Paul Tibbets, the man who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Earlier this week I went to an entertaining talk by the writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink and other bestsellers. Midway through he made a throwaway comment about the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. ‘Imagine how it felt to be the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima – how do we feel about that kind of moral responsibility?’ The implication of this rhetorical question was that the pilot must have been desperately wrestling with the ethical consequences and dilemmas of releasing the world’s first atomic weapon on the unsuspecting city.

Malcolm Gladwell is mistaken. In actual fact, the US Air Force pilot, Paul Tibbets, experienced no profound moral quandaries about his actions, either before or after dropping the bomb that killed an estimated 140,000 people. In a revealing interview with the oral historian Studs Terkel in 2002, when aged 87, Tibbets described exactly what happened on the historic mission in the Enola Gay.

It was absolutely perfect. After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, “You know what we’re doing today?” They said, “Well, yeah, we’re going on a bombing mission.” I said, “Yeah, we’re going on a bombing mission, but it’s a little bit special.” My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, “Colonel, we wouldn’t be playing with atoms today, would we?” I said, “Bob, you’ve got it just exactly right.” So I went back up in the front end and I told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, in turn. I said, “OK, this is an atom bomb we’re dropping.” They listened intently but I didn’t see any change in their faces or anything else. Those guys were no idiots. We’d been fiddling round with the most peculiar-shaped things we’d ever seen.

So we’re coming down. We get to that point where I say “one second” and by the time I’d got that second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000lbs had come out of the front. I’m in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just great.

Tibbets tells the tale as if it were an exciting action movie. The tension builds, everyone’s on alert, the timing is crucial – and the execution is perfect. A job well done. Terkel gave his interviewee the opportunity to explore the ethics of his actions, but received little response:

Studs Terkel: Do you ever have any second thoughts about the bomb?
Paul Tibbets: Second thoughts? No. Studs, look. Number one, I got into the air corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. That’s what I believe in and that’s what I work for.

Ultimately Tibbets justified his action with the age-old reason that he was just following orders: ‘I did what I was told’.

Terkel then asked him about his thoughts on the September 11 bombings, and how the US should respond to the threat of terrorism. His emphatic reply displayed the simplistic topography of his moral beliefs:

Paul Tibbets: We’ve got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn’t waste five seconds on them…
Studs Terkel: One last thing, when you hear people say, “Let’s nuke ‘em,” “Let’s nuke these people,” what do you think?
Paul Tibbets: Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ‘em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: “You’ve killed so many civilians.” That’s their tough luck for being there.

It is certainly worth reading the whole interview, which first appeared in The Guardian. I think the most remarkable aspect is that Tibbets seemed to display no empathy for the victims of the Hiroshima bombing. Flying up high in the sky, he never came into contact with the people he killed, or with the survivors. He never saw the burned skin, the charred bodies, the faces of the children wandering alone looking for their parents. His distance from the victims was essential to his empathetic denial.

I wonder if Tibbets, who died in 2007, ever allowed himself to see some of the rare original film footage taken immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including shots inside emergency hospitals where people were being treated for the effects of the radiation. It is so harrowing and horrifying that the US government denied its existence for two decades, and only publicly released it in the late 1960s. In 1970 Erik Barnouw produced a 16-minute film using the footage called Hiroshima Nagasaki August, 1945. You can watch it here (in two parts). I warn you that you will not like what you see, that you may have to turn away from the reality of what human beings can do to one another. I have never seen anything so disturbing.

Like all ranking charts, the choices are bound to be controversial. But I can assure you that a very careful formula has been used to make the selection. To find themselves on this exclusive list, a person has to display a unique combination of traits: they must have a highly developed capacity to step into the shoes of other people; their empathising must have had a major social impact; it should have required acts of personal courage; and finally, it must provide inspiration for others.

So, let’s meet our empathetic wunderkids, in reverse order:

#5. Hilary Swank

Hilary Swank playing Brandon Teena in the 1999 film Boys Don't Cry.

Coming in at number five is Hollywood actress Hilary Swank. She gains her coveted place for her Oscar-winning role in the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, which is based on the real-life story of Brandon Teena, a transgendered man who was raped and murdered by his male friends after they found out that he had female genitalia. In preparing for the part, Swank cut off her hair, dressed up in her husband’s clothes, put on a cowboy hat, and ventured out onto the streets of New York for a month to see if she could pass for a young man, just as Brandon Teena had done. Describing her adventure, she said, ‘I got to see what it’s like for a transgender person, or a person with a sexual identity crisis, or a lesbian or a gay person, and the daily harassment you can get…it’s a scary place to be, to feel not understood’. Swank’s brilliant portrayal of Brandon Teena helped raise the political profile of the struggles faced by transgendered people, and also inspired her to become a campaigner on gay, lesbian and transgender issues, and a spokesperson for the Harvey Milk School in New York.

Find out more: Watch the film Boys Don’t Cry and visit the website of the Harvey Milk School.

#4. George Orwell

George Orwell in 1946, pushing his adopted son Richard through the streets of Islington, North London.

How could you have an Empathy Top Five without putting George Orwell on the list? He earned his empathy spurs in the 1920s while working as a colonial police officer in Burma. Orwell was disgusted at the brutality of colonialism which he witnessed first-hand, and vowed on his return to Britain to step into the shoes of everyday working people and discover what their lives were really like. ‘I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over other man’, he said. ‘I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.’ That’s when he decided to dress up as a tramp and live amongst beggars and vagabonds on the streets of East London, a time of his life described in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). With this book, together with his political reportage, Orwell shone the spotlight on neglected and marginalised communities in British society like almost no other writer in the twentieth century.

Find out more: Read Down and Out in Paris and London, and Orwell’s short essay ‘Down the Mine’.

#3. Harriet Beecher Stowe

Charley, killed by cholera in 1849.

The American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe may be history’s most forgotten empathist. The great issue of her age was slavery, and the brutal treatment of slaves on the cotton plantations in the south of the United States. In 1852 she published her story Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was effectively a political tract against slavery. It was a publishing sensation, selling four million copies within a decade. The book helped transform the worldview of a whole generation, showing them the horrors of slavery up close, and thereby encouraging the rebellion against slavery and its proponents that eventually played itself out in the American Civil War. Beecher Stowe was inspired to write the book following the tragic death of her eighteen-month-old son Charley in the Cincinnati cholera epidemic of 1849. This event ripped her open into empathy for black women whose children were being sold into slavery: ‘It was at his bed, and at his grave, that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.’

Find out more: Read the fascinating biography Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan Hedrick.

#2. Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi taking a rest from spinning cloth in 1946. He is one of the few political figures in history able to make his own underwear.

I realise this may create gasps of incredulity, but the great master of empathy Mahatma Gandhi only comes in at second place. After his return to India from South Africa in 1915, Gandhi decided that if he was going to campaign for Indian independence from British rule, he would need to experience what life was really like for the poorest people in the country. So he threw away his fancy barrister’s suit and collar, wrapped himself in a dhoti or loincloth, and established the Sabamarti Ashram, where he lived from 1917 to 1930. Ashram life was about stepping into the shoes of peasant farmers. He and his followers grew their own food, spun their own cloth, and cleaned out the latrines – a job usually relegated to the Untouchable (Dalit) caste. Gandhi’s deep empathetic instinct also took him across religious boundaries. He was appalled by the violence between Hindus and Muslims, and fervently opposed the creation of a separate Muslim state. A devout Hindu himself, he once declared to a group of Hindu nationalists: ‘I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew – and so are all of you.’ These words, which still resonate today, rank amongst the greatest empathetic statements of all time.

Find out more: There’s no better starting place than Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi. Also try Gandhi’s An Autobiography – or The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

#1. Claiborne Paul Ellis

C.P. Ellis, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, with his friend Ann Atwater.

Top of our empathy poll is…C.P. Ellis. ‘Who?’, you are bound to ask. C.P. Ellis was born into a poor white family in Durham, North Carolina, in 1927. Finding it hard to make ends meet working in a garage and believing blacks were the cause of all his troubles, he followed his father’s footsteps and joined the Ku Klux Klan, eventually rising to the top position of Exalted Cyclops of the Durham chapter of the KKK. The turning point in his life came in 1971, when he was invited to a ten-day community meeting to help solve racial tensions in schools. C.P.Ellis was chosen to head the race committee jointly with a local black activist who he hated, named Ann Atwater. But working with her completely exploded his prejudices about African Americans. He saw that she shared the same problems of poverty as his own and that their real enemies were white businessmen and politicians who kept their wages low and pitted poor blacks and whites against one another. ‘I was beginning to look at a black person, shake hands with him, and see him as a human being,’ he recalled of his experience on the committee. ‘Somethin’ was happening to me. It was almost like bein’ born again.’ On the final night of the community meeting, he stood at the microphone in front of a thousand people and tore up his Klan membership card. C.P. Ellis later became a famed civil rights campaigner and labour organiser for a union whose membership was seventy per cent black. He and Ann remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Find out more: Read the moving interview with C.P. Ellis by the oral historian Studs Terkel in his book, American Dreams: Lost and Found. You can also find an extract here.

I imagine you have your own empathetic heroines and heroes, so I invite you to leave a comment revealing to the world your personal choices of people who deserve a place in the Empathy Hall of Fame.

You might think it near impossible to imagine the reality of his experience, to make an empathetic leap into his mind’s eye. Yet Bauby – who died two years after his stroke aged forty-five – conveys his frustrations and despair, as well as his limited pleasures and dreams, with a succinct simplicity and acuteness. He describes the agony of living inside ‘something like a giant invisible diving-bell’ that holds his whole body prisoner, while also relating small moments of irritation, like when a hospital attendant unthinkingly turns off the television when he is halfway through watching a football match with his single good eye. His only real relief is through his imagination, when his mind ‘takes flight like a butterfly’. This is his sole freedom: ‘You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face.’

In 2007 Julian Schnabel turned Bauby’s book into a film, also called The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly. Its opening sequence is a masterpiece of empathetic cinematography. We are inside Bauby’s head, looking through his left eye as he wakes up in the hospital for the first time after his stroke. His vision is distorted and fragmented. He is surrounded by doctors asking him questions, but he is unable to reply. Yet we hear all Bauby’s confused thoughts through his inner voice as he confronts his utterly changed world.

You can watch the first ten minutes here:

One reason both the book and film are so compelling is that Bauby helps us recognise the abundance most of us have in our lives. In one imaginative journey he savours his favourite foods, like a plate of sausages and a soft-boiled egg. But fed by a tube, he can no longer partake in such basic culinary pleasures. He describes the joy of a visit from his ten-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter on Father’s Day. Yet it is filled with tragedy: he cannot bear the thought of being unable to touch his children, and he breaks down with grief as they play hangman on the beach. Bauby never, however, asks us to feel sorry for him. He remains a whole person, full of emotional complexity, ambition, desire and dignity despite his physical incapacities. This is what allows his story to be so life-affirming.

The force of the book also lies in what it reveals about Bauby’s character. Reading the publicity quotes, you would think he was a gentle and humane person. One critic describes the author’s ‘gallantry’, and another sees the book as ‘an almost inconceivable act of generosity’. Yet my impression is that, before his stroke, Bauby was not a particularly pleasant individual to be around. I don’t think I would have liked him. He comes across as self-centred and vain. He was a playboy who appeared to have little time for his kids. He was so driven by his career ambitions and desire to live the high-life that he allowed his relationships – especially his marriage – to fall apart.

Despite these traits, I still found myself empathising with him – both in the sense of looking through his eyes and feeling the emotional bond of caring for his welfare. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly shows that it is possible to empathise with people whose lives are not only very different from your own, but whose core values and beliefs you do not share.

A fascinating genre that can expand our empathetic imaginations is war movies depicting the perspective of enemies. Recent examples include a pair of films directed by Clint Eastwood in 2006 about the Battle for Iwo Jima in the Second World War, one from the viewpoint of US soldiers (Flags of Our Fathers), and the other seen through the eyes of Japanese soldiers (Letters from Iwo Jima), which is entirely in Japanese. The inverted lens challenges simplistic notions of nationalism, patriotism and triumphalism, and makes war seem far from glorious while at the same time breaking down the barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

But if you are a purist, you will sit yourself down in front of the first – and greatest – film in the genre, the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front. This classic is based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of the First World War. It is astonishing that an anti-war movie from the perspective of a German soldier was produced in Hollywood only a dozen years after the armistice. But, for me, an even greater achievement is that it contains the most moving empathetic episode in cinema history.

The main character, a German footsoldier named Paul, who has enlisted in the fervour of schoolboy patriotism, is now on the Western front facing the French. Surrounded by gunfire, he jumps into a trench for cover. An instant later, a French soldier drops into the trench with him. Without a moment of thought, Paul draws his dagger and stabs him in the chest.

To find out what happens next, either watch this clip (the first seven minutes), or read the description below.

The soldier is mortally wounded, but still breathing. Paul washes the blood off his hands and the soldier writhes before him, slowly dying. The gunfire continues and Paul, forced to stay in the trench overnight, cannot avoid the face of the soldier, whose eyes are still open. At first he is irritated by the Frenchman’s wheezing, final breaths, but with the passing hours he is overcome by remorse. ‘I want to help you,’ Paul pleads, offering his enemy a little water. But it is too late, the soldier is unmoving, which prompts an anguished soliloquy:

‘I tell you I didn’t want to kill you. I tried to keep you alive. If you jumped in here again, I wouldn’t do it. You see, when you jumped in here, you were my enemy – and I was afraid of you. But you’re just a man like me, and I killed you. Forgive me, comrade. Say that for me. Say you forgive me!…Oh, no, you’re dead! Only you’re better off than I am – you’re through – they can’t do any more to you now…Oh, God! why did they do this to us? We only wanted to live, you and I. Why should they send us out to fight each other? If they threw away these rifles and these uniforms, you could be my brother.’

Though Paul has come to see his adversary as a fellow human being who has similarly been used as a pawn by the generals and politicians, there is still a final moment of empathetic recognition to come. Paul reaches inside the soldier’s coatpocket and draws out his identification papers. He has a name, Gerald Duval, and inside is a photo of his wife and daughter. Paul now understands that he has killed not only a brother in arms, but a unique individual, with a family, with emotions, with a home to go to, just like him. ‘I’ll write to your wife,’ he tells the dead man. ‘I’ll write to her. I promise she’ll not want for anything. And I’ll help her, and your parents, too. Only forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me….’ He weeps, his head at the feet of the frozen body of Gerald Duval.

After this small taste of All Quiet on the Western Front, you may well feel able to give James Bond or Lord of the Rings a miss on Christmas Day, and instead opt for a film experience that reveals not just the horrors of war – both in the past and the present – but what it means to be human.

Paul, unable to look at the man he has killed, Gerald Duval. From All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).