Made In America - Bill Bryson [192]
Oddly, one of the things World War II didn’t leave Americans with was a memorable song. Almost every other war had, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ of the Revolution to ‘John Brown’s Body’ and the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ of the Civil War, to World War I’s ‘Over There’. Most World War II songs by contrast seemed to be begging for instant obscurity. Among the more notably forgettable titles to emerge in the early days of fighting were ‘They’re Going to Be Playing Taps on the Japs’, ‘Goodbye, Mama, l’m Off to Yokohama’, ‘Let’s Knock the Hit Out of Hitler’, ‘Slap the Jap Right Off the Map’, and ‘When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys’. Only one achieved anything like permanence in the popular consciousness – and that as a catch-phrase rather than a song. It was based on the supposedly real-life story of a naval chaplain, William A. McGuire, who reportedly climbed into the seat of an anti-aircraft gun at Pearl Harbor after the gunner had been killed and began knocking Japanese planes from the sky as he cried the famous words: ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.’ In fact, as a bemused McGuire told the world after the song became a hit, he had never said any such thing, and indeed had never even fired a gun. All he had done was help lift some boxes of ammunition.30
On 6 August 1945 President Harry S Truman announced to the nation: ‘Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It is an atomic bomb.’ It was the first time that most people had heard the term. In the following years many other words connected with splitting the atom would become increasingly familiar to them: nuclear, fission, fusion, radiation, reactor, mushroom cloud, fallout, fallout shelter, H-bomb, ground zero, and, unexpectedly, bikini for a two-piece swimsuit designed by Louis Reard, a French couturier, in 1946, and named for the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, where America had just begun testing atomic bombs.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the end of one war and the beginning of another: the cold war. The cold war may not have generated a lot of casualties, but it was none the less the longest and costliest war America has ever fought. War was unquestionably good for business – so good that in 1946 the president of General Electric, Charles E. Wilson, went so far as to call for a ‘permanent war economy’. He more or less got his wish. Throughout the 1950s America spent more on defence than it did on anything else – indeed, almost as much as it did on all other things together. By 1960, military spending accounted for 49.7 per cent of the federal budget – more than the combined national budgets of Britain, France, West Germany and Italy.31 Even America’s foreign aid was overwhelmingly military. Of the $50 billion that America distributed in aid in the 1950s, 90 per cent was for military purposes.
Cold war,