Von Braun

[Monte Davis]

David Morris writes:

> For the Greatest Generation, those A-bombs were a God-send, 
> and they didn't feel guilty about their use.

I tend to agree: my parents (both US Marines) married in Hawaii in March
1945, and my older brother was conceived very soon after, in part because
they believed my father's life expectancy as a combat correspondent would be
a lot less by that fall than it had been in his previous two years in the
Pacific.

Those A-bombs *did* end the war quickly, and I think it almost certain --
Allied losses  aside -- that more Japanese would have died in (1) an
invasion, (2) a prolonged blockade, or (3) a continuation of the
conventional firebombing that had been going on since early 1945.

The irony was that the A-bombs finally produced the dramatic, war-ending
"shock and awe" effect that "strategic" bombing advocates had been promising
since the 1920s. That effect had *not* been produced by either the heaviest
conventional bombing of military targets *or* by the city-smashing  terror
raids that the Axis pioneered -- and the Allies took to a much greater
scale.

Strip away "who started it" and "who deserved it," and it's the consensus of
most military historians (starting with our own OSS surveys in 1945-46) that
the resources directed to strategic bombing, from the Blitz through
Hamamatsu in July 1945, would have accomplished more -- brought victory
sooner -- if directed into tactical air power and other efforts aimed at the
enemy's military forces. Seen from this distance, we did it mostly because 

(1) after the front-line slaughter of WWI, it was seductive to believe that
bombers could leap beyond the fronts, knock out the enemy's productive
capacity, and shatter his people's will to fight. The (theoretical) doctrine
of "taking the war to the home front" via air power led to plans for fleets
of increasingly heavy bombers (especially in the UK and US) by the
mid-1930s.   

(2) in practice, all sides found precision bombing of military targets much
harder and more costly than area bombing of cities  

(3) we *wanted* to believe that the will to fight in citizens of Germany
1944 and Japan 1945 would prove weaker than that of citizens of England 1940

(4) because of early German and Japanese successes and because of geography,
the US and UK *could not* engage the bulk of their forces until D-Day and
Okinawa. Until then, strategic bombing was what we *could* do to hurt them
-- and that's what we did, rationalizing that killing war workers, and
diverting some of their resources into defensive fighters, anti-aircraft
guns, civil defense, and reconstruction was worthwhile in itself.

This is all cerebral stuff -- just like the simple calculations that show
the Germans spent a lot more (and got even less accuracy) for X pounds of
high explosive in a V-1 or V-2 warhead than they'd gotten from bombs dropped
in the Blitz... or that Japanese kamikaze attacks were a poor substitute for
their successes at Pearl Harbor or off Malaya in 1941. They did it because
by that stage in the war, that was what they *could* do.

I'm suggesting that Pynchon asks us to look deeper, to take a stroll among
the bombed ruins -- anybody's ruins -- smelling the rotting bodies, just
like a Nazi death camp, and say "I don't care who did it, I don't care why:
this is a crime and a horror, this is a shame to our species. We simply
can't go on this way." Picasso's Guernica, Hersey's Hiroshima, and
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five do that explicitly. I believe GR does it in
its passing glimpses of the bombed-out acres of London, the bombed-out
square miles of Berlin, and the mushroom stem over Hiroshima. And I believe
its hallucinatory last hundred pages or so, on the way to the last picture
show in 1973 plus some delta, are the most powerful statement ever that

WE (the species) BLEW IT, FOAX: we *did* go on that way.

Only a dozen years after the Zone, the rationalizations of Peenemunde and
the rationalizations of Los Alamos would be combined in sleek new packages,
with a Verdun or Stalingrad or Auschwitz worth of death in each.

And six decades after the Zone, with our many thousands of packages patient
in their silos and in their submarines, we're all a-twitter about what some
new players might do with a handful of them... or even a less sleek package
in a panel truck. We've reached some meta-stable, mutually deterred
understanding with the post-Stalinist crazies and the post-Maoist crazies,
but those guys in Pyongyang and Tehran, not to mention in some cave in North
Waziristan -- they're *really* crazy. 

Not like the rest of us.

Bottom line: I believe a lot of what strikes me as smugness regarding that
hypocritical war criminal Wernher von Braun is in fact displacement. It's a
way of *not* regarding just how "naturally" and "logically" and "inevitably"
we put him to work on behalf of the Free World. It's a way of concentrating
on the creators and paymasters of those evil Nazi V-2s, instead of thinking
too much about how their all-American and all-Russian (and British, and
French, and Chinese, and Israeli, and Indian, and Pakistani) descendants
came to be. 

If there's one thing GR is about, it's about not letting us -- any of us --
off that hook.