V-E Day

“Yesterday I visited the battlefield of last year. The place was scarcely recognizable. Instead of a wilderness of ground torn up by shell, the ground was a garden of wild flowers and tall grasses. Most remarkable of all was the appearance of many thousands of white butterflies which fluttered around. It was as if the souls of the dead soldiers had come to haunt the spot where so many fell. It was eerie to see them. And the silence! It was so still that I could almost hear the beat of the butterflies’ wings.”  British officer, 1919, 30 years before an even costlier war erupted

Seventy-five years ago, Germany surrendered unconditionally to Allied forces, marking the end of World War II in Europe.  Crowds gathered to celebrate in America and Great Britain, and President Harry S Truman, who turned 61 that day, declared that its was his happiest birthday ever.  He dedicated the victory to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died a month earlier, and wished his predecessor were alive to savor the moment.  Truman was made clear, however, that the war was only half over and that the next task was to defeat Japan.

Historian Ray Boomhower reprinted part of a column Ernie Pyle drafted shortly before his death on Ie Shima on April 18, 1945:

    Last summer I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is so easy for us to forget the dead. Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.

    But there are so many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

    Dead men by mass production-in one country after another-month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

    Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

    Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

    Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went way and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.

    We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.

Walter Smolar

Of the 16 million American G.I.s who served in World War II there are fewer than 400,000 still alive.  Heralded as the “Greatest Generation,” those on the Western front fought to defeat Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and save Europe from falling under totalitarian control.  Those in the Pacific expected the ordeal would last many more months, not realizing that atomic bombs would bring a sudden, terrifying end to the conflict.  One of these was Whiting, Indiana, native Walter S. Smolar, who recently died at age 99.  The Slovak-American graduate of Hammond Clark High School served with the 313^th air force bombing wing mission on Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas.  His obit mentioned that Smolar was a great storyteller who, in addition to recounting war stories recalled seeing Horace Mann star Tom Harmon play football against the Whiting Oilers, and attending a Chicago Bears scrimmage and a basketball exhibition starring Wilt Chamberlain in East Chicago. The author of the obit added: “Walt held on until the Cubs won the World Series, and his goal was to live to 100.  We’ll round it up and call it 100.”

The Trump administration has invited seven of these old soldiers to a White House ceremony, and the President will no doubt be there without a mask, hogging the limelight and mingling with this at-risk group despite having been informed that a valet who has served him meals recently tested positive for Covid-19. Some have suggested that veterans refuse to attend the White House photo op, given that Trump has ignored the lessons of World War II concerning the importance of alliances such as NATO and international organizations such as the U.N. and the World Health Organization.  Safety concerns aside, if honored by an invitation to the White House, I believe I’d go, no matter who the president was, if only to express my disapproval of the leader’s actions.  I recalled antiwar activists at the University of Maryland urging distinguished African-American historian John Hope Franklin to boycott a 1970 commencement ceremony at which a received my doctorate and he received an honorary degree.  At the time the campus was under martial law in the wake of Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State.  Franklin told those who questioned his decision that he had earned the honor and his appearance in no way was an endorsement of the war.