In Paul Fussell’s essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” , he argues the importance of experience when thinking about the use of the atom bomb. He begins his essay with a verse: “In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.” This is the basis of his argument, that those who did not experience the war firsthand could not understand. They did not know the horrors the soldiers went through. The Japanese were determined to win this fight; they would mobilize every Japanese person to suceed. If the atom bomb was not dropped, many more lives would have been lost. Fussell starts his argument with why it was necessary to drop the bomb. Many of those that say the bomb should not have been used are implying that, according to Arthur T. Hadley, “it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs”. Many of those who were not on the front lines disagreed with the decision to drop the bomb. Many of those who were on the front lines were not “elaborately educated people”. These soldiers experienced the brutality and mostrosities of the war. Many of the soldiers have remained silent about their firsthand experiences because they were …show more content…
The soldiers and marines would view the Japanese as “subhuman, little yellow beasts” and the “only approppriate treatment was ‘annihilation.’” The Americans dehumanized the Japanese people, merely because they were not European. Many kept body parts, such as hands, as trophies. Others recounted how signs encouraging everyone to “KILL JAPS!” Herman Wouk suggests “this obliviousness of both sides to the fact that the opponents were human beings may perhaps be cited as the key to the many massacres of the Pacific war.” They saw all Japanese as monsters an this justifies the dropping of the