From Do You Want Total War?, Part Two, as Sean (the narrator) meets up with Becs (one of his classmates) for the first time:
Three days before my first-trimester AP European History final exam, Becs comes to my house for our first study session. She arrives just after sunset; as I open the front door, she’s waving goodbye to her mother. “Mom needs the car tonight,” she apologizes. She’s wearing blue jeans and a demure white cardigan beneath her brown, suede jacket.
I lead Becs to the soft seats of the living room, where we quickly swamp the coffee table with backpacks, textbooks and study notes. “How do you want this to work?” she asks.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I respond. “What areas do you want to focus on?”
“All of them,” she says. “But then, you’re the one who could teach our class, so perhaps you should choose. I don’t want this to be boring for you.”
“Unfortunately, it’s the boring bits I need to work on. I’m hoping to make them less boring by studying them with someone else.”
“What do you find boring?”
“Short answer: I’m not interested in history that doesn’t move history forward.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“Well, consider our most recent subject, Absolutism and Constitutionalism. Think of all of the decisions that Richelieu and Louis XIV made to shape the destiny of France, and thereby Europe. Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, expelling the Protestant Huguenots from France: this shaped the future of his regime and the wider Christian Church, and the thousands of Huguenots who emigrated took their skills and their hatred of France to Holland, England, Prussia and wherever else. That’s a big deal, right?”
“Yeah.”
“The next section in our textbook is about French Classicism in the arts. Nicolas Poussin was a painter. Molière and Racine were playwrights. Now, I’m not a philistine: I tend to enjoy English class, and I learn from the works I read there. But did Poussin, Molière or Racine really impact the course of Europe? I’m sure their works influenced the art and literary world, but how much do the arts contribute to the rise and fall of nations?”
“It’s a fair point.”
“Sure, they contributed to the progress of European thought in some way. But can you compare even Shakespeare with the contributions of Hobbes or Locke, or Machiavelli before them? Machiavelli directly influenced the people who made the decisions who did make an impact.”
“That’s OK – you’ve sold me.” Becs smiles. “You can stop now.”
“Sorry.” I blush. “I get worked up about this sort of thing.”
“You’ve made that argument before, haven’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“To Mr. Prendergast himself?”
“Perhaps.”
“You’re always willing to speak your mind, aren’t you? You don’t seem afraid of what other people may think of you.”
“Not in History class, anyway,” I say. “But I’m trying to be more open-minded. I need to be, if I want to pass our exams. You can’t get by on political, diplomatic and military history in this class.”
“And that’s where I come in?”
“I hope this will be a mutually beneficial relationship, but yeah, that’s the idea. Anyway, what are you hoping to get out of our class?”
“I don’t know – I’m just here to learn, really. I like how history connects everything in the world together. For example, did you know that you and I are both direct descendants of Charlemagne?”
“How could you possibly know that?” I ask.
“Everyone in the Western world is – it’s a simple question of genealogical math,” answers Becs. “So many generations have passed since Charlemagne was alive…”
“…that we all must be related to everyone who lived that long ago. I get it.”
“Exactly. We’re all connected through people and events of the past, or through great symphonies we’ve heard or great books we’ve read and shared with one another. And I guess the more I learn about history, the more those connections feel real to me.”
“That sounds…almost noble.”
Becs blushes. “It’s not meant to be,” she says.
“OK, then – let’s talk about some of those great books. What do you know about Don Quixote?”
So we get started, beginning with our most recent material and working backwards. I know more about the “history of” stuff than I like to let on, of course, but when Becs quizzes me on baroque architecture and Colbert’s economic policies in 17th-century France, the review we undertake is helpful. She likes to listen to classical music, so she possesses the same innate understanding of composers and their works that I do about wars and their instigators. And when I throw names and Roman numerals like Philip II and Charles V at Becs, she’s quite handy at describing where they came from, what they did and why they were important. It’s actually rather fun.
Still, when Becs asks me to say something insightful about the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, I can’t help myself. “He popularized the use of gunpowder in Europe, right?”
“What?” Becs looks confused.
I smirk. “I know, that’s not right. But given that gunpowder was introduced to Europe around Velázquez’s time and sort of, you know, revolutionized the nature of warfare in Europe, don’t you think it might be appropriate to know who was responsible for that?”
Becs relaxes. “And he’s off,” she says, grinning.
“Even a single mention in our textbook of, like, one technological advance in warfare before World War I would be nice. I’m not asking for too much, am I?”
Becs starts flipping through our textbook in search of something. “What is it?” I ask.
“Hold on…there. Ha!”
“What?”
“Page 467, right after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis – a treaty which, by the way, ended the conflict between which two countries?”
“Cateau-Cambrésis? France and, um, er…the Holy Roman Empire?”
“Bzzzzz – we were looking for France and Spain, not the Holy Roman Empire.” Becs laughs.
“I should have just said ‘the Habsburgs’ and covered myself.”
“Anyway, I quote from the book: ‘The use of gunpowder altered both the nature of war and popular attitudes toward it. Guns and cannon killed and wounded from a distance, indiscriminately. Writers scorned gunpowder as a coward’s weapon that allowed a common soldier to kill a gentleman.’ And then, skipping a bit: ‘Gunpowder weakened the notion, common during the Hundred Years’ War, that warfare was an ennobling experience. Governments had to utilize propaganda, pulpits and the printing press to arouse public opinion to support war.’ Happy now?”
“I happily stand corrected,” I say. “Still, I bet there’s no mention of the trace italienne, the fortifications developed to help protect cities and other strategic locations from cannon fire.”
“Wow, you’re right. This course is a travesty. Let’s just pack up, and I’ll have my mother pick me up early.”
“I’m just saying that maybe we should learn something about Vauban, France’s greatest military engineer, instead of looking at more paintings by obscure artists who should stay in AP Art History where they belong.”
“Vauban, you said? What did he do?”
“He revolutionized the art of building fortifications, which helped Louis XIV win his wars, which helped perpetuate the existence of absolutist monarchism.”
“Maybe the reason we study artists rather than military engineers is that artists contribute to building up civilization, whereas warmongers just find faster ways of tearing it down.”
“Michelangelo himself designed one of the first trace italienne forts, at Florence.”
“And he shall have to answer for that some day.”
“You know who Robert Oppenheimer is, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Vauban contributed at least as much to the science of warfare over a far longer period of time than Oppenheimer did. So if we’re studying history – and I mean all of history – why shouldn’t we know who he was?”
“I wish I’d never heard of Oppenheimer, so…”
“Why not?”
“He led the project that created the atomic bomb.”
“Arguably the most amazing scientific accomplishment mankind has yet achieved.”
“Great, so we’ve figured out a way to not only annihilate ourselves as a race, but also blanket the world with radiation so that nothing will grow on it ever again. No thanks.”
“But you have to view everything in the proper context.”
“Hang on.” Becs looks genuinely alarmed for the first time. “Are you about to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki to me? Because you can’t. It’s not possible.”
“You don’t think we should have used atomic weapons against Japan at the end of World War II?”
“Absolutely not, and I don’t believe there are any circumstances under which their usage could ever be justified.”
“Will you give me the chance to make that argument?”
“You think their usage was justified?”
“Absolutely. One hundred percent.”
“I may never speak to you again, but OK. Make your case.”
“I’m not even nervous – it’s absolutely watertight. I can go into as much detail as you want, but I’d make four basic points. The first is that dropping the A-bombs was absolutely necessary in forcing Japan to surrender. The Japanese behaved throughout the war in a manner totally alien to the West, from the kamikaze attacks and banzai charges to the universal preference to die for the Emperor rather than be taken prisoner. As the war came closer to Japan, these attitudes became more intense, not less: Japan was willing to risk national suicide to make America back down from its unconditional surrender demands and win a negotiated settlement. Even the Soviet Union’s entry into the war didn’t change this calculus – it took two atomic bombs to make Japan’s leaders understand that the Allies no longer needed to invade Japan to win the war. The Japanese prime minister at the time, Suzuki, said as much immediately after peace was declared, and I’m convinced by other evidence that his testimony is accurate. Plus, Japan’s leaders were able to save face with their people and the military by being able to claim they were defeated by supernatural forces.”
“We nuked Japan so its leaders could save face?”
“Not as such, but you have to understand how important saving face is within Japanese culture – it’s much, much more important than it is in the West. Anyway, the second point is that America’s leaders had also concluded that invading Japan would cause losses on a scale unacceptable to the American public.”
“So the Bomb saved American lives,” says Becs. “I’ve heard that one before.”
“The most realistic planning estimates made by the Joint Chiefs for just the opening invasion of Kyushu, based upon America’s casualty rates on Okinawa, determined that in the first 90 days alone, around 150,000 American soldiers and sailors would be killed and another 350,000 would become wounded or missing in action. And that estimate was made before further reconnaissance and intelligence reports revealed the Japanese had deployed their strongest remaining army and air units to Kyushu, right where the Americans were planning to invade. On 9 August, the day of the Nagasaki bomb, America’s top naval commander in the Pacific – Admiral Nimitz – weighed up the evidence and informed his boss that he could no longer support an invasion. MacArthur was an idiot, as usual, and refused to believe the intelligence reports, but there’s no way Truman would have endorsed the invasion after a second review.”
“How do you remember all of this?”
“I just do. As for my third point, the A-bombs almost certainly saved the lives of many, many more Japanese than Americans. The estimates I quoted didn’t include Japanese casualties: there were roughly 500,000 Japanese committed to defend Kyushu, plus another 3.5 million civilians on the island. Again, given the Japanese casualty rates on Okinawa, you’d have to think that at least a million Japanese would have died, whereas the most aggressive estimates of those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined are around 300,000. But never mind the proposed invasion: at the time of the two A-bombs, America’s conventional strategic bombing campaign against Japan was about to stop targeting cities and instead hit transportation-related targets like railway centers and the system of bridges and ferries that connected the four Home Islands with one another. The US had closely studied the effects of its bombing campaign against Germany and had come to understand how sensitive Japan’s system of food distribution was to these transportation links: by destroying this infrastructure, mass famine would have ensued, resulting in millions upon millions of civilian deaths and probably massive civil unrest even if Japan had chosen to surrender at this point, which is far from certain. So, unless the US and the Soviet Union simultaneously abandoned their pursuit of unconditional surrender – which was never, ever going to happen – the next-best scenario for the Japanese people by far involved the use of atomic weapons.”
Becs nods her head, slowly and passively. “You said there was a fourth point?” she asks.
“Yes, there is. By the way, my first three points were cribbed from a historian named Richard Frank – I’d highly recommend his book, Downfall, if you want to read more about all of this. But the fourth point is basically my own: in short, weapons are created to be used. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic weapons were used under arguably the best possible circumstances – using them helped end a vast and interminable war almost immediately, saving many lives in the process. After peace had been declared, their usage could be fully investigated, and their horrible and unexpected side-effects revealed. Before the next war could break out, a consensus had emerged: many countries wanted atomic weapons, but nobody wanted to use them. By way of comparison, a similar international consensus formed after World War I around the use of poison gas, which after the 1930s was only ever used on a wide scale during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. But because poison gas was first used in 1915, near the beginning of the war, its usage became repeated and widespread, and more than 1 million soldiers became gas casualties before the war ended in 1918. Imagine if the US had acquired its atomic capability in 1943: how much additional carnage might have occurred before the war ended?”
“I don’t know,” says Becs.
“I don’t know either, although I’d certainly wager that more than two bombs would have been dropped. But the more important counterfactual is this: what if the US doesn’t use A-bombs in 1945, or doesn’t perfect the technology until after the war is over? When the Cold War breaks out and America’s atomic monopoly ends, now you have two superpowers armed with nukes and possibly willing to use them. Who makes the first move, and where? Korea? Cuba? Berlin? Maybe everyone keeps the genie in the bottle, but with no stigma attached to the usage of nuclear weapons, and their destructiveness continuing to increase, it’s increasingly likely that any attempt at localized usage would escalate into widespread holocaust or even global apocalypse. But all of this was thankfully avoided, hopefully forever, when Truman pulled the trigger on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US now bears the stigma of being the only country to actively employ atomic weapons, but it’s a stigma America is capable of bearing, and it’s probably part of the price you pay for being the world’s dominant superpower.”
I finish, and Becs remains quiet. When I can no longer stand the silence, I blurt out, “Like I said, that last argument was my own, and it’s not as solidly backed by evidence as the ones I’ve provided from Frank. That’s Richard Frank, of course, not someone named ‘Frank’. And I didn’t mean ‘frank’, as in truthful – well, I mean, I am trying to be truthful, and frank, but that’s not what I’m trying to say…”
Becs sniggers gently. “That’s OK,” she says. “You did well.”
“Really?”
“You made a lot of very good points.”
“Oh, OK – thanks.”
“What was the book called?”
“Frank’s book – Richard Frank’s book – is called Downfall. You can borrow my copy, if you’d like.”
“You’ve got your own copy?”
“The book made a powerful impression on me.” I smile. “And anyway, that’s who I am. I’m the one who reads history for fun.”
“I like that,” says Becs.
“Now, shall we get back to business?”
“Good idea.”
“Great. So, where were we?”