Cannae and Hiroshima

Eighty-one years ago today on August 6, 1945, a nice man from Ohio named Paul Tibbets flew an airplane named after his mom to Japan to kill 70,000 people at 8:15 AM, with a single weapon named Little Boy.

An oddly comparable apocalypse had been perpetrated almost exactly 2,161 years earlier. On August 2, 216 BCE, 50-60 thousand Romans lay dead or dying in pools of their own blood, vomit and feces at Cannae. The Romans were killed in more intimate and terrible ways (limbs hacked off, faces, chests and abdomens punctured and mangled) over a more extended period of a few hours, rather than instantaneously vaporized like the citizens of Hiroshima.

These two horrible events, which if we would remember anniversaries should be observed together in the first week of every August, had similar impacts on the societies which lived through them.

Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (Harper Perennial, 1996), is a startling book. I offered it to my father-in-law, who had been a 19-year-old American soldier trained to pilot Higgins boats to the beaches for thirteen Pacific landings, and who would have been ordered to storm mainland Japan in a deadly first wave if Truman had decided not to use the atom bomb to end World War II. Hypothetically but for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bob might never have survived the war, my wife would never have been born, and my children and grandchildren would not exist. I'll never forget Bob's perspective on the Lifton book. He very rarely spoke about the war, but he said Lifton was right, Paul Tibbets never had to drop that bomb: the USA, Truman, et al., were probably guilty of a transcendently immoral act that just incidentally saved his own life. 

At the same time, he said when societies fail to avert destructive wars, any and every terrible weapon simply will be deployed. No other morality exists. If Abraham Lincoln had been in possession of a nuke in 1863, he definitely would have used it against Richmond! Lincoln could only afford his wonderful "malice toward none and charity for all... to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who (had) borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphan..." in 1865. That was after "every drop of blood drawn by the lash (was) paid by another drawn with the sword." That's the only way it ever works.

In The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, by Robert L. O'Connell (Random House, 2011) a renowned military historian meticulously narrates one of the most famous battles in the history of Western civilization. My daughter was a classics major who wrote a fascinating thesis about Roman society, but coincidentally developed great admiration for Hannibal Barca during her studies. The Carthaginian commander was fatally wrong about the nature of Roman power, and his inability to separate the alliances ultimately brought the slaughter of his own people and such destruction of his once-great home city as can compare with the atomic obliterations in Japan many centuries later.

The impact of Cannae on the Roman psyche was analogous to the impact of Hiroshima in America. The handful of Roman survivors of the battle were shamed and banished to Sicily. Those disgraced remnants became a nucleus for a future army, but the spectre of Cannae haunted everyone. No matter how all-powerful Rome was later, she remained instinctively afraid, she always expected the empire's fall, and she always knew that it must deserve to fall. The Republic went into full panic after its catastrophic defeat in 216. The Senate appointed a dictator, began drafting young boys, criminals and slaves to fill the ranks of the legions for the existential crisis, and even banned public mourning for those 20% of military-age Roman men whose bodies were rotting in the southern Italian field. 

Perhaps Rome only became a brutal empire as a reaction to its chronic nightmare of another Cannae. Maybe if not for that nightmare the Republic could have survived. Perhaps the USA was similarly harmed by the unspeakable flight of the Enola Gay. 

It seems to be the same whether you are victor, vanquished, or both: when so much is destroyed and you were there, you think it must somehow have been at least partly your fault. It changes you toward a darker future.

That darker future often brings desperate solutions. E.g., "psychedelic assisted therapies" or psychiatry itself, little manipulations of the brain to "improve" human cognition, emotion and behavior which only cause more harm and make people crazier than ever.

We need to pay better attention, and solve this.