Chapter 8: “The Victors and the Vanquished” by Tom Engelhardt Summary
The Pearl Harbor Attack, when the Imperial Japanese Army made a sneak military strike on the eponymous American naval base in December 1941, was a defining moment in American history. According to historian Tom Engelhardt, not only did the attack officially force the United States to join World War II, but it also continued the narrative of American triumphalism, “a continuous arc of victory that began with the first Indian wars and the Revolution.” No wonder the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor was celebrated with much fanfare in 1991. Of course, for then-President George W. Bush Senior, the triumph being celebrated was two-fold: the American victory in World War II, dubbed the Good War, and the American bombing of Iraq in January 1991, which brought the Gulf War to a close.
Yet, the surprise was that the victory of the Good War still resonated with people more than the far more recent Gulf War win. In fact, since 1945 and the bombing of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the narrative of triumphalism had become increasingly diluted in the United States. The defeat at Vietnam played a huge role in this changed narrative, since it was the first time America had lost in war—that, too, to a developing Asian country. However, Engelhardt traces the anti-triumphalism strain to further back in history, and that point is the dropping of the nuclear bombs in 1945. This can be seen in the way the commemoration of August 1945, the month which officially ended World War II, differed from the hype around the Pearl Harbor anniversary. Unlike in Europe, where the fiftieth V-E (Victory in Europe) Day anniversary in May 1995 was commemorated with much fanfare, both V-E and V-J (Victory-in-Japan) celebrations were severely muted in the United States. This showed Americans were more comfortable with a different kind of memorializing, especially when it came to wars of 1945 and after.
In 1975, a unique war memorial was built on the Washington Mall. It was funded entirely by the public; designed by Maya Ying Lin, a twenty-year-old Chinese American art student; and featured a long V-shaped black granite wall inscribed with the names of the 58,000 soldiers who died in the war. Jan Scruggs, the Vietnam War veteran who founded the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund that financed the memorial said this was the way “Vietnam veterans could be honored without commenting on America’s Vietnam policy; the warrior could be separated from the war.” Thus, the memorial focused more on the loss of the soldiers than on any triumphalist narrative. Members of the Reagan administration protested the memorial’s plainness, calling it a “black gash of shame.” Statues of GIs and nurses were built at a distance to compensate. Near the GI statue flies the American flag. The disjointed memorial manages to capture the mixed feelings around the Vietnam War, and the culture of defeat that it reflects.
Post-Hiroshima Japan also had to contend with the culture of defeat. Because the atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities—unlike the losses of Vietnam, which happened off American soil—and obliterated over tens of thousands of lives in one strike, the defeat scarred the national consciousness permanently. Before World War II, Japan also had a culture of triumphalism. Even until 1941, Japan dominated much of Southeast Asia and had defeated American and European fleets in the Pacific. It was only since 1943 that Japan suffered losses in World War II, culminating in the air raids on Tokyo, which killed a hundred thousand people, and then the nuclear bombings which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Japan to survive the crushing, humiliating defeat, they had to...
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invent a new culture of forgetfulness, focusing on the future and engaging with a distant past of emperors and mythological creatures. Monsters were no longer real, but behemoth-like creations. Japan’s innovations in technology, and popular films likeGodzilla (1954), are all linked with this new national consciousness.
Although on a public level the Japanese may have wanted to forge ahead of the ruins of Hiroshima, the trauma lives on in private consciousness, as revealed in interviews with survivors, eyewitnesses, and others affected. Researchers have noted that the testimonies often seem to erupt from survivors, showing their sheer emotional power. While forgetting was a way for post-1945 Japan to survive, selective remembering was a way for America to paint 1945 as an unadulterated triumph. Since 1945, the American version of events has focused on the technological marvel that was the Enola Gay; the bravery of its pilot, Colonel Tibbs, and his crew; the thrill of dropping the bomb; and the end of World War II. What the narrative leaves out is the ground reality in Hiroshima (and later, Nagasaki) after the bombings. To confront those scenes of devastation would dilute America’s victory. Even when movies were made on the B-29 bombings, they ended in the dropping of the bombs, not their aftermath. Hollywood could not show the enemy dying, because the enemy died horribly and in tens of thousands. Thus, the memory of the bombings had to be carefully constructed. Perhaps that is why the fuselage of the Enola Gay aircraft itself was stashed away from larger public view for so long.
Images of the aftermath of the bombing would have another unwanted effect: they would make Americans fear their own possible defeat at the hands of a nuclear power. America therefore managed the images coming out of Vietnam for over a decade, with “images of the human suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . almost impossible to find in the United States” until the late 1960s. Practicing blindness became essential to preserving the fragile triumphalist narrative around 1945, the last war America could still celebrate. The Enola Gay exhibit, which planned to remove the blindfolds around the triumphalist narrative, was thus bound to be controversial. One unexpected fallout of the careful narrative around the bombings was that veterans like Colonel Tibbets had never been allowed to celebrate their bravery freely. Now when an opportunity presented itself on the fiftieth anniversary of August 1945, it was designed to make the bravery of the airmen questionable. Tibbets urged reconsideration to “let the exhibition of the Enola Gay accurately reflect the American spirit and victory of August 1945. . . . The million or so of us remaining will die believing that we made the world a better place as a result of our efforts to secure peace that has held for almost 50 years.”
The divide in views was generational as well. The people of Tibbets’s generation—especially veterans, who had, after all, fought bravely for what they believed was a just cause—wanted the bombings to be remembered as commemorative. But subsequent generations could not view the bombings without the context of their horrific aftermath. The original script of the Enola Gay exhibit tried to balance both views in principle, but it was missing the celebratory feeling around the air attack on Japan, which, too, had been an American moment. The fourth section on the effects of the bombing overshadowed the rest of the script, with “its most forbidden, most forbidding images of the nuclear age . . . a dead schoolboy’s tattered jacket; a fused rosary”; a melted lunch box with carbonated food belonging to a schoolgirl whose body is assumed to have simply melted or evaporated.
Given all these complicated truths and narratives around Hiroshima-Nagasaki, perhaps there is no way to commemorate August 1945. Or perhaps the only way to commemorate it was what was shown in the final exhibit: the polished fuselage of the B-29, without accompaniments. The gleaming surface of the aircraft would reflect whichever truth the viewer wanted to believe.