Oliver Kamm

Natural disaster

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, and have nothing useful to say on the human suffering a continent away, in New Orleans. In that respect, though in nothing else concerning this issue, I am at one with the European press, whose expressions of Schadenfreude in place of human sympathy are laid out here by the BBC. What I find indecent about this sort of reasoning is not its obduracy – there are many issues on which I am obdurate too – as its inaptness. There may be lassitude in the federal response to natural disaster, but that is not the same as culpability, and still less is it culpability for the failings the critics invariably cite.

What is the point of saying, for example, as Jon Snow did on Channel 4 News, “How ironic that the world’s No 1 polluter is now reaping the ‘rewards’ that so many have warned would flow”? You might just as well in this context cite failings of Government (a local politics hamstrung by lobbies), or of federalism (a system with a dual chain of command entailed that both were inadequate). But these are unlikely to be the points made on Channel 4. Introspective recrimination where there is either no human perpetrator (Hurricane Katrina) or where the perpetrator is not us (9/11) is a peculiarly destructive impulse. As the sociologist Frank Furedi (not someone I often sympathise with) says in this commonsensical article, from the BBC News Online magazine, about responsibility for natural disasters:

Instead of a powerful story that we can learn from there is a risk that we will become disoriented by an obsession to blame.

Rural writing

I try to keep autobiographical information to a minimum on this site, not least because of the oddity of some of my correspondents. But this is an exception.

Books on rural life have an important place in English literature, though some of the supposedly elegaic veer into the twee, and the authors themselves have included some very rum characters. (And not in any endearing sense either. Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, was interned during the War for his Nazi sympathies and remained to his dotage a member of the Imperial Fascist League of Arnold Leese.) One author who has slipped out of public recognition is my grandfather Adrian Bell, whose semi-autobiographical accounts of Suffolk farming life before the war have a small but devoted readership. Though I am biased, I value his books because I genuinely admire them. I read them when I was in my teens, feeling that to do so was a family responsibility, and found them not an obligation but a joy. He also compiled the Times crossword puzzle (including the first one, in 1930) for 50 years. I tried doing these also in my teens, when he was still alive; I could recognise which puzzles were his from his literary enthusiasms, but I still wasn't able to solve them. He was also, unlike Henry Williamson, a splendid human being.

During the War, he received many letters from British squaddies, written in pencil and on the flimsiest of regulation paper but in a careful hand (as was then taught in elementary schools), and in conditions of great hardship and danger, expressing their appreciation of his evocations of English life, as a reminder of what they were fighting for. My family keeps them, and I have read them; they are wonderful letters.

Grandfather was the subject of a Radio 4 programme yesterday, presented by his son, my uncle, Martin Bell, and his book Corduroy is next week's Book at Bedtime, also on Radio 4. I can hardly legitimately urge you to listen, but it is a fine book by a marvellous writer of English prose.

More on the A-bomb

I wrote a brief comment in The Times last month on the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, criticising CND for its historical claims and current campaigning. I ought to have added - not because the source is credible or the argument convincing, but for sake of courtesy - that the newspaper published a follow-up letter from Bruce Kent, on behalf of CND, which reads in full:

Sir, Oliver Kamm (Comment, August 16; see also letters, August 12, etc) accuses CND, in relation to the use of atomic bombs in 1945, of selective history and worse.

Field Marshal Montgomery, General Eisenhower and President Truman’s Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, all took much the same view. In his wartime memoirs, I Was There, Leahy wrote:

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan . . . In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."

Had the Allies at Potsdam assured the Japanese that the position of the Emperor would be safeguarded in any postwar settlement, or had we encouraged the Soviets to enter the Pacific war earlier, there would have been no question of a ground invasion of Japan.

As it was, when the Soviets did come in on August 8, they overran most of Manchuria in ten days.

However, neither the Japanese leaders nor the Americans wanted a partial or total Soviet occupation of mainland Japan.

The claim that but for the bombs an invasion would have had to happen, and that it would have cost a million casualties, is more fantasy than fact, however much apologists for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki want to promote it.

BRUCE KENT
(Vice-President, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)
Islington, London

I have a longstanding affection for Bruce Kent, who in the weeks after 9/11 made the following contribution to a New Statesman survey of opinion about what the US should do next:

First, the United Nations must ratify the ten different terrorist conventions that have previously been vetoed by the United States. Second, we should try Osama Bin Laden in absentia in an international court, or even set up an ad-hoc court pending the start of international criminal court proceedings. I think we need to pursue Bin Laden in different ways: for example, by blocking communications to Afghanistan. I would even go as far as combing through bank accounts across the world and freezing anything suspicious.

Things must be serious. Faced with a theocratic totalitarianism that had killed 3000 civilians in a morning, Bruce Kent would open a bank statement that wasn't addressed to him. Unsurprisingly, the US decided on a less frivolous course, whereupon Bruce turned up on Newsnight to announce the opposition of world opinion. "These people who support the bombing: where are they?" he demanded rhetorically. If he'd waited another 48 hours, he could have answered his own question: "In the streets of Kabul."

More seriously, I'm most grateful to the historian Dennis Giangreco, of the US Army Command and General Staff College, whom I cited in my article and who has written to me with further sources on his research. A bibliography of his writings on the planned invasion of Japan, rendered unnecessary by the atomic bomb, is available here.