Reading this post by Purple Avenger over at Ace of Spades HQ really got me to thinking. In it, he merely recounts a few of the stories about WWII that he had heard from the men of that generation who fought in that war.
Another story dad would rarely tell, and always with tears in his eyes, was of a cave near a small vacated town outside Naples. The Army and Marines had pushed forward and he was assigned guard duty at the port. During off hours, the sailors would wander about the countryside seeing what was to be seen. During the German retreat, they’d apparently blown up the mouth of this cave and the ground troops sweeping through never bothered to look inside. My dad and his pals did…and they discovered why the little town was vacant. The contents of the cave was the townspeople…all neatly shot in the back of the head. The Germans had blown the entrance to try and hide the atrocity.
Remember, this is the war that retards like Pat Buchanan and Vox Day tell us was just a big waste of our time and money, enemies who weren’t really so bad, who weren’t a threat to us in any way.
I remember some stories from my older uncles who fought in that war (my dad was 6 when WWII ended, he served in the Navy during peacetime in the late 1950s). One uncle was a tailgunner on a B-25, and was shot down over Germany on their last mission before rotation out of theatre. He got to spend 18 months in a German POW camp as an enlisted man. He didn’t talk about that much, but from what I could gather, the experience was nothing like Hogan’s Heroes.
Other uncles fought the Japanese in the Philippines and the island hopping campaigns. They all had stories to tell.
But what got me to thinking, especially after Purple Avenger mentions at the end of his piece that all the guys he heard the stories from are gone now, is that we are losing a national treasure with these vets. These guys who really were part of the greatest generation. These are the guys who became the military and political leaders who brought us through the Cold War. Guys who made all of us latté-slurping fatboys today look like the decadent softies that we are. I just can’t imagine the greatest generation, if it were still in its prime, taking something like 9-11 and not scouring the earth of those radical Islamic scumbags – something we should have done, but didn’t because of all the political correctness and leftist nonsensobabble about “tolerance” and moral equivalence.
Our greatest generation is going the way of all men. I only have one uncle left who fought in WWII, like Purple Avenger’s folk, the rest have gone on. We are losing the generation who instilled in America a fighting spirit that had previously been sapped by decades of short-sighted isolationism. A piece of our history is being lost irretrievably. We need to honour these men (and women, who fought the production battle on the homefront!) and lift up their memories this Memorial Day.
