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Who is the intended audience of Paul Fussell's essay, "Thank God for the Atom Bomb"? What material does it cover?
Quick answer:
The audience is the readers of the New Republic magazine. The material covered is Fussell’s experience in the infantry, contrasted with that of people who have no such experience.
Fussell is writing for an audience (readers of the New Republic magazine) that quite likely was born after World War II and has no direct experience with the war in the Pacific, or in later wars such as Korea or, more significantly, Vietnam. To this end he quotes Arthur T Hadley as saying, “People holding such views [i.e., that dropping the bomb was wrong] do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots.” These are the people Fussell is addressing.
Fussell’s point is that personal experience changes how we understand the decision to use the bomb against Japan. From his point of view, as someone who served in the infantry during WWII, the bomb saved thousands of lives that would have been lost if there had been a D-Day style invasion of the Japanese home islands. No one who knows what combat is like, he says,...
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would argue that dropping the bomb was “unethical.”
The intended audience of Fussell's essay is people—such as John Kenneth Galbraith (whom the author names in his essay)—who believe that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II was not necessary. Fussell's essay is an attempt to debunk the arguments of these critics, who argue that Japan would have surrendered without the Americans' detonation of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.
Fussell argues that an infantry assault on Japan would have been deadly and would have resulted in the loss of huge numbers of Allied troops. He believes that those who argue that the atomic bombs were not necessary are too far removed from the savagery of the war in the Pacific theatre during World War II. Fussell writes that the bombs were necessary to end the war and that they were not intended to punish the Japanese.
Paul Fussell's "Thank God For Atom The Bomb" was first published under the title "Hiroshima: A Soldier's View," in a magazine, the New Republic, in August 1981. It was then republished under the title "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" in his essay collection Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays in 1988.
Its initial publication in the New Republic, a liberal magazine that describes itself as "tailored for smart, curious, socially aware readers", suggests that Fussell is writing mainly for an upper middle class, highly educated, and politically liberal audience. Textual evidence suggests that Fussell expected most of his readers to think that the American decision to drop the two atom bombs on Japan, landing in the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II, was ethically wrong.
The main argument of the essay is based around social class and personal experience. Fussell argues that people who consider the decisions wrong lack personal experience of the horrors of war as seen from the infantry perspective, because their class privilege means that they have no relevant personal experience. He also argues that Japan was not close to surrender, and that although the devastation and casualties caused by the bombing were horrific, that opponents of the bomb neglect the equal or greater horrors suffered by the American soldiers, the Japanese civilians conscripted to fight against them, and the prisoners of war.
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