hiroshima: a thousand suns

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One and I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds

Today, the world is marking the anniversary of the Atom-Bomb's being dropped on Hiroshima, in the second man-made nuclear explosion in history on August 6, 1945. The first one was on the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the sheer destructiveness of the thing caused Robert Oppenheimer to quote the variation on a verse from the Bhagavad-Gita at the top of the page.

How did it all start? On December 6, 1941, US President Franklin D Roosevelt sent a "triple priority" telegram to Emperor Hirihito of Japan, delivered by ambassador Joseph C Grew, in which Roosevelt reminded the god-king of the mutual benefits of the hundred-year friendship that had existed between the two countries, and asked him to reassure the American people that war was not inevitable by withdrawing his forces from Indo-China (south-east Asia). On the next day, of course, Japanese forces bombed the US fleet in the Hawaiian port of Pearl Harbor, which marked the start of America's formal entry into World War II without, as Grew writes in his 1944 memoirs, Ten Years in Japan, "the usual preliminary declaration of hostilities". In a CBS radio address delivered on August 30, 1942, Grew referred to the "Spartan" qualities that the Japanese Army had "nourished and encouraged" in its warriors, opposed to their perception of "the white man's flabbiness".

By the time the bomb was dropped, American forces were involved in a grim island-by-island struggle. The Telegraph's Kate Day states that 70,000 Japanese are reckoned to have died on that fateful day when the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima, and another 70,000 died within 5 years. Compare this with 110,000 Japanese killed in the battle for the island of Okinawa alone.

I'm not trying to make out the dropping of Little Boy to have been a philanthropic act - the Second World War was what it said on the tin, and, of course, when the Japanese powers-that-be realised that the attrition was not going to stop after the Nagasaki bombing, many American lives were saved. (And not only American: Professor Calculus once told me that when he heard the news about Hiroshima his reaction was "thank God" - his brother was fighting in Burma).

When Max Planck founded quantum physics with the publication of his paper on black-body radiation in 1901, the die was cast: as soon as 1905, Einstein had published his Special Theory of Relativity, containing the equation that would power atomic research: E=mc².

Like Einstein, many of the foremost mathematicians and theoretical physicists lived in Europe and were Jewish. After the rise of Hitler, many would flee to America, thus making the A-bomb project possible. In his 1999 biography of the mathematician Paul Erdős, The Man who Loved Only Numbers, biographer Paul Hoffmann describes Erdős' surprise in finding, at a meeting of mathematicians in Los Alamos, that everybody in the room was not only European but, like him, Hungarian.

A Thousand Suns by Alex Scarrow is an account of a German-built A-bomb that is made possible because a captured Jewish scientist, working under threat of his family being executed, finds the hole in Werner Heisenberg's theory that will allow a bomb to be built with pounds of uranium instead of tons of the stuff. (Heisenberg was interrogated at Farm Hall in the Cambridgeshire village of Godmanchester.) We read the crises of conscience of the scientist, who places a note inside the bomb's arming compartment telling of his fears that an atomic explosion might start a chain reaction that would destroy the world - something that worried Oppenheimer; the leader of the crew that will fly a captured B-17 Flying Fortress, modified to carry more fuel, to New York; and, towards the book's gripping dénouement, the crew-member who goes to arm the bomb and finds the note. Along the way we visit President Harry S Truman's war-room and the chaos of Hitler's crumbling bunker.

Threaded through, we read the story of a photographer and his minder who, diving off the New York State shore, find the wreck of the craft, and trigger a chain of events which will lead a CIA operative, who has spent his life guarding the hidden history of America's short-lived surrender to Germany, to a decision which will, in the light of his own troubled conscience, either redeem him or damn him.

There are many well-drawn characters in the book, which is named after Oppenheimer's comment. But there's no doubt in my mind that the hero of the piece is the Medusa, the fictional B-17 bomber that, ironically, was the name of one of the ships which survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Scarrow has obviously done his research. At one point he has a navigator take a reading on a sextant, whose use in WWII bombers is not widely known, which makes me wonder if one of his resources was Colin Heaton's authoritative history of the night war over Europe, Night Fighters.

So how have we fared since 6 August, 1945? Well, after Nagasaki no nuclear device has been set off in anger, a situation which is increasingly likely to change as more and more unstable countries seek the bomb, and nuclear powers China and India increasingly look to Africa for Lebensraum.

In other areas, we're not doing too well: one example of this is published in John Smeaton's blog for today, quoting the Reverend Arnold M Culbreath's statistic that "every month in the U.S., approximately 35,000 black babies die by abortion" - a 6 August 1945 every two months, showing that predominantly white population controllers are something more sinister than flabby. And in Japan, when abortion became legal in 1949 there were 246,000: the fateful day over three times over - things are so bad that older women are buying "healing dolls" to replace children who weren't born.

Mori Masaki's anime film Barefoot Gen, based on Keiji Nakazawa's manga series of the same name, depicts the horror of Hiroshima as seen through the eyes of an innocent victim, a child. Spare a thought for the innocent victims of other, undepicted, catastrophes.

Night Fighters

Night Fighters - Luftwaffe and RAF Air Combat over Europe 1939-1945
Colin D. Heaton and Anne-Marie Lewis
Naval Institute Press 2008
pp 188




Some wars are with us for a long time - campaigns by Julius Caesar and Constantine set the structure of modern Western Europe, the Third Battle of Lepanto consolidated it, and the American Revolutionary War saw the birth of a country which continues to challenge and change the world.

Others are with us still in less benign ways. The Battle of Kosovo Field erupts intermittently, and the Crusades leave a bad taste in many mouths.

Machinations started in the first half of the seventeenth century by Cardinal Richelieu to keep the Germanic principalities from uniting, which would threaten France's influence in Europe, came to an end after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 when, on 18 January 1871, the Hohenzollerns proclaimed a German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The rest, as they say, is history, and Night Fighters is the story of a fiercely-fought episode in that history, where "over a million men fought in the hostile skies from the British Isles to the steppes of Russia, and from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara", which gave us many advances in military and civilian technology, in a war whose conclusion bequeathed us the United Nations, the European Union, the Space Programme and the Cold War.

Night Fighters deals with combat between the Luftwaffe and the RAF (Nachtkrieg - "night war" - in German), principally Bomber Command, over German-occupied Europe. Each of the authors brings a special gift to its writing: Colin Heaton's accounts of battle and its outcome are all the more chilling for his matter-of-fact manner borne of combat experience, and meticulously-transcribed interviews with German, British and American officers and airmen, many unavailable elsewhere, add valuable insights; Anne-Marie Lewis is a researcher and co-ordinator of veterans' foundations, including the Celebrate Freedom Foundation. In the light of the traumas suffered by airmen involved in nocturnal aerial combat in WWII, it is nothing short of amazing that these two have managed to bring British, German and American airmen from the conflict together for reunions.

The authors point out that Bomber Command as an organisation was virtually synonymous with Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the controversial figure blamed by many for bombing German cities indiscriminately, whose memory is proudly guarded by the veterans of RAF Bomber Command (formerly the Bomber Command Association).

Myths about Harris explode like ack-ack from the start - referring to successes by the neonatal RAF in bombing German airfields in France in 1918, Stanley Baldwin enunciated the doctrine that "the bomber will always get through". This was in 1932, a rather confused period of British political history: he was at the head of the Conservative Party, which was then in a coalition "national" government with Labour, in response to the international financial crisis. Labour had expelled Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald from the party for consenting to the coalition in the first place, which meant that Baldwin effectively ran the country. He continued: "The only defence is an offence which means you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy."

Chruchill's first choice to head Bomber Command was a founder member of the RAF and its first chief of staff, Air Vice Marshall Sir Hugh Montague Viscount Trenchard, who had envisaged "round-the-clock" bombing of enemy manufacturing centres in January 1918, with the caveat that there would be losses of British aircraft and crew from the outset.

The last piece of the puzzle would fall into place in the aftermath of the Coventry raids of November 1940, when ordnance meant for factories landed on residential areas and power and sanitation facilities. Hitler was not the only one to look at the result with interest. Oxford physics professor Dr Frederick Lindeman (1st Viscount Cherwell) interviewed survivors and found that losing one's home was more debilitating than losing friends and relatives. The die was cast: Churchill presented Harris with orders to "de-house" German factory workers.

There has been much discussion over these raids over the decades, and indeed on British TV there was a televised debate on the eve of the First Gulf War on how to prosecute the air campaign, which referred back to the bombing campaigns on Germany - the daytime "precision-bombing" raids by American bombers, certainly, but principally Harris' nocturnal campaign.

At the time there was vigorous debate on the night-bombing campaign in the US -having joined the war after the attacks on Pearl Harbour - whose polar opposites were represented by General James H. Doolittle, who wished to maintain the moral upper hand, and General Curtis E. LeMay, who differentiated between the moral high ground and the military-industrial lowlands. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed with Churchill that alternating American daytime raids with British night-time ones would be the most effective option.

The British were up against formidable opponents. I sometimes wonder if people who disapprove of Harris' tactics are aware of the situation as it existed. In the first part of his memoirs of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill talks of preparations for a German invasion, which would constitute mass distribution of bayonets with a grim poster campaign on the theme "you can always take one with you". Until the US entered the War, an Allied victory - in essence a British one - was unlikely. The authors' meditations on how the war might have proceeded had the Luftwaffe defeated a lone Britain's RAF are both counterintuitive and compelling.

The German genius for organisation was represented in the air-war by the Kammhuber Line, an "intricate array of defensive relay and observation systems" which stretched over much of occupied Europe and was, in part, manned by two million schoolboys, who had been conscripted under Article 1 of the Law concerning the Hitler Youth of December 1, 1936: "The entire German youth within the borders of the Reich is organised in the Hitler Youth" (one - unwilling - member was Josef Ratzinger, who would spend time in an American Prisoner of War camp with Günther Grass, and later rise through the Roman Catholic Church to become Pope Benedict XVI). There would follow airborne co-ordinators, and "Dark Night Trains" where a team of radar-operators who were experienced as pilots would guide night-fighters within squadrons.

The Nachtjagdfliegern - Night Fighters - were headed by Wolfgang Falck, who immediately saw that the problem with research and development was that innovations were being created by engineers who had no flying experience. Many of the pilots he inherited had been blooded in the Spanish Civil War, while Harris' crews had to gain experience and confidence bombing "softer" targets such as Luebeck and Rostock, and the Renault factory at Billancourt.

Falck fought with those he commanded, through a desperate game of technological catch-up which saw each side improve its navigation and detection systems, only to see the other improve them more. One of Falck's innovations was Schraege Muzik (Jazz Music) - arrays of guns mounted at 60 or 70 degrees, enabling German fighters to come up on the bombers from below and fire along the weak-points of their wing-roots.

Another was the Wilde Sau (Wild Boar), which would attack bombers as they approached their target. With the addition of the Zahme Sau (Tame Boar), British aircrews would constantly be under threat from either flak or fighters virtually from the moment that they were picked up by the Kammhuber Line, and sometimes find that they had been followed home covertly by night-fighters, who would start firing as the crew started to relax in anticipation of a landing which might not happen.

The authors explore the resulting crises suffered by crews exposed to prolonged stress and sometimes repeated trauma with an admirable even-handedness, weighing the physical and mental attrition suffered by aircrew against what was at stake, but also taking into account the sometimes unrealistic demands put upon them by a hierarchy who might have minimal flying experience, and the power medics with none had over their lives. Heaton and Lewis tell of a man who was seriously injured three times and was awarded the DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross) and DSO (Distinguished Service Order), who after an especially heroic feat confided to his commanding officer that he didn't feel able to fly again, and found himself transferred to a job as a janitor. The authors quote Scottish Victoria Cross recipient Bill Reid speaking to Heaton in 1999:

[Our superiors in London] should have [held] their conferences on board a Lancaster flying through flak, searchlights and dodging German fighters, all the while being rocked and bumped by the concussions from the flak and the shrapnel flying through the thin aluminium fuselage; men screaming and others dead or dying. This is the forum in which I think more lucid planning would have been developed.

However, once it became obvious in Westminster that things were going badly wrong, the neuropsychiatrist became part of the airfield medical team: not only had occupational health as we know it been born, but, in the military realm, this would eventually lead not only to improved healthcare but to ways of identifying individuals suitable for advanced and even élite training.

As a former mental health worker, what I found interesting was that serious study of psychiatric presentation moved the RAF forward from a one-size-fits-all kneejerk judgement to identify two sorts of risks: not only people who were severely mentally fatigued and didn't want to go back into a game of chance with loaded dice, but others who were too eager to volunteer for duty, who refused to take leave and took unnecessary risks. This was a vital step in identifying the objective effects of different personality-types and looking for different modes of treatment, which would eventually supercede the career-ending diagnosis of "Lack of Moral Fibre", but unfortunately too late for the many men who left the RAF under a cloud and whose records are still sealed.

As the war progressed the German night-fighter pilots found themselves suffering also - from the long-range and hard-to-detect Mosquito, from knowledge that their country was turning into an inferno - and often at the hands of the two individuals who were also Britain's enemies. In Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger gives a nineteenth-century diplomat's assessment of Tsar Alexander I's absolute power - "What he dreams of at night he can carry out in the morning". However, one can predicate of Hitler a deeper pathology even than that inflicted by absolute power. Kissinger again:

Hitler always seemed strangely unfulfilled by his victories...Psychologists may find therein one explanation for his conduct in the war in a manner that seemed to lack a strategic or political rationale until Germany's resources had been squandered and Hitler could finally, and still unyieldingly, fulfil himself by defying the world in a bomb shelter in the encircled capital of his almost completely occupied country.

If Der Fuehrer was determined to tear down the structures of his own making, Heaton and Lewis show that Goering proved himself a willing helpmate. A lord of misrule like his master, he was happy to see his subordinates divided among themselves so that he would remain unassailable. He would lie to senior Luftwaffe officers that he had passed their reports on to Hitler, and helped spread Kammhuber's anti-aircraft guns and Falck's night-fighters too wide to work efficiently, in accordance with Hitler's "delusional" fantasies, which survived even D-Day, that Germany was winning. Falck's, (Generalleutnant) Adolf Galland's and Hans-Joachim (Hajo) Herrmann's interviews with Heaton provide invaluable insights into how a mighty military machine was dragged down into the madness of the last months of the Reich.

Nothing succeeds like success, though - No. 617 Squadron of Bomber Command earned its nickname "the Dambusters" because of the famous night-time raid of 16/17 May 1943 on the Moehne, Eder, Sorpe and Schwelme Dams in the Ruhr Valley, with the intention of killing and "de-housing" workers who, according to Harris' argument, were contributing to Germany's war effort. Squadron Leader Guy Gibson was given a Victoria Cross for this, just as Harris was given a Knighthood for his strategy, which included "Operation Millenium" on Cologne in 1942, carried out by over a thousand bombers. Given that Heaton has been honoured for his work on the role of ununiformed combatants in war, his analysis of Harris' methods is eye-opening. And neither do the authors run away from the question of why concentration camps and the railway lines supplying them weren't bombed - their conclusion, even 60-plus years after the fact, is shocking and controversial, and demands a re-examination of the extent to which the political masters of Allied commanders considered the end to justify the means.

One thing Churchill and Hitler agreed on was that the British would not tolerate a death rate of much more than ten percent in Bomber Command. This figure was not passed many times (although on one early raid it reached 22%), but cumulatively, by the end of the war a staggering 51% of active Bomber Command crews were dead - 46,268 men killed on operations, with a further 8,090 killed on non-operational and training missions. (Only 2,500 out of a total of 25,000 German fighter-pilots - of which 400 were night-fighters - survived.) While not doubting the bravery of the German pilots, I support the campaigns by the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph to have a Bomber Command medal minted.

There's also a growing head of steam for the campaign to have a statue of Sir Arthur Harris erected on the empty fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square. After reading Night Fighters' delineation of impossible decisions that had to be made in a battle for national survival, that statue is long overdue.

Wounded Knee meets Glencoe

I read in the Cambridge Evening News on 29 December that it was the 117th anniversary of the Battle of Wounded Knee, which was the last major conflict between US troops and Native Americans, in this case the Lakota Sioux. The Battle was later referred to as a "massacre" by the leader of US forces, General Nelson A. Miles.

So what's the connection to the draughty old fen? I'm the connection, because I used to live in Glasgow.

In 1992, a member of the Cherokee nation called John Earl came to Glasgow on holiday. He went to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, where he came face to face with a Ghost Dance Shirt, which had been sold to the city in 1892 by George C. Crager, who had come to the city with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. The shirt is believed to have been robbed from the body of one of the Lakota killed at Wounded Knee.

The Ghost Dance movement was propagated by a member of the Paiute nation called Wovoka, who later took the name of Jack Wilson. The properties of Ghost Dance Shirts were taken to be metaphorical to greater or lesser degrees by different nations, but the Lakota Sioux took it as revealed truth that the shirts, made of fabric, would stop bullets. The stage for the massacre was set, the rationale for the building conflict being that "lazy Indians" were workshy: they had in fact been maneuvred into reservations with the most barren soil by a process of gerrymandering that allowed Americans and Europeans to appropriate the most fertile land. 150-300 Lakota Sioux were killed, some by bullets, others by hypothermia, in a man-made tragedy that mirrors the Glencoe massacre in my own land. One hopes that the scars of Wounded Knee will heal in a shorter time than it took those of Glencoe to.

In November 1998, I squelched through a path to the Burrell Collection Centre (Glasgow) with my friend, a decorated US veteran and historian called Colin Heaton, who is now a world-renowned educator and published author. All this history weighed heavily upon us, perhaps more than the iron Scottish sky. We formed part of an audience for a meeting of Glasgow City Council which was receiving representations from the Lakota Sioux, and was charged with making the final decision as to whether to repatriate the Ghost Shirt. Museum curators the world over followed the proceedings, which had the potential to set an international head of steam for the return of other peoples' artifacts, and were later reported to a Parliamentary Committee.

The chief negotiator was Marcella LeBeau from the Lakota Sioux nation, who was articulate and passionate in her desire for the return of the Shirt to her nation, so that there might be some healing for the evils of addiction and gambling in her people. She spoke as a mother and as a master of her topic, and afterwards in the reception, which I was able to attend with Colin because, like many ostensibly white American people he is part Native American, the compassion she evinced for her people made me want to cry. The chief negotiator for Glasgow Museums, who had blunted his Slavic-like voice perhaps in the hope of things to come, had no chance. At the end of the day the Council had to think of the voters of Glasgow, many of whom knew what it was like to be forgotten.

Many of the Glaswegian chattering-classes spoke of superstition, in the hope that they could use this occasion to cast aspersions on all religious sentiment. But do they not hold onto their mothers' wedding-rings? Do they not keep photographs of people who have passed away?

At the time when I struggled along the path with Colin I had walked away from my faith: but life is full of twists, turnovers and U-turns that would give a surrealist a headache. Having returned to the Roman Catholic Church, the story of the shirt's repatriation reminds me of the driving sentiment behind Nostra Aetate (the Second Vatican Council document on relations with non-Christian religions): "We cannot truly call on God, the Father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man [sic], created as he is in the image of God."

The Ghost Dance Shirt, I believe, was repatriatriated to the US in 1999, in anticipation of a museum being built specifically by the Lakota Sioux to hold it. Nothing heals you as well as feeling you've got your pride back.

It felt great to meet Mrs Le Beau's son, Richard, on the day of the decision. Choked, he told me, "it's coming home". I wish his nation and all the peoples of America well. If they figure out some way to bypass misery, I hope they tell me.

I headed home, through scenes of increasing disorder, until I became one of the forgotten among the forgotten of my city. Then one day I found the draughty old fen.