Infinite Monkeys

VDH on WWII's Lessons

My Memorial Day post just below ended with a quote from Maj. Richard Winters (Ret.), "Pass these lessons that we learned along. Don't forget them. They were hard lessons to learn." Yesterday I ran across something on Victor Davis Hanson's website that addresses some of those lessons. It's from the Response to Readership section of his site, but this particular question and answer are still on the site's frontpage, and not yet in the official Question Log. So, I'm taking the liberty of reposting that entry here.

On this Memorial Day weekend and with the upcoming 60th anniversary of D-Day, and at a time in-which we are engaged in a war, what lessons can we learn from WWII and more specifically D-Day that can be applied to the present day conflict?

We should remember that WWII and D-Day itself were fraught with uncertainty. Today's media would have gone ballistic to hear about the Deppe Raid, or the deathly consequences of the bad weather on June 6th, 1944, or the December surprise at the Bulge. The worst year of the war in some ways was early 1945-the horrific fighting in January and February to clean out the Bulge, or the 90-day nightmare of Okinawa just months before the Japanese surrender. Yet the difference between our generation and our fathers' was that they realized that they were just human and did their best, with full appreciation that we err and then go on to learn from it. And so then they went on and won.

In contrast, we are spoiled utopians; and if we can't have our way - paradise right now on earth - we become demoralized, turn on each other, and give up. This year in Iraq is not nearly as hellish as one day on Iwo, nothing like a night over Schweinfurt, or a few hours at Normandy. And our now demonized "neoconservative" planners haven't made half the errors of a prior generation's naive trust in Stalin, turning over Eastern Europe to totalitarians, not bombing the death camps, or attacking head on 100,000 dug-in Japanese on Okinawa. Add in the Japanese relocations, the carpet bombing of the Normandy train centers on the eve of D-day, or the March 11 fire-raids, and it would have been easy for the greatest generation to unleash the NewYork Times, Senate hearings, and Hollywood to demand an end to the bloodletting and bring the troops home in shame.

Yes, we can learn from WWII and D-Day about courage and audacity; but far more importantly, we can grasp from that generation something about quiet confidence in our civilization, a lack of arrogance about obtaining perfection, and a quiet trust in doing what we can according to our station and time. It sounds reactionary and trite to say that as a general rule I like those folks better than my own generation (I was born in 1953), but I confess I do and so might as well as admit it.