War poem - Mixed

War poem on destruction of Dresden,Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A poem on the mass murder of defenseless civilians by the British and the Americans during World War Two.

This poem, Lumberjacked Cities, is part of the Genghis Lotus Poetry Collection, a selection of poems free to read online. The Genghis Lotus poems are hosted at two locations, genghislotus.com and zenvirus.com/genghis-lotus/. Webmaster for both sites is poet Hugh Cook, born in Britain, educated in New Zealand, and the author of, amongst other works, the fantasy series Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.

The poem focuses on a phase during the Second World War in which Britain and America moved into a mode of mass murder, gratuitously slaughtering the civilian populations of, amongst other cities, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

You can, if it suits you, create an elegant intellectual justification for these war crimes. I would suggest, however, that constructing such a thesis would not be the optimal use of the human intellect.

If you were to construct such a thesis, it would have to deal with, to start with, the fact that the British and the Americans had committed themselves to the position that they would accept nothing short of absolute surrender.

In other words, the destruction of entire cities was a strategy conducted in a context in which the allies (that is, the British and the Americans) had deliberately chosen to preclude any possibility of a negotiated surrender.

During the Cold War, when the West was gearing up for global thermonuclear warfare, there was a political need to justify the use of nuclear weapons, and, for this reason, the West never confronted either the human cost of the destruction of entire civilian cities or the war crimes committed by their leaders.

In particular, the nuclear annihilation of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was often construed, in the West, as an act of virtue. The virtue of hard necessity. Murder not as a crime but as a duty.

If you doubt the truth of this statement, then you could try checking out the archives of any newspaper of record (that is to say, any reputable broadsheet newspaper) for issues round about 6 August and 9 August, the anniversaries of the atomic bombing of, respectively, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki get a lot of publicity in the West and the firebombing of Tokyo is, of course, remembered in Japan.

Dresden is part of a pattern. This city was made, for the most part, of wooden buildings. When these were set alight by incendiary bombs, the resulting firestorm was so fierce that, in some cases, people had the air sucked out of their very lungs.

Horror does not require nuclear war. All horror requires is a miscue with a pot of boiling water in the kitchen.

If you're interested in learning more about the human cost of the destruction of Dresden, an easy way to get acquainted with the topic of the destruction of Dresden, a city of wooden building which were set alight by incendiary is to read Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel Slaughterhouse Five.

During the Second World War, Vonnegut, an American of German extraction, served in the American army, and was captured by the Germans.

As a prisoner of war, he was accommodated in a slaughterhouse, that is to say, a place for butchering animals. This place was one of the few places where survival was possible in the firestorm that consumed the city of Dresden.

While Vonnegut's novel is SF, it is written from the sober perspective of someone who was there, who was at ground zero when the city was incinerated, and who saw his duty as being to tell the tale of that event.

Mixed War Poem:
Kaddish
Nagasaki
Hiroshima
Tokyo
Dresden