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THE
United States leveled Hiroshima with the atom bomb on
August 6, 1945, but the history-making news didn’t reach
the Philippines until two days later. American troops
there, like my father, were waiting apprehensively for
plans to invade the Japanese home islands.
“It’s
almost too good to be true,” he wrote my mother on
August 8 from Mindanao, where he was an Army field
hospital doctor supervising public-health measures for
Filipinos malnourished after years of Japanese
occupation. “The news we’ve been given describes a
veritable Buck Rogers mechanism of destruction that is
capable of erasing any city or nation.... For the first
time, I feel that the war may end shortly and we can all
go home, and I hope to God it’s so.”
By the
next day, he was far more guarded but remained
optimistic, noting further details about the atomic
weapon and news that the Soviet Union had actively
entered the war against
Japan. “It’s damned fortunate that we were first in its
military use and it may—and probably will—be the final
all-important factor in ending this awful war.”
Then he
penned a sobering postscript: “There is still something
frightening about the new bomb, a weapon that truthfully
is not pleasant to contemplate, and that bodes danger
for our future if human beings don’t quit acting like
apes. The world had better come to its senses after this
one.”
These
past months, in reading my father’s 300-plus letters
written 62 years ago, I realized that this endnote was
no accident. More than joy, the cautious relief that
framed his response to news of the wonder weapon was his
coda to many months of correspondence about the
corrosive aspects of war and the contradictions that
fighting entails.
Less
than three weeks before
Hiroshima,
he had written: “After almost four years in the Army, I
hate war, not in an objective way, but as a very
personal thing. When I hold a bullet in my hand or stare
at a mortar, it’s a feeling that in this inanimate metal
is the degradation of the human race, a precision-made
missile containing all of the world’s hate.”
In his
missives, my father had been scathing about “slick news
stories” that my mother clipped and included in her
daily letters, saying their glamorized tales of war bore
no resemblance to combat. “The GI letters that I read as
a censor are not only more eloquent than all the
magazine stories, but are so different as to make the
latter ridiculous.”
While
treating wounded infantrymen on
Leyte in early January 1945, he wrote that every GI asks, “When is
this war going to end, and when can I go home?” At home,
Americans had been told that
Leyte
was secured and that soldiers were mopping up Japanese
Army remnants. “The words are so misleading. The
fighting is often more vicious and severe after the
generals say the battlefield is ‘secure.’ I’ll never
again be able to tolerate a war movie or political
speech on military heroes, not after seeing newly dead
American GIs come in on litters, spotting them from the
wounded by seeing the undisturbed flies on their
yellowish-white still skin, or whatever is left
anatomically. Seeing the newly dead tells me that war
prevention is the real job.”
Adding
to the misery were the thousands of Filipino refugees
with chronic diseases and many without enough food.
Supplies were never sufficient, even for the bountiful
US Army, to take care of all the civilians. Yet from
time to time, my father wrote of a stubbornly resilient
humanity during war. When his unit left Leyte in early
May for Mindanao, “a truly poverty-stricken mother of a
child we had saved sought me out for personal thanks and
a present of a dozen fresh eggs. Her family and those of
many others lined the road in a collective ‘goodbye’
wave.”
And
there were the situations bringing forth black humor. He
recounted an order in early June from higher-ups to
establish two whorehouses, “one for whites and one for
colored, to stem the trouble and venereal disease that
comes in all theaters when the G-Is want their women. .
. . I am to take care of the medical angle and must meet
with the CO [commanding officer], the MP officer and a
‘madam.’ So do I make small talk and ask ‘How’s
business?’”
But
little masked his lament at death and disease
everywhere. When hearing American planes overhead on
their way to smash Japanese still fighting in the
Mindanao hills, he confessed, “I should exult, I know;
the Japs have asked for the slaughter and deserve a
complete defeat, yet I’m more or less confused in my
emotions: war and its causes are so complex and
sometimes, I fear, all is so futile.”
To
mid-July news about Congress considering postwar
mandatory military training for all young men, he wrote
to my mother, “I wonder why no one has suggested that
Congress pass a law for one year’s compulsory training
in peace?”
On the
morning of August 15, 1945, when Japan’s offer of
surrender was made public, my father watched dozens of
warships in Macajalar Bay blow their whistles and fire
smoke shells in an impromptu celebration. “I am
emotionally limp, so long have I hoped for the end to
this wasteful existence called war,” he wrote. “I will
think of nothing but our soon-to-be reunion.” David
Smollar, a former Times reporter, lives in San Diego. |
