In the early days of August many pundits, print and electronic, turn their attention to the anniversaries of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. None of them will write with clarity and force displayed by Paul Fussell in his essay Thank God For The Atom Bomb, which I highly, highly recommend.

Mr. Fussell, who I’ve mentioned previously, has a personal connection to the events:

I was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rifle platoon. Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war I had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my leg buckled and I fell to the ground whenever I jumped out of the back of a truck, and even if the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over, my condition was held to be adequate for the next act.

And he has very strong words for those with an overly simple view of the ending of the Second World War:

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. As with the Russian Revolution, there are two sides that’s why it’s a tragedy instead of a disaster-and unless we are, like Bruce Page, simplemindedly unimaginative and cruel, we will be painfully aware of both sides at once. To observe that from the viewpoint of the war’s victims-to-be the bomb seemed precisely the right thing to drop is to purchase no immunity from horror.

The future scholar-critic who writes The History of Canting the Twentieth Century will find much to study and interpret the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness f the A-bomb-droppers. He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he 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. Down there, which is where
the other people were, is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule.