I thought instantly then that the poem had come to me at that moment because alone in a Japanese tramp steamer, barely nineteen and on my way back from Japan to Africa in 1926, I had first read this poem on a moonlit sea off Java, and had been inexpressibly touched by it. I realized however, a second later, it had done so even more because it introduces a series of poems that make up one of the greatest and most uncompromising manifestos of life written in my generation under the title: ‘Look! We have come through!’
‘A remarkable thought’
Men think by fits and starts.
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.
A. E. HOUSMAN
I TRIED TO compress the quintessence of all this into the ten minutes I had with the shrivelled little Japanese doctor in the television studio in America that evening. I tried to stress how certain I was that if the atom bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war would have dragged on, the Japanese would have fought as they had fought everywhere else to the bitter end, from island to island, and so on to the last, in the islands of Japan proper. I told him that I believed this because those two terrible bombs must have seemed as supernatural to the Japanese as they had seemed to me when I first heard of them in the darkness and the danger of our own prison. Somewhere in the unconscious minds of the Japanese people, I argued with the eloquence of an absolute conviction, it must have looked as if their Sun Goddess Ama-Terasu herself had hurled fragments of her sun at Japan to shatter it out of its suicidal course and show it in incontrovertible fashion that it had to stop and mend its ways. After all, had not they themselves described the flash which preceded the first mushroom cloud at Hiroshima: ‘Brighter than a thousand suns’?
I told him how certain I was that the Emperor could never have gathered round himself sufficient influential voices to make the party of peace win the day, and that he himself might have been assassinated, as he very nearly was, by some of the more fanatical and younger Japanese officers. The war would have dragged on and apart from many many more Japanese dead, hundreds and thousands of Americans and their allies would have died as well. Above all for me, selfish as it may sound, there was the certain knowledge that if the bomb had not been dropped and the Emperor had not been able to intervene, Field-Marshal Terauchi would have fought on and hundreds of thousands of prisoners in his power would have been killed. Even had we not been deliberately massacred, we were near our physical end through lack of food. The war had only to drag on some months longer for most of us to have perished. But quite apart from the death through starvation which threatened us there was, most important for me, this question of a deliberate massacre.
The date for this was to be co-ordinated with the day on which the Allied invasion began in the South-East Asia theatre of war that was under Terauchi’s command. We knew now that this invasion, by forces under command of Lord Mountbatten, was planned and ready to begin on 6 September, that is to say, within three weeks of the Japanese capitulation. As far as the many hundreds of thousands of prisoners and internees in South-East Asia were concerned, therefore, death by all counts had been a near miss. There would have been no miss at all if it had not been for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I would not be there to speak to him.
I admitted that he could, perhaps, still suspect this part of my reasoning. I could imagine that he might accept more readily an hypothesis that if the war had gone on longer the military casualties would have been many hundreds of thousands greater and that, as far as we in prison were concerned, whether we would have lived or not was purely conjecture, and death by deliberate killing far from a certainty. Indeed he may well have thought that all I had told him about myself and my fellow-prisoners in Java was just part of a natural fear created by the strains of years of imprisonment. In that connection, I hoped he would believe me, when I told him that, when I went back to active service and joined the staff of Lord Mountbatten, I discussed this aspect of our imprisonment fully with Lord Mountbatten’s Director of Military Intelligence, an experienced officer called General Penney, whom I had known well. He had been my tutor at a staff-college and I had worked closely with him on an urgent mission on which he and I were sent by Lord Mountbatten to the War Cabinet in London.
General Penney had assured me that, among the staff records captured at Terauchi’s headquarters, evidence was found of plans to kill all prisoners and internees when the invasion of South-East Asia began in earnest. I begged the doctor, therefore, to accept that, terrible as the dropping of the two atom bombs had been, his wife and the many thousands who died with her had died in order to save the lives of many hundreds of thousands more. I had tried to speak to him in this way not only for myself but for thousands thus saved, and would like him to know how we would be forever in his wife’s debt as well as that of her fellow-victims.
Those of us who had survived like him and myself could only discharge our debt by looking as deeply and as honestly as we could into the various contributions we had made to this disaster. The war and the bomb, after all, had started in ourselves before they struck in the world without, and we had to look as never before into our own small individual lives and the context of our various nations. We who were saved seemed to me charged by life itself to live in such a way now that no atom bomb could ever be dropped again, and war need never again be called in, as it had been throughout recorded history, as the terrible healer of one-sidedness and loss of soul in man. Could I through him thus presume to acknowledge my debt of life to his wife and beg him to believe she had not died in vain?
Whether I had helped him by my story, and whether he agreed with my conclusions, I could not tell for certain. All I know is that at the end of our television discussion, before we left on our separate ways, he bowed to me as the Japanese general and his officers on that fateful August day had done.
Hissing between his teeth as the old-fashioned Japanese used to do when moved, he came out of his bow to say: ‘Would you please be so kind as to allow me to thank you for a remarkable thought.’
He added to that, after a pause, the traditional farewell of the Japanese, which in itself reflects much of their spirit charged so heavily with provision of fate: the Sayonara that just means: ‘If it must be.’
Postscript
The question may well be asked why this story was not told twenty-five years ago. There are two main answers to the question. One is that when I came out of prison in August 1945, I went straight back to active service without even a day’s leave. For close on the eighteen months that followed I was involved in another kind of war, both military and political, in Indonesia. Militarily, it was a desultory and minor war compared with the war which had preceded it but for me at any rate it was often as dangerous and always more unpleasant because, among other things, unlike its predecessor, its objectives were confused and dubious.
When the British forces could at last be withdrawn from Indonesia towards the end of 1946, I was ordered to stay on as military attaché to the British minister in Java. I could not return to Britain until a year later like some kind of military Rip van Winkle, so quickly and completely forgotten was the decade of war, imprisonment and more war to which I belonged. I immediately found myself confronted on my return with another special challenge as personal and, to me, even more important and urgent than the one which had made me go straight from prison to active service. This challenge constituted the second reason that made it impossible for me to give my mind to the theme of this story.