Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

BURNING CONSCIENCE. The case of the Hiroshima Pilot Claude Eatherly told in his letters to Gunther Anders. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson.)

Until the first atom bomb was dropped on Japan perhaps the one argument that no one could win was the one between the best version of pacifism and the best version of fighting for what one believed: an argument, say, between Gandhi and Orwell. Both sides were right, the side one took depended not on facts, but on one’s temperament. Now the existence of the atom bomb has made all the difference. When in the eighteenth century Patrick Henry said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ decent, intelligent people agreed with him. But today the slogan ‘better dead than Red’ is rightly considered nonsense by the same sort of people. Yet even now it is hard to bring oneself to admit that a world dominated by Hitler and his gang would have been preferable to an atom war. One cannot but feel grateful that history saved us from having to make the choice. Today, however, we have two relatively responsible regimes who base their conception of government on the ideas of serious political humanists (in the one case on those of Marx and Lenin and in the other of Jefferson and Lincoln), threatening the world with atomic warfare.

     These letters are the story of Claude Eatherly, a young Texan officer, in the United States Air Force, who was a member of the crew that dropped the atom bomb on two cities in Japan. There is a danger that it may be turned into the Dreyfus or the Sacco and Vanzetti case of this generation, because for many years now Major Fatherly has been locked up in a hospital for insane people.

     Anybody reading these letters will see that Fatherly is an attractive, intelligent, courageous human being with not a few home-spun grass-root American virtues, and a deep reverence for humanity. His answer to what he took part in, purely by chance, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is to spend his life in trying to stop both the manufacture and the use of atomic weapons. This is the real reason why conventional people try to make out that he is insane.

     In the beginning his sense of guilt and shame and remorse at being partly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent unarmed civilians, two whole cities in fact, with their full quota of such unmilitary objects as children and grandmothers, certainly unbalanced him. So he set out to destroy the myth of the war hero, as he himself had been turned into a leading example of one. He did this in a very human, if technically illegal, way, by staging fake hold-ups. He held up a number of banks and pay-roll trucks in various small towns in rural Texas and in the oilfields near Dallas, and left without taking a penny, or perhaps I should say a dime. Up to this point the military, medical and legal authorities treated him with real kindness. It was not until he channelled his revulsion at what he had taken part in, by entering upon a serious anti-nuclear campaign, that they certified him insane. His wife divorced him, stopped him from seeing his children, and his brother sided with the authorities.

     In the meantime he was becoming justly famous in Europe and Asia, in great part through the efforts of an Australian philosopher and anti-nuclear fighter, Dr Gunther Anders, to whom most of these letters were written. Yet some of the most moving of them are those written to and received from a group of Japanese women who, when they were young girls, were permanently deformed by the explosion of the first atom bomb ever to be dropped. Both they and the American airman recognized one another as equally victims of this event. These two letters, on their own account, and without any further evidence at all, prove beyond any worrying doubt that humanity with all its faults is well worth saving from atomic destruction. What one can’t understand is why the second bomb, the one on Nagasaki, was ever dropped at all, and why the authorities, and not only those in the United States, have such a stupid attitude to all anti-nuclear campaigns. Professor Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt asking for priority on the making of the bomb because at the time it was thought by informed opinion that the Nazis were about to invent one of their own. When the American bomb was ready Einstein then wrote to President Truman suggesting that an international demonstration should be arranged on uninhabited territory. One can’t help wondering what Roosevelt’s answer to that would have been, had he lived. There is no point, however, in using the Claude Eatherly case as a weapon against America in the cold war. One has only to remember what has happened to the woman whom Boris Pasternak loved, and to her daughter, to more than cancel it out.

     One cannot but hope that one of the immediate results of the publication of this book will be the early release of Major Claude Eatherly, who is quite unrhetorically one of the key figures of our age. This Texan airman, with his Christian humanism, and his unfanatical respect for all the races of mankind, and whose participation and share of guilt in the destruction of human life was incalulably smaller than Adolf Eichmann’s is the extreme opposite to the Nazi bureaucrat as he revealed himself in his defence before the judges of Israel. One cannot get away from the thought that the Americans found it easier to drop the bombs (notice the plural) on Asians than they would have done if the people living in the target area had been Europeans.

     It is incredible, as Mr Roy Bell, a courageous young Texan journalist, points out in one of the finest letters in this book, that decent ordinary people through fear and prejudice, but according to their own lights relatively honestly, could consider Claude Fatherly to be insane. Surely it is not too much to hope that President Kennedy’s administration, which includes such outstanding men as Adlai Stevenson and Professor Galbraith, will be able to conclude this scandal. Perhaps it would help if they remembered that Alphonse Dreyfus was also a major.