Greatest Generation Or Unluckiest?

Pearl Harbor was, among other things, the first mass martyrdom of what we've come to know as the Greatest Generation: 2,403 people died there--with awful suddenness. The first thing to understand is that this was just a drop in the cauldron that was World War II, which, globally, cost at least 50 million lives. We Americans lost more men in our victories--more than 6,000 at Iwo Jima, for example, 12,000 at Okinawa--than we did in that defeat. This is one of the many things you won't learn from the blockbuster movie on the subject that opened last week. Perhaps more important, of the 408,439 service members who gave their lives in the war, only a few died heroically. Most died the way soldiers usually die--because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was, as we understand it, a good war. We have known that ever since we learned about Nazi genocide. The greatness of the Greatest Generation derives from this: they stopped the most vicious killing machine in human history. But almost none of them, at the time, knew the full import of what they were doing. That came later, at war's end, when the death camps were liberated, and the ghastly pictures began appearing. Heroism, one thinks, must include self-, social and perhaps world consciousness if it is to have a vivid picture of the evil it opposes. Otherwise we're just talking mindless personal courage, which exists equally on both sides in any war at any time in history.

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But that consciousness was hard to come by. Public discussion of the fate of European Jewry was considered counterproductive. The Office of War Information, for instance, advised movie producers not to mention the genocide. The O.W.I. had surveys showing substantial anti-Semitism in the U.S. Better, it thought, to play the Nazis in traditional enemy style, as geopolitical bullies. This avoidance was true everywhere in the culture. Ben Hecht, the screenwriter, wrote a pageant depicting the extermination of 2 million Jews--an accurate figure as of 1943. It was officially shunned, marginalized. "This generational thing is s____," says Robert Kotlowitz, noting the virulent anti-Semitism he encountered in the Army. He's the author of Before Their Time, a powerful memoir of wartime infantry service. He says that as the son of a cantor who had been trying desperately to get family members out of Warsaw since 1937, he "believed in the war." Believed, that is, in halting the genocide he knew was taking place. But his book is not about that; it is about an 18-year-old kid's chilling terror and loneliness in combat and how that drove more abstract ideals out of his mind. "You got through because you didn't want to look bad to the guys around you," says Kotlowitz.

In short, you survived however you could, and that need tended to drive out noble sentiments. This is a theme another writer, Paul Fussell, takes up even more brutally in his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb." His argument is simple: better them than us--them being the Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, us being the American troops (Fussell among them) poised to invade the Japanese home islands in 1945. Citing ex-Marine E.B. Sledge's eyewitness account of Pacific combat, Fussell writes of Marines "sliding under fire down a shell-pocked ridge, slimy with mud and liquid dysentery ... into the maggoty Japanese and U.S.M.C. corpses at the bottom, vomiting as the maggots burrowed into their own foul clothing."

The fury and frenzy of the Pacific war--the Japanese always fought to the death, avoiding shameful surrender--are not much remarked. Japanese war crimes--the 250,000 dead at Nanking, the 100,000 civilian deaths when they torched Manila--are largely elided in our popular histories. So is the fact that our Marines boiled Japanese skulls clean and carried them around as souvenirs. But this fact is undeniable: the war blanched all moral niceties from everyone's consciousness. Naturally our troops sobbed with relief when they heard the Bomb had been dropped. It was for men farther behind the lines to debate the morality of the Bomb. It was for men farther forward in the future to idolize this generation.

The Greatest Generation? The superlative has the odor of heedless publicity. They were, surely, the Unluckiest Generation, emerging from Depression into total war without a break. They were, equally, the most dutiful generation. They may have lacked any sophisticated understanding of why they fought. But they stood when they were told to, advanced when they were ordered to and died because, at the time, they were the right age for the killing fields. They were basically democracy's profoundly human champions and, yes, victims. As a beneficiary of their exertions, I'd somehow rather remember them in their griping imperfection than as the subjects of a fatuous slogan.

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