Thank God For The Atomic Bomb and Other Essays

The author Paul Fussell recently died and while reading one of the obituary pieces I noticed that he wrote an acclaimed essay called “Thank God For The Atomic Bomb,” which sounded intriguing to me. About a year ago I was taking a history correspondence course to renew my teaching license in America I wrote a research paper on the reasons the US bombed Japan. So I was interested in hearing Fussell’s perspective, since he served as a soldier in the European theater in WWII.  It turns out that I had to hunt it down since the book is no longer in print. But it seems that his main reason was to save American soldier’s lives and it follows Japanese civilian lives that would have been lost had the US been forced to invade Japan.  This book of essays, from 1988, also has several other war related pieces: “An Exchange Of Views” with a historian who challenges Fussell’s assumptions about the war, “Postscript (1987) on Japanese Skulls” points out that Americans did take grotesque wartime souvenirs such as skulls home as war trophies, and “Writing in Wartime: The Uses of Innocence” about a wartime memoir that was a fake and used for the propagandistic purpose of bringing the US into war with Germany.  Being a George Orwell fan I also found his essay “George Orwell: The Critic as Honest Man” interesting and informative. Orwell was also inspiration for his essay “A Power of Facing Unpleasant Facts” about the need for intellectual honesty in the world despite the unpleasantness that this often produces. I found his opinions concerning the 2^nd Amendment provocative and timely given the several mass killings in the US recently in his essay “A Well-Regulated Militia.” He makes some interesting points about the distinction between travelers and tourists in “Travel, Tourism, and ‘International Understanding.’” Surprisingly, he is an advocate of “naturist” or more commonly known as “nudism” as “Taking It All Off in the Balkans” attests. However, there were a couple of essays that I couldn’t finish due to lack of interest in the subjects: the pastoral poetry in “On the Persistence of Pastoral,” chivalry in “The Fate of Chivalry and the Assault upon Mother,” and car racing in “Indy.” All in all, it is a provocative collection of essays.