why does fussell thank god for the atom bomb

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In general, the principle is, the farther from the scene of horror the easier the talk. The aim of war is to destroy an enemy who is trying to destroy you. ., I was horrified indeed at the sight of a stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeball in his palm. In this book's title essay, he evokes the ethos of wartime sentiment without flinching from Allied barbarism, then proposes that postwar arguments condemning President Harry Truman's decision to. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. Details; Description; . The citizens of Japan had never expected something as extensive as a bomb. What did he do in the war? We were going to grow to adulthood after all. by Paul Fussell. Being aware of the segregation against blacks, the Japanese created propaganda such as books that illustrated the racism in America along with how the African Americans were treated. (A good place to interrupt and remember Glenn Grays noble but hopelessly one-sided remarks about injustice, as well as suffering.). (The earlier landing on Kyushu was to be carried out by the 700,000 infantry already in the Pacific, those with whom James Jones has sympathized.) 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! 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. Fussell's argument resembles the standard defense of the bombings: dropping atomic bombs on two cities forced Japan to surrender without a costly US invasion of Japan and thus supposedly saved more American and Japanese lives than were lost in the bombings. 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 . 2. Paul Fussell wrote an article called "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," seemed to be about how only certain people would understand why it happened while others are still debating if it happened because we wanted something cruel to happen or because that was an alternative to something less painful. Who is the intended audience? 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. he uses statistics to prove that while the bomb killed many japanese lives, it saved many more american lives. The author of Drop the Bomb as agreed by saying that the Japanese have demonstrated a willingness to fight to the death. By July 10, 1945, the prelanding naval and aerial bombardment of the coast had begun, and the battleships Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and King George V were steaming up and down the coast, softening it up with their sixteen-inch shells. "So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war." Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb & Other Essays 6 likes Like All Quotes From this, one recoils says the reviewer. He looked to be in great pain but there was nothing that I could do for him. So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us. knew better than did Americans at home what those bombs meant in suffering and injustice. Division headquarters is milesmilesbehind the line where soldiers experience terror and madness and relieve those pressures by crazy brutality and sadism. He does agree that the dropping of the bomb was horrific and not morally right, but the bombs were necessary. Many kept body parts, such as hands, as trophies. On the tragic day of August 6, 1945, US Air Force deployed the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. When the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came, he asks us to believe, manyan American soldier felt shocked and ashamed. Shocked, OK, but why ashamed? [Excerpted from Paul Fussell's "Thank God for the Atom Bomb. These childlike drawings and paintings are of skin hanging down, breasts torn off, people bleeding and burning, dying mothers nursing dead babies. Planners of the invasion assumed that it would require a full year, to November 1946, for the Japanese to be sufficiently worn down by land-combat attrition to surrender. 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. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past. "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. The authors overall purpose in the article is to persuade the audience that the atomic bomb had a negative effect due to the effect it had on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ", What is an example of an appeal to character in "Thank God for the Atom Bomb? of drones and debtors forbes. The veterans in the outfit felt we had already run out of luck anyway. Dowers book, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, is an intelligently crafted review of the racial aspects that were integral to the incredible violence of the Pacific theater. The Japanese believed their culture was unique, and spent this period of time during the war focusing on themselves and their race. But The Warriors, his meditation on the moral and psychological dimensions of modern soldiering, gives every sign of error occasioned by remoteness from experience. 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. He does so without showing bias or raising the question of whether or not the United States should have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Fussell begins by stating that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a necessary evil. Enjoy eNotes ad-free and cancel anytime. ISBN-10: 0671638661. Rhetorical Questions 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. As I said, I am a peace-loving guy, a pacifist at heart but a realist in real life. The first was The Great War and Modern Memory. The dramatic postwar Japanese success at hustling and merchandising and tourism has (happily, in many ways) effaced for most people the vicious assault context in which the Hiroshima horror should be viewed. The Japanese pre-invasion patriotic song, One Hundred Million Souls for the Emperor, says Sledge, meant just that. Universal national kamikaze was the point. Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays by Paul Fussell. KILL JAPS! they supported the idea that the war was going to end . Question: 1.) It would shock the American public and the world. 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. During the war there were many times for the Japanese to surrender, but it was never done. Chapter 8, The Pure Self, Dower explains the Japanese traditions and culture, along with the humiliation and discrimination the Japanese received. 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.) For this was hell, the soldier goes on. 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. Course Syllabus School, What Is It GoodFor? The people became prejudice. Others recounted how signs encouraging everyone to KILL JAPS! Herman Wouk suggests this obliviousness of both sides to the fact that the opponents were human beings may perhaps be cited as the key to the many massacres of the Pacific war. They saw all Japanese as monsters an this justifies the dropping of the. Because wed destroyed civilians? 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. In the poem, Hiroshima Exit by Canadian Writer Joy Kogawa presents a flash back of these events that occurred during World War II. And not just a staggering number of Americans would have been killed in the invasion. 4 Paul Fussell, who faced death in combat, articulately and forcefully states this view. Why not blow them all up, with satchel charges or with something stronger? During the early 1920s the anti-Japanese crusade grew nastier (Marrin 63). Former Pfc. 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. 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. He heaps sarcasms on the "sensitive humanitarian" who "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 else's." KILL MORE JAPS! Herman Wouk remembers the Pacific war scene correctly while analyzing ensign Keith in The Caine Mutiny: Like most of the naval executioners of Kwajalein, he seemed to regard the enemy as a species of animal pest. And the feeling was entirely reciprocal: From the grim and desperate taciturnity with which the Japanese died, they seemed on their side to believe that they werecontending with an invasion of large armed ants. Hiroshima seems to follow in natural sequence: This obliviousness of both sides to the fact that the opponents were human beings may perhaps be cited as the key to the many massacres of the Pacific war. Since the Jap vermin resist so madly and have killed so many of us, lets pour gasoline into their bunkers and light it and then shoot those afire who try to get out. In addition to the almost unbearable pictures, the book offers brief moments of memoir not for the weak-stomached: While taking my severely wounded wife out to the river bank . What did Paul Fussel feel towards the dropping of the Atomic Bomb? The U.S. government was engagednot in that sort of momentous thing but in ending the war conclusively, as well as irrationally Remembering Pearl Harbor with a vengeance. All this is not to deny that like the Russian Revolution, the atom-bombing of Japan was a vast historical tragedy, and every passing year magnifies the dilemma into which it has lodged the contemporary world. The Alsop-Joravsky debate, reduced to a collision between experience and theory, was conducted with a certain civilized respect for evidence. Over the years, opinion has shifted sharply toward the position that dropping the bomb both incredibly cruel and totally unnecessary. David Joravsky, now a professor of history at Northwestern, argued on the other hand that those who decided to use the A-bombs on cities betray defects of reason and self-restraint. It all neednt have happened, he says, if the U.S. government had been willing to take a few more days and to be a bit more thoughtful in opening up the age of nuclear warfare. Ive already noted what a few more days would mean to the luckless troops and sailors on the spot, and as to being thoughtful when opening up the age of nuclear warfare, of course no one was focusing on anything as portentous as that, which reflects a historians tidy hindsight. Aim of war is to destroy you the aim of war is destroy. Luck anyway of extermination the humiliation and discrimination the Japanese constituted a,... To adulthood after all he uses statistics to prove that while the bomb both incredibly and. Good place to interrupt and remember Glenn Grays noble but hopelessly one-sided remarks about injustice, trophies!, articulately and forcefully states this view by Paul Fussell remarks about injustice, as trophies horrified at... 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