A Sardonic Critique of the Atomic Bomb

[My father’s rather pessimistic worldview as well as his wit are in evidence in this journal entry about the atomic bomb. (His use of the first-person plural “we” to express his opinions is somewhat unusual for him, however.) Written about half-a-year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this essay characterizes the development and use of atomic bombs as “simply the latest in a long series of inventions and situations which man has used to make himself seem a bit more important than he actually is.” Despite causing people to worry about humankind’s survival — and, perhaps driving them see a movie now rather than later given that “any day now an atomic bomb could conceivably close the show and your interest in it simultaneously” — my father has little doubt that the new weapons “should be an overwhelming success.”]

March 21, 1946 (location unknown)

This is the year when the world is absorbed with the power-play between the United States and Russia, and with the forthcoming atomic bomb test at Bikini lagoon. These events no doubt have an important bearing on the question of war and peace, and even of ultimate human survival on this planet. There used to be some conjecture, mainly in the Sunday supplements, about the remote possibility of our sun flaring up and baking us to a crisp, or of a collision between our little planet and some vast marauder from outer space. Another favorite theory had the sun cooling down after some millions of years until life should be extinguished on this planetary chunk of ice.

Since last summer these theories have been relegated to the category of harmless bagatelles, strictly for children. And even as we write it, we detect an odious patronizing note in our reference to the kids, not at all fair to them. For years they’ve been ardently supporting Buck Rogers, Superman, and company while we have smiled indulgently, or scoffed, perhaps. Now that our scientists have released atomic energy, we find that our kids have intuitively been forging down the right track, and left us behind in our ivory towers. But now that the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have shattered our complacency, we’re still a little confused. It may indeed be true, as we have been warned by various authorities, that we are threatened with mass extinction unless we do something about it very soon. Fine, – we’re agreeable, but what are we supposed to do? After all, we have only the haziest conception of how the contraption works. We don’t even know what it looks like, and have to trust our newspapers and magazines for an account of what it does. We can offer one suggestion strictly from the layman’s point of view. If these A-bombs are the dangerous toys that our scientists claim, why don’t we just dispose of our present stocks in some out-of-the-way place, and then discontinue production from this time forward? To please those who are patriotically-minded, the disposal could take place on this coming Fourth of July.

But we are being facetious, and we admit it. In our exceedingly complex civilization, so simple a solution is utterly impracticable. Imagine every nation in the world promising never to fool around with atomic explosives, not even out of curiosity, and then keeping its promise. The results in technological unemployment alone are frightening to estimate. Thousands of scientists and technicians the world over would be thrown out of work. Of course, men of their ability and training might be enlisted in the struggle to produce the food, clothing, and shelter which alone can save a reported quarter of the population of the globe from untimely and uncomfortable death, but the difficulties of adjustment between two such divergent types of work are probably too great even to be considered. It must be somewhat discouraging to these men, however, to see how far the old natural scourges of famine, disease, and exposure are still outstripping the destructive power of their newest explosive.

We suspect that this atomic bomb is simply the latest in a long series of inventions and situations which man has used to make himself seem a bit more important than he actually is. Being too intelligent to enjoy life entirely on the low level of appreciation of the beasts and birds, he needs to dramatize his life by devising real or imaginary threats to his already troubled existence, – everything from an inscrutable and vengeful God to an excess-profits tax. He feels most alive when he is in danger; his senses are keyed up to an unusual awareness of this life which becomes suddenly so valuable when it appears that it may have to be cashed in tomorrow or the next day. You’ll think twice about putting off seeing “Life With Father” until nineteen forty-eight or nine when you realize that any day now an atomic bomb could conceivably close the show and your interest in it simultaneously.

Of course this is rather a risky game which man has been playing with himself. It has to be. If no one got  hurt or killed in these various experiments with predestination and mechanics, the farce would become too apparent, and people would lose interest. I imagine that this point might be demonstrated by the slackening of popular interest in religion since the terrors of hell fire and the imminence of divine intervention have been generally discounted. Throughout history those enterprises have enjoyed the greatest interest and support in which the members have most recklessly invoked their own death and destruction. By this criterion, the atomic bomb should be an overwhelming success.

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Reflections on Post-War Seattle, New Year’s 1946

[One more vignette of post-war Seattle, written on New Year’s 1946. As a 20-year resident of the city’s suburbs, I find many of my father’s observations of mid-1940s Seattle quite interesting (the aversion to umbrellas remains strong, but is no longer universal). It seems that the good citizens of Seattle were more than happy to make a profit off the returning troops, who for all their drinking and partying couldn’t — to my father’s mind — conquer the “loneliness of spirit” that they shared with most other Americans.]

January 1, 1946 (Seattle, WA)

Seattle is one of the northernmost of US cities, but, being within breezing distance of the Japanese current, its winters are not as severe as they are exasperating. It’s an unusual day when a little rain falls. On a usual day a lot of rain falls. No one really worries about getting wet, but accepts his daily soaking as a matter of course. I haven’t noticed an umbrella during ten days in Seattle.

Seattle, like most other American cities, is much less impressive as an old acquaintance than as a bustling stranger. As a port city, it sees more than its share of soldiers and sailors, and sees them only as short-time transients bent on having a good time. Entertainment is a booming business for Seattle people, and the boys in the service are never in any doubt that it is a business. They pay top prices for anything that’s offered to them, and most of what they get is second-rate, or worse. But the simple pressure of their numbers makes them powerless to protest, and most of them have enough money to give them a “what-the-hell” attitude. But among themselves they curse the city volubly.

No doubt the good people of Seattle do a little private cursing of the troops. The boys go into town to get drunk and look for girls. These are the things they’ve been dreaming about most avidly during the months overseas, and as they come plowing deep into Puget Sound on the ships, they begin to build Seattle up into the Mecca of their longings. The people of Seattle apparently don’t make much objection to the damage done their city’s morals by the uniformed pilgrims, but they probably grow quite weary of their streets reeling with drunken, brawling, flirting kids.

On First Avenue are the military trinket stores and the penny arcades. Most of the boys make a bee-line from the ships to the trinket stores to stock up on the stripes, patches, medals, buttons, theater ribbons, overseas “hershey bars,” caps, and hash marks which become the visible marks of glory. Then, after everything is sewed and pinned in place (often at the USO on Second Avenue), they launch off into the city to consume and conquer. Several hours and a good many dollars later they drift back to their ships and barracks to boast or bitch, according to their respective fortunes.

The only regular stage performance in Seattle is a dingy burlesque show at the Rivoli on First Avenue. (Sin, by the way, is arranged symbolically in Seattle. It parades in its rawest forms along First Avenue, which is the waterfront, becomes more refined on each succeeding avenue up the hill, and is sophisticated practically beyond recognition by the time one reaches Sixth Avenue.) The movie theatres, which carry such piquant names as the Blue Mouse and the Music Box, are mostly all owned by a Mr. John Hamrick. Mr. Hamrick had a very mediocre offering for the Christmas season. “The Stork Club,” featuring Betty Hutton and Barry Fitzgerald, was as good as anything going, and it was not good at all. But the theatres stay open all night, and draw the bulk of their late-evening patronage from boys on pass who have no other place to go.

There’s one thing about Seattle, and about any other American city, that most fellows can’t understand, because they’re products of the city way of life. They’ve learned to depend on the mechanical, commercialized dispensers of “pleasure,” which never really please. The human spirit has probably never before been more completely neglected than it is in America today. Even lovemaking has no significance beyond its physical thrills, and the most intimate moments are shared by fellows and girls after an evening’s, or even an hour’s, acquaintance. There is in almost every American a tremendous loneliness of spirit coupled with an ignorance of the means of spiritual fulfillment. Spending money is the most obvious opiate for his vast restlessness, and just now he has plenty of money. Probably during this New Year of 1946 Americans will spend more money to satisfy personal wants than ever before, and then come to the end of the year as dismally dissatisfied as ever.

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Service Member “Waywardness” in Post-War Seattle

[My father returned from Okinawa to the States in mid-December 1945 on the troop transport U.S.S. Mellette, arriving in Seattle just prior to Christmas. In this journal entry, he captures the post-war scene in Seattle, as idle servicemen kill time in the way that idle servicemen will do. My father’s discussion of this “waywardness” and his analysis of its roots includes one of my favorite lines from his journals to date: “The American is no more inherently immoral than the men of any other race or nation, but more than all others in this unbalanced world he suffers from an excess of civilization and a paucity of culture.” I think that description sums up the current American scene quite nicely as well!

Anyone reading only this journal excerpt might infer from the mention of “spiritual destruction” that my father’s bleak view of affairs was driven by a Biblically based puritanism. As earlier posts have illustrated, however, my father was more interested in establishing a personal spirituality and faith model than in adopting any formal religion. The excerpt’s final paragraph, in which he speaks of men losing the capacity for an “inner life” expresses the true source of his dismay.]

December 27, 1945 (Seattle, WA)

The streets of Seattle in the winter are cold and wet, rain is almost always in the air, and soldiers and sailors are always in the streets. Most of them have no place to go, and nothing to do. They just walk up and down the streets in pairs or small groups, always chattering, never pausing to think, because what is there to think about? The war is over, and now, just like after a big game, they want to get home. But the stadium covers the world, and not everyone can leave at the same time. Those who have to wait are impatient, lonely, and rebellious. The days drag slowly at best, and liquor, girls, and gambling are the surest ways to kill time. The arm of military authority relaxes, the excitement and danger of battle are gone, and the GIs drift into a frenzy of dissipation which shocks the world. They rage and riot in Paris, they sow a bumper crop of babies in the arms of the late enemy in Germany, they supply and patronize the black market in Rome, they drink themselves to death in Japan. And beneath these various spectacular outbursts there is the steady tempo of gambling, drinking, and whoring which daily involves millions of America’s fine young men in uniform. There are exceptions, of course, but they are too few to alter the scene appreciably, and their number, I suspect, loses more to the great temptations than it gains in new recruits.

The American is no more inherently immoral than the men of any other race or nation, but more than all others in this unbalanced world he suffers from an excess of civilization and a paucity of culture. His amiable lack of principle and value is camouflaged behind such vague phrases as “traditional American idealism” and “the democratic spirit.” His ingenuity is genuine and sterile, for by it he only adds to the dazzle and comfort of a civilization which has already reduced him far down the road towards his spiritual destruction. He’s a barbarian who worships daily at the shrines of Flesh and Money and Self, and tolerates just as much religion of the true God as will salve his vestigial conscience and do no harm to his worldly pursuits.

If the boys in khaki and blue ever stop to question the wisdom of their waywardness, they content themselves with the explanation that they act as they do because they’re not at home. In other words, the determinants of their morality are external, – geographical limits and family relationships. I’ve found that most fellows are filled with stories of their families and work at home, but in ordinary conversation with their fellows, their proudest achievement is to outdo each other in stories of drunken binges and seductions. They live so much on the surface that they themselves lose sight of their capacity for an inner life, and from long neglect, no doubt, they gradually lose much of their original capacity.

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Dealing with the Bomb, and an Unstable Post-War World

[After observing the friendliness of Japanese prisoners of war and noting that “practically all the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other,” my father makes his first journal entry about the arrival of atomic bombs on the world scene. He isn’t too optimistic about the prospects for the U.S., or the world at large, to do a good job of managing this new destructive power. Nor does he expect a victorious U.S. to seriously address the inequities among nations in the post-war period, despite the emergence of a modern world that “is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states.”]

December 6, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

… All along the roads here on Okinawa, as we go rumbling along on our truck, we pass Okinawan men, women and kids, trudging along singly or in groups, most of them carrying bundles of junk they’ve picked up from the dumps. It just takes a wave of the hand and a smile to get a wave and a smile in return. Some of them even make the first gesture.

Up at the dump where we took our load of scrap field wire there were some Jap PWs unloading trucks, little wiry fellows, very inoffensive-looking, who work rapidly and efficiently. On the way back we passed a truck with a couple of PW’s in the back. As we drew alongside, one of them saluted me smartly and grinned. “You know, Siggie,” I said, “practically all of the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other.”

“Sure, that’s right,” Siggie said. “They all like to be liked.”

Not all of them, of course. A lot of people are like those Canadians I was just reading about in TIME who want to get all the Jap “rats” out of Canada, even though they may have been born there. For one reason or another, people are taught to hate certain groups of other people who happen to differ from them in color, religion, race, occupation, or social standing. But who promotes these hatreds, and why? Well, it looks like one group pitting itself against another; until a whole mythology of grievances and prejudices is built up to justify the often inhumane measures which each group practices to protect its own special interests, and finally there evolves a false morality based almost solely on power. And though this development is nothing new in human society, the new technology which produces the modern implements of power has brought us to the critical points where the largest groups, or nations, are capable of annihilating each other.

Critical people generally, and TIME magazine notably, in my limited reading of recent weeks, have been pointing up the revolutionary terror which the atomic bomb has let loose in the world. They also take the average people to task for failing to wake up and do something about it. Do what? Keep it an American secret? We sense that would be fine, if it were possible, but the troublesome fact arises that the secret is really no secret at all. Russia, we are told, will be able to produce atomic bombs in two to five years.

Well, then, how about releasing everything we know to an international commission, and leave it to the commission to control atomic research for the good of the world? To some people that makes a good deal of sense, and probably a good many people who don’t believe such beneficent control possible wish that it were. And still other people see the bomb simply as the culmination of man’s age-old, ironic lust for power, – ironic in the sense that he has been feverishly searching for the instrument which will assure his own destruction. And now he’s found it. So what the hell?

I confess that at the present time I’m pretty much of a mind with this third group. And though I recognize that such an attitude must be considered cynical by people who don’t share it, I don’t consider myself cynical for holding it. I like people, and I don’t normally enjoy seeing them get hurt. I can’t derive any satisfaction from seeing the German and Japanese people suffering the starvation and misery now which they so recently imposed upon other peoples. There was a time when I believed that somehow the common suffering of this war would lead men of all nations to put into practice what is almost universally admitted in theory, – that the modern world is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states. It may be too early to be disillusioned, but then, too, it may have been too late to hope.

My aunt Eva has for several years been trying to sell me on the Bahai group, which is but one of many groups propagating the old Christian faith in the brotherhood of man and its practical realization on earth. With the faith I am in complete accord, but of its realization I remain unconvinced. Human organization, which is always as much against something as it is for something, inevitably seems to corrupt no matter how noble its original purpose. The only true brotherhood of man occurs in the earliest years of infancy. As soon as I begin to talk and understand, I’m an American, and Hans is a German. “My country, right or wrong” expresses an attitude which honest and just people may often deplore, but which only the rarest of martyrs can ever deny. Even when one’s country is flagrantly wrong, treason remains a crime universally abhorred. But millions of men can be made to look upon murder as a virtue when the victim is an enemy of one’s country. The appeal to patriotism almost always drowns out the voice of conscience. Many Americans can feel perfectly righteous about insisting on raising their own already comfortable standard of living while millions of Europeans and Asiatics are facing a winter of freezing and starvation. Yet they would be unspeakably indignant and bitter if the scales were suddenly shifted to the opposite extreme. They can’t see how they are doing any wrong now, but if they had to change places, they would certainly feel that they were being wronged.

The funny thing is that though I understand all this, I don’t intend to do much of anything about it. I, too, look forward to enjoying the comforts of American life, even though I can’t partake of whatever further pleasure there may be in the feeling of self-righteousness.

The old cry of “Let’s set our own house in order first” will soon regain sufficient strength to kill our present feeble and fumbling attempts to set in order a world house in which our own country is but one of the rooms. We’ll go ahead with a lavish job of redecorating our own room, and then won’t we be surprised when it’s ruined by the rest of the house falling in on it!

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A Soldiers’ Bull Session: Capitalism versus Communism

[In this entry, my father recounts a late-night debate about politics and economics among the soldiers in his tent. Many of the comments reported touch on issues that remain hot-button topics today. They include the lamentation that “politics always seems to boil the scum to the top” and the fair observation that a Constitution “written over a hundred and fifty years ago for a little colony of thirteen states” might need some tweaking to remain relevant in the current America. If only the conservative “originalists” on the U.S. Supreme court could exhibit such common sense!)

September 29, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

I come back to the tent about eleven-thirty after an evening of bridge. The only light is at Fisher’s improvised work bench, where he sits with black-bearded head bent forward, puzzling over some piece of electrical equipment. But there are voices in the dark. Old Buck and Stan Graham are deep in a discussion of economics and politics. Right in this one tent we have concentrated the best bull-shooters in the whole platoon. Last night it was Army organization, and war responsibility. Tonight it’s communism versus capitalism. These guys are so serious that they can complete one of these discussions without once bringing in women or sex. Of course, they’re never completed in the sense that unanimous conclusions are arrived at. They die out either from the exhaustion of the participants, which is rare, or from the intercession of perverted individuals like Tom Pearson, who believes in going to sleep early because he can’t help waking up early in the morning.

The discussion tonight is even more hopelessly abstract than usual. “I’ve read, or, er, I’ve heard it said,” Buck says, “that capitalism is just the thing for a young country – “

“That’s right,” Stan breaks in, “it’s OK as long as she’s expanding, as long as there’s a frontier. But now the frontier is gone.”

“Yes. Yes.” Buck says. “That’s just what I mean. So now I think that this country is ready – er, really needs some kind of economic regulation.”

“Yeah,” Stan says, “and then we come to a situation where we’re advocating just the things we’ve been fighting this war to prevent.”

“Well,” Buck says, “I think we ought to have a group of economic experts study the situation, and then make an honest report to the people on just what has to be done to stop depressions.”

At this point I enter the discussion and explain that a large number of such studies have already been made, and the reports are available to the public for whatever they’re worth. But Buck says he’s never heard of them. Then I try to explain the dilemma that arises when anyone attempts to press economic sanity through the maze of American politics.

“Well,” says Buck, “it seems to me that if we could educate the people on those things…”

Here again I’m skeptical. I point out that good education demands exceptional teachers, and there aren’t enough exceptional teachers to go around.

“Yep,” Stan agrees, “you can’t get a good man to work for nothing, and that teaching’s one of the lowest-paid professions.”

Then Buck starts working around towards communism again. Joe Graham comes in and says that communism, without the dictatorship part, is the only solution.

“Sure,” I say, “but just take away Joe Stalin and the club over a man’s head, and see what happens to your communistic system.”

Buck has an idea of more “personal” government at the township level. “The township is a closeknit unit, and, with the right kind of supervision, there hadn’t ought to be a single person in it on direct relief.”

I don’t seem to agree with anything that Buck has put forward. “What about the huge cities?” I ask. “That’s where most of your unemployment is. And besides, local economic problems are only tiny segments of disorders that have to be considered on an international scope.”

Stan tries a new tack. “I don’t know why it is,” he says, “but politics always seems to boil the scum to the top. Now if we could have some kind of group down in Washington, and salaries high enough to attract good men, and let this group hold a whip hand over all the sonsabitching senators and representatives, maybe we’d get something done. If they didn’t do a good job, they’d just get their asses booted out of there…”

“And we get some guys just as bad in their places,” I say.

“And how would you know when they’re doing a good job?” Fisher asks.

“Well, you’ve got something there,” Stan admits. “Look, fellows, I’ll tell you what. Don’t you just think that a Constitution that was written over a hundred and fifty years ago for a little colony of thirteen states might be a little obsolete today?”

“You’re absolutely right!” Buck agrees. “Now if we could just make the right changes…”

“Listen,” T. J. Pearson breaks in with a weary voice, “there’s a bunch of guys in this tent you have to shake their asses to get them out of bed at seven in the morning for breakfast, and that starts talking politics at eleven-thirty at night. That’s the one thing that’s wrong with the American way of life.”

 

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Snapshots of Post-war Okinawa

[In this entry, my father captures scenes — on the road, at the beach and in camp —  of life on Okinawa in the days soon after the war’s end.]

September 23, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

Snapshots along the road to the beach:

A two-and-a-half ton truck jammed with Jap prisoners of war, many of them giving us toothy grins, roars past us. – Our three-quarter-ton stops short , and a six-by behind us swings out, barely missing the rear corner where I’m sitting. One of the boys leaps out and retrieves a brand new pith helmet from the side of the road. – A native donkey cart going up the hill, holding up traffic. The little old duffer leading it flashes us a grin as we go by. – Two nurses riding with two officers in the jeep just ahead of us. The one in the rear seat has on a white kerchief, and the guy’s arm is around her. A GI driver, coming past them, leans halfway out of his cab, eyes wide open, and lets out a Yeeow! – We pass a truck of bouncing , laughing Okinawan girls, who wave at us and throw things. A big green lime hits Budwick smack in the eye. – Giant bulldozers and scrapers and crushers pushing forward the coral rock and read earth for a new stretch of road. – A long stretch of lush green valley, a muddy stream running along its bottom, green terraced hills, rising on the other side, rolling cumulus clouds, standing above them. – The tumbled remains of thatched-roof native huts, surrounded with dense shrubbery, their massive foundation beams and wooden frames splattered with dried yellow mud. – A tall thin MP directing traffic where route 16 crosses route 13. The spot is as busy as a Manhattan intersection, but the vehicles are all GI, muddy and battered, but plenty of life in them. The nearest thing to a battleship coming down the road is a bulky “duck,” one of the amphibious trucks.

Snapshots at the beach:

A bunch of Negro fellows running a broad jump contest beside a rusted steel dock which has been beached just above the high water mark. – The rank brown seaweed piled in great windrows along the beach after the typhoon. – The broken bodies of five Navy PBM’s [the Martin PBM Mariner, a patrol bomber] and PBY’s [the Consolidated PBY Catalina, a “flying boat”] rammed up against the coral ledges south of the beach. They were looted first, and now are being torn apart by Navy salvage crews. – The desecrated tombs, with burial urns smashed, and disinterred bones lying around the entrance. Near one of them is a frail wooden box containing a body not completely decomposed. The story is that these bodies are treated and cared for during a 33-year process of burial. – Four Navy fighter planes and one Lightning dogfighting many thousands of feet above the bay, looking like small black crosses against the gray cloud cover. – Two GI’s paddling out to sea in a gaudy yellow and black-striped life raft. – the endless line of fellows going through the Red Cross canteen for coffee. – Sign on bulletin board in canteen: “Sgt. Anders: You are flying home at 1300 today. Leave from in front of Building A-2. Report immediately. M. Johnson, 1st Sergeant.” – A long line of native women, about fifty in all, walking in single file along the edge of the sea cliff. They’re carrying large bundles of salvage lumber on their heads, and have made pads of long grass to protect the tops of their heads. At the rear of the procession is a young native man riding a pony. – Old native men, brown and grizzled, carrying tokes across their shoulders, from both ends of which are suspended heavy bundles of wood and field produce. The men are barefoot, and paddle along with a short, mincing gait.

Snapshots around the camp area:

Three fellows struggling down the road with a small home-made trailer which is loaded precariously with 9 five-gallon water cans. – A couple hundred fellows sitting around on piles of unpacked crates, eating chow. – Improvised clothes lines sagging with the daily washing. – The SIAM theater with an overflow crowd to see the evening movie. The benches are packed, guys are ranged solid along the bunks on either side, and standing on the trucks which are parked in the rear. The fellows had got hold of a couple of 16 mm. reels showing girls taking off their clothes. They show them before the regular feature. “Fellows, these films were made for art instruction. How many artists in the audience?” Howls and shrieks and groans greet the disrobing girls.

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Deployment to Okinawa after Japan’s Surrender

[In late August, 1945, my father left Seattle on the troopship U.S.S. Haskell, headed for Okinawa, Japan. The timing of this deployment was anticlimactic. The U.S. had won control Okinawa that spring after an 82-day battle that cost the Allied troops more than 50,000 killed and wounded, and resulted in more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers killed or captured. Tens of thousands of Okinawan civilians were also killed, wounded or committed suicide during the battle.

Less than two months after the Battle of Okinawa concluded, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). Japan announced its surrender eight days later, on August 15, 1945. The timing of this surrender wasn’t soon enough to alter the Army’s existing plans to transport and base thousands of soldiers on Okinawa, which had initially been captured as a staging point for attacks on the main Japanese islands about 350 miles to the north.

My father was based on Okinawa for only about three months before being shipped back to the States. Almost all of his journal entries during this period are descriptive of life aboard the troopships to and from the island, and on Okinawa itself. Although these entries don’t generally include the type of social and political commentary that I’m highlighting on this blog, I’m posting several of these Okinawan entries because they provide an interesting window into life on the island in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific war.]

September 12, 1945 (Aboard troopship U.S.S. Haskell)

“There it is, almost dead ahead,” we said as we leaned out over the rail on the weather deck and pointed out beyond the bow to the horizon. “That’s land!” There were some skeptics – and Tom Pearson was one of them – who wouldn’t believe it. We were in morning chow line on the port side, and the sun, less than two hours over the horizon, was already hot. Its blazing light cut a swatch clean out of the horizon, the meeting line of sea and sky completely lost in the blinding golden glare. But it was almost in the opposite direction, westward, that we claimed to see our speck of land, a low gray-blue promontory just a shade darker than the sky. “That’s it, for sure,” we said with the proper sagacity of old salts. But Tom, unconverted landlubber, refused to be convinced. “Naw,” he said in a flat New England disavowal. “That’s not land. It’s too soon.”

But when we came up from chow, there was no doubt about it. It was land, a long low stretch of it now, with a white fringe of surf, and furthermore, it was quite plain that we were not the first to set eyes on it. In fact, it soon appeared that we were latecomers to this strand. Suddenly we saw three, four, five, six ships standing off that strand. After near two weeks of isolation on the eternally rolling Pacific, during which we’d seen only three or four other ships, and all save one of them mere specks trailing smoke along the horizon, we began to feel rather crowded.

It was near 0830 now, and a great puffy cloud had dropped a shadow over our section of the ocean. Just now our ship’s bow swung to the north, and brought to view quick as a curtain dropped before our eyes a long stretch of beach no more than a mile distant. Our cloud’s shadow reached only about the half-way mark to shore, and left a margin of pale blue-green water capped by brilliant white sand. A long tall ship stood in close to shore – a tanker, we surmised, tied to a pier still hidden from our eyes. For many feet above the water line it was painted an angry copper red – strange color, we thought. Every few minutes a long roller would slap it broadsides, and send a spume of
white spray curling lazily above the deck.

It was only when we came close astern of the old ship that we saw its true fate. It had been beached there at the eastern tip of the atoll to serve out its lonely old age as a breakwater. The copper read was simply raw rusted metal. Perhaps it was an old Jap tanker, dealt a mortal blow while the atoll was still in the hands of the enemy. There was no way we could tell now; no name or sign remained on her dead sides. But, whatever her nationality, there was something lonely and pitiful about her now, melancholy even in the bright sunlight. For the rightful grave of old ships is deep beneath ocean which is their natural home, while this unfortunate derelict was consigned to rust away naked on the beach.

Just a passing sigh for her, though. Things are happening too fast now. A signal light flashes at us from atop a black spider of a tower on this tip of land. A trim little harbor boat which has been coming at us slantways from the inside of the lagoon makes a graceful turn, for all its bouncing on the choppy water, pulls up alongside, and a tanned sailor in blue pants and white cap tosses a message roll up to our bridge. As the boat pulls away, a little brown mongrel dog bounces up from its interior and barks a greeting to us.

Now, at last, we’re inside Eniwetok lagoon. Most of us are jampacked on our narrow section of deck to see something new in our world. Hundreds of us are standing shoulder to shoulder there, drinking it all in. The sailors, who have jobs to do, have a tough time bullying a passage through our ranks. No one talks much – just a light buzz of conversation: “Look at those Navy planes” – “Isn’t that a carrier way off over there?” – “Goddam, there’s an awful lot of ships in here.” But mostly we don’t talk – just stand and watch as our ship glides slowly and deeply into the great lagoon. What do we think of? Lots of things, no doubt. A few, perhaps, remember the American fellows who not so many months ago swarmed ashore here through the enemy’s lead and fire. Lashed on our ship are the same assault boats they used. But, because they came first, and did a good job, we’ll never have to use them ourselves. Not the way they did, anyway. A couple thousand miles further on across the ocean, in Tokyo Bay, the Jap bigwigs this same day are signing the harsh terms of their unconditional surrender.

A whole fleet of fat Navy seaplanes, 50 or more by rough count, are nuzzling in to the calm water out there in front of us. Beyond them, the land, a little patch of green here and there, but mostly what appears from here a tenuously slender barrier against the pounding sea on the other side. Except for a few Quonset huts, the buildings are squat, rectangular, and camouflaged.

Our anchorage is at the far end of the other side of the lagoon, and it takes us half an hour at our slackened speed to get there. We’re getting pretty close to that carrier now, and we can see that it’s a baby flat-top, with its planes lined up on the flight deck, looking disproportionately large. All of the other ships – and we see that there are more than imagined, more than 50, for sure – are merchant ships, tankers or troopships like our own. All but two or three are riding at anchor. And soon our own ship faces around into the wind and stops stock still. Underfoot we feel and hear the rattle of the anchor chain paying out, a stretch at a time. We see the oil slick on the water lapping at our side, we catch the harbor smell in our nostrils. Home we are, in a sense, after our long voyage, even if it is just a first step in an immense trip which most of us hope will bring us round about, before too many months, to that real home, now six, eight, and nine thousand miles away.

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“National Sovereignty” Concept Cripples U.N.’s Mandate

 [In this third installment drawn from the July 22, 1945 entry, my father presciently identifies the problems the new United Nations organization will face, especially due to its adoption of the slippery concept of “national sovereignty.” In many ways, this entry foreshadows the rocky road that the UN has travelled since its founding, particularly the Cold War-era face-offs between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Whether it’s from China, Libya or the U.S. itself, the constant invocation of National Sovereignty by U.N. member countries shows no signs of dissipating.]

 July 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.), con’t.

…We may already have congratulated ourselves on the part we played in the drafting of the United Nations Charter at San Francisco, and on the part we now expect to play in whatever international organization is established under the charter. But our congratulations should be well-tempered with caution. The document on which we are preparing to set our Congressional stamp of approval is well booby-trapped with those supposedly rational words and phrases which technological developments have made largely obsolete in the modern world. We may bandy them about in good faith, but when we shape national policy on them, we’d better be damned sure we know what we’re talking about before we act.

“National sovereignty” was a phrase stressed more, perhaps, than any other at the Conference, and it’s by all odds the most dangerous. For what does “national sovereignty” mean in today’s world? The most common interpretation seems to be that the administration of domestic affairs is solely the concern of the respective national governments. This, at least, is the best that the delegates to San Francisco would allow themselves publically to express, though if they are the able men they’re supposed to be, they must all privately have realized that this interpretation is little more than a verbal evasion for the time being of a practical problem which must be faced repeatedly whenever the international organization begins to function. For it is simply a backhanded statement of isolationism (You let me alone, and I’ll let you alone), and  thus at the very beginning a flat admission that the nations are not willing to attempt to enforce that international law and order which could be their only justification for joining together in the first place.

Of course this is an overstatement of the situation. But it’s better to see it that way than to attempt to hide it or minimize it. Its most optimistic supporters admit that the charter is only a hopeful beginning. At least it gets most of the nations on the world peacefully together under one roof. What goes on after that admittedly depends on the willingness of the great powers, or the US and the USSR, to cooperate. But it isn’t clearly pointed out that international cooperation must inevitably mean a continuing compromise on matters which are still considered to be purely domestic in nature. Until “national sovereignty” is whittled down to about the present significance of “state sovereignty” in the US, no international organization will have a ghost of a chance of keeping the world at peace.

This is going to [be] a tough job of whittling, when most of it must be done by two nations of such divergent political opinion and practice as America and Russia. We want the Russians to come a certain distance towards democratic capitalism. We must then be prepared to move a certain distance towards democratic communism. I say this without meaning that Russian communism is at present markedly democratic. We believe that much is lacking in that respect, though we must concede that millions of Russians are apparently well-satisfied with their government, and convinced that we Americans are politically backward in certain respects. This is certainly not a situation which can be helped by name-calling. But we should insist on steadily expanding facilities for the interchange of unbiased news, as well as facts and figures on industrial production and military strength. Among nations which honestly desire to remain at peace with each other there can be no reason for suppressing such information, and its dissemination in reliable, public bulletins should have the effect of dissipating that unhealthful atmosphere of intrigue and distrust with which nations have habitually carried on their diplomatic relations. Texas doesn’t feel injured when Massachusetts knows how much oil it produces, or how many airplanes. The members of an international organization which means business should invite the publication of all such devious facts.

The possibilities of such forms of international cooperation are as numerous as the problems which the nations of the world share in common. But we will never see them realized if we place our hopes in the formal signing of documents and treaties, and the dispensation of high-minded advice. Ours is the potential power, and therefore the responsibility, to set practical examples of cooperation for the maintenance of international law and order. There’ll be no law and order in those places where people have no food and shelter and clothing. In those places it’s our responsibility to provide the essentials of life as far as our means allow without the actual deprivation of any of our own citizens of these essentials. Our business sense should tell us, if it’s as keen as we claim, that we won’t get something valuable without paying a good price for it. International order and peace in a world so terribly devastated by war comes at a high price. Millions of American men are still paying that price in the actual  waging of war. But most Americans have a chance to get off incomparably easy as compared with the peoples of the rest of the world. Near the all time material peak of their standard of living, in spite of the war, they have only consent to the slight cut in that standard which will be necessary to supply the peoples of devastated areas with the means of staying alive and starting a new community life from scratch.

Put didactically, as I have done it, this sounds like an easy thing to do. But put practically to Sam Jones and family, in the form of continued rationing so that our ships can cart off to foreign countries some of the things “we’ve been fighting for,” it will be near to a political impossibility. In the abstract, perhaps, it won’t be so hard to convince Sam that primarily we’re fighting for a peaceful world where all men will be able to enjoy a larger share of the things which make life more pleasant, – the beef steaks and the automobiles. But then tell him that he’ll have to wait a little longer than he expected for his own postwar beefsteak and automobile, and he’ll write to his senator: “Dear Bill: How much longer is this country of our going to play Santa Claus to those damned foreigners? Cut out sending them good stuff that American citizens can use right her and now!”

Already this outcry is rising like an Anvil Chorus throughout the nation’s newspapers. And no doubt it’s rising to a roar in Congressional mail. That’s public opinion. The poor Congressmen have little choice. Cut down UNRRA shipments. Stop feeding civilian populations in liberated and conquered countries. Relax rationing at home. No foreign loans without guaranteed security….

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“Irrational” Governments Doomed to Failure

 [In this excerpt, a continuation of the long journal entry he made on July 22, 1945, my father makes the case that tyrannical, nihilistic and “irrational”  governments — including Nazi Germany — must inevitably fail, though they may take decades to do so. His exposition is interesting both for its historical perspective as World War II neared its conclusion, and for its current relevance to the popular uprisings against tyrannical regimes now occurring throughout the Middle East. When he writes of the American government that “Irrational elements weaken it, and a preponderance of irrationality, long prolonged, will destroy it,” it seems a caution tailor made for our current political landscape, where right-wing rhetoric and policy — on topics ranging from climate change to the “threat” posed by public employees’ unions — long ago dispensed with hard facts and rational discourse.]

 July 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.), con’t.

… Thus total military victory in this war will not be a total vindication of American government. On the contrary, it will be a dearly-bought opportunity to reorganize our government in such a way that America’s undoubted power may be used to improve living conditions generally for all the inhabitants of the world. This isn’t dreamy-minded altruism, but an historical imperative of any government any time in history. A government of any description is a social organization entrusted with the maintenance of law and order which are at the foundation of any civilized society. This is a responsibility which is automatically commensurate with the government’s power. When a government shirks, or neglects, or makes a mockery of this responsibility, it that far limits its power. And despite age-old traditions, and constitutions, and armed forces, it will eventually be discarded if it continues to fail of fulfilling its primary responsibility of maintaining law and order.

I don’t speak of “law and order” in a narrow legalistic sense; the Nazi government had its law and order, but in such a form that violence was done to ineradicable aspirations of millions of human beings for economic and intellectual freedom. Tyranny and persecution are not legitimate functions of any government from the point of view of the people being governed, and the deadly opposition of tyrannized and persecuted peoples is as sure the recurrence of the seasons. Total annihilation of these slave peoples would be the only method of stilling their rebellion, and total annihilation of a continental population is not yet a perfected human technique, though the Germans did make a promising advance in that direction. My guess, however, is that the regenerative powers of the human race will continue to outrun its destructive techniques for some time to come, at least as long as will concern anyone now alive. Persons who hold a contrary point of view, of course, and hope to see the entire human game played out to a finish in the twentieth century will continue to devise political and mechanical means of implementing their nihilistic theories, whether or not they have the inspirational guidance of such a leader as Hitler. And they won’t all be Germans or Japs.

Persons, on the other hand, who believe that this nihilism is leading the world down a blind alley, and this presumably includes the great majority of the men governing our country, should be interested in means of combating this abortive trend, and of getting the world pointed towards the goals named or suggested in the United States Constitution, and other documents which are professed still to be the foundation of American government.

This is a peculiar world we have today, in the sense that the words and phrases we have used to describe the relationships of its various peoples are now often quite inadequate for that purpose. Vocabulary, of course, like all things human, shows evolutionary changes, but it is, nevertheless, just about the most conservative of our departments. Words and phrases are naturally intended to supply our minds with ideas, which are necessary as a starting point for our rational actions. (And human civilization, of course, differs from animal societies only in its rational, and irrational, elements. Beavers, for instance, have never shown a development among themselves of the principle of the division of labor, which we may call an example of human rationality, nor have they seized on certain victims among themselves, to be slowly dissected to death, which is solely a triumph of human irrationality. Beavers, like all created beings with the exception of man, are strictly non-rational; and so spend no time worrying about how to improve or degrade themselves.)

Irrationality, therefore, doesn’t indicate the absence of mind, but simply, according to civilized standards, the misuse of the mind. Naturally no civilization can tolerate an irrational government such as the Nazis attempted. Insofar as such a government succeeds in perpetuating and extending its power, chaos and bestiality are the inevitable results. The fact that civilization has historically always asserted itself over chaos, has always, in the long run, dissolved predominantly irrational governments is sufficient proof for most of us that things were meant to be that way, so we may as well cooperate to the best of our ability.

Our philosophers concluded fairly early that, according to the conclusion of social experience to date, the Nazi government was highly irrational, and consequently not long for this world. And the American people, a bit slower than their philosophers, nevertheless soon gained an understanding that Nazi aggression on human rights challenged their way of living, which respected those rights, and they inevitably joined the opposition to the Nazis. And the defeat of the Nazis was inevitable, though it might well have taken sixty years rather than six.

If we want to save ourselves a repetition of this world misery in the not so distant future, now is the time for us to remember that our government operates under the same historical laws which applied to the Nazi government. Irrational elements weaken it, and a preponderance of irrationality, long prolonged, will destroy it. We’ll not be wise to forget that we must carry a large share of the blame for the original Axis aggression because of our irrational behavior, as a nation, in the past….

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The Limits of Letting Public Opinion Drive Public Policy

 [In a long journal entry — close to 4,000 words — on July 22, 1945, my father opined about foreign policy, the imperative of the United States to engage in reconstruction, the downside of public opinion driving public policy, and a host of other topics. In this first excerpt from that entry, he notes the proclivity of the “everyman” American, Sam Jones, to worry more about a steak dinner today than a recurrence of world war 15 or 20 years into the future. My father’s comments about the need for political leaders willing to buck the pressure of uninformed public opinion seem apropos to the present day (as his journal writings often do). Another of his statements that remains true for our times: “…we easily persuaded ourselves that national good was necessarily universal good, and failed to perceive that certain of our cherished advantages were maintained directly or indirectly at the expense of other parts of the world.”]

July 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

… Basically, these war years, with their extravagant spending of men and material, have outraged the practical “business sense” of the common American who carries on the national business, be he civilian or soldier. Right now, he’s getting angry about our large scale handouts to our Allies, and President Truman, his perfect representative, is apparently telling the boys at Potsdam that from now on it’s “put up or shut up.” This attitude is generally applauded, and rightly so, if we don’t let ourselves get talked or scared into “practical” deals which end by increasing, rather than diminishing, the various frictions still existing among the nations. But that’s a big IF, and will often call for national policy which demands present sacrifices as the investment in future security. UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration] presents such a situation now, and we don’t seem willing to go very far beyond a profession of good intentions. Exasperated, but well-fed Americans get the preference over starving Europeans. And later many Americans will become exasperated at these Europeans for embracing Communism after we’d gone to the trouble and expense of liberating them from Fascists totalitarianism. We’ll never know how quickly the sweets of liberation can pale on an empty stomach.

As a nation we’ll make these “mistakes” simply because a steak dinner today seems more important to Sam Jones and his family than another world war fifteen or twenty years from now. That doesn’t mean that Sam Jones is a bad or irresponsible man, but it would seem to mean that he’s a poor man to entrust with the shaping of American foreign policy. Yet Sam Jones, taken by the million, is public opinion, and we are told with authoritative finality that American foreign policy between these last two wars was increasingly isolationist and appeasing because public opinion would allow nothing else. “We knew what was coming,” many of our leading statesmen have said, “but we were powerless to act because of public opinion.” Of course, one seriously questions the omniscience of most of these bleating sheep, but at the same time one must admit a measure of truth in their argument. If important information was made available to the members of Congress, information which revealed the extreme danger of our position in an Axis dominated world, and if these men, reflecting the naturally limited viewpoint of their constituents, refused to believe in the significance of this information, refused, possibly for reasons of election strategy, to pass it on to their constituents, and thus left us dismally unprepared when the strike came, then our foreign policy set-up is certainly inadequate.

There is always pressure for various changes in any governmental system, and unimportant changes in both personnel and procedure are constantly being made. Over a period of years these minor changes may add up to a real change in political philosophy. This is evolutionary development, and has been a privilege of the American people since 1789, with the exception of the Civil War. At that time the revolutionary concept of the right of secession from the Union was advanced, and it was denied only at the cost of a bloody war.

The present war has been as much a Civil War as that war between the North and the South, but because it concerns a world union of “sovereign” nations rather than a continental union of “sovereign“ states, because the apparent national differences of the peoples involved have obscured the basic philosophical issue, we, as the victor side, are likely to bungle the victor’s responsibility of directing reconstruction even worse than we did after our Civil War, when the issues were relatively clearer. The German and Japanese totalitarian governments have been a mortal challenge to our own democratic institutions. This challenge could hardly have been made with such ferocity if democratic government had seemed as fair and advantageous to the rest of the world as it seemed to us. In other words, we easily persuaded ourselves that national good was necessarily universal good, and failed to perceive that certain of our cherished advantages were maintained directly or indirectly at the expense of other parts of the world. And to bring it closer home, we may as well admit that during the thirties the democratic way of life left several million Americans out in the cold of economic privation. Had these millions become a majority, or seized political power while still a minority, Americans might possibly have found themselves attempting the desperate cure for their ills which the Germans tried under Hitler….

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