Hiroshima book review and historical analysis

¶ … Dawn's Early Horror: Hiroshima and the End of the "Good War"

The book Hiroshima by John Hersey and Sam Sloan answers a very important question: where were the "good" Japanese? After all, there are always people who do not have a clue about the surrounding conflict and are simply going about their daily activities. The answer is simple, yet complicated and profound at the same time: we were killing them with atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and with firebombs in Tokyo. Rightly or wrongly, Hiroshima was a victim of what so much else was in Japan in World War II: total war. The war on Japan was total in the sense that the divide between soldier and civilian was erased. Civilian centers like Hiroshima were now legitimate military targets in a grueling war of attrition to the death. To illustrate this, one of the figures, Reverend Tanimoto an American trained Christian minister did everything possible to look like the patriotic Japanese civilian, including overseeing the air raid preparations for some 20 neighborhood families (Hersey & Sloan 2010, 4-6). Certainly, none of the training he received at Emory University had prepared him for the scientifically engineered and very real version of Hell that would appear for the first time in world history.

Ironically, the reader even meets a good German, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge who is in Japan to preach a gospel of peace. Defenseless and reclining in his underwear on the roof of the Jesuit mission in Hiroshima, he is steeped in early morning revery, reading and without a clue what will happen (Hersey & Sloan 2010, 3-4). Like his fellow countrymen (many of whom are also good Germans who have no love of war) who have died in firestorms at American and British delivered firestorms at Hamburg and Dresden, he now will now have to try to survive a firestorm of a new and very different kind. In this Japanese version of Slaughterhouse Five, we find that truly there is no such thing as a good war. Total war kills totally. There is no differentiation between soldiers and civilians in this new type of warfare.

There is no special hatred for the Japanese being exhibited here. Certainly, revenge is on the agenda. However, these kinds of primitive considerations can not approach the savagery that this new type of scientific warfare has created. This new war has unleashed an industry of death, a military industrial complex which here delivered a crescendo of Gotterdamerung. Even Wagner or Nietzsche would have been given pause as the gods died. In this case, the god in question was the god Emperor Hirohito, son of a goddess, whose empire of the rising sun had just set ingloriously. This new warfare had psychological as well as purely physical aspects of battle. The will of the Japanese people themselves had to be annihilated by snuffing out the lives of sufficient hundreds of thousands of them.

The old weapons were simply not sufficient anymore for the effect. Ironically, this most savage warfare is conceived and carried out by the most rational of scientists, senior military men and politicians who coat their various agendas in the belief that somehow they have been knighted by a "good war." The Japanese had started it after all, and by God, we were going to finish it. Vietnam was not the first place that the U.S. had to burn a village or a town to save its people from an "ism." It was instead in Hiroshima. This frightful paradigm of the "good war" candy coats our consciences when we recoil at the tens of thousands of deaths at Hiroshima.