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Thursday
Last week, when marking the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I recounted how my father was in Munich taking German citizens through required tours of Dachau when he heard the news. Julia and I have been looking through old papers of my parents, including old love letters, and came across this account. I already knew the story but hadn’t realized—or perhaps just didn’t remember—that he had written it down.
Imagine being 22 years old and encountering first the Holocaust and then the atom bomb. It helps explain my father’s fatalistic determinism, which he and I used to argue about. How can you have devoted your entire life to fighting for social justice, I would ask him, while declaring that we’re all going to end up wiping ourselves out? In response, he would just shrug and say that one does what one can.
Even though he died at 90 during Barack Obama’s second term—which is to say, he saw the reward for having worked tirelessly for civil rights and racial justice—I imagine that would not have been at all surprised at Donald Trump’s ascendency. If someone had told him that, a little more than a decade later, masked storm troopers would be grabbing people off the streets and the national guard would be occupying Democratic cities, he would have felt affirmed in his view of the world.
Perhaps his pessimism served to insulate him against the kind of disappointment that causes people to withdraw from politics. Expecting nothing, he kept fighting. When I think of him organizing against segregation and homophobia and climate destruction, I am put in mind of a song that I remember singing in a civil rights workshop we attended in Charleston, South Carolina in 1967. Present there were Fanny Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Stokely Carmichael and others activists who would go on to become legends. The following stanza stands out:
My mother, she was a soldier
She had her hands on the gospel plow
One day she got old, she couldn’t fight anymore
She said, “I’ll stand here and I’ll fight anyhow.”
That was my father. Here’s his war story:
A Memoir
By Scott Bates
We passed by the gate
In the back of ten-ton trucks and couldn’t see much
But the smell was terrible.
They had piled up the bodies
In long syummetrical stacks like cord wood
Next to fright cars hoping to shipm them out before we came.
But they hadn’t had time to get rid of them.
We drove on by into Munich with the Seventh Army
And set up shop in the City Hall.
But we found out later that
The infrantry men who took the camp were so sick at
What they found that they rounded up all the guards
And shot them on the spot.
They also killed the SS officers.
It was our job to show to the German public
The movies we took and the ones we captured
Which pictured graphically the horros of the camp.
We required the people to watch them. They didn’t like it.
They didn’t believe them either.
It was just a lot of war propaganda to them.
But still after a couple of months we were
Making some headway in breaking through all that Nazi propaganda when we read in
The Stars and Stripes about the bomb dropped at Hiroshima.
We couldn’t believe it. Had the Air Force lost its mind?
How could they be so dumb as to do a stupid thing like that!
Here we were
Trying to get the idea through to the Germans about what their government had done
And with one single bomb we had made a dozen Dachaus.
We also realized with terrible foreboding
That we had started a new and potentially fatal arms race.
Julia and I have also come across my father’s old war letters. They’re actually pretty boring—perhaps intentionally so as he didn’t want to disturb his parents—and only twice does this kind man express anger. Once was at the Merchant Marines for delaying deployment of the troops back to the States but the other, more significant, was at the Germans for refusing to take responsibility for what they had done.
This, however, meant that Hiroshima and Nagasaki hit him doubly hard. As he puts it in his memoir, “with one single bomb we had made a dozen Dachaus.”
