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.]
A Wheel of Evil Come Full Circle
Edmund: The wheel is come full circle. I am here.
—King Lear V.III. 185
During the late 1960s I developed a brief but warm relationship with Hannah Arendt. We were both members of the editorial board of The American Scholar, which met twice a year alternately in New York and Washington. After these long and rather soporific meetings, Hannah and I would retire to a bar and drink scotch, for which we both had a fairly enthusiastic taste. I was an ardent admirer of her work, though as one untrained in philosophy I found much of it rough going, and the thickets of her English sometimes verging on the impassable; still I regarded The Origins of Totalitarianism as a great illumination, and had made Eichmann in Jerusalem a kind of handbook. My novel The Confessions of Nat Turner had recently appeared, and had been furiously attacked by members of the black intelligentsia. A book of essays had been published—William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond—in which I'd been accused of racism and of falsifying and distorting the story of the rebel slave leader. This assault had left me with a residue of indignation, although I was cooling off.
Hannah had read my book, and I'm sure that some small part of the affinity we felt for each other came from a shared sense of aggravation: she was still vexed over the rancorous criticism of Eichmann in Jerusalem, and while she had cooled off, too, I sensed a touch of bitterness about what she continued to view as an absurd misreading of her work. She insisted that those who had accused her of asserting that the European Jews had capitulated, in a form of self-murder, before the Nazi onslaught were guilty of gross misinterpretation. I felt she was still resentful, as I was, over being hounded by special-interest groups. And so she chain-smoked, which I mildly chided her for; and we drank our scotch in a glow of rueful sympathy and mutual martyrdom.
I recall her asking me how it was that a Southern-born writer, connected tenuously to the modern European experience, could reveal a compulsive interest in anything so essentially European as the Nazi camps. Hannah always used the word “camps,” or, occasionally, “Auschwitz,” as a generic term for the Nazi terror—never “Holocaust,” which doesn't appear in Eichmann in Jerusalem, and which, in the late sixties, was largely a scholarly characterization, one that would begin to enter the common speech only a decade or so later. I reminded her that totalitarianism, on which she was perhaps the leading authority, had found its expression in America in the form of chattel slavery; she agreed that, in a broad and abstract way, at least, the leap from the slave South to Auschwitz formed a logical transition. It was plain that both of us were fascinated by those wellsprings of human nature out of which there boils over the need for subjugation and oppression.
I remember our discussing a book which we'd both read, a work I had encountered just after the war, when, following service in the Marines, I had returned to college. This account of Auschwitz, Five Chimneys, was written by Olga Lengyel, a doctor's wife who with her family had been transported to the camp from Transylvanian Hungary in 1944. Curiously enough, she does not identify herself as Jewish, although this would appear almost certain, given the chronology of the transports from Hungary. The book was one of the first narratives of its kind published in postwar America; it had affected me in powerful, unsettling ways that had lingered over the years.
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