Potsdam: Juggling the Fate of the World

[My father’s cynical — though realistic — side is on display in his jaded take on the Potsdam Conference, which ran from July 16 through August 2, 1945. At the conference, the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union met to decide upon the punishment for Nazi Germany, which had unconditionally surrendered on May 8, 1945 (VE Day). The victors also sought to develop peace treaties and a model for a new world order that would reduce the liklihood of yet another world war.

The Potsdam Agreement issued at the end of the conference included a long list of penalties and prescriptions for Germany, as well as for the disposition of Poland. The conference also produced the Potsdam Declaration, which proposed terms of surrender for Japan. Japan rejected the Declaration and, within a week of the conference’s conclusion, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the entry’s last paragraph, the “eccentric character” referenced is, of course, my father, himself.]

July 17, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Potsdam! Look to Potsdam, ladies and gentlemen, for the super-historical spectacle of the Big Three juggling the fate of the world like a rosy, red apple. Back and forth it goes, flipped from one to the other, twirling through the solemn air, caught at the last moment, and tossed up again. Look close, ladies and gentlemen. These three great performers have practiced their act for a long time, but no human is infallible. Will one of them make a fatal slip? Will we all end by being communists? or democrats? or imperialists? or will we get a bastard mixture, with a little of each? Forty centuries of recorded, bloody history look down on this momentous gathering, watching with the bated breath to see if the appointed time has come for that miracle of miracles, that dream of the ages, – the generation of the sweet perfume of universal peace out of the stinking cauldron of war. Forty centuries have tried this desperate alchemy time and again, and failed. But look to Potsdam, ladies and gentlemen. The curtain rises on the grandest attempt of all.

And now we take you to Potsdam for a ringside seat at this latest delivery from the pregnant womb of history. Will the nations of the world finally accept the issue, or will it, like all its predecessors, be scorned as a bastard, and left to die miserably in the next great clash of arms?

Well, it makes good newspaper copy, anyway. It provides fertile grist for the greedy minds of the columnists and commentators. And perhaps it even puts a little zest into the lives of the common people these hot summer days. Certainly something is wanting for that purpose, though a bottle of iced beer may prove to be more practical in the long run. The college debating societies, of course, go wild over this sort of thing, and the women’s clubs will be a set-up in the next few months for lectures prepared to discourse on “The Implications for America of the Potsdam Conference.” Next Christmas will be time for an enterprising correspondent to sum it all up in an authoritative volume entitled “World After Potsdam.”

As a comic sidelight to this epic page of history, we heard yesterday of an eccentric character, now serving in the Armed Forces (and better out of them, we submit), who claims that the Potsdam Conference has as little significance to go with its pomp and circumstance as a presentation of grand opera at the Metropolitan, and that the Metropolitan could perhaps improve upon its leading characters. There will be the customary situations of suspense and discord, and then the final scene of overwhelming triumph to bring the waiting cheers from the expectant audience. Afterwards, the people will return to their familiar occupations, and go on deciding through their mysterious collective force, as heedlessly and unwitting as ever, the future issues of war and peace, irrespective of the wishes or formal agreements of Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. This heresy, which could be dangerous coming from a man of any standing, serves in this case as an ironically humorous comment on the vagaries of an irresponsible and immature mind.

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Lines To The Raw Recruits – A Poem

[Another poem written by my father. As with most of the other poems he wrote during this period, this one conveys a somewhat dark and fatalistic perspective on the war, and of the soldier’s prospects in it.]

June 18, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Sitting in the “Ship Ahoy” Sunday noon, eating a chicken dinner, and a line came into my head: “Boys, put down your shining toys –“ It was one of those lines that stays around to tempt your imagination, and it was still buzzing my brain when I walked off over to the Presbyterian church. Had the first stanza all done by then, and finished the second by sort of talking it out with Fran. Then I did the last two in a few minutes at code school this morning. It might be called “Lines To The Raw Recruits,” but no one will agree just how much I believe what I’ve written, and least of all, I myself.

Come laughing boys,

Put down your toys,

The time has ceased for play;

Your country’s need,

Yourselves to bleed,

And throw your lives away.

 

Now don’t look sad,

It’s not so bad, –

A year or so to fight,

And then one day

You’ll go the way

Where bullets never bite.

 

Don’t stop to ask, –

The bloody task

Won’t wait upon your fears;

Ten million more

Have gone before,

And no one scorns your tears.

 

Come, laughing boys,

Put down your toys,

And kiss your girls goodbye;

Dead years to wait

Their heavy fate,

While yours’ is but to die.

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The Holocaust and Circumstances of Birth

[My father had no illusions about his own fallibility, and he was too intelligent to think he was innately superior to America’s war-time enemies. As he notes here, only the circumstance of his birth in the United States may have separated him from the Germans engaged in the terrible malevolence of the Holocaust. Knowing this, my father also understood the burden of responsibility he carried to promote the compassionate and inclusive philosophy into which he had been born and raised.]

May 6, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Last week TIME printed pictures and reports from several of the German concentration camps captured by the Americans. This week there was additional evidence, about Dachau; LIFE printed pages of the horror, – human bodies, broken, burned, beaten, starved, – piles of bodies so vast and horrible that the sense of individual tragedy is blurred, and the mind fails to comprehend the meaning, if there is any meaning, to such utter bestiality. Then this afternoon it came over me, while I saw these scenes repeated on the theatre screen, how slender a thread of chance had prevented me from being one of those beasts, or one of those victims. We are all men, and partake of the same nature, and ultimately know the same capabilities, even of degradation. Had I been born in Germany, and been educated a German, and caught up in the Nazi madness at the age of eleven or twelve, I could have been one of those German boys who burned the despised swine in the warehouse, and machine-gunned those few who broke loose and fled. I know there is cruelty in me, and more than once I have exulted in it. But what is important is that I’ve had the chance to learn a way of life which can keep in check the brute in me, if never wholly eradicate it. Very well I know that it isn’t the only way of life, or a perfect way of life. But by its principles men are, at least, strongly influenced to live peaceably together, to respect the rights which all men share alike in a common humanity. This morning I finished the philosopher Spinoza’s pure exposition of those principles, and knew that they were in harmony with the ideas of man and society which I have learned to love. If I falter now in my fight to keep those ideas living among men, after I’ve seen so clearly what men can become when these ideas die in them, or are never born, the fault will lie with no one but me.

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