War's Aftermath

Tuesday night I watched the last of the PBS series, The War. I will catch the beginning when I can sit and think about it all again. It is very intense and after watching the last three, I better understood how Ken Burns had decided to tell the story-- through how it impacted four towns across the United States (East, Midwest, South and West) and what it was like for those from there who fought and those who stayed home.

Personalizing the story, as he did, made it far more powerful. It is a huge story even with the limitations he set up. It's amazing to realize how this country, with far less people and material resources than today, was able to fight what amounted to around the world, gathering strength and resources every day. There was a united will in our people, a belief it had to be done.

The photo at the right is part of my family during WWII as they looked at the Atlas to keep track of where their men were-- one in Europe, one in the Pacific. (My Aunt Katie, Grandma, photo on the mantle my Uncle Fred, his wife Aunt Ruth, my cousin Barbara and my grandfather. Baby photo of me on the mantle says this is probably 1944). Families all across this nation were doing the same things, not just those with relatives overseas, but everybody listened to the radio, kept track of the battles. It was personal and it required sacrifice to which people didn't object. Industries and people changed jobs to provide the tools the war needed.

One of my valued possessions is the little cross in the picture to the left. My uncle, who volunteered in 1942 and served in the European theater, brought it back for me from France. Photo shows him on the left (Uncle Kelly, Aunt Katie [his wife], and Uncle Fred). I cannot say why the little necklace has had such value to me-- maybe because it says he thought of me over there and somehow it has always represented WWII for me. I wore it until one time the clasp came undone, and I had it fall off. Then I didn't take the risk I might lose it permanently.

From watching the documentary, I didn't learn anything new as far as the events of the war. In school, as I was growing up, we studied WWII, its reasons and what happened. We wrote papers on the battles. We knew the names of all those places where our troops had fought. There was nothing about the events that I didn't know.

The War, however, personalizes the sacrifices made by the fighting men, it brings it to us. Also it showed things I hadn't thought enough about. For instance the racial bigotry that was taken for granted at that time. If you were not a minority, you only knew of it abstractly; but to see those films, to hear the men talk about it, that brings home how recently things were not good-- stories of separate regiments, barbers who wouldn't cut a black man's hair, and the Japanese, who came home after fighting courageously for the United States, and still had to face hatred because of their ethnicity. We have come a long way from those days but with obviously farther to go.

Despite the footage of real combat, showing of the dead, broken bodies, for me, the last episode was the most emotionally wrenching because of the concentration camps. Oh I had read about it, seen still photos, watched Schindler's List (one of my exceptions to avoiding brutal films); and so the things that I saw weren't a surprise. They were more impacting though because it wasn't fiction, it was the real, uncensored video from when the GIs got there, what they saw and descriptions of their emotions. It's bad enough how POWs were treated, and that was often also terrible; but these innocent people were killed, tortured, treated like animals, most of them simply because of their ethnicity.

It's hard to watch that kind of footage and have it drilled home once again what happened, what some humans are capable of doing. It's also hard, for me at my age, to believe anybody tries to deny it happened. Fact: it happened. It shows how important this documentary is as proof for those who keep trying to deny the tragic reality.

Remember this documentary was told from the perspective of the soldiers, what they saw and experienced. It's not an attempt to tell the whole story of what the Nazis did to those they deemed imperfect, but just the story of these men as they arrived at these camps. They said they had no idea what they were about to find. The Russians had gotten to the first camps on their own march to Germany. When they told our military leaders, our generals felt it must have been exaggerated. The troops said they had not been warned. It's not hard to imagine their horror and shock.

The soldiers said that, in the towns close to these prisons, the stench was so horrendous that the locals would have had to know. In one small town, the troops made the citizens, who denied they knew what went on, bury the dead, made them all view the bodies. There are films of the townspeople as they filed past those long lines of bodies.

What happens to a culture that it becomes so dulled to humanity that it can allow something so horrifying right in its midst? It's impossible to get our heads around such numbers. Six million Jews were exterminated in these massive gas chambers. More were murdered or starved to death all across Europe. Some figures put the entire total of murdered Jews at eleven million. Hitler had run on a platform of cleansing the land of the imperfect which to him were Jews, Communists, gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents, certain religious groups, and those who were handicapped. The death camps were throughout the land and yet the citizens of Germany said they didn't know? Yeah right. They knew.

Did the German people turn their backs out of fear or perhaps from thinking the 'greater' plan must be good. Remember religion was a factor in the rise of Third Reich. A people who allow their government to use fear and force to control everybody, who allow one group to be turned into an enemy with no rights, no value, those people become dehumanized themselves.

It was hard to watch that film and not feel angry-- not just at them but at what I have seen starting to happen in my own country. Nobody should tolerate fascism or the beginning stench of it because the last stench is Auschwitz. It is better to speak out against it even if it means being killed; than to keep quiet and have to live with that.

Leaving that for something else in the documentary that was horrible, something I have heard debated all of my life. Some groups have always claimed it was wrong for the United States to use the A-Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki-- they were innocent civilians. The War makes clear that millions more would have died without those two bombings, terrible as they were.

The Japanese were prepared to fight to the last person; and having seen how they defended some of the Pacific Islands, the Kamikaze planes, there is no reason to doubt they would have-- to the last child, the last woman. In reality, civilian casualties or not, not only American soldiers were saved by dropping those bombs. The United States didn't drop one of them on Tokyo. The bombs were dropped to end the war, not to get revenge. From the time I was a child, I have understood it had to be done. I have never changed my mind even though it brought nuclear power to the war table.

I read presidential candidate Barack Obama said we should, as a world community, eliminate all nuclear weapons. I don't disagree with that. We should but reality is the genii is out of the bottle. Even if we and the other major nations got rid of ours, nuclear bombs are out there and someday they are likely to be used again unless humans learn better ways to deal with evil and settle their disagreements. That doesn't seem likely anytime soon.

You come away from this documentary asking how can anybody ever choose war? I don't know the answer to that; but once a people must fight one, they must fight it with every tool required. Wars should never be gotten into on the cheap, never at all unless the people are willing to accept what they are doing. War is about killing people-- innocent right alongside of soldiers. War means you do it or ask others to do it in your name.

Despite what most of us might wish, sometimes war does have to be. Whether WWII could have been headed off years ahead, maybe so-- hindsight and all that-- but by the time the United States came into it, WWII, in Europe and the Pacific, was not a war of choice for us.

War does come home. Many men and women today have fought in wars, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and now the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars. The fortunate ones do come home. The impact of being in combat comes with them. Some just have nightmares, post traumatic stress and that's bad enough; but some never get over it. Some families are torn apart by war's aftermath. My uncles both came home, had children, and lived out full lives. They did not talk about the war where I heard.

Finally, the stupid thing that Bush has said about fighting them there to not have to fight them here is not only ignorant of the nature of terrorism but of the real cost of war. If you have to spill blood, make sure it's for real reasons-- not political . It does come home one way or another.

I'd like to think we can learn from the Iraqi war and never let another leader carelessly get us into a war that is not a necessary war, and if we do go to war again, then fight it with all of us, using all we need to get it over as fast as we can. If the citizens are not willing to pay the full price, be fully engaged, then it should not be entered into.