Chosen few

The Bible, the Book of Genesis in particular, has been coming up in my daily rounds, lately.  I’ve been on a Bible binge of late:  read the King James Five Books of Moses, got the Wolverton illustrated version, and was just looking at some nice linoleum prints of the text in my local library.

And…R. Crumb’s long-anticipated illustrated version of the first book of the Bible, “All 50 chapters!  Nothing left out!” has arrived at last.  For devotees of Crumb or the good book, it’s a happy day.  Crumb has played it straight, so if you are hoping that he has turned the stories into an excuse for weirding us out, you will be disappointed.  If you doubt it, look at his representation of Onan in the leading image of this post:  Who would have thought that coitus interruptus would be treated with such discretion by the creator of the Snoid, Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and innumerable other phallic maniacs?

He stays very close to the text, although the words are not my favorites, but a modern translation, and he’s done a lot of research.  He did take a liberty with the serpent – showing him as an upright lizard with legs rather than a snake – or did he?  In his notes, he gives a convincing justification for his change from tradition.

Abraham is the patriarch to whom God makes an offer that he cannot refuse.  He really can’t - declining an offer from Yahweh is not an option.  Somehow, I feel that the story of Abraham and Isaac is the center of the whole convenant thing between Jehovah and the Jews.  Was it really such a good deal for the Jews to be the Chosen People?  It had advantages, but oy!, in the long-term?  There really wasn’t a choice in the matter, maybe that’s the ultimate lesson of the story.

Which brings us up to the present time:  Marek Edelman was remembered in an obituary in the New York Times yesterday.  Edelman was the last survivor of the Jewish uprising – he didn’t think that word was appropriate – against the Nazis as they moved to destroy the Warsaw ghetto and murder all of its inhabitants…liquidate is the word that everyone uses.  Apparently, he was prone to speaking inconvenient truths, are at least, truths as he saw them.  He dismissed the word “uprising” saying it was simply the desperate attempt by a couple of hundred people to determine when they would die and how.  There was not question of success.  He was not keen on Israel or Zionism.  He decided to remain in Poland all his life, a fact which drove some Jewish scholars of the Holocaust batty.  He ridiculed the notions of heroism that people retroactively assigned to some peoples’ actions, while others, those who went quietly to their deaths, were categorized as passive.  He said they only did what they could to maintain their dignity, to comfort their families for whom there was no hope at all of rescue.

For some Jews, the question of the nature of the deal they got from God rankles.  “If we are the Chosen People, how could you let this happen?”  Which brings up the question – Chosen for what?

For a depressing sample of scholarly venom deployed against Edelman, read these letters in Commentary from the 1980s regarding an article on Poles and Jews.  Commentary is a creature of the Podhoretz gang, a bunch of Jewish former leftists who “got religion” and turned hard right.  The original neo-cons.

Hangmen Also Die!

The hangman of the film’s title is Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s top men, No. 2 in the SS, put in charge of the occupied city of Prague.  He was killed by a British commando team in 1942, and the Germans shot 1600 people and destroyed Lidice in retaliation.  At the time this movie was made, according to Wikipedia, the actual story wasn’t known, and the film makes it the act of the local resistance movement.

The film was the work of the Expressionist master, Fritz Lang, with Bertolt Brecht and others helping out on the writing.  It’s a long film for that time, over two hours, and it’s filled with shadows, menace, brutality, and a bit of Hollywood wartime feel-good sentimental patriotism.  Mostly, it’s scary and claustrophobic.  It tells a story of the assassin attempting to elude the Nazis, torn by his duty to the underground and the knowledge that the Germans have arrested hundreds of innocent people to shoot in batches until he is discovered.

The Hangman of Prague makes his entrance in the beginning, shown as a strutting peacock and a sadist.  At first, I thought I was watching Klink from Hogan’s Heroes.  In general, the Gestapo are shown as brutal, sadistic, and full of themselves.  We get a close-up of one looking at himself in a mirror while he squeezes a big pimple on his face during a break in his desk work.  The depiction of interrogations, though without much explicit violence, is chilling.  One old lady is made to stand by a chair that is designed to come apart if she puts her weight on it for relief.  The film is filled with sick little details like that.

The most interesting character in the film is Inspector Gruber of the Gestapo played by a well known Jewish character actor of the day.  Gruber is a sexual libertine and a heavy drinker.  In contrast to many of the Nazi villains who are uptight sadistic militarists,  he is earthy and almost casual in his mannerisms, but he is very clever.

Here we see him at work in his office.  No uniform, sitting down and giving orders, a modest (venus pudica) nude in the background.  He is on a long leather couch.  Could this office be the commandeered space of a psychoanalyst?

With business over, Herr Gruber gets down to business with his secretary who was behind the screen.

In Lang’s earlier classic, M, the image of a balloon floating upwards was used to indicate the murder of a child.  There is a similar use of images to indicate or punctuate actions in this film, as well as to build character.  In this image, Gruber is shown pulling us his socks and tieing his shoelaces – a frequent action for him.  It distinguishes him yet again from his fellow Nazis, always so spit-and-polish.  Here, he does it front of a naked statue, in a place that doubles as a workplace and a place of sexual indulgence.

On the track of the assassin, Gruber breaks in on a couple in the midst of a tryst, or so it seems.  (In fact, the woman is pretending in order to hide a fugitive.)  Gruber is not put off by her state of undress – he rather enjoys making her uncomfortable while he thoroughly ransacks the room.  He also enjoys the possibility, slim he thinks, that he has simply blundered into an adulterous rendezvous.  It’s all the same to him!

Later, Gruber carouses all night with some prostitutes,  and forces one of his suspects, the actual fiance of the young woman, to join him.  He thinks he can wear him down with drink, women, and jealousy.  (The guy isn’t in on what his girl is involved with.)  The lipstick on his cheek jogs his memory about a detail in his meeting with the girl and he’s off to get her.  He knows she’s involved in the plot!

He finds the real killer of Heydrich, a local surgeon, but the doctor kills him before Gruber can turn him in.  Like the balloon floating upwards, his hat, falling to the ground and rolling about under the table on which he is being throttled to death indicates his end.  His left foot dangles nearly to the floor, its sock and part of his calf visible.  When his body if found in a cellar coal heap, planted there to pin the blame for the assassination on a collaborator, only his calves, shoes and socks are visible.

His Master’s Voice

Very nearly at the end of Grossman’s monumental novel, Life and Fate, the main character, Victor, a Jewish physicist gets a phone call.

He is a brilliant scientist, but a little too free with his thoughts and his talk. He has said things, made jokes, even about Stalin!, that a more circumspect academic would have avoided. His thoughts, well…he knows what was done to the kulaks, he knows the vast, murderous injustices of the Great Terror of 1937, he doesn’t believe in those sham trials of the old Bolsheviks…NO! But for the most part, he’s been careful, and there’s his work to keep him busy during the war.

His makes a breakthrough in his study of the properties of the atom. People are ecstatic, they hail him as a great successor to the quantum pioneers! But there is that matter of nationality…Rumors grow. Some people make criticisms of his work – too Idealistic, not properly Leninist/Marxist/Materialistic. Influenced by foreign elements. And his stated belief that physics knows no party? How can a true communist say such a thing?

He is denounced at a meeting that he refuses to attend. He will loose his position. He grows depressed as he sits at home, waiting for the knock on the door of the men who will take him away in a Black Maria to the Lubyanka, the interrogration hell of the secret police organs. After all, the former husband of his sister-in-law , a fanatical Bolshevik from the early revolution was just hauled in. Hadn’t Trotsky, long ago, praised an article he had written? He philosophizes, contemplates love – he wants them to come for him so it will at least be over!

Ah, but Grossman has other things up his sleeve as he dissects and portrays the ways the State can crush all life out of a man, and not just by killing him.

Victor gets a call from Stalin. Just a brief hello. “Your work is on a very interesting topic. I hope you have the resources you need.” The world has turned completely. From being about to topple into the abyss of the Gulag, Victor is now a privileged genius to be pampered, feted, trusted, and consulted. Why? The State has realized the importance of nuclear physics for its own ends – nothing to do with pure research. Russian scientists and policy makers are aware of the possibility of a nuclear bomb. They have their plans.

Victor need tell no one. Everyone knows of his call soon enough. They smile now, instead of looking away. They hug him, congratulate him, when before they denounced him. But there’s more…

Victor starts to get used to his new life, his freedom to work, the fast cars taking him to important meetings where everyone works cooperatively. The respect of his peers and superiors, not to mention his subordinates. Yes, he still knows what went on with the Ukraine famine, the forced collectivization, the disasterous fiasco of Stalin’s stupor when the Nazi’s invaded. He knows all that, but he is proud, elevated, to have been singled out by the great leader. He doesn’t think about those things so much…

All because he heard his master’s voice…

Life and Fate

I feel comfortable calling this novel, Life and Fate, one of the greatest ever – certainly of all I’ve read.  For years, I had heard of this book, and finally I am reading it.  All 850 pages of it.  It is a monument to the disaster of the twentieth century, the century of mass murder, totalitarian rule, and ideological dementia.

That’s Vassily Grossman up there, the loyal communist who served as a war correspondent on the front lines with the Soviet Army and who wrote the first journalistic accounts – he was an eyewitness – of the liberation of the Nazi death camps.  He must have seen too much, learned too much.  His novel was written in secret, published outside of the USSR – he was hounded, his typwriter and its RIBBONS confiscated.  He died not knowing if his work would see the light of day.  When he wrote this book, he had come to believe that Nazism and Stalin’s Communism were different only in name – not an idea that you could hold comfortably if you were living in Russia.

He wrote of Stalingrad – the mind boggling six month battle that broke the German war machine and sent them reeling back to Berlin.  (Here in the USA, we think of D-Day as the “mother of all battles,” but on the eastern front, they had a D-Day practically every week.)  He wrote of the civilians on their way to the gas chambers.  He wrote of decent men and women trying to serve their country and rid it of the Nazi murderers, but having to always look over their shoulder in case the NKVD was listening in on them.  That joke you told…that song you were singing..was it in the Bolshevik spirit?  You say you held off thirty German attacks here?  Then why haven’t you filed your reports?  Are you taking care to inculcate the proper class-spirit with your men?… He wrote of intellectuals trying to deal with the horror of the purges of the 1930s and of the Ukranian famine – all directed by the Supremo, Comarade Stalin.  He wrote of the Gulag.  And he wrote of the disease of anti-semitism, in Germany and in the USSR.

The title of the book echoes Tolstoy’s War and Peace for obvious reasons.  Recently, I gave up reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which I have read twice many years ago.  That book, similarly ambitious in scope, seems like a trivial joke next to Grossman’s work.  The same for Vollman’s Europe Central.  Grossman uses no clever tricks, no post-modern jive, no meta-ironies…none of that.  He has a style though.  He knows exactly what he is doing:  hitting you over the head with a gigantic brick so you will know a little bit of what he saw.

Pynchon

The image here is an elargement of a postage stamp from the last days of the Third Reich showing the launch of five Victory Rockets, the V-2, towards London. (I bought it on ebay, where else?) For dramatic effect, the artist has shown the rockets taking off at steep angle rather than vertically, as they would have been launched. When they reached the point at which their engines would cut out, brenschluss, the rockets would continue on their way, “pure ballastic”, powered solely by the force of gravity, describing a rainbow parabolic arc to their explosive terminus in England.

I have read Gravity’s Rainbow several times. Most of the people I recommend it to barely start it. I guess I like it. But I’m not sure how much I like it. It was certainly an important book to me when I first read it in college – we fans called ourselves the Gravity Men. But since then, I have gone back and forth on my “critical” assessment of this work that is, regardless of my opinion or anyone elses’, a very important, i.e., influential, book.

To summarize the “main” thread of its incredibly complicated set of plotlines, or at least the one that interests me the most and relates most directly to the title:

Tyrone Slothrop is a private in the US Army stationed in London during the V-2 blitz. A colleague, plotting with colored pins on a map of London the impact sites of the rockets, begins to notice a pattern: When Slothrop, who has a knack with the ladies that is envied and celebrated by his buddies, beds down with a new bird, the rocket arrives the next morning to destroy the site. It’s almost as though Slothrop’s presence brings the rocket on later, or as though through some weird sex-guilt-perversion-psycho complex, Slothrop chooses to have sex with women who will be destroyed. And how could he know in advance..? Are cause and effect reversed in time? (You only hear the supersonic rocket coming after the impact!) It all has to do with the experiments performed by Lazlo Jamf, using baby Slothrop as a subject, that tested his sexual arousal in the presence of a new plastic, Imopolex G, which substance is a critical component in the V-2 rocket…

From here on, it gets complicated.

Maps, mathematics, sex, history, techo-weirdness…it has its appeal.

Pynchon can write poetically, and he sometimes conveys a sense of deep pathos, but too often his characters are mere cardboard that he moves around to make his fascinating and convoluted points. The book is permeated with the spirit of “stoner humor,” the sort of jokes that you imagine might be hilarious if you were high, but that can be a bit tedious and sophomoric if you are just reading. Paranoia, the ultimate scheming by the unamed and unknowable Them, the depiction of all social structures as conspiracies (from motherhood to the distribution of lightbulbs) can be outrageously funny, but to one who has never been a fan of Ken Kesey, 60s-style counter-cultural posturing, it can also appear dated and somewhat trivial.

Lots of critics are in awe of Pynchon’s grasp of science and mathematics, but I suspect that this has a lot to do with the general ignorance of such topics among literary critics. (cf. his endless discussion of entropy, a concept much abused in non-scientific argument.) I love his fascination with drainage and urban sewers (a central element in his novel, V) and as one who grew up in the shadow of Rocketdyne and the roar of its engine tests (or at least that’s what we thought those noises were), how could I fail to be amused by The Crying of Lot 49, in which Yoyodyne is the name of a principal defense-aerospace contractor? (I was told by an auction house person that nobody uses that phrase, “crying a lot” anymore.) That novel centers on another conspiracy, one involving the postal service, the first one of which was started by the ancient family of Thurn und Taxis (you can see that name carved into the frieze around the NYC main post office along with the famous “Neither snow, nor sleet, nor gloom of night…” slogan.)

Still and all, Pynchon can compress so much into a paragraph. Here he is describing the Victorian Gothic-Revival architecture of the building, known as The White Visitation, where the British counter-intelligence teams work:

The are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals – but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God’s actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel netowrk of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent back the intentions of the builders no on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year.

The spirit of the age crystalized in architecture, and his prose.

Ich bin ein Dresdner?

“Write what you know.” Isn’t that what they say? So, Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the firebombing of Dresden in World War II in his novel, Slaughterhouse Five. Each time I read this book, I am more impressed by it. His control of tone is wonderful – the simple, repetitive phrases that give it the air of a parodic gospel. The dark satire, restrained by a fatalistic humanism. The downright horror of it all.

He didn’t write about the Nazi destruction of the Jews – he didn’t witness that. He made no grand claims, other than that in the war, tens of thousands of innocent civilians were burned to a crisp in a city that had no military value. (Some have recently claimed that this was not true, but it certainly took them a while to make their arguments! See my post on Bomber Harris.) More people died there than in Hiroshima, but who’s counting? Is the body count all that matters?

The subtitle of the book is The Children’s Crusade, a reference to the fact that the American army was largely composed of boys, barely out of childhood, hastily dressed up and shipped overseas in uniform as GI Joes. For the most part, they were woefully unprepared, a point that is amplified in a brief historical book about the US war in northern Europe, The Boy’s Crusade by Paul Fussell. (He was there too.) They were fighting a desperate and seasoned killing machine led by experienced and ruthless officers fighting for their lives, the Nazi army.

There are a lot of things in this book that may have seemed very outré in 1971. His description of the American collaborator, Campbell and his tirades against US soldiers; the way the Germans treated the Russian POWs like animals to be worked to death – right next to the Americans and British; the incompetence and chaos of the American fighting – their poor equipment. Lots of things that don’t accord too well with our current mythology of The Greatest Generation either.

Of course, the book had added poignancy because it was published at a time with the specter of mass incineration was hanging over just about everyone.

Requiescat In Pace

Naked and Dead

My memory of Norman Mailer, recently deceased, is of him, drunk, asinine, and rude, on the Dick Cavett show with Gore Vidal. That was a long time ago. I don’t know much about the man or his work, and I have only read his book, The Naked and the Dead. That novel, published right after WW II when he was very young, made his name. It’s a long, uneven, and at times, powerful and shocking piece of fiction.

The passage the stands out in my recollection of The Naked and the Dead is a description of the aftermath of a vicious battle on one of the small islands where the U.S. fought it out with Japan as the war wound down to its inevitable conclusion. The American soldiers have gathered together a group of naked and scared Japanese prisoners – then they move them away and shoot them. Just like that. He describes the white, chubby flesh of one of the captured ‘Japs.’ I wonder if this scene caused a hub hub in 1948. The idea that American soldiers would shoot unarmed and docile prisoners was deeply shocking to me, and here it was in a fictional account of the Pacific War by someone who was there in the fighting (at least a little). I subsequently learned that it was quite common, although it is not well known. (see War Without Mercy)

The Japanese took no prisoners, and fought to the last man – the Americans reciprocated. Both were partially motivated by a murderous racial ideology. Of course, if the goal was to gain a quick victory, shooting Japanese prisoners was not the way to encourage the other side to drop its fanatical notions of bushido. In Europe, the US Army broadcast propaganda to the Germans demonstrating how well prisoners were treated to encourage them to surrender. That was not the way in the Pacific theater. So it went, until the final incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended it all.

Mailer focuses on the psychology of the men fighting, and recounts the horrors of battle in a deadpan way. Soldiers rushing up a beach remark on comrades with skulls blasted apart, brains dripping out. A man absently notices that he has lost control of his bowels, fouling his trousers. A new lieutenant – they were called 90-Day Wonders, I believe, and had a very high casualty rate – is all gung ho to carry on the fight. His men are more jaded and practical. They go out on a patrol, his first real action, and almost immediately he’s killed by a sniper shot. No comment – things like that just happen all the time. So much for romantic heroism in the world of industrialized warfare.

How We Won the War…NOT

Man! I know I sound like a crank, but I have to comment on the WWII frenzy that is building in this country, what with the memorial fund raising spearheaded by the Great Hero, Tom Hanks (ooops, only in the movies) , and the new Ken Burns film coming out. From what I’ve read, it pretty much leaves one free to think that, gee, the USA won WWII all on its own. I’m not saying that there is no value in seeing and hearing about the experiences of our veterans, and I don’t have any desire to minimize their achievement. No, what I’d like to see and hear a little is some perspective on the historical role we played in WWII.

I guess this is my hobbyhorse sometimes. After all, this is the country that is still obsessed with our defeat in Vietnam, in which we lost 50,000 dead, and that still flies flags implying that P.O.W.s are being held captive, secretly, somewhere, in the not-so-evil empire of Communist Vietnam. And while I think we should give full attention to the soldiers who were ruined by Agent Orange and other innovative American inventions, it would be good to recall, oh, now and then, that about 1,000,000 Vietnamese died, their country was pulverized, and that’s not even mentioning what happened to their neighbors.

So, back to WWII. Well, we didn’t want to get in it, many of us, but when we were attacked, we went full bore ahead. Fought a war on two fronts. I know far less about the war against the Japanese, which was basically us slugging it out with them, and they were doomed from the start. The war in Europe, however, was already won by the time we got in it. The Russians had broken the back of the Nazi war machine, and the British had ruined their air force. D Day, the titanic Mother of all Battles in American mythology was a picnic compared to what went on along the Russian Front, the largest and most brutal theatre of war ever seen. The Russians had a D Day everyday. Losses? Maybe 25,000,000 soldiers and civilians. The USA lost 500,000 soldiers in WWII.

We did our part, but we didn’t destroy the Nazi army any more than the French or Canadians did.

Mr. Churchill Says…The Kinks Say

For the last week, I’ve been listening to Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1970) by The Kinks. Listening over and over again because it’s such a good rock album, and I have always been fascinated by pop music that takes a look at history and society, although I don’t mind songs about wanting to hold hands either.

I was only 13 when this album came out – I didn’t get to know The Kinks’ music until the last two years, spurred on partly the interest of my young daughter in 60s music. I wasn’t a close follower of rock ‘n’ roll as a teen, but I knew the big hits by The Kinks – “Lola”, “You Got Me”, etc. “Mr. Churchill Says,” a song on Arthur, is now firmly lodged in my head and I can’t get enough of it. It begins with a slow, bluesey cadence:

Well Mr. Churchill says, Mr. Churchill says
We gotta fight the bloody battle to the very end
Mr. Beaverbrook says we gotta save our tin
And all the garden gates
And empty cans are gonna make us win

and goes on to quote Churchill himself, with a little additional text by Davies:

We shall defend our island
On the land and on the sea
We shall fight them on the beaches
On the hills and in the fields
We shall fight them in the streets
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed to so few
‘Cos they have made our British Empire
A better place for me and you
And this was their finest hour

 An air raid siren goes off, and the song changes into a fast-paced rock number. After a long instrumental passage, they sing:

Did you hear that plane flying overhead
There’s a house an fire and there’s someone lying dead
We gotta clean up the streets
And get me back on my feet
Because we wanna be free!
Do your worst and we’ll do our best
We’re gonna win the way that Mr. Churchill says

 Is he mocking Churchill? Yes. Is he celebrating him? Yes. Is it gentle mockery or admiration he’s expressing about the slogans, the legendary ‘British pluck’ that got them through the blitz? Both, I think. The last song, “Arthur”, after making a little fun of him, concludes with the rollicking chorus

Arthur we read you and understand you
Arthur we like you and want to help you
Oh! we love you and want to help you…

 Several of the songs evoke the horror and dehumanization of war – are they “anti-war” songs? They are intensely personal. Is “Get Back in Line” (on a different album) an anti-Union song because of the lines,

‘Cause that union man’s got such a hold over me
He’s the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve, or I eat…?

It’s intensely personal, but doesn’t make an explicit political points. Davies is not a politico. His song “Some Mother’s Son” is about death in war, good war, bad war, indifferent war, period.

Davies was born in ‘44 in working class London, too young for memories of the war, but no doubt surrounded by folks for whom the experience was as vivid as it could be. So British, so 60s in a way, breaking away from the past, welcoming the swinging present, but looking with a bit of (sceptical) nostalgia at the past. I don’t know of a comparable strain in American rock/pop music, but Ray Davies may just be extraordinary. Certainly, his muscial roots in British music hall culture (someday I’ll find out just what that was) are part of it, and he shares that with the Beatles.

The Blitz? Gravity’s Rainbow does a nice job of evoking the terror of life lived under the rain of the first rockets. Orwell, in 1984, draws on his experiences with the random destruction of streets, houses, and lives in that time. (I wonder if Orwell would have liked the song – he could be a real stick in the mud when he wasn’t being brilliant.) I’m not sure why it fascinates me so – I’ve always had a thing for the Spitfire airplanes. The fact that the Brits had radar, and nobody else did, so that they had advance warning of the Luftwaffe raids, which, together with the skill of the RAF and the prowess of the Spitfires, wrought terrible losses on Hitler’s planes. Of course, it was nothing compared to the siege of Lenningrad…which makes me think about September 11th …

Some people say 9/11 changed everything – I just don’t get it. It was a terrorist attack…but maybe I’ll post more on that later.

Bomber Harris and 20th Century Friends

The esteemed blogster, Troutsky, points out that all my catalogs of 20th century industrialized killing seem to leave the western democracies off the hook – a good point. Time to address that oversight! The image above is of “Bomber Harris,” the man in charge of Britain’s air war against Germany. He’s not so well known here, but he is in the UK and the Commonwealth, and there was even a flattering statue of him unveiled a few years ago, which initiated a vigorous controversy.

A lot of folks defend him as the stalwart warrior who brough the Nazis to their knees. Some see him as simply a war criminal, a soldier bent on bloody vengeance to repay the Germans for the Blitz, and to pummel them into submission. I’m no afficianado of military history – the debate still goes on – but my sense is that it’s been pretty much agreed that his massive air raids on German cities did not hasten the end of the war, caused tremendous civilian casualties, and, in fact, stiffened the resistance of the nutso Germans. Less often mentioned is the terrific toll on allied airmen that was suffered by the attacking forces – the targets were often well defended, and we’re not talking B-52s flying high, out of sight! No, Senator George McGovern and actor Jimmy Stuart, both wartime bomber pilots, among others, have spoken of the terror of those missions.

In the July 4th parade in my town, there is always a float that has a model bomber gun, the kind that has a double-barrel machine gun and plexiglass enclosure, with a “gunner” inside. It turns around and goes tat-tat-tat. I always recall to my kids the remark my father made that the gunners who manned these positions were often “scooped out with a spoon” after the plane returned from its mission. If it returned.

In the film The Fog of War, Robert McNamara alludes to this horror: Seems that an enormous number of sorties were aborted because of mechanical difficulties. When Bob examined the data, it turned out that most of the mechanical problems were trivial, or unconfirmed. The pilots and crews were quite simply scared to go on their missions, and they grasped at any excuse to abort. When the command instituted a harsh policy against aborting missions, the behavior stopped. Well, that’s good management!, but hey, there was a war on. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Yep, and there’s Dresden, the destruction of which was witnessed and written about by Vonnegut. A recent book claims that the city was a vital military target after all: maybe so – I don’t follow these debates – but why has it taken 60 years of bad press for the allies to bring these ‘facts’ to light? I’m skeptical. Where have the defenders of the military-industrial complex’s reputation been all these years? On Tralfamadore?

Bomber Harris had his American alter-ego, Curtis LeMay, inspiration for Kubrick’s Colonel Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.

He remarked to McNamara, right after the war, that if the allies had lost, he and McNamara would probably have been brought up on charges of war crimes for their fire-bombing of several Japanese cities. Maybe they were war criminals. Was it really necessary to incinerate hundreds of thousands of civilians in German and Japanese cities to end the war? Did they even believe that it was, or were they just on a bloody roll? Easy to ask these questions now, eh? Well, some people asked them then. Freeman Dyson, the renowned physicist, was employed by the war department in England in a job that helped plan the massive raids. He has spoken movingly of his anguish over the work he did (I believe he resigned, but I’m not sure.) He suspected then, and certainly feels now that it was brutal, cruel, unnecessary, and simply criminal.

But you know, I love those planes! I spent many happy hours building models of them as a boy:

This is the age of machinery,
A mechanical nightmare,
The wonderful world of technology,
Napalm, hydrogen bombs, biological warfare,

This is the twentieth century,
But too much aggravation
It’s the age of insanity,
What has become of the green pleasant fields of Jerusalem?

The Kinks, “20th Century Man”

Good bye, 20th Century!