Human Smoke, Part Two

Review: Human Smoke
By Nicholson Baker
The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

Six members of the Peace Pledge Union were arrested and tried for publishing a poster in London. The poster said: “War will cease when men refuse to fight. What are YOU going to do about it?” The Ministry of Information attacked the Peace Pledge Union’s ‘pernicious propaganda.” Eventually, the men were released, but people got the point: Pacifism was subversion. It was June 1940.

In Germany, Dr. Herman Stohr, secretary of the German Fellowship of Reconciliation, refused to join the army. He was shot.

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The Royal Air Force bombed Genoa and Milan. It was June 1940. They dropped bombs on Dusseldorf, flew away for a while, and then returned to drop more bombs while people were climbing out of shelters to put out the fires. In Munster and Wertheim, the RAF lit parts of the town and then flew low, machine-gunning fire brigades.

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The Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, politely rejected Gandhi’s suggestion to the British people that they employ nonviolent methods in opposing Hitler. The British government, Linlithgow said, was “firmly resolved to prosecute the war to a victorious conclusion.” It was July 10, 1940. “I was grateful to H.E. the Viceroy for forwarding my offer to His Majesty’s Government,” Gandhi replied, in Harijan. “No doubt the determination is natural and worthy of the best British tradition. Nevertheless the awful slaughter that the determination involves should induce a search for a better and braver way to achieve the end.”

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In Colorado Springs, Herbert Hoover gave the press a statement about the food situation in Belgium, Holland, Poland, and Norway. “The obvious truth is that there will be wholesale starvation, death and disease in these little countries unless something is done about it,” Hoover said. It was August 11, 1940.

Churchill was the chief obstacle, Hoover wrote later. “He was a militarist of the extreme school who held that the incidental starvation of women and children was justified if it contributed to the earlier ending of the war by victory.”

Poland, as it happened, was particularly vulnerable. Hoover’s Polish Relief Commission had set up canteens in Polish ghettos and poor districts, where they had been feeding two hundred thousand people per day – the Chamberlain government had allowed the food through the blockade. “When Churchill government Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940,” Hoover wrote, “he soon stopped all permits of food relief to Poland.”

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After an air raid, Edward R. Murrow went around to watch buildings burn in a working-class district of London. With him was a bomber pilot who’d flown twenty-five missions over Germany. They saw a woman carrying a cooking pot and another woman holding a baby. The women were looking back over their shoulders at fires gusting through a housing block.

“I’ve seen enough of this,” said the bomber pilot. “I hope we haven’t been doing the same thing in the Ruhr and Rhineland for the last three months.” It was September 25, 1940.

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Admiral Richardson, commander of the US fleet, had a confrontation with President Roosevelt. It was October 8, 1940. Richardson said what he’d said in his letter to Admiral Stark and his memo to Secretary Knox – that Pearl Harbor was the wrong place for his ships. Roosevelt said he thought that having the fleet in Hawaii had a “restraining influence” on Japan.

Was the United States going to war? Richardson asked the president. “He replied,” in Richardson’s account, “that if the Japanese attacked Thailand, or Kra Peninsula, or the Dutch East Indies we would not enter the war, that if they even attacked the Philippines he doubted whether we would enter the war.” But the Japanese couldn’t always avoid making mistakes, the president said. “Sooner or later they would make a mistake and we would enter the war.”

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The Japan Advertiser carried an editorial about Pearl Harbor. “Huge overseas naval concentrations are equivalent to extension of national boundaries,” the newspaper said. “In America’s case, they suggest a dictatorship over the parallels of latitude below Pearl Harbor, an invitation to others to keep away, therefore a challenge and threat, preliminaries to hostilities; hence a contradiction of America’s announced policy of keeping its fighting sons at home.” It was January 17, 1941.

The sixteenth annual Conference on the Cause and Cure of War was not held that January. It was canceled for lack of funds.

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The New York Times published an editorial that tried to soften slightly Churchill’s speech of the day before: “This is no sadistic desire for revenge manifesting itself; it is rather a sincere conviction that bombing Berlin will hasten the victory and speed the peace,” the editorialist said.

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Vera Brittain lay in bed at twilight, listening to the British bombers flying out to sea. It took an hour for the sound to pass. “How many children in Germany would be dead by morning?” she wondered. She wrote a peace letter: “To realize that one’s own people are suffering damage is grievous, but to know that they are about to inflict it is detestable.” It was July 31, 1941.

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Herbert Hoover gave a speech on the radio. There were about forty million children in the German-invaded democracies, he said, and the blockade was killing them: “Their pleas for food ascend hourly to the free democracies of the west.” It was October 19, 1941.

Hoover cited two recent reports. One was about hunger in Belgium, and one was the report by Dr. Szoszkies about hunger in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. In Warsaw, Hoover said, the death rate among children was ten times the birth rate, and corpses lay in the street. America was now, by failing to compel England to change its policy, a moral participant in the blockade.

“Is the Allied cause any further advanced today as a consequence of this starvation of children?” Hoover asked. “Are Hitler’s armies any less victorious than if these children had been saved? Are Britain’s children better fed today because these millions of former allied children have been hungry or died? Can you point to one benefit that has been gained from this holocaust?”

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President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill condemned the killing of French hostages. It was October 25, 1941. “Civilized peoples long ago adopted the basic principle that no man should be punished for the deed of another,” Roosevelt said. “Frightfulness can never bring peace to Europe. It only sows the seeds of hatred which will one day bring fearful retribution.”