Greatest Generation Or Unluckiest?

The hoopla for the men who fought WW II cheapens what they accomplished

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,...

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