When you realize that the Pearl Harbor attacks took place 71 years ago, and that Bob Dole is 89 years old, it becomes clear that we don’t have too much time left with our beloved World War Two veterans. I’ve always found that generation to be filled with very impressive people. Whether they talked about the war or not, they had been hardened and shaped by it. I always feel a certain sense of reverence around them. It’s not just what they went through, because some of our boys have faced worse in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s their connection to great history-changing events. I could study the 1930’s and 40’s for the rest of my life and never exhaust my fascination with that period. On Pearl Harbor Day, I’m sad to think about losing the last touchstones to the war.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
When I was a very little kid I looked forward with great anticipation the visits from ‘my lion uncle’ who was a grand storyteller. He was a judge on island and his wife was a doctor. They told so many first-hand accounts of the islanders’ idyllic but challenged life before December 7 and then the accounts of sheer bravery, fear and damn hard work to survive day to day afterwards.
I think this is true when we seeing the ending or passing of that last touchstone to any major era. I remember when the last know veteran of the Civil War passed away. And I think it was just in the past few years that the last veteran of WWI died.
My m-i-l, who served in the Coast Guard in WWII, passed away 5 weeks ago at the age of 91. Fortunately, my son the historian, recorded a lot of her stories and remembrances from her time in service.
Of course, this applies to what are conceived as noble causes. I doubt very much that it will be noted when the last veteran of Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan passes away,and I don’t know how to feel about that.
Do we define these people, whether from past wars or current ones too much by their involvement in those conflicts? I think most would prefer to be remembered for other reasons.
They never got over themselves and they never stopped hating the 60s generation for refusing to go obediently to Vietnam, no questions asked, as they and their fathers had gone obediently to Europe for Democratic presidents who had promised them otherwise, twice.
They never met a war they didn’t approve, in many cases just being dogs in the manger about it.
“We had to go. Now you have to go.”
Bloody Archie Bunkers, all of them.
Mighty big, wide brush you’ve got there. Too bad the reality is more complex than your cynical narrative.
People these days underestimate the extent to which the World War II generation and the so-called Silent Generation (i.e. McCarthy-era generation) motivated and shaped the social change of the 1960s.
Major examples: John F. Kennedy, George McGovern, Mark Hatfield
You’ve pretty much got to paint with a broad brush when you’re talking about a whole generation.
My father fought in WWII, as did his 5 brothers, and we’re Jews, so it’s not like WWII doesn’t loom large for other reasons–but my father was and remains deeply unimpressed with the veneration. He says the vast majority of them (himself included) were stupid children fighting a war they didn’t understand with an almost-complete lack of self-reflection. And the racism was virulent.
But yeah, the loss of living history is tough. Of course, I don’t think that’s a function of WWII so much as of our age. We’re getting old, Boo. People must’ve felt the same when the civil war vets were all dying off.
The loss of living history allows the perpetuation of stereotypes. Politics and war are complicated and the motives for being in the military during a war are also complicated.
I cringe when Tom Brokaw genuflects, but the folks I’ve known who fought were different from the folks who were older or younger. It’s hard to explain. Imagine doing eight D-Days in the Pacific and then going home and running a family farm in ice cold rural Minnesota for fifty years. That’s toughness.
But I’ve seen it in veterans of Libya, Sicily, and Anzio, too, who worked in large office buildings in Manhattan churning out new ways to sell Mr. Coffee machines.
They were tough and they had confidence. They didn’t need to brag. It’s hard to explain.
It’s not that hard to explain. They went from being boys in high school to being men with guns who were killing others. And it happened in 2-3 months.
So, in other words, they became adults, and had to become decisive quick thinkers. Because if you were not a decisive person, you were often dead.
So being a soldier does change you. Sometimes for the good, other times not so much.
I’ll be 50 in a few months and I’ve seen the same thing. Those who fought in the war and even those who did not — those of that generation — are different. Not necessarily better than the rest of us. People still vary, one from the next. Some were more honest than others, some more open minded. But there was an overall sense that “you do what you’ve gotta do” and a very strong ethos of personal responsibility that went with it. It’s hard for us, in our time, to understand but these men were willing to give up their lives for an ideal. Both the ideal and the shared sacrifice shaped them. Those who returned home knew that others did not.
My dad’s generation, which followed soon behind, really respected those men. He and his peers tried to be like them, but there were clear differences. My dad’s generation — which came of age during Korea and soon after — is a bit softer, a bit nicer, a bit more negotiable and able to think outside the box; yet still with a strong sense of duty.
My father and all my uncles were in WWII.
My father in law was in Korea.
My brother in law was in the Air Force and part of the Cuban missile crisis.
My son in law’s Dad and I were in Vietnam.
To hell with all that.
Well said. We lefties are also capable of strident, reflexive demagoguery at times, it seems. The Second World War was a failure of the positive potential inherent to human civilization, to be sure, but very few apart from strict pacifists could — or can — fail to see its sad necessity once events were in motion. Many of the people who fought it helped shape the era, in many inarguable ways, in which we find ourselves.
Actually, Philo, polling data shows that older people in the Vietnam Era were more likely to oppose the war than younger people.
You’re trafficking in bogus stereotypes.
trying to start flame wars on a couple threads today
Bloody Archie Bunkers, all of them.
Howard Zinn? Kurt Vonnegut? George McGovern?
The oh-so-transgressive radicalism you imagine yourself to be expressing was first expressed by those “Archie Bunkers” themselves, except when they did it sixty years ago, it wasn’t banal and derivative, like your comment.
.
“… some of our boys have faced worse in Iraq or Afghanistan.”
You do not know the fear and stench of any war. I think suffering in war can be expressed by the number of deaths and wounded coming out of a conflict. Vietnam was a guerilla war with massive bombardments of civilian populated areas in and near Hanoi. In modern conflicts, the civilian population bears gross burden of suffering …. see Yugoslavia, Congo, Iraq and today Syria. Civil War can be very ugly. In the single battle of Iwo Jima there were more fallen soldiers than Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Iwo Jima: 36 Days of Hell
Civil war can indeed be ugly. US Civil War – Antietam – 22,700 dead in one battle on one day. Little “collateral damage” because of the style of warfare.
My dad, now 85 years old, is a WWII veteran. He served in the army toward the end of the war. He’s got some interesting stories to tell.
It wasn’t just World War II that shaped that generation. They were the children and teens of a two-decade rolling agricultural depression that resulted in a general depression. A majority of them cast their first votes for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the end of World War II what they wanted most was the normalcy promised in 1920 but never achieved.
And it was the last war the US fought in which almost everyone sacrificed in some way or another, the last war that had rationing and wage-and-price controls. And the first war involving mass radio and film propaganda.
As long as we’re taking a moment for reflection, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you for the wonderful perspectives you consistently provide in conversations on this site.
I’m just a geezer who calls them as I see them. If you hang around a long time and try to get something done, you see a lot of interesting things. Also having a hobby of local history and genealogy helps you see the complexity of historical events.
Thank you for your kind comment.
I second that emotion!
So say we all.
I’ll restrain my critiques of that generation until tomorrow. Instead, I’ll point out the danger of current generations heaping beloved hagiography on any of their ancestors.
And tomorrow I’ll remind you that the whole idea of a “generation” as a zeitgeist was a marketing invention during the 1950s that affected dramatically the culture of the 1960s in all sorts of bizarre ways.
Since it’s tomorrow, I just read about the Hollywood Canteen where that generation told my grandfather not to show up and dance with the stars like all the other soldiers because he might rile them up. Since gasp! His first name was Juan, not John!
My dad was in WWII, from 1944 on (he turned 18). He was part of the 43rd (Rainbow) division.
He did what was needed. He was not a hero. He was an infantry guy. Few soldiers are heros. I simply will not call all soldiers heros. Most are trying to get by without getting killed. Many succeeded in WWII. Many did not.
But the “Greatest Generation” was also one of the luckiest. For those who survived the war, it was a grand moment, in which they were taken from boyhood and became men in a very short time. Rather than having helicopter parents, they had some drill sargeant screaming at them. When in France, they got to have fun which was not available in teh US. This means that, for those who survived, the war was a huge moment of adulthood being thrust upon them, and the fun part (drinking a lot, whoring, no parents to force them to be good) was there for a year or two. Of course, it was not fun if you got killed or injured. But those did not come home. THe ones who came home were changed, and they didn’t go back to the farm.
They did become Archie Bunker. I know that my dad (I was 18 in 1970) did not understand the opposition to the Vietnam war. He would not have been happy to see me killed, but he would have been less happy had I done some cowardly shit like Ted Nugent the prince of shit. Lucky for me, my number was not called.
So enough of the generational hagiography. They did their duty, and I will grant them that. But that is not a reason to make them saints. My dad had a hell of a temper, and knocked my mom around some, and acted like an asshole plenty of times. He’s dead now, and I had a lot of respect for him, but also I knew that he was a flawed vessel. As am I.
My dad was 7th Division Army in the Pacific Theater and was in the Philippine invasion to retake the islands. He rarely talked about it, but did bring back a lot of souvenirs, including an 8mm film he shot from the deck of his ship as they were approaching the landing site. Its a Kamikaze attack on one of the ships following theirs. We’re currently waiting for some archival restoration folks to finish their work on it and then maybe I’ll post on YouTube.
I realize now the war was reflected in his eyes for the rest of his life and as far as I know, he never laid hands on a firearm again after returning home.
Yeah, the firearm thing. My dad had no interest in guns. He never went hunting.
He kept a journal, and we discovered it about 1990. My sister typed it up, and we gave out copies. It’s interesting but mostly small beer – they found some wine one day, they were cold as hell.
His division, the Rainbow, had a number of important roles in the war. They discovered a huge cache of Nazi papers in Berchtigarden. They liberated Dachau. My dad didn’t talk about that. There were 20,000 guys in the division, so it’s not like each guy did something that the division did.
The biggest effect of the war for ME was that in 1957, we moved to Germany and lived there from 1957-1962. I was 5-10. I learned German some, still speak it pretty good although my vocabulary sucks. Better than my Russian of course. We visited Dachau when I was 8. I remember the ovens and the smell of burned stuff. This was in 1960. Nobody had been cremated in 15 years at that time.
I think that the elevation of the NRA happened after much of the WWII generation was adults. I think that began in 1985 or so, when that generation was mostly retiring. The NRA was elevated mostly by those who did not serve, and who did not have the truth of guns seared into their skulls by watching a buddy get shot the shit up by some Nazi teenager. You do not elevate guns to the position that the fuckhead gunsucks do if you saw the TRUTH of guns.
Have quite a few memories of the WW2 generation.
One of the sergeants I served with in Germany in the mid to late 70’s landed on Anzio in 1944, but never wanted to talk about it. Also met a first sergeant who served with Patton, he was all spit and polish said Patton wouldn’t accept less.
Serving in Germany in the mid 70’s met people from the German Wehrmacht. One old gentleman was a Me-262 pilot, when I met him he was part of the Civilian Support Center troops, mostly old german men from WW2 working for the US Army in cold war Germany. My girlfriends father was a U boat crew member, and her grandfather served on the western front infantry in both WW1 and WW2. Captured both times, and spent time in Siberia.
Went thru Basic in ’75, all my drills were Vietnam Vets. Many stories about that war in basic for training purposes.
I understand losing living history, In Louisville VA a WW1 vet was active in volunteering up to his 107th birthday, he died a number of years ago the VA hospital is named after him. Robley Rex, was his name, real polite gentile person.
My dad was a Korean vet, hard to the core, hated hippies and any anti war people at all.
Till a few things happened, that caused him pause.
During the Iranian hostage crisis, he ranted about invading Iran and seizing the hostages. I reminded him every one of his sons except his youngest was serving, and most of us would end up in such a war. The odds of all four returning not really good. He never mentioned it again.
When I got orders to the Gulf in 1991 was one of the few times he wasn’t all for the war. I was EOD, and the things the media was stating about Saddam’s weapons combined with my job wasn’t at the time thrilling to him.
The thing that really made him pause was during the Iraqi war his grandchildren were serving and that disturbed him a lot. I was against Iraq from the start, this bothered him, till his grandchildren started to go, then he wasn’t so for it.