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Edited on Fri Dec-08-06 11:53 PM by Lisa
You are so right, MarianJack!
I was born long after WWII, but I'm old enough to remember a time when almost every family you talked to had someone still alive who had directly experienced the war in some way. ("The war." I'm almost scared to ask the students in my classes WHICH war they think of when I say those words ... some might think of Vietnam, or increasingly, Iraq and Afghanistan.)
I'm in Canada, and my oldest uncle (who died about a decade ago) was already in the Canadian Army when war broke out in the Far East. His unit was in the middle of training -- people did have an idea, by the late 1930s, that Japan was going to do something, but were unsure of what to expect. The drill sergeant used to tell them, "You'll be facing masses of nasty little guys who look just like Harry!", and hundreds of pairs of eyes would swivel to look at him on the parade ground. (My family is Japanese.) To give them credit, the guys would take Harry drinking with them, and they would refuse to hang out at any bar that wouldn't let him in, in his uniform.
Anyway, my uncle had downplayed a foot injury in order to enlist, but when it looked like they were going to receive orders, the unit physician pulled him out and said that they would probably be doing a lot of marching, and he would only slow them down. In a way he saved my uncle's life, because he got discharged before the unit was sent to Hong Kong. (About 8 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Army attacked Hong Kong too, and during the following days, the garrison was shredded. A lot of my uncle's fellow soldiers -- the ones who were kind to him, the ones who muttered racist remarks, the ones he knew from high school -- were killed, or taken captive and tortured.)
The world changed abruptly for both my mom and my dad's families, after Dec 7th -- they were relocated away from the coast, into internment camps or (in my mom's family's case) exiled to be farmhands on a mink ranch way up north. My folks never did return to the west coast. (After 9/11, my dad remarked that all the pronouncements of the news anchors that "now everything has changed" seemed overreactions, by comparison with before and after Pearl Harbor.)
On the other side of the world, my boyfriend's dad was a sergeant in the US Army during the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he married a Jewish woman -- soon to become my boyfriend's mom -- who'd lost a lot of her family in the Holocaust.
Another guy I knew in my neighbourhood had a dad who'd been a navigator on a Lancaster bomber. He never talked about it. (After I read about what the average lifespan of air crews in Bomber Command was, I could see why.) My Grade 5 teacher had been a teenager in London during the 1940s, so she vividly described what it was like to be on the receiving end of a "stick" of bombs ... one warm June day, she just put down her colonial history book and started telling us about surviving the Blitz. I'm glad I listened ... she died back in 2000, and there aren't that many people around anymore (let alone still teaching) who have that kind of direct experience of MODERN history to pass along.
The lady who lives across from us had been a little girl in Austria during the war, and of course they'd made all the kids join the Hitler Youth in those days. (When her pre-teen daughters started pestering her to let them join the Brownies, she panicked and rushed over to talk to my mom, seeking reassurance that the uniforms and the camping activities weren't a sign that something sinister was afoot in Canada!)
All these people are dead now, or in their 80s or 90s. I'm still shocked by this, because in part of my mind it's still the 1970s, and there are not only lots of vigorous WWII vets around, in their 50s and 60s, but survivors of the Great War who are still able to march in the Nov 11th parades.
Almost all the WWI vets are gone, and soon the people who remember WWII will be gone too.
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