[Rhodes22-list] Omaha Beach - History and politics (anyone know what day it is?)

[brad haslett]

This is a good day to call my dad.  BTW, thank you
Stan.  Brad

----------------

Too Much, Too Late
Baby boomers heap insincere praise on the "greatest
generation."

BY DAVID GELERNTER
Friday, June 4, 2004 12:01 a.m.

My political credo is simple and many people share it:
I am against phonies. A cultural establishment that
(on the whole) doesn't give a damn about World War II
or its veterans thinks it can undo a half-century of
indifference verging on contempt by repeating a silly
phrase ("the greatest generation") like a magic spell
while deploying fulsome praise like carpet bombing.
The campaign is especially intense among members of
the 1960s generation who once chose to treat all
present and former soldiers like dirt and are willing
at long last to risk some friendly words about World
War II veterans, now that most are safely underground
and guaranteed not to talk back, enjoy their celebrity
or start acting like they own the joint. A quick
glance at the famous Hemingway B.S. detector shows the
needle pegged at Maximum, where it's been all week,
from Memorial Day through the D-Day anniversary
run-up.





When I was in junior high school long ago, a touring
arts program visited schools in New York state. One
performance consisted of a celebrated actress reciting
Emily Dickinson's poetry onstage for 90 minutes or so.
I defy any audience to listen attentively to 90
minutes of Dickinson without showing the strain, and
my school definitely wasn't having any.
A few minutes into the show, the auditorium was alive
with student chatter, so loud a buzz you could barely
hear the performance. Being a poetry-lover, I devoted
myself to setting an example of rapt attention for,
maybe, five minutes, at which point I threw in the
towel and joined the mass murmur.

The actress manfully completed her performance. When
it was over we gave her a stupendous ovation. We were
glad it was finished and (more important) knew
perfectly well that we had behaved like pigs and
intended to make up for it by clapping and roaring and
shouting. But the performer wasn't having any. She
gave us a cold curtsy and left the stage and would not
return for a second bow.

I have always admired her for that: a more memorable
declaration than anything Dickinson ever wrote. And
today's endless ovation for World War II vets doesn't
change the fact that this nation has behaved
boorishly, with colossal disrespect. If we cared about
that war, the men who won it and the ideas it
suggests, we would teach our children (at least) four
topics:

• The major battles of the war. When I was a child in
the 1960s, names like Corregidor and Iwo Jima were
still sacred, and pronounced everywhere with respect.
Writing in the 1960s about the battle of Midway,
Samuel Eliot Morison stepped out of character to plead
with his readers: "Threescore young aviators . . . met
flaming death that day in reversing the verdict of
battle. Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June.
They and their comrades who survived changed the whole
course of the Pacific War." Today the Battle of Midway
has become niche-market nostalgia material, and most
children (and many adults) have never heard of it.
Thus we honor "the greatest generation." (And if I
hear that phrase one more time I will surely puke.)

• The bestiality of the Japanese. The Japanese army
saw captive soldiers as cowards, lower than lice. If
we forget this we dishonor the thousands who were
tortured and murdered, and put ourselves in danger of
believing the soul-corroding lie that all cultures are
equally bad or good. Some Americans nowadays seem to
think America's behavior during the war was worse than
Japan's--we did intern many loyal Americans of
Japanese descent. That was unforgivable--and
unspeakably trivial compared to Japan's unique
achievement, mass murder one atrocity at a time.

In "The Other Nuremberg," Arnold Brackman cites (for
instance) "the case of Lucas Doctolero, crucified,
nails driven through hands, feet and skull"; "the case
of a blind woman who was dragged from her home
November 17, 1943, stripped naked, and hanged"; "five
Filipinos thrown into a latrine and buried alive." In
the Japanese-occupied Philippines alone, at least
131,028 civilians and Allied prisoners of war were
murdered. The Japanese committed crimes against Allied
POWs and Asians that would be hard still, today, for a
respectable newspaper even to describe. Mr. Brackman's
1987 book must be read by everyone who cares about
World War II and its veterans, or the human race.

• The attitude of American intellectuals. Before Pearl
Harbor but long after the character of Hitlerism was
clear--after the Nuremberg laws, the Kristallnacht
pogrom, the establishment of Dachau and the
Gestapo--American intellectuals tended to be dead
against the U.S. joining Britain's war on Hitler.

Today's students learn (sometimes) about right-wing
isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and the America
Firsters. They are less likely to read documents like
this, which appeared in Partisan Review (the U.S.
intelligentsia's No. 1 favorite mag) in fall 1939,
signed by John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Meyer
Schapiro and many more of the era's leading lights.
"The last war showed only too clearly that we can have
no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to
any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan
of 'Stop Hitler!' would actually result in the
immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here. .
. . The American masses can best help [the German
people] by fighting at home to keep their own
liberties." The intelligentsia acted on its
convictions. "By one means or another," Diana Trilling
later wrote of this period, "most of the intellectuals
of our acquaintance evaded the draft."

Why rake up these Profiles in Disgrace? Because in the
Iraq War era they have a painfully familiar ring.

• The veterans' neglected voice. World War II produced
an extraordinary literature of first-person soldier
narratives--most of them out of print or unknown.
Books like George MacDonald Fraser's "Quartered Safe
Out Here," Philip Ardery's "Bomber Pilot," James
Fahey's "Pacific War Diary." If we were serious about
commemorating the war, we would do something serious.
The Library of America includes two volumes on
"Reporting World War II," but where are the soldiers'
memoirs versus the reporters'? If we were serious, we
would have every grade school in the nation introduce
itself to local veterans and invite them over. We'd
use software to record these informal talks and weave
them into a National Second World War Narrative in
cyberspace. That would be a monument worth having.





Speaking of which: I am privileged to know a gentleman
who enlisted in the Army as an aviation cadet in 1942,
served in combat as a navigator in a B-24, was shot
down and interned in Switzerland, escaped, and flew in
the air transport command for the rest of the war. He
became a scientist and had a long, distinguished
career. Among his friends he is a celebrated
raconteur, and his prose is strong and charming. He
wrote up his World War II experiences, and no one--no
magazine, no book publisher--will take them on. My
suggestions have all bombed out.
If you're interested, give me a call. But I'm not
holding my breath. The country is too busy toasting
the "greatest generation" to pay attention to its
actual members.

Mr. Gelernter is a contributing editor of The Weekly
Standard and professor of computer science at Yale.






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