Thank God for the atomic bombs!

Eighty years ago this week, the Boeing B-29 Enola Gay carried Little Boy to Hiroshima, and Bocks Car followed up by dropping Fat Man on Nagasaki, effectively obliterating both cities and ending the war that Japan had launched by invading China years earlier. To the fury and fitful rebellion of his armed forces, the emperor Hirohito surrendered on August 15 in his first radio address to the Japanese people, though he didn't use the S-word. Instead, he explained that the "the war situation has not necessarily turned in Japan’s favor.... Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives." I am one of a declining age group that remembers those events of August 1945, and who was old enough to skip with joy that the War was over and I wouldn't have to fight in it. Thank God for those atomic bombs!

Paul Fussell was not so blessed. He went to war as a 20-year-old second lieutenant -- a platoon leader, probably the most dangerous job in the infantry -- in France in 1944, where he was wounded in action. He earned a Bronze Star for valor and a Purple Heart for his wound, recovering in time to be assigned to the 45th Infantry Division for Operation Coronet, the invasion of the Japanese main island of Honshu in March 1946. (Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu island, was scheduled for November 1945 and would have involved American and British Commonwealth troops already in the Pacific theater.)

Lieutenant Fussell was spared by the bombs of August, and he lived to become a noted author and professor. By the 1980s, most scholars and authors and Good People had already turned against the nukes, and he wrote "Thank God for the atom bomb!" for the New Republic, a left-wing magazine but one still willing to publish contrary opinions. (Including mine, in the 1970s.) The essay became the title piece in the similarly named book, now out of print but fairly cheap on AbeBooks online. Or you can download the 14-page text file from Scribd.com for the price of a one-month subscription.