Excerpted
from Michael S. Sherry The Rise of American Air Power' The
Creation Of Armageddon (Yale University Press, 1987).
How
does Sherry relate the development of the bomb and the impulse to destroy that
it represented to what he calls technological fanaticism? How can you present
this material in a way that to make an argument about why the bomb was dropped?
Sherry is suggesting that the dropping of the bomb had much to do with the
larger way that war is waged in World War II. How was the war waged? How is
this essential to Sherry’s argument? How is his perspective different from the
other 2 main ideas: that the bomb was dropped to save lives and end the war
quickly or that the bomb was dropped as a weapon of diplomacy against the
Russians?
Ever since the telegraph was
invented, and doubtless long before, field generals have complained of
interference from superiors safe in capitals and insensitive to war's
realities. Oversight--watchful, suspicious, domineering--was not new to warfare
in 1944. The novelty lay partly in the technology of control. Through radio and
teletype and through the rapid courier service and the personal visits made
possible by air transport, Washington's contact with its far-flung Asian bomber
commands was even more exacting than it was with the strategic air forces in
Europe. The sheer volume of communications--ranging from [Commander of the U.S.
Army Air Forces, Lieutenant General Henry H.] Arnold's chatty but pointed
personal letters to reams of target information and the trivial detritus of
military bureaucracy--was also novel. [Major General Haywood) Hansell had
earlier presided over the creation of this communications net during
organization of the Twentieth's headquarters, but he quickly became "sick
of it" when he began commanding bomber missions from the Marianas in
November: "The machine worked 24 hours a day all right, without stopping.
Most of the messages seemed to consist of questions that I couldn't answer. I
began to understand the meaning of the remark ascribed to Lord Palmerston to
the effect that the disintegration of the British Empire had begun with the invention of the
telegraph." In Hansell's case, it was his own command that was soon to
disintegrate.
More important was the organizational
novelty involved. It was one thing for a capital to keep close tabs on what its
commanders were doing, another to plan in great detail what they would do, as
Washington head- quarters did in 1944. To be sure, the long line of
communications to Saipan, Guam, and Kharagpur sometimes stretched thin, no
flood of directives from on high could entirely substitute for judgment on the
spot, the field commander with suitable drive could adapt orders to his
purposes, and Arnold's volatile temperament undercut any tendencies to settle
into bureaucratic routine.
Nonetheless, the supervision from
Washington was at times remarkable. "General Arnold's control of the U.S.
Air Force is as complete, virtually, as is Hitler's control of Germany,"
observed an English officer with pardonable exaggeration. "He is a
complete dictator.... Be discovered doing something Arnold does not like and
Arnold sacks you-like that." No more than [Army Chief of Staff George C.]
Marshall and [Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest J.] King could Arnold
always play such an imperial role: in an air force huge by 1944, he was more
than ever dependent on a growing headquarters staff and on a heart whose
failings repeatedly removed him from day-to-day control of the air force. Yet
if not always wielded personally by Arnold, power usually remained in his
headquarters. "It is a current saying that you cannot run a war from
Washington," [General Lauris] Norstad commented in September. "The
fact is, however, that all of this war has been run to a larger degree than
most people realized from Washington." If anything, Washington's grip
tightened late in the war, for the completion of the tedious business of
mobilizing men and planes by 1944 left headquarters free to exercise the
"very real prerogatives of command over world-wide operations."
Officers at headquarters regarded such
centralized control as another operational imperative. To weave bomber
operations into the broader fabric of strategy, informed judgments had to be
made from Washington, by men who had a global perspective on strategy, not by
the theater commander who saw "the general situation through glasses
prescribed by the local op- ti6an," as Arnold pointedly put it to [General
Claire] Chennauldt. In particular, coordination of the widely separated bomber
commands of the Twentieth Air Force seemed impossible from any other vantage
point, all the more so since the Pacific theater had no unified -command. As
usual, operational necessities were only part of the story, however.
Centralized command also satisfied air force ambitions. Only with it could the
airmen prevent theater commanders from seizing control of the bombers in
pursuit of "tempting local plums"; only with it could they cultivate
the image of a global air force with revolutionary consequences for world
geopolitics; only with it could Arnold have the operational command he had
never before enjoyed. And only centralization permitted maximum use of the
techniques of operations research and bureaucratic management enjoying favor in
Washington-the full employment of the forces of civilian militarism.
One result of this centralization was
the physical distance it interposed between decision makers on the one hand and
the conveyers and victims of destruction on the other. Modem communications and
transportation, far from facilitating the close witness of war, impeded it by
allowing decision-making to take place far away. In such circumstances, William
Blanchard speculates, "Man no longer feels his aggressive impulses with
the same intensity. Aggression is viewed more with the intellect," through
the "symbolic representation of events rather than his own
awareness." To the authorities in the Pentagon, what the bombers did was
represented by strike photos, telegraphed reports, and statistical summaries.
They enlivened symbols and abstractions with an occasional visit to the field,
but even then they were hundreds of miles away from the action.
Operational commanders also experienced war
secondhand, for the notion that the practice of war could be separated from its
management was also applied to them. When [General Curtis] LeMay insisted that
he fly missions with the 21st Bomber Command he headed up in the fall of 1944,
he found the "people upstairs were yipping shrilly at the idea." They
included "those misguided souls in Washington [who] had the notion that a
commanding officer didn't need to be qualified as an Aircraft Commander. He had
a lot of those folks under him.... His job was to proceed in his
own echelon and on his own exalted level." For LeMay, command meant the
sharing of danger, the knowledge derived from firsthand experience, not the
bureaucrat's management of men. But his victory in this skirmish was
token--permission to fly one mission. 'Me more cerebral Hansell was equally
determined to fly but found that his slight familiarity with the atomic bomb
(about which LeMay then knew nothing) and Allied code-breaking prohibited his
participation in combat missions as well.
Whether Arnold did not feel "his aggressive impulses
with the same intensity" because of his distance from the war is difficult
to prove. But the difference made by his remote position is suggested by
comparing his recollections of the war with those of LeMay, so direct a
participant in combat and destruction before he reached India, who portrayed
much more frankly and fully the destructive fury of American bombers. Even
Marshall, another and more preeminent organizer Of victory, seemed more sensitive
to the nature and magnitude of death in war, in part because it became more
personal with the death in battle of his stepson. For the air force commanding
general who never served in combat or overseas. war's remoteness took several
forms.
More than most military operations, the
Twentieth Air Force waged war by assembly-line procedures that divided tasks
and fractionated responsibilities. The end product of its efforts--the target
folder, and then the destruction--emerged from a long planning process in which
the designers rarely saw their creation, and the operators had little to do
with the design. Acting on the broad directives coming from the JCS [Joint
Chie& of Staff]
and
Arnold, civilian and military experts examined data on the enemy's military and
economic systems and drew conclusions about which target systems would be the
most vulnerable to destruction. Much of that work took place outside regular
military channels altogether, in the work of the Committee of Operations
Analysts, men who had almost no firsthand contact with war. The task of
translating those conclusions into specific targets and priorities fell to
other men, in the plans and operations staffs of the air force and the Joint
Target Group. Staff for the Headquarters Twentieth Air Force also helped to
choose the timing and order of attacks on targets. At the bomber commands,
LeMay and Hansell then conducted photographic surveillance and analysis,
compiled the glossy target folders used by airmen, factored in operational
considerations-weather patterns, available strengths, estimates of enemy
reactions, and so forth--and, usually, chose the specific days and force
assignments for attack. Once a mission was carried out, the whole process was
reversed, as streams of information flowed back to Washington for
evaluation....
Washington waged the air war by remote
contro1, thereby reducing a sense of responsibility for the destruction that
war entailed. Nor did distance from the enemy and bureaucratic methods of
waging war against him create a less vindictive approach to war than that
favored by men in the field with more direct contact with the enemy. There was
no demonstrable correlation between vindictiveness toward the enemy and
proximity to him: Washington, far from acting to curb the excesses of a Hansell
or LeMay, often prodded them into more destructive action. Besides,
vindictiveness was not a prerequisite to pursuing the most destructive course
with the enemy: insofar as airmen viewed their war as the task of applying the
proper technique, the motives and rewards for intensifying its fury had little
to do with satisfying their visceral hostilities toward the enemy.
Washington's distance from the
consequences of what it planned and ordered allowed the destruction to go forward
smoothly, without engaging emotions and moral questions about its consequences.
Nor was physical and bureaucratic remoteness from war the only kind of distance
the men in Washington maintained. Air force planners employed methods of
analysis and styles of language that also distanced them from war's realities.
In one way, this was hardly their intention. "It is not sufficient merely
to bomb Japan," Norstad reminded an audience. "The targets selected,
the timing, the weight must be chosen with surgical skill." It was the
planners' job to help connect means and ends, to show how the force available
could be used to secure victory. Often enough, the connection was hard to
maintain, either effectively or conceptually, as designs for incendiary war showed.
Though central to Marshall's scheme for
intimidating Japan on the eve of Pearl Harbor, firebombing as a large-scale
practicality became possible only after American entry into the war, when the
technical work was carried out by the Army Chemical Warfare Service, the National Defense Research Committeee,
and the petrochemical industry. Much of their experimental work, presided over
by Harvard chemist Louis Fieser, concerned tactical weapons—flamethrowers and
the jellied gasoline that Fieser’s scientists produced by adding extracts from
aluminum naphthanate and aluminum palmitate (from which Fieser drew the name
napalm).Fieser,
although he regarded use of poison gas as "inhumane," relished development of incendiary bombs for
strategic use, some of his experiments taking bizarre form. In 1943, he launched a project to
release captive bats carrying tiny incendiaries from American bombers. These
creatures, given to roosting in dark attics and cellars, would ignite thousands
of fires in the highly flammable buildings of Japan's cities. Fieser imagined
“a surprise attack on Tokyo" with fires "popping all over the city at
4 A.M..” Tests continued for many months until "a number of bat bombs,
blown out of the target area by high winds, burned down a theater, the officers,
club, and a general's sedan at Carlsbad New Mexico Amy Air Field." Other
impractical but prophetic ideas flowed from the Chemical Warfare
Service--experiments in showering incendiary "loaves" over forests
and grainfields, an early exercise in the arts of defoliation. In the bizarre,
Japan sometimes matched the United States, as in its hapless effort to rain
balloon-bombs on the United States.
The major preoccupation of the American
chemists was the development of reliable incendiaries to be dropped by aircraft
against enemy cities. Much effort was necessary to produce bombs which did not
disintegrate under field conditions and which penetrated rooftops and zeroed in on targets without being blown
off course. The Chemical
Warfare Service was up to the
task. Model enemy towns were constructed at proving grounds in the United
States, the effort at authenticity measured by the employment of German Jewish
architects to design the German towns and by the attention to detail down to
"the curtains, children's toys, and clothing hanging in the closets."
In testing incendiary attacks on mock Japanese workers' districts, teams of
firefighters were brought in to quell the blaze with methods the Japanese would
use. The tests against "Little Tokios" inspired confidence that
"fires would sweep an entire community" and cause "tremendous
casualties. . . “
Interest in firebombing Japanese
cities crystallized earlier and more intensely. Initial studies by the air
force staff had emphasized the classic precepts of high-explosive bombing of
precision targets, but by 1943 incendiary war attracted sustained approval. It
was supported by British planners and by the prime minister himself, who in May
spoke to the American Congress of "the process, so necessary and
desirable, of laying the cities and other munitions centres of Japan in ashes,
for in ashes they must surely lie before peace comes back to the world."
In Arnold's Committee of Operations Analysts (COA), military members compromised
long-standing air force doctrine to press for incendiary bombing, while Guido
Percra, the lawyer and leading civilian member, "felt it was wrong for the
Air Force to turn from precision bombing to area attacks." As "a
cynic might add- it is worse than iinmoral because it is ineffective." So
he recalled in his memoirs at least, but little trace of his doubts or of any
discernible difference between civilians and professional officers on
firebombing survived among contemporary records....
Staff officers and operations
researchers continued to press the case for incendiary attacks, first
experimental, then comprehensive. A September 4 [1944] report by a COA
subcomniittee acknowledged that full-scale attacks .on six large urban areas
would not likely "affect front line strength." But there was
satisfaction in another projected measurement: the attacks "will produce
very great economic loss, measured in man months of industrial labor-probably
greater loss per ton of bombs despatched than attacks on any other target
system." Damage to industry would merely be a welcome side effect of the
general dislocation caused by the "dehousing" of some 7,750,000
workers and the evacuation of many more. The report was a rarity in that it
explicitly made an estimate of probable enemy casualties, extrapolating its
figures from the great Tokyo fire of 1923: some 560,000 Japanese, almost half
in Tokyo, would be killed, missing, or seriously wounded. Otherwise, in
applying their skills as economists and lawyers, the experts usually measured
the effect of bombing by the statistics and language of cost-benefit analysis.
When the full committee issued
revised guidelines in October (omitting any mention of casualties), it
recommended an incendiary assault on Japan's cities to come after a precision
campaign, when a sufficiently large force of bombers had been assembled to
permit highly concentrated fire raids. As usual, the analysts made no attempt
to project how such raids would help secure final victory, simply implying their
relationship to victory. Shortly thereafter the newly formed Joint Target
Group, a Joint Chiefs of Staff agency, gave qualified approval to the COA
report.
At the same time, in another
indication of civilian interest in incendiary war, Vannevar Bush forwarded to
Arnold the recommendations of an operations researcher on his staff at the
Office of Scientific Research and Development. Incendiary bombing, it was
argued,
may be the golden opportunity of strategic
bombardment in this war-and possibly one of the outstanding opportunities in
all history to do the greatest damage
... for a minimum of effort.
Estimates of economic damage expected indicate that incendiary attack of
Japanese cities may be at least five times as effective, ton for ton, as
precision bombing of selected strategic targets as practiced in the European
theater. However, the dry economic statistics, impressive as they may be, still
do not take account of the further and unpredictable effect on the Japanese war
effort of a national catastrophe of such magnitude-entirely unprecedented in
history.
Still,
"dry economic statistics" were what the analyst had to offer, again
leaving the impression that "the greatest damage to the enemy for a
minimum -of effort" had become a goal apart from victory, in part because
it was more easily measurable. Bush recognized that the issue of incendiary
bombing involved "humanitarian aspects" for which a decision
"will have to be made at a high level if it has not been done already."
Nothing came of his recommendation, no doubt because the air force believed it
had already received sufficient sanction from the president....
In November, as pressure to conduct
further incendiary tests mounted, air officeres increasingly mimicked the
language of the civilian analysts: "De-housing industrial workers causes a
greater loss of man hours per ton of bombs dropped than can be accomplished by
any other method." De-housing" was becoming the favorite euphemism
for a variety of virtues perceived in an incendiary assault, some spelled
out-workers' absenteeism, lower morale, paralyzed systems-some usually left
unspoken: the maimed bodies and bewildering toll of the dead. Target analysts
recognized that such assault would inflict scant damage on primary military and
industrial establishments. But few questioned the moral or strategic wisdom of
the planned campaign. Some worked very hard to make the enemy population the
objective of the bombers. Helmut E.
Landsberg a German
meteorologist advising the Twentieth Air Force staff, produced a report
entitled "Disease Rates after Tokyo Earthquake of 1923" and concluded
that "if an influenza epidemic is started as a result of a saturation
attack upon the big cities, absenteeism in industrial plants can be expected to
soar." Better yet, he suggested, "the casualty rate will be increased
if the attacks are made during the cold season," when survivors crowded
into public buildings and hospitals would spread "serious epidemics. . . ."
The rhetoric and methodology of
civilian expertise also defined goals by the distance they interposed between
the designers and victims of destruction. 'Me more sophisticated the methods of
destruction became, the less language and methods of measurement allowed men to
acknowledge the nature of that destruction. A dehumanized rhetoric of technique
reduced the enemy to quantifiable abstractions. Statistics of man-hours lost
and workers de-housed objectified many of the enemy's experiences and banished
almost house altogether one
category, his death. Certainly Arnold, LeMay, and [Arthur]
Harris [head of the Royal Air
Force Bomber Command) were brutally frank in their vocabulary on occasion;
dehumanized language alone did not compel men to kill and destroy on the scale
they did. But, reinforced by other forms of distance characteristic of the air
war, it did allow them to do so while insulating their consciences and souls.
And by doing so, it hoped to push victory from view and to elevate destruction
into a goal. "To all sides in a conflict,,, [Lord Solly] Zuckerman
[director of the-British Bombing Survey Unit] has commented, "the goal of
war must always be victory, but victory
has over the course of
history almost always been associated with destruction, so much so that destruction
has become a kind of vested characteristic of war." The application of
operations research to war, at least as practiced in 1944, was one source of
that tendency....
The leaders and technicians of the American air force were
driven by technological fanaticism-a pursuit of destructive ends expressed,
sanctioned, and disguised by the organization and application of technological
means. Destruction was rarely the acknowledged final purpose for the men who
made air war possible. Rather, they declared that it served the purpose of
securing victory and that its forms were dictated by technological,
organizational, and strategic imperatives. In practice, they often waged
destruction as a functional end in itself, without a clear comprehension of its
relationship to stated purposes.
To label these men fanatics or their mentality and behavior
as fanatical may defy the usual understanding of the terms, which sees in
fanaticism the workings
of a single-minded, frenzied emotional devotion to a cause. Intensity of
emotion hardly seemed to characterize men whose virtue was their capacity for
rational examination of problems. "The fanatic cannot tolerate scientific
thought," it has been said. Moreover, "fanaticism is a megalomaniacal
condition," one notable for "a jealous, vindictive and monomaniacal
faith," usually in a party, an organization, or a leader in which is
invested a "unique saving function." The air force certainly inspired
among its professional officers an intense loyalty but rarely a monomaniacal
allegiance. While some wartime scientists maintained an unquestioning faith in
their methodology and its beneficence, by no means did all. Nor was faith in
the American or the Allied cause always intense or evenly shared. What
characterized the experts in air war was their flexibility and control, the
ease with which they worked among a variety of organizations serving many
purposes, and the skill with which they balanced personal, professional,
bureaucratic, and ideological goals. Indeed, the practice of air war grew out
of a convergence of diverse appeals, needs, and opportunities, diversity
imparting to the bombing much of its momentum.
Fanaticism in the context of World War II
usually refers to America's enemies-the Nazis, genocidal in ideology and
practice, and the Japanese, whose cult of spiritual strength sent thousands of
men to their deaths in kamikaze attacks. In more recent expressions of
fanaticism--the acts of terrorism carried out by shadowy religious
organizations from the Middle East, for example-self-destructiveness seems the
salient characteristic, indeed the hidden desire of the fanatic. In contrast,
if anything seemed to bind Americans together during World War 11, it was
self-preservation, the lowest common denominator of support for the war effort.
Why then, call the practitioners of
air war fanatics, and what shared mentality constituted their fanaticism? For
one thing, fanatical acts are not always the product of frenzied or hateful
individuals, as Hannah Arendt has shown in capturing the banality of Adolf
Eichmann. For another, there was a suggestion of the megalomaniacal among the
practitioners of air war in their aspirations for technological omnipotence:
over the natural universe for some of the scientists, over the geographic and
political world for the airmen striving to achieve a "global" air
force, with men like John von Neumann embracing both aspirations. For sure,
these aspirations did not often appear suicidal or self-destructive to the men
who held them. Yet the technology they created or promoted--finally the atomic
bomb but to some degree the apparatus of “conventional" air war as
well--carried that self-destructive potential for the nation and the world, and
not simply in retrospect inasmuch as the world-ending potential of aerial
warfare had been recognized before the war by writers like H. G. Wells and
during the war by some atomic scientists and policymakers.
The shared mentality of the fanatics of
air war was their dedication to assembling and perfecting their methods of destruction, and the way that
doing so overshadowed the original purposes justifying destruction. Their
coolness, their faith in rational problem-solving, did not easily appear fanatical
because its language was the language of rationality and technique. It
apparently expressed the triumph of a new set of values, ones often called
modern or bureaucratic, which displaced more traditional ones by which 'people
were defined according to racial, ethnic, religious, and national differences.
Yet it is by no means clear that such values had entirely displaced more
traditional ones. For one thing, whatever their individual value system, those
who waged air war served as the instrument of national passion that were often
decidedly racist in character. For another their rhetoric as in the use of the
term “dehousing”, allowed them to express aggressive and destructive impulses
in other terms, impulses that did not necessarily disappear from motivation,
simply from view.
It was easier to regard the decisions
that took lives as the products of technological, strategic, and bureaucratic
imperatives. In the face of these imperatives, men felt a helplessness that
allowed them to escape responsibility or fulfilled a wish to do so. Actions ceased
to be recognized as the product of aggressive wills and became foreordained,
irresistible. Certainly, the complexities of modern technology, bureaucracy,
and war-making were real enough. The American political system had built-in
impediments to accountability because of its diffuse nature, aggravated by the
division of responsibilities among the three services. The functional
distribution of power along the chain of command and the compartmentalization
that ad- companied it had much the same effect. Efforts to centralize power, as
with Arnold's command of the Twentieth Air Force, did not necessarily enhance
accountability at the top because leaders were so remote from war's realities.
Rarely were these arrangements designed deliberately to negate accountability-as
usual, they were a response to perceived necessities. Yet, for a nation with a
benign image of its role in the world, eager to mete out punishment to its
enemies but reluctant to proclaim its intent to do so, these arrangements were
also attractive, desirable.
The lack of a proclaimed intent to
destroy, the sense of being driven by the twin demands of bureaucracy and
technology, distinguished America’s technological fanaticism from its enemies
ideological fanaticism. That both were fanatical was not easily recognizable at
the time because the forms were so different. The enemy, particularly the
Japanese, had little choice but to be profligate in the expenditure of manpower
and therefore in the fervid exhortation of men to hatred and sacrifice-they
were not, and knew they were not, a match in economic and technological terms
for the Allies. The United States had different resources with which to be
fanatical: resources allowing it to take the lives of others more than its own,
ones whose accompanying rhetoric of technique disguised the will to destroy. As
lavish with machines as the enemy was with men, Americans appeared to
themselves to practice restraint, to be immune from the passion to destroy that
characterized their enemies and from the urge to self-destruction as well.
The distinction between technological and
ideological fanaticism was not absolute. It could not be, given how war often
elicits similar behavior from disparate combatants. On occasion, particularly
when their backs were to the wall early in the war, Americans celebrated the
suicidal defense of hopeless positions, and if the rhetoric of technique
dominated official expression, a rhetoric of racial and martial passion often
dominated the larger culture. Allies like the Soviet Union, although zealous in
pursuing technological advantage when possible, also could be profligate indeed
in the expenditure of manpower. When conditions were favorable, the Japanese
relied on technical superiority; it was not suicidal tactics that destroyed the
American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Even when frankly suicidal tactics were
employed, they had a military rationale, for the intent was to take the enemy
along.
Likewise, the fact that both the United States
and its enemies were fanatical did not mean that the differences between them
in the forms of fanaticism were inconsequential. Destruction disguised as
technique carried the gravest implications for the fate of enemy civilians. At
the same time, it had inherent limits because it had little sanction apart from
the prosecution of war. Since destruction was felt, but rarely proclaimed
officially, as a good in itself, its sanction continued only as long as the war
and the mobilization of technique that went with it continued. It made all the
difference in the world to the Japanese-if we are to contrast their fate to
that of the Jews- that however much vengeance may have motivated Americans, it
did not become official policy and remained fulfilled by policies undertaken
for other stated reasons.
Technological fanaticism had many
sources: in the nature of strategic air power, whose benefits promised to be so
large yet whose consequences were so hard to observe; in its demands for
technique that distanced men from its consequences; in war's powerful emotions,
difficult to recognize given America's strategic position and its own
self-image. At bottom, technological fanaticism was the product of two distinct
but related phenomena: one-the will to destroy-ancient and recurrent; the
other-the technical means of destruction-modern. Their convergence resulted in
the evil of American bombing. But it was sin of a peculiarly modem kind because
it seemed so inadvertent, seemed to involve so little choice. Illusions about
modem technology had made aerial holocaust seem unthinkable before it occurred
and simply imperative once it began. It was the product of a slow accretion of
large fears, thoughtless assumptions, and at best discrete decisions.
In one sense, the disjunction between
means and ends that characterized the bombing seems at odds with the tenor of
wartime political culture in the United States. The very vagueness of American
purposes and the difficulty of achieving consensus about them in a diverse
nation immune to immediate destruction led American leaders to define purposes
by the lowest common denominators of survival and victory. If victory was a
dominant, rationalizing value, was not a premium placed on how destruction
would contribute to it? In practice, the focus on victory tended to validate
any form of destruction that vaguely promised to secure it. Since political
authority defined the path to victory as lying so substantially through
production and technological effort, the focus tended to remain on means rather
than ends, And progress by the preferred method of victory, war by war, could
be measured most easily in terms of the destruction it wrought; the connection of that destruction
to the end of victory was as easily presumed as it was hard to prove.
In their long journey from Pearl
Harbor to the enemy's surrender on the decks of the Missouri, Americans
might be likened to a man forced to set out on a cross-country car trip. As he
drives along, the trip gathers its own interest, momentum, and challenge. He
finds himself diverting to places he had not imagined; he tinkers with his car
and enjoys feeling it run faster and smoother and discovers a power and mastery
in manipulating it. Perhaps he did not choose this mode of travel conscious of
the pleasures it would bring; he thought it necessary because of the baggage he
wanted to bring along and because it was cheaper to travel this way, and after
all, he already knew how to drive. Nor does he forget what his destination is,
but as he travels he does not dwell on its importance; it will take care of
itself if he makes the trip properly. Once the trip is done, it rapidly fades
from memory, its pleasures and challenges now comfortably tucked away in his
mind as necessities imposed on him in order to enable him to reach his
destination, not as choices he had the freedom to make.
By December 1944, Americans were close
to their destination, closer than most of them realized. Proximity was not
evident, not with one more range of mountains to cross, not with the trip
itself generating such excitement and anxiety, not with the machine built to
make the trip yet to be fully tested. There was perhaps even a hope that the
mountains would stand tall, to provide full measure for the test. "To test
the [atomic] bomb's real destructiveness," Arnold later wrote about his
concerns near the end of the war, "three or four cities must be saved
intact from the B-29's regular operations as unspoiled targets for the new
weapon. Which cities should be spared was a problem,” he added. To Arnold, it
seem, the test was as important as the destination. It lay ahead, with not only
the atomic bomb but the “regular” forms of fire his bombers could hurl at
Japanese cities.
Technological
fanaticism, long developing, could now be fully expressed.