and elsewhere, and began to think about what they meant, and I have pretty well decided that these photographs and those scarifying, not quite exact large numbers are what made him insist, oddly but perhaps not insanely, that our men in the Marianas were good. And I believe this is exactly the same ascribing of goodness that overcomes us all when we force ourselves to think about (or resolutely not think about) the numbers we have seen before and then must sum up: a hundred and forty thousand dead at Hiroshima; eighty thousand dead at Nagasaki. Three hundred and forty thousand dead in the other, extended fire raids. Five hundred and sixty thousand civilians dead, more or less. Old Robert McNamara, who was there, too, ultimately claimed the number was over nine hundred thousand.
This is how we won that war, and how we’d do it again in a “Groundhog Day” replay. The Japanese enemy had pulled their remaining planes and ground forces and weaponry back to the mainland and would have exacted an enormous toll of blood and death had we been forced to invade Japan. We exacted the toll and avoided invasion and won. Killing more civilians than the other side is what war makes you do, but reaching the decision and then acting on it doesn’t make you good or great. It makes you tired and it keeps you awake at night, still crazy after all these years.
May, 2015
CONGRATULATIONS! IT’S A BABY
“I always look at the cartoons first,” everyone says. So do I, and I’ve had practice. When I say that I grew up looking at New Yorker cartoons, I do not speak in metaphorical terms. My mother, Katharine Angell—later Katharine White—became an editor for the newborn magazine in 1925, the year I turned five, and because she was involved in the art as well as the prose of Harold Ross’s little enterprise there were always photocopied drawings (with the captions typed on the back) and covers, along with fiction galleys and Talk of the Town pages, all over the house. I went for the cartoons right away. It’s odd to look back on this precocious diet and wonder what I made of Ralph Barton’s gin-raddled nineteen-twenties weekenders or the florid fake engravings by John Held, Jr., which spoofed everything Victorian. I passed them over, I suppose—storing them away in memory until my sophistication quotient caught up a little—and ate up the rest: the covers, which were so much brighter and livelier than my children’s-book jackets, and, inside, Rea Irvin’s plump paired cops tooling around in tiny roadsters; Peter Arno’s thin young men in tails crowding into speakeasies; and engrossing multi-part strips, like O. Soglow’s Little King running away to join some Gypsies; the dusty crosstown peregrinations of a restaurant hard roll, from bakery to diner’s plate, as delineated by Al Frueh; and Irvin’s boldly inked parson rushing over hill and dale, in full ecclesiasticals, to bless the fox after he has blessed the hounds. The first New Yorker cartoon to become famous may have been George V. Shanks’s circus mishap—the butterfingered trapeze artist apologizing, and his dropped partner glaring back up from the bottom of the page. I got that right away.
(Credit 11.1)
I can’t remember myself often asking for help with a caption or a situation. One exception was Helen Hokinson’s American lady in a Paris back street shyly asking, “Avez-vous ‘Ulysses’?” A book banned in this country; I was told, and, uh—well, it’s hard to explain. I was still only ten. I never said anything about an earlier, darkly brooding Reginald Marsh drawing of a bored, vulturous cleric, from a 1929 issue, which my mother had put up, matted and framed, in a corner of the hallway, but I kept stopping to look it over. “Let us pray,” he is intoning into a basket-like nineteen-twenties radio microphone just under his chin: a biting joke back then, when radio was so new—and still disturbing now. I don’t think Pat Robertson would put it up in his hallway, I mean.
Just lately, I’ve been looking at Gluyas Williams’s splendid full-page 1928 drawing captioned “A Little Bird Reveals the Facts of Life to the Editor of the New York Times,” and imagining the intense twenty minutes’ study I must have given to that situation: the Editor, an ancient gent in Dundreary whiskers, sitting stunned; the birdie flying out the window; the horrified editors and press-men recoiling at the door. But what were “the facts of life,” and why didn’t the editor of the Times know them? Within a year or two, I must have spotted the scene again, in one of the early New Yorker albums, and understood it better. It doesn’t matter now, because the joke is still strong and alive. Art waits for us to catch up, and never goes out of date.
I had modern parents—my mother used to take me to lunch at speakeasies—and although they certainly didn’t agree about everything (they were divorced), there seems to have been no debate between them about the notion that kids should be left on their own when it comes to reading. I was a bookworm, and was terrifically lucky to be growing up in a place where funny drawings and brilliant, hardworking artists were taken seriously. When Arno and Hokinson and James Thurber and Mary Petty and Richard Taylor and William Steig and Saul Steinberg and Whitney Darrow and George Price and Charles Addams and the rest began to flourish, in the thirties, every other New Yorker reader got lucky, too.
Cultural historians who offer explanations for this sudden flowering of the New Yorker cartoon seem to share an owlish tone, and cite the same roster of names and sources in their accounting: the old Punch, Charles Dana Gibson, Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, Life (the old Life) and Judge, Prohibition, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, the Depression, the genius of Harold Ross and the genius of his art editor, Rea Irvin. I can’t disagree, but I have a different conclusion. I think it was a miracle. It was an accident of history: something in the drinking water; sunspots; the conjoining of Aquarius and Herbert Hoover in the third house. Nobody knows what happened; we only know that it hasn’t happened again. Something very much of the same order was going on with New Yorker writers at this same moment, when Robert Benchley, Frank Sullivan, Ogden Nash, James Thurber, E. B. White, Russell Maloney, Wolcott Gibbs, and S. J. Perelman were all writing for the magazine. Ah, New Yorker subscribers must have thought, what a funny bunch we Americans are. Just think—all these writers and artists, every week like this, from now on! Well, no. That coming together was a time too good to last, and somebody else will have to explain why
. I’m just glad I was around.
—
THE SUMMER I TURNED fifteen, my mother and my stepfather, E. B. White, were startled one evening at the dinner table when it came out that I could remember every single drawing and every caption that had appeared in the magazine in its first decade. My claim was tested on the spot and it held up, and I can recall my mother briefly worrying about whether I’d been wasting my time. It was too late, in any case, because The New Yorker surrounded me on every side. The magazine was talked about endlessly, all day long, and then some more over the weekends. Frank Sullivan or James Thurber or the Robert Coateses turned up on Sundays sometimes, and we all played word games and Kick the Can. I took on Thurber at Ping-Pong; he could still see then, and he was excitable and scary-wild across the table. After I went off to boarding school, he gave me a great interview for the school paper, along with the original of one of his most famous drawings, which somebody swiped from my dormitory room in Lower Dunworth. (Be warned, whoever you are: Interpol and the Friends of Dr. Millmoss are on this case, big time, and expect a break any day now.)
I studied Peter Arno’s stuff closely while I was growing up, because I’d picked up the news somewhere that he was sophisticated. (I can’t recall anyone at home using that word in conversation.) His men and women were inexorably stylish and stayed out late drinking, but there was also something outré about them, because they looked out of scale and were dazzlingly over-lighted. They reminded you of the movies. His drawings appeared to be about New York and Westchester and the Hamptons, but I think only people from out of town ever believed that portrait. Arno’s jokes were racy, and his line was bolder than anyone else’s—the gleam of a tuxedo lapel, the slash of lipstick, the carnal tilt of a sugar daddy’s mustache—and he overdressed his grandes dames and theatregoers and equestrians (and underdressed his showgirls and bimbos) because it was so much fun for him to draw them that way, in costume. My parents had dressed up in evening clothes and gone to parties, too, back when they were still married—it was a thrill to watch them taxiing off into the night—but in the mornings they got up and went to work. Parties didn’t go on all the time, the way they did in Arno’s world: I knew that much. Arno felt free to play with us this way because he was sure about his eye—he could draw a sophisticated robin—and certainty is the heart of cool. Even his captions had dash—“Hey, Jack, which way to Mecca?” and “Well, back to the old drawing board” and “Fill ’er up!” and “Wake up, you mutt! We’re getting married today”—and brought back the work in a rush when you thought of them later. (I must have spotted that last one in an early Arno album, for a snoring man and a naked woman in bed together was altogether too racy for Ross, which meant that it didn’t appear in his not always sophisticated magazine.)
