Burning Conscience: The Case Of The Hiroshima Pilot Claude Eatherly

Claude Eatherly, Günther Anders

• Publisher: Verdun Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786256928
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A collection of correspondence between Claude Eatherly, a former air force pilot, and Günther Anders, a German philosopher.
Eatherly was the pilot who gave the all-clear for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: an action the implications of which he had not known at the time. Returning from the mission and learning of the devastating impact of the atomic bomb Eatherly was unable to calmly accept his role. Though he was treated as a hero in the press, Eatherly was morally distraught over his actions and felt that he could not silently accept the accolades.
Over the course of some 71 letters Anders and Eatherly struggled with the problem of taking moral responsibility in a time when ethics were the last thing that most people seemed to want to discuss. Part of what fascinated Anders about Eatherly – and prompted the former to contact the latter – was precisely this way in which Eatherly sought to take responsibility for something which he easily could have ignored as having been a matter of "just following orders."
Burning Conscience is a fascinating and troubling book – not simply because it provides a first-hand account of an oft untold moral story in the aftermath of World War II, but because the matters being discussed by Anders and Eatherly are as important today as they were during the lives of the correspondents.— Lib. Ship.

 

LETTER 1—GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY

June 3rd, 1959.

Dear Mr. Eatherly,

The writer of these lines is unknown to you; you, however, are known to my friends and to me. No matter whether we are in New York, in Vienna or in Tokyo, we are anxiously watching the way you are trying to manage and master your condition. Not out of curiosity, nor because we are medically or psychologically interested in your ‘case history’. We are neither medical men nor psychologists. But because full of burning concern, we have made it our daily task to push our way through the moral problems which are blocking the road of mankind to-day. The ‘technification’ of our being: the fact that to-day it is possible that unknowingly and indirectly, like screws in a machine, we can be used in actions, the effects of which are beyond the horizon of our eyes and imagination, and of which, could we imagine them, we could not approve—this fact has changed the very foundations of our moral existence. Thus, we can become ‘guiltlessly guilty’, a condition which had not existed in the technically less advanced times of our fathers.

You understand what this has to do with you. After all, you are one of the first ones who have actually been caught in this new sort of guilt, in which everyone of us can be caught to-day or tomorrow. What could happen to us tomorrow, has actually happened to you. Therefore you are playing for us the great role of a crowning example, yes even that of a predecessor.

Probably you don’t like that. You want your peace, your life is your business. We assure you that we despise indiscretion just as much as you do, and we ask for your forgiveness. In this case, however, indiscretion is, unfortunately, inevitable, even required. Since chance (or however we may call the indisputable fact) wished to change you, the private individual Claude Eatherly, into a symbol of the future, your life has become our business too. Of course, it is not your fault that of all of the millions of your fellow men, just you have been sentenced to this symbolic function; but things are as they are.

And yet, please don’t believe that you are the only one who has been sentenced in this way. For all of us have to live in this epoch in which we could slide into such a guilt; and as little as you have picked out your tragic function, so little have we picked out this tragic epoch. In this sense, we are all in the same boat, we are children of one and the same family. And it is this common fate which determines our attitude towards you. When thinking of your sufferings, we are doing it as brothers; as if you were a brother to whom the misfortune has actually occurred to do that which each of us could be compelled to do to-morrow; as brothers who hope to avoid this calamity as you so terribly, futilely hope that you could have avoided it. But at that time it wasn’t possible. The machinery had functioned blamelessly, and you were young and lacking in insight. You have done it. But since you have done it, we can learn from you, and only from you, what would become of us if we had been you, if we would be you. You see, you are terribly important for us, even indispensable. So to say, our teacher.

Of course, you will reject this title. ‘Everything but that,’ you will answer, ‘for I just can’t master my condition.’

You’ll be surprised, but it is just this ‘can’t’ which is decisive for us. And even consoling. I know that this statement must sound senseless at first. Therefore a few words of explanation.

I don’t say: ‘consoling for you’. Nothing lies further from my mind than to try to console you. The consoler always says: ‘It’s not as bad as all that,’ tries to belittle the pain or guilt or to talk it away. That is exactly what your doctors are trying to do. It is not difficult to see why they are doing it. After all, these men are employees of a military hospital to whom the moral condemnation of a generally respected, even glorified action, would not exactly be beneficial, to whom the possibility of such a damning may not occur; who, under all circumstances, must defend the purity of the deed which you so rightly feel as guilt. Therefore your doctors maintain: ‘Hiroshima in itself is not enough to explain your behaviour’—which, in a less indirect language, means nothing else than ‘Hiroshima wasn’t really as bad as all that’, therefore they confine themselves to criticizing your reaction to the deed instead of the deed itself (or the world condition in which such a deed is possible). Therefore they find it necessary to call your sufferings and expectation of punishment an illness (‘classical guilt complex’), and therefore they must treat your act as a ‘self-imagined wrong’. Is it any wonder that men, who through their conformism and lack of moral backbone, in order to preserve the purity of your deed, must characterize your pangs of conscience as pathological—is it any wonder that men who work with such fraudulent suppositions have not exactly succeeded in reaching sensational results? I can imagine—if I am wrong please correct me—with what disbelief, with what suspicions, with what resistance you must face these men, since they only take your reaction seriously, not your action. Hiroshima—self imagined. Really! You know better. Not without reason do the screams of the wounded deafen your days, and not without reason do the shadows of the dead force their way into your dreams. You know that what has happened, has happened, and is not imagined. You are not taken in by those men, nor are we. We don’t want to have anything to do with such sham consolation.

No, I say ‘for us’. For us the fact that you cannot master what is done is consoling. Because it shows that now, afterwards, you are making the attempt to catch up with, to realize the magnitude of your acts, the effects of which you then had not realized; because this attempt, even if it fails, proves that you have been able to keep your conscience alert, although once you had functioned as a screw in a machine, even successfully so. And since you have been able to do this, you have proven that one is able to do this, that we must be able to do this. And to know that—and it is to you to whom we owe this knowledge—is consoling for us.

‘Also if your attempt fails.’ For it must fail. Why?

Even if one has harmed but one fellow man—I am not speaking yet at all of killings—it is, although the deed can be seen at a glance, no easy task to ‘digest’ it. But here it is something else. You happen to have left 200,000 dead behind you. And how should one be able to mobilize a pain which embraces 200,000? How should one repent 200,000? Not only you cannot do it, not only we cannot do it, no one can do it. However desperately we may attempt it, pain and repentance remain inadequate. The frustration of your efforts is not your fault, Eatherly. It is a consequence of what I previously had described as the decisive newness of our situation. That we can produce more than we can mentally reproduce; that we are not made for the effects which we can make by means of our man-made machines; that the effects are too big for our imagination and the emotional forces at our disposal. Don’t reproach yourself for this discrepancy. But although the repentance cannot succeed, you must daily experience the frustration of your efforts. For outside of this experience of failure, there is nothing else which could replace the repentance, which could prevent us from having once again anything to do with such a monstrous deed. That you, since your efforts cannot succeed, react panically and un-coordinatedly, is comprehensible. One could almost say that it is proof of your moral health. For your reactions prove that your conscience is on guard.

The usual method of mastering what is too big consists of a mere suppression-manoeuver; of going on in exactly the same way as before; of sweeping the deed from the desk of life, as if the too big guilt were not guilt at all. In order to master it, one makes no attempt to master it. As, for instance, your buddy and compatriot Joe Stiborik, the former radar man on the Enola Gay, who, because he continues living as a ‘regular guy’, and because, in the best of spirits he explained, ‘For me it was just a bigger bomb’, one loves to hold up to you as a shining example. An even better illustration of this method is that President who gave you your go ahead signal, just as you gave the go ahead signal to the bomber; who actually, therefore, finds himself in the same situation as you, if not even in a worse one. But what you have done, he has failed to do. A few years ago—I don’t know whether you heard about it at the time—most naively perverting all moral standards, he announced in a public interview, that he felt not the least ‘pangs of conscience’, implying thereby, his innocence was proven; and recently on his 75th birthday as he summed up his life, he named, as the only wrong worthy of his repentance, that he didn’t marry before his thirties. I can’t imagine that you envy this clean sheet. I am perfectly certain, however, that no common criminal could sell you his innocence by telling you that he doesn’t feel any pangs of conscience. Isn’t a man who runs away from himself a ridiculous figure? You, in any case, haven’t done that, Eatherly. You are not a ridiculous figure. Even when you fail, you are doing what is humanly possible. You are trying to go on as the one who has done it. And that is what consoles us. Although you, just because you have remained identical with your deed, have been changed by this deed.

Of course, you understand that I am referring to your forgery, robbery, breaking and entering, and God knows what other irregularities there may have been. And also to your alleged demoralization. Don’t believe that I am an anarchist and in favour of breaking and entering and forgery, or that I take such matters lightly. But in your case, these offences have another meaning than ordinarily. They are acts of despair. For to be as guilty as you are and yet to be publicly classified as innocent, even to be praised as a smiling hero on the ‘strength’ of this guilt—that must be a situation which a decent person just cannot tolerate, and for the ending of which he even takes recourse to indecent steps. Since the monstrous guilt which weighed and weighs on you was not understood, was not permitted to be understood, and could not be made understandable, you had to attempt to speak and to act in the language which is understandable there, in the idiom of petty or big larceny, in the terms of the society itself. Thus you have tried to prove your guilt by committing acts which at least are recognized as crimes. Yet even here you were frustrated. Whatever you do, one continues classifying you as a sick man, not as a guilty one, and for this reason, because the world is begrudging you this guilt, you remain an unhappy man.

Last year I visited Hiroshima, and there I spoke with those who are still there after your visit to Hiroshima. You can be sure: amongst these people there is not one who would think of persecuting a man who was nothing but a screw in the workings of a military machine (that you were when you, as a twenty-six-year-old, carried out your ‘mission’); and no one hates you.

But now you have proven that although at one time you had been misused as a screw, you, contrary to the others, have remained a human being, or have become one anew.

And here is my suggestion:

Next August 6th, as every year, the population of Japan will celebrate the day on which ‘it’ happened. Why don’t you send a message to these people, which would arrive in time for the celebration? If you would tell them: ‘At that time I knew not what I did, but now I do know, and I know that this must never happen again, and that no human being ought to be allowed to demand such a thing of another human being.’ And: ‘Your fight is my fight, your “no more Hiroshima” is my “no more Hiroshima”,’ so, or in this way—you can be sure that with such a message you would make this day of mourning a day of rejoicing, and that the survivors of Hiroshima would receive you as a friend, as one of them, and rightly so. Since also you, Eatherly, are a Hiroshima victim.

With the deep esteem which I have for each and every Hiroshima victim,

I am,

Yours Sincerely,

Günther Anders

LETTER 2—CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS

Bldg. 90,

V.A. Hospital,

Waco, Texas.

June 12th, 1959.

Dear Sir,

Many thanks for your letter which I received on Friday of last week.

After reading your letter several times, I decided that I would like to write you, perhaps carry on a correspondence with you to discuss matters which I think we have a mutual understanding. I receive many letters, but I find it impossible to answer most of them, but to your letter I felt compelled to answer and give you some insight to how I feel toward matters which involve this world to-day.

Throughout my adult life I have always been keenly interested in problems of human conduct.

Whilst in no sense, I hope, either a religious or a political fanatic, I have for some time felt convinced that the crisis in which we are all involved is one calling for a thorough re-examination of our whole scheme of values and of loyalties. In the past it has sometimes been possible for men to ‘coast along’ without posing to themselves too many searching questions about the way they are accustomed to think and to act—but it is reasonably clear now that our age is not one of these. On the contrary I believe that we are rapidly approaching a situation in which we shall be compelled to re-examine our willingness to surrender responsibility for our thoughts and actions to some social institution such as the political party, trade union, church or State. None of these institutions are adequately equipped to offer infallible advice on moral issues and their claim to offer such advice needs therefore to be challenged. It is, I feel, in the light of this situation that my personal experience needs to be studied, if its true significance, not only for myself, but for all men everywhere, is to be grasped. If you feel that all this is relevant and more or less in accordance with your own thinking, what I would like to suggest is that we should together seek to work out its implications through a correspondence extended over a period of whatever time may be necessary.

I feel that you have an understanding about me that no one else, except my doctor and friend may have.

My antisocial acts have been disastrous to my personal life, but I feel that in my efforts, in time my motives will succeed in bringing out my true convictions and philosophy.

Günther, it is a pleasure to write to you, and through our corresponden...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• FOREWORD
• LETTER 1-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 2-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 3-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 4-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 5-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 6-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 7-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 8-GIRLS OF HIROSHIMA TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 9-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 10-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 11-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 12 -CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 13-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 14-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 15-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 16-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 17-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 18-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO EATHERLY’S BROTHER
• LETTER 19-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 20-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 21-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 22-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 23-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO DR. FRANK OF THE VETERANS’ ADMINISTRATION HOSPITAL, WACO, TEXAS-PSYCHIATRIC WARD
• LETTER 24-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 25-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 26-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 27-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 28-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO MR. ROLAND WATTS
• LETTER 29-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 30-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 31-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 32-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 33-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO JUDGE W. HALEY
• LETTER 34-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 35-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 36-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 37-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 38-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 39-THE XY SOCIETY TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 40-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 41-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 42-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO THE REVEREND N.
• LETTER 43-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 44-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO HONORABLE SENATOR RALPH YARBOROUGH
• LETTER 45-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 46-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO EATHERLY’S SISTER AND BROTHER
• LETTER 47-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 48-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 49-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 50-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 51-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 52-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 53-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 54-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 55-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 56-CLAUDE EATHERLY TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 57-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.
• LETTER 58 -GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• LETTER 59-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO MR. RAY BELL
• LETTER 60-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO MR. ROLAND WATTS
• LETTER 61-MR. RAY BELL TO GÜNTHER ANDERS
• LETTER 62-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO MR. RAY BELL
• LETTER 63-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO DR. WALTER F. FORD
• LETTER 64-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO MR. ROBERT KENNEDY
• LETTER 65-GÜNTHER ANDERS TO CLAUDE EATHERLY
• APPENDIX
• POSTSCRIPT FOR THE AMERICAN READER