World War II

Tomorrow in my U.S. History classes we begin our unit on the Second World War. It seemed a pretty recent happening when I was a child. I remember sitting in a barber shop at the age of six, waiting for my turn in the chair. As my father got his haircut I read a comic book. One of the characters in the comic book, a military officer, was saying, "But the war's been over for fifteen years!"

My father and just about every other kid's had been in the war. Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the European Theater, was finishing his second term as president. Most of our mothers had been war brides, worked in industry while the men were away and knew how to make do or do without. Everybody over the age of thirty remembered the Depression. The influences of those two great historical periods weren't found in a book; they were palpably all around us and influenced everybody's world view. I grew up among extraordinary people who had been called upon to accomplish extraordinary things.

It is hard to look back nearly seventy years to the beginning of World War II or the nearly sixty since its end without being rather taken aback by the sheer scope of it all, the brazen ambition and terrible power of the aggressors, the narrow margins by which catastrophe was averted and the immense impact it all still has on the world today. Consider that civilization as we know it might not recognizably exist but for a relative handful of mostly anonymous people: a few hundred Royal Air Force fighter pilots in 1940, a ten-minute dive bombing run on Imperial aircraft carriers west of Midway Island in 1942, stoic self-sacrifice by young Russians in the ruined streets of Stalingrad and by young Americans in the fever-infested jungles of Guadalcanal and the snow drifts of Bastogne.

It is unquestionable that we are the heirs of the world they saved. They are leaving us now, passing from us at the rate of 100,000 a month. In a few short years their generation will fall silent, their story left to others to retell. It certainly behooves us to preserve the legacies they left and to extend the opportunities they made possible. Only in those ways can we pay proper homage to what they did for us so many decades ago, when they were young and everything hung in the balance.