As I proceed through another day with heavier eyelids, I also proceed with a heavier heart, filled with the weight of war. Rick Atkinson has imposed that burden upon me, for which I am thankful. In fact, the great writer and thinker, George Will, expressed a similar sentiment today in the Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-rick-atkinsons-unsparing-history-of-world-war-ii/2013/08/30/fb942f5c-10cb-11e3-b4cb-fd7ce041d814_story.html.
I cannot aspire to Will's eloquence (though he starts his article with the same arresting quote that I memorized on the spot for any future memoral service I conduct), but I can at least give one layman's peek behind the curtain of great history disguised as masterful literature.
On V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, while masses cheered in the States, US troops in Europe were adrift and aimless. They strolled through lush orchards and burnt hillsides, alongside architectural marvels now reduced to rubble, and felt nothing. There was no elation, joy, or relief--no victory party for the average soldier. They had walked through hell to get to heaven, and having arrived at their destination, found few of their friends alongside them to bask in the glow. Their ability to reflect was buried with their battle buddy beneath a cross or star of David.
Many a chapter and section in these books end with a tender letter home from a young man to his wife or mother, looking forward to a future resplendant with renewed love and beautiful children. I came to dread such portions of these books, because this letter would inevitably be followed by something like "But Private First Class Wilson would never again picnic with his young wife as he had hoped. He would be dead from shrapnel wounds in the Ardennes two weeks later."
General Patton was emblematic of the American soldier--courageous and compassionate. He might well be remembered for his slapping of two mentally broken soldiers on Crete, but one should not forget the weeping outside of the medical tents holding his soldiers, or the vomiting at the sight of a liberated concentration camp.
It was this latter reality that enabled the battle-wearied American soldier to run the war through to its course. After losing all sense of why he was fighting this war, the American soldier would stumble upon a place like Bergen-Belsen, sob or shoot a German guard in blind fury, and confess "Now I know." The wells of Western compassion overflowed for the millions of precious lives obliterated with denomic precision--the ovens and gas chambers, the baby slippers and children's shoes, the Rape of Nanking, and the ripping open of pregnant Philippino women and bayoneting of their babies. And the wells ran dry for the perpetrators of these atrocities and the cultures that permitted them.
Rarely in history has the division between good and evil in war been so clear cut. Atrocities were the punished exception for the West. They were the norm for two of the most sadistic leaders and calloused cultures. Only the shadow of the sickle that settled over the Soviet Union, China, and other communist nations would challenge the mantle of evil clearly held by Hitler and Tojo.
And that moral conviction--a conviction often lost in today's society--is what enabled normal men to become heroes. Yes, they fought for each other. But they also fought for the woman and baby in this photo:
(And, yes, this young Jewish woman is trying to shield her baby, but to no avail.)
Close to 420,000 American soldiers died in World War Two (compared with about 10,000 for the two conflicts of the past decade)--most in horrible and lonely ways. But they died for a noble cause.
In the wake of the great wars, cynical generations have sought to deny the glory that comes with war. Yet, history now hangs a wreath upon the head of the allied victors in World War Two. But few soldiers will ever realize that glory in their own day--a day marked by bitter emptiness at the loss of so many after so few years of life. Glory belongs to the dead, not the living.
“The saviors come not home tonight: Themselves they could not save.”
