We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said Harry Truman. We shall destroy their docks, their factories and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. It was to spare-And so on.
One of the books that Lily had brought Rumfoord was The Destruction of Dresden by an Englishman named David Irving. It was an American edition, published by Holt., Rinehart and Winston in 1964. What Rumfoord wanted from it were. portions of the forewords by his friends Ira C. Eaker, Lieutenant General, U.S.A.F., retired, and British Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, K.C.B., K.B.E., M.C., D.F.C., A.F.C.
I find it difficult to understand Englishmen or Americans .who weep about enemy civilians who were killed but who have not shed a tear for our gallant crews lost in combat with a cruel enemy, wrote his friend General Eaker in part. I think it would have been well for Mr. Irving to have remembered, when he was drawing the frightful picture of the civilian killed at Dresden, that V-1’s and V-2’s were at that very time failing on England, killing civilian men, women and children indiscriminately, as they were designed and launched to do. It might be well to remember Buchenwald and Coventry, too
Eaker’s foreword ended this way
I deeply regret that British and U.S. bombers killed 135,000 people in the attack on Dresden, but I remember who started the last war and I regret even more the -loss of more than 5,000,000, Allied lives in the necessary effort to completely defeat and utterly destroy nazism.
So it goes.
What Air Marshal Saundby said, among other things, was this
That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. That it was really a military necessity few, after reading this book, will believe. It was one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances. Those who approved it were neither wicked no?, cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the appalling destructive power of air bombardment in the spring of 1945
The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim., war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an at attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people.
So it goes.
‘If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming,’ said Billy Pilgrim behind his white linen screens, ‘just ask for Wild Bob.’
Lily Rumfoord shuddered, went on pretending to read the Harry Truman thing.
Billy’s daughter Barbara came in later that day. She was all doped up, had the same glassy-eyed look that poor old Edgar Derby wore just before he was shot in Dresden. Doctors had given her pills so she could continue to function, even though her father was broken and her mother was dead.
So it goes.
She was accompanied by a doctor and a nurse. Her brother Robert was flying home from a battlefield in Vietnam. ‘Daddy,’ she said tentatively. ‘Daddy? ‘
But Billy was ten years away, back in 1958. He was examining the eyes of a young male Mongolian idiot in order to prescribe corrective lenses. The idiot’s mother was there, acting as an interpreter.
‘How many dots do you see?’ Billy Pilgrim asked him.
And then Billy traveled in time to when he was sixteen years old, in the waiting room of a doctor. Billy had an infected thumb. There was only one other patient waiting-an old, old man. The old man was in agony because of gas. He farted tremendously, and then he belched.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to Billy. Then he did it again. ‘Oh God he said, ‘I knew it was going to be bad getting old.’ He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know it was going to be this bad.’
Billy Pilgrim opened his eyes in the hospital in Vermont, did not know where he was. Watching him was his son Robert. Robert was wearing the uniform of the famous Green Berets. Robert’s hair was short, was wheat-colored bristles. Robert was clean and neat. He was decorated with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star and a Bronze Star with two clusters.
This was a boy who had flunked out of high school, who had been an alcoholic at sixteen, who had run with a rotten bunch of kids, who had been arrested for tipping over hundreds of tombstones in a Catholic cemetery one time. He was all straightened out now. His posture was wonderful and his shoes were shined and his trousers were pressed, and he was a leader of men.
‘Dad?’
Billy Pilgrim closed his eyes again.
Billy had to miss his wife’s funeral because he was still so sick. He was conscious, though, while Valencia was being put into the ground in Ilium. Billy hadn’t said much since regaining consciousness, hadn’t responded very elaborately to the news of Valencia’s death and Robert’s coming home from the war and so on-so it was generally believed that he was a vegetable. There was talk of performing an operation on him later, one which might improve the circulation of blood to his brain.
Actually, Billy’s outward listlessness was a screen. The listlessness concealed a mind which was fizzing and flashing thrillingly. It was preparing letters and lectures about the flying saucers, the negligibility of death and the true nature of time.
Professor Rumfoord said frightful things about Billy within Billy’s hearing, confident that Billy no longer had any brain at all. ‘Why don’t they let him die?’ he asked Lily.
‘I don’t know, she said.
‘That’s not a human being anymore. Doctors are for human beings. They should turn him over to a veterinarian or a tree surgeon. They’d know what to do. Look at him! That’s life, according to the medical profession. Isn’t life wonderful?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lily.
Rumfoord talked to Lily about the bombing of Dresden one time, and Billy heard it all. Rumfoord had a problem about Dresden. His one-volume history of the Army Air Force in the Second World War was supposed to be a readable condensation of the twenty-seven-volume Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two. The thing was, though, there was almost nothing in the twenty-seven volumes about the Dresden raid, even though it had been such a howling success. The extent of the success had been kept a secret for many years after the war-a secret from the American people. It was no secret from the Germans, of course, or from the Russians, who occupied Dresden after the war, who are in Dresden still.
‘Americans have finally heard about Dresden.,’ said Rumfoord, twenty-three years after the raid. ‘A lot of them know now how much worse it was than Hiroshima. So I’ve got to put something about it in my book. From the official Air Force standpoint., it’ll all be new.’
‘Why would they keep it a secret so long?’ said Lily.
‘For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts’ said Rumfoord, ‘might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do.’
It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. ‘I was there’ he said.
It was difficult for Rumfoord to take Billy seriously, since Rumfoord, had so long considered Billy a repulsive non-person who would be much better off dead. Now, with Billy speaking clearly and to the point, Rumfoord’s ears wanted to treat the words as a foreign language that was not worth learning. did he say?’ said Rumfoord.
Lily had to serve as an ‘interpreter. ‘He said he was there.’ she explained.
‘He was where?
‘I don’t know,’ said Lily. ‘Where were you?’ she asked Billy.
‘Dresden’ said Billy.
‘Dresden,’ Lily told Rumfoord.
‘He’s simply echoing things we say,’ said Rumfoord.
‘Oh, ‘ said Lily.
‘He’s got echolalia now.’
‘Oh.’
Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say. But Billy didn’t really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it. Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.
Rumfoord went on insisting for several hours that Billy had echolalia-told nurses and a doctor that Billy had echolalia now. Some experiments were performed on Billy. Doctors and nurses tried to get Billy to echo something, but Billy wouldn’t make a sound for them.
‘He isn’t doing it now,’ said Rumfoord peevishly. ‘The minute you go away, he’ll start doing it again.’