The Personality of War

John Bryson

• Publisher: John Bryson
• ISBN:
  9781922219244
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

The Personality of War - A volume comprising five pieces. Dresden.
Now an old man, a onetime Air Force flyer recalls his time in the night sky during the bombing of Dresden.
For the incineration of a hundred and forty thousand souls, if things went right, for the destruction of a graceful city, of its old walls and obedient gardens, they flew east. He was the navigator. Rehearsals for the Death of Taipei.
One day every year Taiwan practiced its defenses against its possible invasion by China, or for its own invasion of China. Here is the moment in Taipei. Battle Songs.
Music is as much the sound track to certain grainy recollections as it is to silent movies. Here are the popular songs of WW2 and the warfare they recall. This Perilous Winter in St Moritz.
Holidaying at St Moritz as he had since childhood, German industrialist Herr Genscher rides the cable car to the mountain top to meet his son, and recalls his vacation here on leave from World War Two, as did resting British officers, sharing the ski runs. The End of All Wars.
Four stories, moments which ended World War Two, moments for a small band of German women who formed a chamber orchestra in a cellar in East Berlin, moments for a fighter pilot in New Guinea who disobeyed the cease-fire, for another pilot who was exercising in clouds over the Arafura Sea when told the war is over, and the end of the War in Vietnam for a soldier so damaged by warfare he brings cruelty home with him as if it were a trophy.

The End Of All Wars

One.

THE BELLS of our two cathedrals, the Catholic and the Anglican, rang out over the streets while policemen on point duty slowed the traffic below, their carillon riffs pealed between the office blocks and the department stores, to the stone towers of the small kerbside chapels where, like a Feast Day procession, they brought out of doors the chimes of Saint James and the chimes of Saint Francis, and then the deep Wesleyan on the hill, and as everyone watched from the footpaths, together they rang all the doves of the city into the air.

This was the memorabilia of August 14, 1945, at Tuesday, part of the detail. The more primary statement about the state of the world was being posted at that moment on the bulletin boards outside newspress offices, and it read: Japan Surrenders.

The distinction between detail and generality had become part of the fabric of the times by then. People often began sentences with the phrase ‘details aside’, or ended anecdotes much the same way. It seemed to be not so much a failure of imagination as it was a reliance on it. Everyone received their news this way, in the generality as required, for example, by censorship and security, and were well used now to filling in the detail themselves. This was how it had worked when radio newscasters spoke of the fall of Singapore, of the beach-heads in New Guinea, and the surrender of Java. This was how it worked when an American aeroplane dropped a bomb of inexplicable power on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki, events of such magnitude that it seemed the War in the Pacific could not end until the imagination of the world had time to go to work on it, and so make it feasible.

This point had been reached now as the crowd turned from the bulletin boards, where a vigil had stood for the past eight days, ran the forecourt and onto the road with shoppers who came from the mercers and the manchesters and the teahouses, while motorists climbed out of their carriages without bothering to park and passengers jumped from the swamped tram cars, and turned the streets into a dance hall.

Military commands on Pacific Islands had the news by radio, except for those in terrain inaccessible to the air-waves, as was a unit in the Prince Alexander Ranges which was notified by a dispatch wrapped in oilcloth and carried between villages by New Guinean foot runners, and near Balik Papan the message came through by way of a squadron of Mosquito bombers which overflew the camp in victory formation and circled while bare-chested infantrymen burst, waving, from camouflage.

Over Tokyo Radio, the Emperor directed his armed forces everywhere to hold fire, and current almanacs generally treat the southern Pacific as though fighting stopped right there. But the unruly details were otherwise, at least in Bougainville and Borneo, where local unit commanders decided to disengage from disputed ridges and waterways until the Japanese dispatches and time to get around.

A reconnaissance pilot flying a herringbone course so as to cover the evasive tracks near Rabaul watched lines of Japanese infantrymen walking toward the sea. They moved into the jungle if he dropped too low, but two days later, when he flew over the beach, he found it as crowded as a resort, and the swimmers waved from the shallows while their clothes hung on the butts of rifles which were rammed like sticks in the sand.

At a Japanese compound on South Bougainville, the artillery lay unfrocked and askew, while soldiers waded the camouflage nets into the lagoon to trap fish. Upstream, rain had been falling for days, and the Japanese who had been in control until then of that part of the Mobiai River parked an ammunition carrier across the current so they could bathe and wash clothes in the lee.

At five-thirty next morning an Australian radio unit intercepted a transmission in the frail voice of Lt-General Masetane Kanda, who was then instructing the outposts under his command in the parade-ground procedures proper for a surrender with dignity.

Early next day, or early on a day not much later, the man whose story this is took off from an airfield on South Bougainville as the observer in a reconnaissance plane. They flew further out than was necessary for a security sweep. The air was misty where cloud had caught on the ridges, blue over the valleys between, and down there a flashing sun was shooting the rapids. The pilot’s chart was marked with the position of Japanese encampments which the observer had copied from a map back in the operations room, so they knew where to begin.

They flew in on the first camp, a surprise, set at altitude enough to watch over the sly shipping channels between here and the atolls, a hillside airstrip implausible if the wind was wrong, but when they passed over the treetops, turning, the leaves were quiet. Here were two huts, so far as they could tell, mossy poles and dappled canvas set back under the branches and the movement of upturned faces. From a post a flag hung as still as an empty sleeve, and on the wet grass, midfield, floated a freshly white-painted cross.

They overflew once at a stately pace, saluting with the dipping of wings. By the time they taxied back after landing, the small ceremony had already begun, a dozen or so men dressing to the left, barely enough now for a platoon, most of them in their twenties, stiff and serious in buttoned jackets and duck caps, at one end a youngster with humid spectacles and at the other an old man in a ludicrous apron. Their only armament was a modest sword which the officer gripped by the scabbard as if it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Dresden
• Rehearsals for the Death of Taipei
• Battle Songs
• This Perilous Winter in St Moritz
• The End of All Wars