Elizabeth Bishop - Robert Lowell correspondence

 The focus of these poets on the performative moment emerges even in Lowell’s first letter to Bishop, dated May 23, 1947, and written from his New York apartment, in response to one of Bishop’s regretting a missed meeting due to illness. Opening “Dear Miss Bishop,” it begins in a friendly but comparatively formal way. Then the letter suddenly launches, without transition, into a paragraph of impromptu comic performance. From Lowell’s first letter onward, neither correspondent felt the need for transitions between paragraphs—either could expect the other to follow each successive leap of thought. While much in the correspondence is in some sense historic, impromptu bits of detailed comic or lyric observation would punctuate the letters from both sides for the next three decades, as ordinary folk and distinguished personages (ranging from the modernist sculptor Alexander Calder to the quaintly learned founder of Hires Root Beer) are vividly figured forth in all their eccentric particularity. Among many pen portraits of famous writers, their lively ongoing commentary on the doings and sayings of Randall Jarrell, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Dylan Thomas, and Mary McCarthy feature as highlights. In these pages, too, the austere creator of The Waste Land makes a surprising appearance as “Elbows Eliot,” so named in a Lowell postscript because he “danced so dashingly” with his new wife at a “Charles River boatclub brawl.” Since Bishop and Lowell were at once historic personages, ordinary people, and extraordinarily fresh and funny observers, it should not surprise us that everywhere in the letters one finds a conjunction of hilariously descriptive performance on the one hand and literary history in the making on the other. Often these elements are inextricably intertwined.

Yet their descriptions of obscure individuals observed in passing are perhaps even more compelling. Thus, in a letter from the summer of 1948 in which Bishop has just spoken of several lonely and depressing days enclosed in the fog of Wiscasset, Maine, she writes:

I think almost the last straw here though is the hairdresser, a nice big hearty Maine girl who asks me questions I don’t even know the answers to. She told me: 1, that my hair “don’t feel like hair at all.” 2, I was turning gray practically “under her eyes.” And when I’d said yes, I was an orphan, she said “Kind of awful, ain’t it, ploughing through life alone.” So now I can’t walk downstairs in the morning or upstairs at night without feeling I’m ploughing. There’s no place like New England.

Lowell responds perfectly with a single line in a postscript to his next letter: “There’s something haunting and nihilistic about your hair-dresser.” (...).

As Bishop acknowledged to her fellow New Englander in the letter about her Maine hairdresser, she had in fact been virtually orphaned in early youth, and since then she had been plowing through life very nearly alone. Bishop noted the importance of support from her fellow writers, citing in a 1963 letter from Brazil a remark by Virgil Thomson, who had said: “one of the strange things about poets is the way they keep warm by writing to one another all over the world.” Bishop was born half a world away from Brazil in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911. Her father was William Thomas Bishop, a prosperous building contractor, who died of the still-incurable Bright’s disease when she was eight months old. Her mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, never got over the shock of her husband’s death. In 1915, when Bishop was four, her mother returned with her to the Bulmer family home in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Within a year, Bishop’s mother suffered a severe mental breakdown from which she did not recover, and she was placed in a mental institution in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where she died in 1934. Bishop never saw her again, and she vividly portrays this decisive experience of loss in her poignant “In the Village” (1953), a story which evokes the lingering presence of “the scream”—a scream Bishop associates with her mother’s final breakdown:

The scream hangs there like that, unheard, in memory—in the past, in the present, and those years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, forever—not loud, just alive forever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village.

Lowell praised this story as “wonderful” when it first appeared in The New Yorker, and in 1962 he composed a poem in quatrains “derived from Elizabeth Bishop’s story” entitled “The Scream.” Lowell frequently mentioned “In the Village” in subsequent letters, and the story antedates his own memoir “91 Revere Street” by three years and the composition of his “Life Studies” sequence by four.

In 1917, the year after her mother’s breakdown, Bishop was claimed by her wealthy paternal grandparents and transported from her beloved Great Village back to Worcester. Bishop observed of this move, in her posthumously published memoir “The Country Mouse”: “I had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes to the house my father had been born in, to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r’s of my mother’s family. With this surprising set of grandparents, until a few weeks ago no more than names, a new life was about to begin.” In her own mind, “I felt as if I were being kidnapped, even if I wasn’t.” In the months that followed her unwilling return to Worcester, Bishop suffered simultaneous and nearly fatal onsets of asthma and eczema. She would struggle with severe episodes of both disorders for the rest of her life. When her paternal grandparents realized they could not care for her adequately, Bishop was passed among various maternal and paternal relatives. She lived chiefly, until she reached high school age, with her maternal aunt Maud Bulmer Shepherdson in an ethnically diverse lower-middle-class neighborhood in Revere, Massachusetts.

Thus, with these early and involuntary travels and movements up and down the social ladder, Bishop developed a fascination with geography. This may also explain the rapid juxtaposition, in her letters and in her poems, of sharply different peoples, cultures, and perspectives. After years spent quietly observing her passing world or, when the asthma struck, lying in bed “wheezing and reading,” Bishop sufficiently recovered her health to attend boarding school and later Vassar College on funds provided by a trust established by her father. After graduating from Vassar in 1934, a year or two older than most of her classmates because of the time lost to illness, she embarked on an adventurous life of travel that would lead to extended sojourns in Europe, Key West, Mexico, and Brazil and briefer visits to Newfoundland and North Africa, topped near the end of her life by a journey to the Galápagos. As her letters to Lowell show, Bishop’s insecurities seemed to melt away when she was on the move, and it is a widely held tenet of Bishop studies that her famous travels may have been prompted by a search for a sustaining place to be. Although, as One Art: Letters makes clear, she maintained a remarkably extensive circle of friends and correspondents, to many of whom she wrote nearly as voluminously as she did to Lowell, she once told him: “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” Lowell, quoting this remark back to Bishop nearly a decade later, was recalling the “long swimming and sunning Stonington [Maine] day” in 1948 when Bishop disclosed to Lowell key aspects of her early history. It was at this moment, as Lowell would recall in that 1957 letter, that he came nearest to proposing marriage to her.

Like Bishop’s, Lowell’s early life was deeply troubled by childhood experiences of emotional uncertainty and loss, and his work, like hers, is haunted by painful recollections of his youth. The enthusiasm they display in their letters for each other’s self-exploratory writing about childhood shows that this shared experience was one source of their lasting affinity. Lowell’s memoir “91 Revere Street” (1956)—inspired, as he acknowledged, by Bishop’s earlier “In the Village”—focuses on the year 1927, when Lowell was ten years old and his father, Robert Traill Spence Lowell III, was making up his mind under strong pressure from his wife, born Charlotte Winslow, to resign from a promising career in the navy to take up her preferred mode of living, as an upper-crust Bostonian. This memoir, in combination with the family sequence from Life Studies, makes it clear that Lowell’s parents were ill-matched and played out their difficulties in front of their only son. As Lowell recalled in “91 Revere Street,” “I felt drenched in my parents’ passions.”These passions took the form of ongoing, nightly verbal warfare overheard by the young poet-in-the-making during “the two years my mother spent in trying to argue my father into resigning from the Navy.” Lowell’s memoir revisits the “arthritic spiritual pains” of this period, during which “Mother had violently set her heart on the resignation. She was hysterical in her calm.” The wrenching effect of this not-altogether-civil domestic combat went deep into Lowell’s psyche, and his father’s ultimate defenselessness, which led him to mumble, “Yes, yes, yes,” in nighttime conversations overheard by their eavesdropping son, made it clear that his father would not be able to defend his son from a mother whose threatening presence was a daily reality for Lowell: “I grew less willing to open my mouth. I bored my parents, they bored me.”

It was Lowell’s mother who held the reins of power within his family. Lowell’s father was a descendant of one of Boston’s most famous families, but his was a secondary branch that had cut its ties with Boston two generations before. Lowell’s great-grandfather, the first Robert Traill Spence Lowell, was an Anglican minister and the elder brother of the poet James Russell Lowell. This Lowell ancestor was a sometime missionary to Newfoundland, the pastor of a working class parish in Newark, New Jersey, a poet and novelist of minor reputation, and for three years the headmaster of St. Mark’s School near Boston, the boarding school which Lowell would one day attend. Despite these accomplishments “The clan as a whole was inclined to look at him just a little askance as déraciné,” or so observes Ferris Greenslet in his elegant family history The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds. Perhaps the principal reason for these sidelong looks of disapproval by the family’s principal worthies was because this forebear ultimately relocated from Boston to “live with his wife’s people in Duanesburg [New York].” The maternal Traill Spence line seems also, according to Greenslet, to have been the hereditary source of the bipolar disorder that infiltrated this branch of the family tree. Bishop may well have been aware of these bits of Lowelliana, since Greenslet was the editor of her first book at Houghton Mifflin and in October 1946, a few months before she met Lowell, Bishop congratulated Greenslet on the book’s recent publication and declared her eagerness to read it, “tonight, I hope.” Lowell was exaggerating, but not by much, when he said that he didn’t know he was “a Lowell” until Allen Tate made clear to him the significance—and usefulness for himself as a poet—of his family position.

Lowell’s mother, a descendant of the famous Winslow line, was the family’s acknowledged aristocrat and its dyed-in-the-wool Bostonian, whereas when his father served as third in command of the local navy yard, he was by comparison a mere transplant and also comparatively impecunious. Without the added support of Arthur Winslow, Charlotte’s wealthy father—who had made a fortune as a mining engineer before settling back into the embrace of his native city—the family would have been dependent on Commander Lowell’s modest navy pay. Just as Bishop had been passed along among various grandparents, uncles, and aunts, Lowell was raised more by nurses and schoolmistresses and -masters than by his own mother or father, and he felt himself a victim both of his parents’ neglect and of his mother’s narcissistic overcontrol. For despite the fact that—setting James Russell and Amy Lowell aside—even the judges and captains of industry and Harvard presidents in the main Lowell line had dabbled in verse, and that his Lowell great-grandfather had been a poet of a certain note, it was Lowell’s mother who declared poetry to be an impossible occupation for any son of hers. Lowell wrote to Bishop of his recently widowed mother in 1951, “Well, under the best conditions, of course, I can’t begin to make sense out of her or to her. Each year since I was eighteen, it’s gotten worse.” Three years later, the death of Charlotte Lowell and her son’s journey to Italy to recover his mother’s body would trigger yet another overwhelming bipolar episode.

Certainly, these poets enjoyed real social and cultural advantages. Given their painful early histories, however, and their often turbulent personal vicissitudes, it is not surprising that they frequently found themselves viewing the world, as Adrienne Rich noted of Bishop, through “the eye of the outsider.” Partly for that reason, friendship for them was a matter of the greatest possible importance. Lowell shared with Bishop a real talent for friendship. Each maintained many intense lifelong friendships, and, as Peter Taylor noted of Lowell, loyalty to friends was a crucial personal value. Lowell wrote to Bishop in 1959,

Oh we won’t ever fall out, God help us! Aren’t people difficult. I think, perhaps I have almost more warm intellectual friends than anyone, and have lost none except Delmore Schwartz. But it’s like walking on eggs. All of them have to be humored, flattered, drawn out, allowed to say very petulant things to you. I’m sure they have to bear the same things from me—however, I don’t feel the need to be diplomatic with you and Peter Taylor.

Although they did, on a few occasions, disagree—most strenuously over Lowell’s use of Hardwick’s letters in The Dolphin—and although theirs, like all friendships, contained certain areas of ambivalence, the longevity of their friendship, and its intensity, was never really in doubt.

Lowell, facing a void when it came to parental confirmation, often sought as friends elders who could also serve as mentors. Two of his earliest mentors were the poets and critics Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. Tate, living in his native Tennessee, provided shelter at his home, Monteagle, when Lowell, after a violent quarrel in 1938, left his family and his undergraduate career at Harvard behind. Lowell notes of his arrival at the Tates’ that “Like a torn cat, I was taken in when I needed help,” famously living in a tent because the house shared by Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon, already bulged with writers. Lowell would remain under that sheet of Sears, Roebuck canvas in the yard for most of the summer. The following year, Ransom invited Lowell to room in his faculty house at Kenyon College, where the elder poet was taking up an endowed chair and the editorship of the fledgling Kenyon Review. There, Lowell shared the house’s upper story with Jarrell, three years his senior, who had long been a disciple of Tate and Ransom and who was already serving as an English instructor and tennis coach at Kenyon. Jarrell’s readings of and comments on his early poems helped Lowell to distill the style for that Pulitzer Prize–winning second book, Lord Weary’s Castle. Bishop, six years Lowell’s senior, was, like Jarrell, old enough to be a mentor but young enough to be a peer. In the years that followed their initial meeting, Bishop gradually took over Jarrell’s role as the most important peer-mentor in the Lowell pantheon.

Yet if Bishop served a vital psychological and professional function for Lowell, he served a function for Bishop that may have been still more vital. While Bishop displayed a lively readiness for tackling certain practical details and was accustomed to roughing it when need be, she could seem helpless when facing major life decisions. Given her ongoing sense of diffidence about her abilities—performing at poetry readings, for example, made her deeply anxious—her approach to her career as a poet, despite her profound ambitions, sometimes threatened to be overwhelmed by passivity or shyness. Not surprisingly, she often chose as friends or as lovers people who had the skills and the interest to help her negotiate an overpowering world. Lowell, for his part, had quickly developed remarkable skills when it came to career management and, along with his brilliant reputation, maintained an extensive network of talented and influential friends. Thus, he was in a position to be of great help to Bishop with regard to her poetic career, and he put those skills entirely at Bishop’s service. While Bishop lived remote from urban centers in Key West or, for two decades, in Brazil, Lowell took it upon himself to be her advocate for awards and fellowships. Thus, when Bishop hinted in 1960 that inflation in Brazil was eating into her remaining income and that a grant would come in very handy, Lowell immediately brought this to the attention of the Chapelbrook Foundation, who promptly indicated their readiness to support Bishop’s writing plans. Bishop wrote back, “Heavens Cal! That was SERVICE. I feel as if I had just held out my hand to the skies.” When she was about to take her first teaching job, at the University of Washington in Seattle (a job not arranged by Lowell), he wrote with helpful pointers on how to enter upon a teaching career late in life, as Lowell himself had done in his mid-thirties. Twice, when she was chosen for major literary awards and was reluctant to travel from Brazil to America to receive them, Bishop tabbed Lowell to do the honors of formally collecting the prize. When in 1970, following the tragic death of Lota three years earlier, Bishop’s Brazilian life had changed, and she was feeling trapped there, with little cash and tied to a partially renovated house that she could not sell, Lowell arranged for Bishop to succeed him in his teaching job at Harvard as he sought a new life, with a new wife, Caroline Blackwood, in England. Lowell’s arrangement, three years later, to compensate Bishop for her letters as part of the sale of his papers was part of his effort to support and sustain Bishop in her endeavor to make a new life at Harvard.

The meeting of Bishop and Lowell in 1947 was fateful, both on a personal and on an artistic level. Bishop and Lowell were poets preoccupied with loss and with the curious, indistinct borderline between public and private, fiction and fact. In studying each other’s lives and art while following their own “so different natures and destinies,” each learned to expand his or her artistic reach across their common ground. Their poetry would very likely have been different, and their lives would certainly have been different, if they had not met. Moreover, their meeting led to the creation of an extraordinary body of correspondence whose claims to canonical status as literature must certainly be considered. What Paulin stresses in his impromptu “poetics of the familiar letter” is the quality of performative immediacy, and that is surely vital to these letters. Yet, as the letters accumulated over three decades, they took on further qualities that would have been difficult to foresee—in particular the characteristics of continuity, coherence, and development. Read from beginning to end, or even in sustained, yearlong stretches, the letters establish not just an ongoing dialogical interchange between peers and equals but a compelling narrative line. They tell a story that is immersed in the quotidian, yet one that constantly intersects with public and private history. And it emerges as a story with a surprising degree of integrity as art.

Any individual poet’s “Selected Letters,” however brilliant, must be of necessity partial and miscellaneous. A multivolume “Complete Letters,” however inclusive, must be of necessity both one-sided and diffuse. On the other hand, these letters between Bishop and Lowell, by combining spontaneous performance focused on the moment with narrative coherence and development, may be seen, perhaps, to take on characteristics that one commonly associates with more traditional canonical genres. While the literary scene may seem an arena of constant change, preconceptions about literary genres change very slowly. Yet Bishop and Lowell themselves shared a perception that letters could be literature—and letters like these might begin to challenge preconceptions of correspondence as a secondary literary genre. Moreover, these letters link the separate published canons of these two artists in remarkable ways as we watch their parallel development as poets, as people, and as epistolary stylists. Throughout their lives both Bishop and Lowell were constantly exploring and questioning traditional artistic boundaries, so it seems fitting that we find them pushing those boundaries, once again and posthumously, in these letters.

Thomas Travisano

Words In Air

the Complete  Correspondence Between

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Joseph Bishop - Atomic War Crimes

The further one seriously studies history, and particularly the World War Two period, the more striking is the disconnect between what is popularly believed and what actually happened. Perhaps the reading public continues to shrink, not only in the United States but around the world, while information and opinion are generally retrieved from television and popular films, this in spite of the serious scholarship going on these areas and the many excellent published works in this field. What cutting-edge research demonstrates is often completely at odds with what one views on the big screen and television.

Popular television pseudo-documentary programming continues to purvey certain myths and untruths about World War Two as if they were established facts, the 'final word' on the subject of interpretations of events. Former White House personality Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, has frequently been seen on cable television's The History Channel and elsewhere, stating as 'fact' that the United States used the atom bomb in order to (a) force the Japanese to surrender, and (b) thus prevent an otherwise necessary US military invasion of Japan. Thus, the use of the atom bomb 'saved lives'—the figure of one million being commonly cited—and was an act of statesmanship if not heroism.[1] This myth was first conveyed to the American people and the world in the closing days of World War Two by the Truman administration and a largely uncritical, compliant mass print and radio media. The American public commonly trusted their government and what it told them, and this bit of fanciful propaganda was not questioned at the time. Later, however, criticisms did arise but were not widely accepted. The 'saving of lives' myth has endured as a common belief for well over half a century right down to the present day. The endurance of this set of myths was further exemplified by the uproar over the 1994-5 'Enola Gay' exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., from those angry at the perceived deviation from the patriotic myth of the bomb used to end the war and 

save lives.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. An immortalized, abstractive image. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary in a military sense with regard to Japan, and the decision to use them had almost nothing to do with Japan at all, and far more to do with the projection of American power and influence elsewhere in the world.

Tracing the evolution of this appalling story is useful in numerous regards. It begins in the early war period, as American president Franklin Roosevelt gave audience to a leading scientist named Albert Einstein. Einstein expressed the concern that Nazi Germany had a program to develop a superweapon that could destroy whole cities in one strike and that if the United States did not develop a similar weapon before the Germans did, that the latter could win the war with it. FDR was convinced and authorized what came to be known as the 'Manhattan Project,' which worked to develop the atomic bomb.[2]

Einstein was representative of a group of physicists, many of whom were (a) Jewish, and (b) politically communist. Many of these men were present or former members of various communist parties in Europe or the USA.[3] These men were 'refugees' from internments and other security actions under the Nazi aegis taking place in Europe, and had taken up residence in a welcoming USA. Their collective animus towards Nazi Germany and the intention to subject it and/or Nazi-controlled Europe to atomic bombings were not in question. This private, political agenda came to influence leading American politicians and their policy formulation.

The United States devoted billions of research dollars to the Manhattan Project, which neared completion by the early summer of 1945. The received history is somewhat different up to this point. The physicists group's dominant ethnicity and political leanings are left unmentioned, and their work is usually couched within terms of merely wishing to assist America in repelling the great danger emanating from Nazi Europe, and developing a super-weapon to enable America to attain an ability to combat this supposed evil or danger.

However, events played out somewhat differently from their expectations. The war in Europe ended before the bomb was completed, and thus its contemplated use there was abandoned. Victory in Europe ('VE-Day') came in May 1945 and the first atomic test did not occur until about mid-July. A post-war Europe was already being carved up by the victorious allies, who had agreed to meet at Potsdam, Germany to work out their differences and make the final decisions on the fate of the world. This left the war in the Pacific as the only unresolved area of conflict and the only possible target area for the bomb.

The mythic story line is that the Japanese were stubbornly refusing to surrender, that their nation was dominated by a radicalized military clique who wished the nation to fight to the last island and even to the last man, and that in consequence an invasion of the Japanese home islands by American forces would be necessary to end the war. Such an invasion would cost, it was estimated, at least a million lives and would take many months—if not years—of hard and bloody fighting. It is well known today, and largely undisputed among scholars that Japan actually was ready to surrender and had already been putting out peace feelers to the United States through its diplomats in the Vatican, Portugal, Sweden, and in Moscow.

A dramatic move in this direction was taken by the Japanese emperor himself, in transmitting to the Soviet Union a request to accept the emperor's personal representative Prince Konoye as an envoy to formalize a surrender. The United States had been routinely deciphering and reading Japanese diplomatic and military codes and was well aware of these peace moves and of Japan's disastrous situation by 1945. Clearly it had been thoroughly 'beaten' by strategic bombing and naval blockade and was looking for a way out. Secret strategic intelligence studies carried out by the US military demonstrated that Japan would likely surrender within a few months, and that an invasion was not necessary. Even a paucity of targets demonstrated that Japan was at its end and that a naval blockade alone would bring about surrender. Japan was cut off from its armies on the Asian mainland and could thus not count on reinforcement. The home islands were reduced to starvation levels. Its navy had been destroyed. Its industrial capacity was by now nearly nonexistent, having been bombed into oblivion by the ever-present American air forces.

The intelligence reports and summaries, however, were secret in nature, as was the fact that America had broken the Japanese codes and was aware of its internal situation and communications. The American public believed that Japan still retained the strength and purpose to continue fighting for perhaps years to come and had both the means and the suicidal determination to defend itself against an invasion.

Terms of acceptable surrender consisted of a sort of oral 'unconditional surrender' mantra. The expression itself was never an official or defined American policy and had originated in a speech given by President Franklin Roosevelt soon after Pearl Harbor in 1941. The American perception was that the Axis powers would have to completely and absolutely give in to the Allies without any preconditions or terms whatsoever. Although a politically popular 'feel good' slogan with the public, among military leaders it quickly came to be seen as something which hardened resistance and prolonged the war—thus unnecessarily lengthening American casualty lists and consuming enormous national treasure.[4]

By late 1944, most American political and military leaders were advising the President to define surrender terms to Japan, including a proviso allowing for the retention of the Emperor. It was clearly understood from Japanese peace feelers, decoded secret intercepts, and intelligence reports that the Japanese would accept virtually any and all terms from the victor with the sole exception of the Emperor's status which to the Japanese was non-negotiable, as the Emperor represented Japan's essence and was viewed as a semi-divine being vital for the continuation of Japan physically, culturally, and spiritually. It was also clearly understood that (a) Japan would not surrender without such a proviso, and that (b) America needed the Emperor and his cooperation to ensure a laying down of arms, a spirit of postwar cooperation, and an orderly occupation. Truman was convinced and the 1945 Potsdam Declaration in its draft stage did contain such a proviso; however, at Byrne's urging it was deleted before its transmission to Japan and the world. Byrnes did not want the war to end just yet; his policy was to continue the war long enough to employ both types of bombs and in as bloody and impressive a way as possible to have a psychological effect upon the Russians. Ultimately, the surrender was 'conditional' as it did allow for the Mikado's retention. Hirohito's unprecedented 1945 radio address did in fact order surrender to the Japanese people and allowed America to achieve its goals in Japan - certainly something very difficult if not impossible were the Emperor to have been dethroned or tried as a war criminal.

Advice and opinion relayed to Truman from US Army Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, and MacArthur, US Army Air Force Generals Le May, Spaatz, and Arnold, from US Navy Admirals Nimitz, Leahy, and King, Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of State Stettinius and Acting Secretary of State Grew—and many others—were a solid collective voice to Truman to not use the bomb, not invade Japan, to formulate America's war aims and soften 'unconditional surrender' in something more acceptable to Japan. Such voices had largely convinced the president until Jimmy F. Byrnes's decisive influence on Truman reversed his view and re-oriented policy along harder lines.

General Eisenhower expressed misgivings aforehand to the use of the bomb, as 'unnecessary' and 'horrible'. His somewhat moralistic approach to the atomic bomb is interesting, given his own personal history and doings. He oversaw the carpet - and incendiary-bombing of German cities in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died, as well as the very high death tolls of prisoners retained in camps in Western Europe in the early postwar period; recategorized from POWs to DEPS, their Geneva convention protections were removed and they were typically denied food, medical care, or shelter, resulting in a very high death rate.

Potsdam 1945. Left to right: Military Aide General Harry H. Vaughan (extreme left), Josef Stalin, Harry S. Truman, Andrei Gromyko, Press Secretary Charles G. Ross, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and Vacheslav Molotov. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

To explain this policy reversal, a diplomatic digression is in order. Truman had appointed Byrnes as his secretary of state in mid-1945. Byrnes had been a close friend and mentor of Truman's from the latter's entry into politics many years earlier, and had been a strong associate of Roosevelt also. He had taken Truman under his personal and political wing and influenced his success, even though Byrnes reportedly viewed Truman as a not-so-intelligent nonentity. The 1944 selection of FDR's running mate fell upon Truman almost accidentally, and was widely thought that it should have gone to Byrnes instead.[5] His accession to the presidency on FDR's passing in early 1945 left Truman with feelings of doubt and guilt, as well as confusion and a need to turn to his long-time mentor Byrnes to help him formulate policy. The two men 'went way back' and regularly drank and played poker together in a 'good ole boys' atmosphere that transcended party politics. Truman correctly felt that he owed Byrnes a great deal and needed his wise counsel. Thus the tremendous, even decisive, influence of Byrnes over Truman in this period is not so surprising.

As for Byrnes's motivations and agenda, it was both personal and political. At the time of the Yalta accords with the Russians, Byrnes had served as FDR's point man and spokesman for those agreements, and had returned to America to advocate them as good and enforceable policy. Indeed it could be said that his personal and political reputation was closely intertwined with those accords. It gradually emerged, however, that the accords were not so good for the world, that they served Soviet purposes more than American, that their terms and understandings were vague and open to various interpretations, and also that the Russians intended to interpret them their own way and to act strictly in accordance with their own goals. This could hugely backfire on Byrnes, and politically this was becoming a disaster for American policy and for Byrnes personally. By 1945 it was becoming clear to American leaders that the Russians were going to be very difficult to deal with. They were already shaping Europe to fit their own designs, and had plans for Asia too, especially after their early-anticipated declaration of war upon Japan and the imminent Red Army invasion of Manchuria.

The final development of America's new superweapon offered a possible solution to these problems. It was thought that the Russians could or would be 'impressed' by it, but to achieve this, (a) the bomb would have to be actually used, (b) it would have to be used in combat, (c) it would have to be used in a truly dramatic way, and (d) maximum 'shock' effect could only be attained through its unannounced use and preferably over a major city. Usage of the bomb thus became more political than military in that it would make the Russians more 'manageable' in Europe and Asia. American leaders with this 'big stick' in hand, would 'control' the Russians and achieve American goals around the world. This was the essential
reasoning of Byrnes in his formulation of American foreign policy, and Truman became convinced.

The Potsdam meeting with the 'Big Three' (USA, USSR, and Britain) was postponed until America could gets its test results of the atomic bomb. If the results were a success, America would have the superweapon. If not, it would have to remain conciliatory and continue to compromise with the Soviets. The reports duly came in that the results were even greater than anticipated. Truman immediately took a harder line with the Russians and made the final decision to use the bomb on Japan—and regardless of surrender possibilities, loss of life, or any moral or ethical considerations—even regardless of the continued near-unanimous advice of his military and political leaders to not use the bomb and to accept Japan's surrender. Using the bomb in as dramatic a method as possible, would serve as both carrot and stick to the only emerging superpower that could challenge the United States in world affairs: a 'carrot' in the 'we might share this with you if...' sense, and a 'stick' as in 'cooperate or...'

The tragic events unfolded. Two Japanese cities were bombed and nearly 150,000 lives were taken as a result of each event—a figure including the later deaths from radiation poisoning, injuries, etc.[6] Japan was not forced to surrender by the bomb, it was already prepared to surrender many months earlier, and America knew it but did not act on that fact. The war itself was not shortened by the bomb, in fact it was prolonged by at least several weeks if not months longer than necessary. Lives were not saved, they were wasted: hundreds of thousands of lives were squandered in order for the United States to attempt to achieve a political effect with the Soviet Union. Ironically, the effect was ultimately not achieved at all, as the psychological impact upon the Russians was limited and they continued to go their own way in Europe, achieved their goals in Asia, and much of the world fell into their control. Far from 'controlling' the Soviets, they became less trusting and more truculent, and a 'cold war' soon commenced while the world became divided into two major camps engaged in a hugely expensive and dangerous arms race.

There are numerous interesting asides to this story, all worthy of further research and comment.

The Jewish physicists resisted the use of the bomb on Japan and made representations to Truman accordingly. Their somewhat genocidal view towards Germany amazingly metamorphosed into a more ethical and moral humanitarian approach once the likely target had shifted from Europe to Asia. These same physicists had also urged Truman to share the new weapon and its technology with the world—which primarily meant sharing it with the Soviet Union—in the interests of 'lessening tensions' and reaching some sort of utopian world peace and amity. This advice was not taken seriously and not followed. A number of these men were later uncovered as atomic spies, passing technology secrets to the Soviets and enabling them to develop their own bomb, thus plunging the world into a state of nuclear terror lasting many decades and bringing the world very close to the brink of destruction at least once.[7] Scores of thousands of nuclear weapons piled up around the world. That terror persists to this day, and arguably the nuclear dangers are more profound in the modern world than they were during the 'cold war' period of international tension, as the technology to produce these weapons proliferates amongst smaller and 'rogue' nations and regimes as scientists and technologists are more willing and able to sell the necessary secrets and components.

Ramifications of international and military law are explicitly damning. The intentional targeting of civilians and the use of poisons against anyone—radiation poisoning easily falling into this category—is prohibited. Only days after Hiroshima, the August 8 1945 treaty was signed in London which established the legal basis for the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes trials. A day later, Nagasaki too was bombed. No American military or political leader has ever been prosecuted for these crimes, while many Germans and Japanese were tried, convicted, and executed for far less serious actions. To what degree this troubles the world, or troubles the American conscience, remains unknown.

In later years, popular distaste for the use of atomic bombs began to threaten reputations. Criticisms and informed reassessments began surfacing, in response to which 'damage control' and 'spin-doctoring' went into play by those whose place in history were at stake. Byrnes, for example, in postwar interviews attempted to shift responsibility to the 'Interim Committee'—purportedly an advisory group set up by the president—for having made the recommendation to Truman to use the bomb. In actuality the committee was a sort of rubber stamp group which Byrnes dominated as the president's personal representative, and simply relayed his own agenda up the line, blessing decisions already made elsewhere. The president's daughter Margaret Truman in her memoir of her father's life, claimed that a meeting occurred in Potsdam at which the president polled the opinions of his leading military men, all or most of whom—according to her account—advised use of the bomb. Later historians in their analysis of Potsdam found such a meeting impossible in the timelines, and no evidence of such a meeting has ever surfaced in any memoirs, diaries, or interviews of the alleged participants—nor has Margaret Truman responded to any of the many enquiries put to her about this issue. Stimson was persuaded to allow others to ghost-write a postwar essay under his name for Harper's Magazine which reversed all his earlier views and recommendations regarding the bomb, to bring his 'new' thinking in line with 'Cold War' policy and doctrine. The later memoirs of Stimson, Byrnes, and of Truman, as well as those of others, similarly re-wrote history into a more establishment-friendly tone and outlook—often distorting past realities and sometimes inventing new lies to protect old ones.

Historians and biographers attempting to get at the truth were—and often still are—denied access to private diaries and journals of the major participants, period memoranda and documentation, and official, albeit secret reports, even though many documents and files have been routinely declassified. 'Friendly' writers, however, were often granted access. This misuse of information by a supposedly 'transparent' democratic government and its representatives who insisted they were hiding nothing, resulted in distortions of history and the misleading of Americans and the world whilst greatly hampering the work of researchers. All of this, of course, is completely inimical to the public's inherent right to inspect the records of the public's business.

Post-war policy and America's 'Cold War' place in the world were at stake. Policy-makers wanted Americans to 'hang tough' on nuclear weapons, both in order to be ready to use them again and to convince perceived enemies that it had the will to do just that. The perception of an America that did not lie to its people and did not commit war crimes was necessary to sustain.

The responsibility of mass media is likewise subject to question. They had access to all the major political and military figures of the time, yet did not question American policy and actions, instead taking the government line and helped to purvey the mythology surrounding the bomb and its use. Ordinary Americans trusted their government and without any information to the contrary, accepted the myths as truth.

One must wonder about the process of history. Important works on these issues are published, but the readership is surely very small. Some sixty-plus years after these events, the myths stand firmly in the minds of most Americans, while only a relatively small group of scholars and their small readership understand the reality behind them. Meanwhile, everyone is subjected to the mass-message on television and in films wherein a very different—and very false—'establishment' myth-line is purveyed. Another half century from now, or hundreds of years hence, will the myths have been dispelled or will they be just as firmly, or more firmly, established? World War Two is rife with lies and misunderstandings, and entrenched interests wish to keep it that way. A failure to understand the past can surely only be disastrous for the future.

To sum up, the atomic bombings were entirely unnecessary and were in fact acts of genocide that mostly targeted non-combatant civilians resulting in huge numbers of fatalities. To paraphrase F. J. P. Veale's famous critique of the modern world, the usage of these indiscriminate weapons were far from being a military 'advance'. They were rather a 'return to barbarism'.

Notes

This reviewer can be contacted at: Revisionist21@aol.com. Copyrighted 2010 by Joseph Bishop. All rights reserved.
[1] Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: and the Architecture of an American Myth, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995, p.520. The one-million figure originates from a May 15, 1945 estimate contained in a memorandum sent by former President Hoover to Secretary of War Stimson, thereafter attaining its own life and becoming a popular quote - along with other lower, and also higher, contradictory estimates
[2] Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1995, p.16 onwards.
[3] No longer seriously disputed by historians and widely documented in countless postwar biographies and histories studying the communist espionage networks within, or closely connected to, the Manhattan Project and their passing of atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, along with treason trials and executions, e.g. that of the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, et al. Confirmation of these activities was abundantly found in the opening of the former Soviet archives from 1990 onwards.
[4] A useful discussion of the origins of the 'unconditional surrender' demand is contained in Takaki, pp.34-37 and elsewhere; a sort of 'ad lib' comment by Roosevelt at the 1943 Casablanca conference, it was originally not used more than as a political slogan but came to crystalize within the media and popular consciousness.
[5] Ably discussed in Aperovitz, pp.198-9.
[6] Takaki, op. cit., pp.46-7. Cited are 60,000 fatalities from the blast and approximately 70,000 from radiation etc. by 1950; Nagasaki estimates were 70,000 killed in the initial explosion and another 70,000 from radiation poisoning etc. afterwards.
[7] The most famous being the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Sources: Inconvenient History, vol. 2, no. 1 (spring 2010)