A Colossal Wreck (10 page)

When I was sixteen I developed a passion for the baroque and in my enthusiasm hitch-hiked part of the way by barge up the Rhine—price of the ride, playing chess with the captain—to Würzburg to admire the Bishop’s
Residenz
with its ceilings by Tiepolo, which supposedly prompted Napoleon to say that if he could not be emperor of France he would want to be bishop of Würzburg.

I made my journey in 1957 and now find from his very fine article
in the
Catholic Worker
of June–July 1996, that Gordon Zahn was there at the same time. Zahn recalls how, at 9.20 p.m. on March 16, all the bells of Wurzburg began to ring, a reminder of the time, twelve years earlier, when British bombs hurtled down, destroying 85 percent of Wurzburg in twenty minutes and killing 3,000 men, women and children now buried in a common grave in Wurzburg cemetery. The Bishop’s palace was heavily damaged, though the Tiepolo ceilings were spared.

Wurzburg had no military significance. There was no reason for the raid, beyond the desire to exterminate and destroy. Like myself, Zahn had walked about Wurzburg back in that 1957 spring, brooding on the Apocalypse twelve years before. He’d been a wartime conscientious objector, and reflected on his Wurzburg visit that the bombing “must be described … as a work of calculated barbarism and the slaughter of its inhabitants as calculated murder.” But this piece in the
Catholic Worker
discusses a new memoir,
The Withered Garland
, by the RAF commander Peter Johnson, who led that raid. After reading
The Withered Garland
, Zahn now confesses that “impossible though it may have seemed then, I believe that, were Peter Johnson and I ever to meet, we could be good friends.”

Johnson’s father was a captain in the British Navy, killed in 1914, at the very start of World War I, in a German submarine attack. Young Peter grew up with a great hatred of Germans. World War II found him in the Royal Air Force. In 1942 he applied to join Bomber Command. Here he was soon furnished with vivid evidence of the moral context for his activities. Soon after he had assumed active command of his squadron, a visiting high-up from London was inspecting photographs of the results of a raid on Dusseldorf. The VIP woofed with satisfaction: “Capital, capital. This is really getting somewhere. I do congratulate you.” Johnson looked over his shoulder and got a glimpse of the photos.

“I had never seen anything like them. Seen through the stereoscopic glass, the detail was staggeringly clear, showing just rows and rows of apparently empty boxes which had been houses. They had no roofs or content. This had been a crowded residential area, long streets of terraced houses in an orderly right-angled arrangement,
covering virtually the whole of the six-inch square photograph. There were one or two open spaces, but the chief impression was just those rows and rows of empty shells, a huge dead area where once thousands of people had lived. There were no craters, simply those burnt out houses.”

Johnson began to have “reflections and doubts.” He wondered why incendiaries were necessary in the raids on the Krupp’s munitions works at Essen and Kiel. “Nothing but the end of the war,” he wrote in an undelivered letter intended for a girlfriend killed in a German raid on London, “can stop the destruction of practically every city in Germany.” Johnson was beginning to fathom the fact, as Zahn writes, that “though Hitler may have proclaimed and boasted of the Third Reich’s commitment to
Totaller Krieg
[Total War] … it remained for British and American airpower to develop, perfect and practice it without moral restraint.”

Johnson evokes British bombing policy, in particular “de-housing,” introduced by Lord Cherwell, scientific advisor to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It was reckoned that a ton—2,000 pounds—of bombs dropped on a town center would destroy forty buildings and de-house one to two hundred people. Factoring in rates of warplane production it was happily computed by Cherwell and his men that soon a third of the entire German population would be “turned out” of house and home.

In February 1942 Lord Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, declared that “operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and, in particular, of industrial workers,” adding later “I suppose it is clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not for instance the dockyards or aircraft factories.” Churchill, with his usual bluntness, called upon the Minister of Aircraft Production for “an absolutely devastating extermination attack by very heavy bombers.”

Assigned, on the morning of March 16, 1945, the target of Wurzburg, Johnson did ask, “Why?” “Bit of railway junction,” he was told. Johnson wondered what to do. He could refuse to order his squadron into this mission, which would mean court martial and maybe execution. It would not prevent the raid and, Johnson
reflected, would mean his wife and children would get no pension. He enquired again about the merits of the target, and was told by the intelligence officer with great irritation, “I’ve said it’s an important railway center [which Johnson knew was not so] and also there are thousands of houses totally undamaged, sheltering tens of thousands of Germans. I hope that will not be the case tomorrow, which will be another nail in the enemy’s coffin.”

Johnson led the raid. Three thousand died and Wurzburg was almost completely destroyed. There were too many bodies for nails and coffins. Just a big hole for all in the cemetery and, later, a chronicle of the raid with eighty-seven pages listing the victims by name and former address. Zahn remembers his verdict of 1957, about the bombers being “barbarian murderers.” After reading Johnson’s memoir (published by New European Publications, in London, with the subtitle
Reflections and Doubts of a Bomber
) Zahn writes now of the officer in charge:

A barbarian? After reading his memoir I can no longer make that judgment. The sensitivity of the undelivered letter, the struggling with his conscience growing ever more intense as the nature of the air war became clearer—these reveal a concern about, and respect for, moral considerations and limits meriting credit, even admiration.

A murderer? Harsh though the judgment may be, it is hard to see what other term would be appropriate for the action itself, the slaughter of three thousand civilians, including women and children, in a war already won. Obedience to orders, even seen as a sworn duty cannot justify engaging in what he believed—worse still, what he knew—to be an action contrary to the Law of War: the murder of an entire city and its population.

Zahn takes Johnson’s book as an act of contrition that could awake other consciences. “In any event, the final judgment is not ours to make, but we can pray with some confidence that the Heavenly Bookkeeper will take full account of the sincerity and, in His boundless mercy, forgive.”

September 25

Sioux Falls—Here I am, in South Dakota with the express and only purpose of covering Republican Senator Larry Pressler with the slime of innuendo, aimed at providing just that marginal twitch in public opinion which will ensure the victory of his Democratic opponent, a conservative Midwest Democrat named Tim Johnson. And who knows? Johnson’s eviction of two-term incumbent Pressler could, at only a modest level of unlikelihood, mean the recapture of the Senate by the Democrats, a return to the best we can hope for—gridlock in the US Congress.

I’m here to hurl slurs at Pressler at the request of my old friend Jim Abourezk, who served as US Senator for South Dakota between 1972 and 1978 before quitting in disgust because he couldn’t get anything done. Jim, Lebanese by family origin, was born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation where his father and mother ran a store, and in course of time became a populist politician and certainly one of the most radical denizens of Congress in this century. In the mid-1970s his bill proposing vertical divestiture of the oil companies—meaning they couldn’t simultaneously own oil wells, tanker fleets, refineries and gas stations—failed in the Senate by only three votes, marking the high-water point in post-Watergate legislative exuberance. The oil companies, led by Texaco, promptly doubled their purchase orders on Congress.

Jim, now practicing law in Sioux Falls, mostly on behalf of a Yankton Indian tribe, has one failing: a loyalty to the Democratic Party that is invulnerable to the repeated rebukes of history. He’s a lesser-of-two-evils man and when driven into a corner starts the traditional keening about appointments to the federal bench.

Jim nourishes a particular contempt for Pressler, partly because this nincompoop took over the Senate seat Abourezk had held throughout the 1970s. Mentally frail and morally inert, Pressler is a man long and widely derided in Washington as an imbecile of fantastic proportions. Jokes about Pressler have haunted him from the beginning of his congressional career, when he bucked the Watergate crash for Republicans and won a House seat in 1974.

All the above facts about Pressler—ranging from his incredible
stupidity to speculation about his supposedly meandering sexual preferences—have for many years been a source of ribaldry and gossip in Washington and South Dakota. Only the ordinary voters have been spared the truth, with newspapers, radio and television respectfully displaying the words and deeds of their senior Senator.

Hence Jim Abourezk’s plea that I hurry east.

I did his bidding. On the appointed day in Sioux Falls, September 19, I faced a grueling schedule of two morning radio shows, an address to the City Club, a speech at the University of South Dakota’s Vermillion campus, addresses at two bookstores—Zanbros and Barnes and Noble—plus sidewalk encounters. At each opportunity I derided Pressler. On one radio show a listener called in to ask whether the fact that my father Claud had once written for the English
Daily Worker
might perhaps have affected my view of the Senator.

At the City Club Mrs. Pressler’s daughter by a previous marriage rose to denounce my treatment of her stepfather. The local newspaper reported that she quavered words of denunciation of my brutality before sitting down “amid stifled sobs.” That may be but she was seen ten minutes later clambering into her car with a Pressler supporter, roaring with laughter. Kevin Schieffer, Pressler’s former Chief of Staff, exhibited the imbecility of his boss by insisting on a lengthy exchange—carried on public radio—about the substantive evidence for my allegations. Pressler rushed out a statement saying that I was trying to ruin his life and that I was a tool of the Johnson campaign.

When it was all over, the local Gannett paper, the
Argus Leader
, carried the charges and editorialized that I had failed to prove them. But perhaps … out there my words will have found their mark, sufficient to make the difference. Jim Abourezk pronounced himself satisfied.

October 2

Like a death ship, its sails hanging limply off the spars, Campaign Dole drifts ever deeper into a Sargasso Sea of disaster. Dole campaigns on the crime issue and the Justice Department reports that violent crime is down 10 percent. He hammers the Clinton economy
and the Bureau of the Census announces that real income for the average American went up for the first time in six years, and that the number of Americans living in poverty dropped from 36.4 million—a tidy total, to be sure—by 1.6 million.

Things are so bad for Campaign Dole that the columnist Mary McGrory reckons its shining moment came when Bob fell off a platform in California.

October 4

Ever since leaving South Dakota, I’ve been moving westward in the ’72 Imperial, noting the effects of political campaigning on the landscape. Bad. Driving into Yellowstone from Cody, the road was ripped for sixty miles, with several hundred bulldozers, loaders, oilers, dump trucks and graders massed along terrain that looked like the Plain of Jars after four years of American bombing in Laos. This is Senator Alan Simpson’s annual contribution to the economy of Wyoming, with millions poured into the effort to build something resembling the New Jersey Turnpike from Cody through to Old Faithful, then out the other side to West Yellowstone.

After a night under canvas in sub-freezing temperatures in Yellowstone, never my favorite park, I turned southward into the Tetons, finally entering the town of Jackson Hole, a horrible spot now favored by President Bill who told Vernon Jordan not so long ago that he much preferred it to Martha’s Vineyard, since it was impossible to get “pussy” in the stuffy Massachusetts resort. Jackson Hole probably reminds Clinton of Hot Springs.

October 9

Back in 1991, when outing was a hot topic, I wrote about the matter and got the opinions of my friend John Scagliotti, maker of the famous historical documentary
Before Stonewall
. The test for outing, John said, should be:

Has the person benefited from being in the closet in careerist terms, in the sense of actively pretending to be something he or she is not? There’s a difference between a passive closet, in which you simply survive and hope for the best, and the active closet, which involves putting on a heterosexual mask and promoting yourself as such, which is in ethical contradiction to your actual life. You’ve made the choice. You’re living an actual lie, bringing girls to the company ball and so on.

So, think about a gay actor who has made the decision to advance his career by pretending to be heterosexual. But by doing that he is insulting and oppressing all those who are already out. Take Barry Diller, who is in a position of enormous power at Fox. Why doesn’t he push for a gay and lesbian TV show, which I could produce, which would be a gay version of
In Living Color
? Now, no one wants to out little people, gay teachers and so on—unless gay teachers are publicly anti-gay—but I would out people who are gay and yet are promoting heterosexuality.

I believe as a general proposition that people should come out. It would be better for them. But at the same time I understand that such a public coming out might hurt or confuse children, parents, etc. But just as there’s a difference between being passively and actively in the closet, you can be actively or passively out. In the former, you are publicly espousing a case, and in the latter, passive case, you are attempting to live a gay or lesbian life within the limits of what’s possible for you and not too hurtful to parents, children, etc. One of the reasons straight people don’t understand outing is that they don’t understand what it’s like to be gay. It’s all more complicated than they think.