Bill's posts with tag: authors
 When I saw the news this afternoon, I felt it like a blow.
It was in my later years of school when I first encountered the works of Kurt Vonnegut. It was the novel "Jailbird", one of his less distinguished efforts, which I got as a school prize. It was the second prize. I'm glad I did not get the first - that was some kind of kid's encyclopedia. I had not even heard of Vonnegut in those days.
Nor was I familiar with "Jailbird", whose theme revolved around corporate America, locksmithing, low security prisons, and Watergate, not to mention passing references to the McCarthy witch hunts, all of which were unfamiliar to me. But the book, for some reason, gripped. I think every fan of Vonnegut's will say the same thing - Vonnegut's style is almost the exact obverse of conventional writing, with the denouement usually coming right at the beginning, with no proper structured plot or character build up, and revisiting themes all through - but he knew how to write. Oh yes he did.
I re-read Jailbird a couple of times before I found more books by Vonnegut - short stories, essays, novels, I simply couldn't get enough. Vonnegut was difficult to find in India then - and it's almost impossible to find him now. Sidney Sheldon? Sure. John Grisham? No problem! Kurt Vonnegut? Kurt who???
Found a lot in the end, though...
Somewhere along the way I kept on finding references to the novel Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut himself referred to it numerous times in his writings. I have to point out that all this was in the eighties, when there was no internet and I couldn't just run a google search for myself. Then I came across a tattered paperback copy in the library. I read it standing right there among the shelves, as much as I could, then I stuck it under my shirt and walked out. Yeah, I stole it.
I still have it.
There is an odd peception that the war crimes committed during the Second World War were all committed by the Nazis and the Japanese (and as for the latter, most people don't even know any of their crimes except those pertaining to Allied prisoners). Not one in a hundred will identify one of the most long drawn out, recurrent crimes - the bombing of Japanese and German cities, day and night, by American and, even more, British aircraft streams.
The reason this is a crime is that it achieved precisely nothing - it did not shorten the war by a day, it destroyed no factories, it did nothing but kill civilians and arguably harden support behind the Nazis. All it did was burn the centres out of German cities, with their old and lovely architecture, and kill civilians not just indiscriminately but deliberately. In fact, the idea was to time the bomber waves so that the second wave of attack would arrive just in time to kill the firemen and ambulance workers as they tried to rescue the survivors of the first wave.
The people running this arguably terror campaign were genuine psychopaths - Churchill, who had used air power against Iraqi protestors in what was then Mesopotamia in the 1920s, and his henchman, Arthur "Bomber" Harris, probably one of the worst unpunished war criminals of all time.
Possibly the acme of the conventional bombing, in Germany, (the Japanese were bombed out in much larger numbers even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that's another story) was the fire-bombing of the German historical city of Dresden in February 1945. This city, militarily insignificant, was repeatedly bombed for no apparent purpose than to advertise to the advancing Red Army that the Western Allies were ruthless and would go to almost any extent - a precursor, as it were, to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings. As one critic wrote, "The Soviets seem to be able to take over cities without razing them to the ground."
Vonnegut was a prisoner in Dresden at the time (if I remember right he had been an artilleryman) and witnessed it all. In the end he wrote a book about the bombing - and that book was Slaughterhouse Five.
How does one write about a massacre one has personally witnessed? One can write a factual account, but this is liable to read no different from a historian's analysis; or one can write a personal memoir, but unless one has seen everything (most unlikely) this is going to be limited to one's own experiences or else hearsay. In either event it is going to be coloured with one's own biases.
Vonnegut tried his own - third - method.
I am not going to discuss the novel - anyone interested can find an account of it here. But I will say that although Vonnegut relied on the (then accepted, but since discredited) casualty estimates of the British "historian" David Irving, in every other way his rendering of the bombing ("like giants marching") is about as good as it gets from a personal viewpoint. He did not see everything; nor does his character Billy Pilgrim. He did not know why the city was bombed; nor does Pilgrim. He was a victim, accidentally spared; so was Pilgrim.
Before Slaughterhouse Five almost no one had heard of the fire bombing of Dresden - now it is impossible to ignore. That is the message of the novel.
I have, over the years, accumulated a small library of Vonnegut writings, and I am going to begin reading them again in the wake of his death today...
As the Tralfamadorian aliens in Slaughterhouse Five would say, "So it goes".
So long, Kilgore Trout, sorry, Mr Vonnegut. We'll miss you.
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