War and peace
I appreciate your eloquent comments, A.J., especially your telling of your father’s responses to both world wars. Do you think we become bored with peace or forgetful of what war is really like? In any case, you raise the hard question as to whether or not war is indeed inevitable. Civilized peoples want to eliminate it, but why is it so difficult to remember what it's really like without the actual experience of it?
Fussell is very good at describing the kind of “cavalier” attitude that you say the Europeans adopted before and during the war. In his chapter 3, he tells of a sharp divide that came to exist as the futility of the fighting became more and more obvious to the trench soldiers. In the words of one report from the Front Line: “‘It must be emphasized that by the end of 1918 there were two distinct Britains:…the Fighting Forces…and the Rest, including the Government” (89). It’s also interesting to me that you speak of the World Wars as Act I and Act II of a continual warfare, as your father saw it. It reminds me of Fussell’s writing in chapter 6 (“Theater of War”) of a common British perspective in WWI: “seeing warfare as theater provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theater he can perform his duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place” (192). I'd like to know what you think of this observation of Fussell's. I take it that your father also, along with you and your brothers, regarded WWII as a necessary war that restored the world to "a rational place."
Comments
Thank you, Dr. Allums, for your remarks on my comments of July 27. You asked whether I believe that wars are inevitable. You wrote:
“Civilized people want to eliminate it, but why is it so difficult to remember what it’s really like without the actual experience of it?”
I believe you accurately framed the dilemma. So long as people experience war as a paint ball game we are subject to stumbling into the real thing every other generation or so. Adding to the fog is the tendency of the military to get directions from antiquated road maps, to underestimate the ferocity of technology because their technology is itself classified. In the Great War the Russian commander-in-chief favored sword and bayonet over machine guns because machine guns were not sporting. And the French entered that war dressed in red pantaloons and royal blue jackets befitting warriors in le grand tradition. Twenty-five years later, the Polish Army in the lead-up to its annihilation believed its “spit and polish” cavalry was the equal of Hitler’s Panzer battalions.
I don’t believe wars are inevitable, but I find it difficult to transcend the message in Barbara Tushman’s masterful “The March of Folly”. To pursue the irrational when its disadvantages are obvious is to reject reason itself. She stops short of including the greatest of all follies that humans may commit: the initiation of a war using nuclear weapons. Yet she implies that possibility as an undertow from the many historical examples she cites, from Troy to Viet Nam, of nations entering conflicts with full knowledge of the dire consequences and with ready alternative options, but choosing the course to disaster regardless.
Paul Fussell published a book in l990 entitled “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb”. In a customer review of the book on Amazon.com, a quotation by Fussell cautions against those who talk irresponsibly of using nuclear weapons; who insist that “everything is on the table”; who, in fact “have dared to build a new generation of Fat Man and Little Boy to be used in an aggressive first strike on unarmed civilian populations…” On September 2, l945, less than three weeks after the first atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, I was in Japan (so was Paul Fussell) among those assigned to the scheduled November invasion, had that invasion been necessary. Four months later I flew over Nagasaki in a low-flying seaplane. That’s all the actual experience anyone needs to sense and to fear the dark matter of Folly.
Posted by: A.J. L'Hoste | August 2, 2007 11:54 PM
Thank you, Dr. Allums, for your remarks on my comments of July 27. You asked whether I believe that wars are inevitable. You wrote:
“Civilized people want to eliminate it, but why is it so difficult to remember what it’s really like without the actual experience of it?”
I believe you accurately framed the dilemma. So long as people experience war as a paint ball game we are subject to stumbling into the real thing every other generation or so. Adding to the fog is the tendency of the military to get directions from antiquated road maps, to underestimate the ferocity of technology because their technology is itself classified. In the Great War the Russian commander-in-chief favored sword and bayonet over machine guns because machine guns were not sporting. And the French entered that war dressed in red pantaloons and royal blue jackets befitting warriors in le grand tradition. Twenty-five years later, the Polish Army in the lead-up to its annihilation believed its “spit and polish” cavalry was the equal of Hitler’s Panzer battalions.
I don’t believe wars are inevitable, but I find it difficult to transcend the message in Barbara Tushman’s masterful “The March of Folly”. To pursue the irrational when its disadvantages are obvious is to reject reason itself. She stops short of including the greatest of all follies that humans may commit: the initiation of a war using nuclear weapons. Yet she implies that possibility as an undertow from the many historical examples she cites, from Troy to Viet Nam, of nations entering conflicts with full knowledge of the dire consequences and with ready alternative options, but choosing the course to disaster regardless.
Paul Fussell published a book in l990 entitled “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb”. In a customer review of the book on Amazon.com, a quotation by Fussell cautions against those who talk irresponsibly of using nuclear weapons; who insist that “everything is on the table”; who, in fact “have dared to build a new generation of Fat Man and Little Boy to be used in an aggressive first strike on unarmed civilian populations…” On September 2, l945, less than three weeks after the first atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, I was in Japan (so was Paul Fussell) among those assigned to the scheduled November invasion, had that invasion been necessary. Four months later I flew over Nagasaki in a low-flying seaplane. That’s all the actual experience anyone needs to sense and to fear the dark matter of Folly.
Posted by: A.J. L'Hoste | August 2, 2007 11:54 PM