‘down in the terraces between the targets’ verse, both of them dead bomber crew, but does not name any killed on the ground:
‘OfVan Wettering I speak, and Averill...who late in school|Distinguished the belt
feed lever from the belt holding pawl.’^27 It would be left to a poet and pilot eloquently
to address the retrospective distress, though focused on similarly anonymous
victims, of those dropping the incendiaries. James Dickey’s ‘The Firebombing’
recalls destroying people’s homes in order to attack their ‘will to fight’ when what
they were called upon to do without complaint was suffer, endure, and die:
The enemy-colored skin of families
Determines to hold its color
In sleep, as my hand turns whiter
Than ever, clutches the toggle—
The ship shakes bucks
Fire hangs not yet fire
In the air above Beppu
For I am fulfilling
An ‘anti-morale’ raid upon it.^28Dickey’s poem is performing one of the importantly new roles created by the
mechanical reproduction of death: the preservation of shared humanity and
responsibility—even when caught in the unenviable position of having to do one’s
patriotic duty. It does this by leaning towards the modernist modes of simultan-
eously presented multiple perspectives which had been adapted to war contexts
during the 1914–18 conflict by poets associated with the Cubists in Paris. ‘Nuit’ by
Pierre Reverdy includes two lines referring to the end of an air raid on the French
capital: ‘Les avions de feu sont presque tout pass ́e|A travers les signaux d’alarme’
(‘The warplanes have almost all gone by|Through the air-raid sirens’).^29 Later
in the century the modernist enthusiasm for multiplicity of viewpoint would be
obliged to address by means of such techniques the more anguished and intractable
issues arising from moral conflict and multiple perspective in wartime.
Writing during the 1950s of the fire raids that had burned so much of the
old wooden architecture in Japanese cities, Noriko Ibaragi resorted to a child’s
wonder at the heavens in ‘Dialogue’ and to a survivor’s sardonic irony in ‘When I
was at my Most Beautiful’.^30 When writing about the bombing of Milan in 1943,
Salvatore Quasimodo equally refrained from direct criticism of the raids as such.^31
(^27) Richard Eberhardt, ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’, in Shapiro (ed.),Poets of World War II,
31.
(^28) James Dickey, ‘Firebombing’, ibid. 157.
(^29) Pierre Reverdy, ‘Nuit’, inPlupart du temps 1915–1922(Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 244.
(^30) Noriko Ibaragi, ‘Dialogue’ and ‘When I was at my Most Beautiful’, inWhen I was at my Most
Beautiful and Other Poems, trans. Peter Robinson and Fumiko Horikawa (Cambridge: Skate Press,
1992), 23 and 32–3.
(^31) Salvatore Quasimodo, ‘Milano, Agosto 1943’, inPoesie e Discorsi sulla poesia(Milan: Mondadori,
1971), 134. Ezra Pound, though, lamented the damage to the Italian cultural heritage done by air
attacks in ‘The Pisan Cantos’; seeThe Cantos(London: Faber, 1986), 459 and 497. The Tempio
Malatestiano in Rimini had been hit by Allied bombing on 28 Dec. 1943 and 29 Jan. 1944.