Clouds of War

We don’t know where the electron is. All we know is its probability of being, well, inside this cloud, right here. Statistics conquers all. Based on the most recent orthodoxy, there are no “laws” of nature—only high and low probabilities that matter will behave in certain ways. True. The probabilities that I will fall when I walk out of the tenth story window of this building, right here, are extraordinarily close to one. But in theory at least—meaning that it is permissible to think this—somewhere, sometime, a million years ago but, for that matter, perhaps tomorrow, someone will go on a walk and start rising into the air, getting ever more desperate, until, not even visible to the naked eye of his dog, who lives by other odds, he gets into the stratospheres where the oxygen’s no more.

Destruction at a distance is my subject, actually. It is associated with artillery, bombing, and drones. In David McCullough’s biography, Truman, Truman is quoted as saying (p. 439 of the 1992 Touchstone edition), “It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are.” Reasonable estimates from Japanese sources put deaths in Nagasaki at 87,000, in Hiroshima at 90,000, suggesting that the trade of 177,000 for 250,000 was numerically the better bet—provided, of course, that the same probabilities applied in both cases and that only two cases were possible—an atomic attack or the slow grind of warfare on land. It wasn’t at all certain that a quarter of a million Americans would die; different strategies might have kept numbers much lower; that around 170,000 Japanese civilians, among them a small number of Japanese soldiers and sailors, would be boiled, burned, and blasted to ash—that was a great deal more probable. The case is further “clouded” by the fact that the civilian inhabitants of the two Japanese cities (and surely some were children) were not, as it were, organized state forces opposing that flower of our manhood.

The third way might have been to stop U.S. advances and to tighten what was no doubt a serious blockade of the island of Japan. Time would have eventually produced a Japanese surrender. Japan was already on its last leg. But inside the vast clouds of public opinion, impatient expectations, and the mood of the times generally, the rational solution wasn’t even contemplated.

Destruction at a distance by an explosive device—or bio-bomb—treats opposing states as if they were single bodies made up of cells and directed by a single mind. Therefore the laws of war have been obsoleted by another rather questionable and very nebulous theory under which non-combatants, not least children, are combatants, become combatants by the mere fact of belonging to the enemy domain.

We don’t know where the enemy is. All we know is its probability of being, well, inside these borders here. Shock and awe will do it.

Thinking of drones, it occurs to me that small numbers of casualties and shielding verbiage, as in collateral damage, in no way change the underlying moral situation in any way. I ought to withhold a carefully calculated amount from my income taxes because drones are immoral; I am, after all, as a U.S. citizen, directly responsible. But it turns out that the amount I should withhold gets washed out by the mere fact that TurboTax rounds numbers before submitting them to big brother, one of whose obedient cells I happen to be.

Shock and Awe in 1940s Style

The following extract is taken from a strange and wondrous essay titled Air War and Literature (Luftkrieg und Literatur) by W.G. Sebald, published in 2003 by Carl Hanser Verlag. Its thematic is that the air war in Europe was an unspeakable horror such that a collective forgetting has wiped it from memory—and that the literary community has utterly failed to record it. Well not quite. As I learned this morning, the essay is available in English as part of On the Natural History of Destruction, by Sebald, but the following extract is my own translation from the German. The book I own was a gift to me of son-in-law and Michelle’s husband, Thierry Paret.

In midsummer of 1943, during a heat spell of long duration, the Royal Air Force, supported by the 8th American Air Fleet, flew a series of attacks on Hamburg. The object of the mission, called “Operation Gomorrah,” was the most complete possible destruction and burn-out of the city. During the attack during the night of July 28, which began at 1 o’clock in the morning, ten thousand tons of explosive and fire-bombs were unloaded over the densely populated residential area east of the Elbe, a region that included the districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm-North and South, Eilbek, Barmbek and Wandsbek. Following an already proven method, four-thousand-pound explosive bombs were deployed by means of which all windows and doors were broken and ripped from their frames; then lighter igniters fell and set the roofs ablaze even as fire-bombs, with a weight up to 15 kilos, broke through into the lower storeys. Within a few minutes gigantic fires burned everywhere over the roughly twenty square kilometer attack terrain; the fires joined their edges so rapidly that a quarter-hour after the descent of the first bombs the entire airspace, as far as one could see, became a single ocean of fire. And after another five minutes, around 1:20, a firestorm of such intensity arose that no human, until that time, could have imagined it possible. The fire, exploding now two thousand meters into the sky, devoured oxygen with such violence that the air currents reached hurricane strength and roared like mighty organs on which all registered had been pulled. It burned like that for three hours. At its peak the storm lifted up gables and roofs and whirled beams and plaster walls through the air, twisted trees out of the ground and drove people before it like living torches. Behind crumbling facades flames shot house-high into the air, rolled like a flood wave with a speed of more than 150 kilometers an hour through the streets, whirled like fireballs in odd rhythms over open squares. In some canals the water burned. Glass panes melted in streetcar wagons; sugar stores cooked in the cellars of bakeries. Those fleeing from their underground shelters sank in grotesque twisting forms into the liquefied asphalt that formed thick blisters. Nobody really knows how many lost their lives that night or how many went mad before death overcame them.

The horrors of modern war, mirrored on the other side by the 57 nights of German bombing of London, called The Blitz, by the twin nuclear descents of atomic bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, echoed by words like Dresden, and marked more modestly on childish memories—mine were those of a child who lived through such things but managed to escape unharmed, Brigitte’s those of a young girl who had to help clear rubble—should be, if at all possible, kept vividly in mind as we contemplate yet more mayhem, endlessly, and the decades keep rolling on.

W.G. Sebald, I think, has a very legitimate point to make. It is that our memory is rather selective. We remember the Holocaust and keep its memory alive, forgetting that it was a part of a much greater display of collective inhumanity in that weirdest of all times that Brigitte and I have lived through. We remember what flatters and not that which instructs. And, indeed, reading such posts as this one does not exactly make one’s day.