MORE MAX

MARCH 26, 2023 -Yesterday’s post expressed anxiety if not pessimism about the nation’s current heading. Today a burst of spring weather, including uninterrupted sunshine accompanied by snowmelt off the back roof, helped temper yesterday’s worry. But what better assuaged my concern was another 50 pages (thus far today) of Inferno by Max Hastings (see 3/16, 3/23 posts). That and a break from “breaking” news.

For me, a surefire counterweight to all of our public woes is a study of past cataclysms. The latter endeavor is a reminder that the species has endured worse—and survived. Nothing since WW II begins to eclipse the devastation of that epoch, but Inferno reveals to me—a history major—just how ignorant I’ve been. Only by reading a comprehensive survey of the war can one optimize the antidotal effect on sizing up current threats to our well-being. This is particularly true for the American reader.

We of the American Boomer generation grew up with constant reminders of WW II. Our parents fought in it, thereby earning the collective moniker, “The Greatest Generation.” For decades our regular exposure to books and films about “The War,” as it was long called by those who lived through it, ensured that for Boomers, anyway, it would survive as an historical reference point.

For most of us, exposure to our parents’ defining epoch was Americocentric. The war was our war: Pearl Harbor; the Battles of the Coral Sea, Guadalcanal, and Midway; the invasion of Italy, the D-Day invasion, Battle of the Bulge, the taking of Japanese-held Pacific islands, sequencing closer to Japan; the A-bombs. Our perspective was shaped by PT-Boat 109; the Longest Day; the Dirty Dozen; Tora! Tora! Tora!; Patton; Saving Private Ryan; Pearl Harbor; and numerous lesser known dramatizations. (We might have viewed Schindler’s List as an effective depiction of why we were fighting Germany, but in fact, anti-Semitic American officials actively sought to hide evidence of the Holocaust from our GIs in Europe. Morale would suffer, it was claimed, if “our soldiers were told they were fighting for Jews.”)

After reading disturbing personal accounts of the horrors and trying to grasp the numbers (as many as 30 million dead on the Eastern Front), the American reader of Inferno confronts a dose of perspective: Americans were among just 0.32% of the total war dead.

By modern standards our losses were significant: 28,000 airmen died in the bombing campaign against Germany; 29,000 (106,000 wounded) American soldiers died in the D-Day invasion and 19,000 (75,000 wounded) in the Battle of the Bulge—the last German offensive; in the Pacific, we lost over 111,000 (253,000 wounded). Every last death was a tragic loss; every seriously wounded soldier, sailor, airman—a case of horrible human suffering; yet American sacrifice was limited when judged by the comparative enormity of suffering by other nations.

For Boomers, WW II is no closer to everyday consciousness than are old-time films of the conflict. A large majority of Americans under 60 couldn’t fit the conflict into a correct timeline or name the line-up of Axis and Allied belligerents. Members of the Greatest Generation (the very youngest American serviceperson involved in the war would now be 96) would likely be dismayed by our national amnesia.

Yet, amnesia, even wholesale ignorance—if most of us have but a foggy knowledge of America’s involvement in WW II, awareness of the Eastern Front or the Japanese occupation of China is close to non-existent—is probably a good thing. When I observe our seven-year-old granddaughter’s innocence and imagination, I don’t wish to pour the hot lava of historical horrors onto her perception of the world as a place of hope, dreams, wonder and beauty.

Yet, if we are to honor the sacrifice of millions in WW II by living productive, forward looking lives, we also carry a duty to stand up to naked aggression before it can be stopped only by catastrophic measures.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson