The German researchers were up in the wilds of Norway, analyzing thousands of trees along a pristine rolling landscape of fjords and sky. It should have been routine, just another day at the office (in the forest). But their samples kept showing something strange, right around the year 1945. The trees’ growth was stunted in that precise time frame, and some didn’t recover at all. The scientists began collecting local lore, and they eventually found a reason.
A Nazi battleship called the Tirpitz – referred to as “The Beast” by no less an authority as Winston Churchill – had hid from Allied planes in the area during World War II. Part of its cover was chemical camouflage: a massive smokescreen that worked to mask this largest of all battleships ever built by a European navy. The haze had blotted out the sun and choked out the trees with the toxic concoction for the better part of a year, and the trees have showed it ever since. It made for an interesting little story at one of the science magazines I write for by day.
But for a little science story, it carries quite a big metaphor. And it’s something that may resonate with readers who may soon be interested in my forthcoming first novel from Pandamoon Publishing.
You see, “history isn’t just one thing – it’s the only thing” (as one of my characters puts it). Or as William Faulkner so artfully framed it: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Those trees are rooted down and unmoving in that Norwegian soil for these last 70 years, and relatively easy to study. But you can also see the trauma in the world’s peoples and cultures.
Take world events now. We have a Europe that is radicalizing, and is becoming increasingly suspicious and hateful toward immigrants and “foreigners.” The United States is increasingly interested in isolationism and “populism.” China is eager to assert its dominance in the Asian sphere so it never again has to suffer the indignities it suffered at the hands of others from the 19th and 20th centuries.
The past is not past, in any of this. As Santayana once wrote, “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” But it seems to me that even if the lessons are learned, there may be a cycle to things that appears to be inescapable, inexorable, decreed by fate.
The novel I wrote, Project 137, plunges into one of the lesser-known chapters of recent history. In fact, it may open your eyes to the worst World War II history you’ve never heard of.
Unit 731 was a human experimentation program that defied any code of ethics or decency, including vivisections, deliberate medical torture, and the spreading of disease throughout wartime China. The horrors are too many to enumerate here in a few sentences, and only ended with Japan’s surrender.
You may be thinking: good thing those guys lost and were caught, right? But you would be wrong. Because almost everyone responsible, from the Emperor on down, was never prosecuted. Instead, the United States authorities cut deals with these war criminals – all to further our own biological and chemical warfare experiments program.
The history doesn’t end there – and some would argue, it continues to this day.
As for the novel, it follows a doctor untangling this Japanese-cum-American legacy in the year 2087. The medical thriller/science-fiction dystopia follows a string of murders – and a conspiracy that looms out of a toxic haze, like a huge battleship, with its eight 15-inch guns locked and loaded. The book shows, I think, that there is nothing new under the sun (to paraphrase the Book of Ecclesiastes).
My point to all this is: history may be inescapable. But you have to believe that there is a chance to right the past wrongs. By refining our knowledge of what has come before… perhaps we can be better in the times to come. Just maybe, by knowing what self-inflicted damage we have wrought, we can prevent our children’s children from having that encoded in their view of the world.
Or, as one of the German scientists told me, as she looked very scientifically at the gnarled tree rings from 1945 for the first time:
“Of course, we were wondering why that is so, why there was this exceptional stress response.”