The World At War

I'm watching the 1974 British documentary, The World At War, again. It is an amazing program. At that time, many of the top leaders were still alive, so there are interviews with Albert Speer, Karl Doenitz, Bomber Harris, Curtis LeMay, Ira Eaker, Mark Clark, and a host of lesser ranking people.  It is sobering to see the more ordinary ranking people - Bill Mauldin, Otto Kretschmer, and other veterans - and to realize that when I was a boy, they were still vigorous adults in the prime of life, in their 50's and 60's. It makes you realize how quickly time passes. I vividly remember watching this show in high school. Now I am as old as some of the people pictured here.
But the point of the documentary is the enormous thing that was World War II. The numbers of participants and casualties stagger the imagination. The stakes are almost unimaginable. There was a moment in the fall of 1940 when Germany might have secured its borders and kept control of Europe for who knows how long. D-Day might have failed. We look back with comfortable hindsight at a successful long-ago endeavor, easily forgetting that the 1940's were not simply a triumphant decade of Glenn Miller music and stunning victories, but for years were a time of suffering and fear, when darkness and death swept across the world and threatened to extinguish the light. I've read that for the United States, something like 90% of our casualties came in the last eighteen months of war, 1944-45. Think of the timeline: Facing an ascendant Axis through 1942, the shock of Pearl Harbor and loss of the Philippines, Nazis deep in Russia and Africa. We didn't know then that Midway was a turning point. 1943 was a transitional year of ferocious fighting in the Soviet Union, horrible struggles in the North Atlantic, combat in places that we had never heard of like New Guinea, and Tarawa, and in places still far from Germany - Tunisia and Sicily. In 1944 came the rollback of German and Japanese forces, liberation and recapture of the enemy conquests. It is stunning to realize that the US lost more than 10,000 killed in combat every month through 1944 and 1945. With measurable progress came awful pain and loss.
We have to remember this forever. So much was sacrificed for our freedom. All we can do is to work constantly to keep liberty, the blessing they gave us.