This year will witness the thirteenth anniversary of the destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center. For some, and perhaps most, the memories are still painful, if not exactly fresh. It occurs to me now that when I was nine years of age, in 1958, a time I remember clearly ( think A Christmas Story, growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the mid 1950’s), World War II was just thirteen years in the past.
I remember the six volume set of Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War on our family’s bookshelf. My parents were not heavy readers, but my father made sure I understood the magnitude of the events that had transpired just before my birth in 1949. My mother would always be certain to remind him that in her view Churchill gave short shrift to the Yank’s efforts.
The point being that the war was still very fresh in their minds, and it was talked about weekly. Apparently my dad felt that it was important that his witness to these events be carried on by me. He served in both theatres, landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day +2, bringing ammunition fresh from a North Atlantic convoy. He was in the Transportation Corps, and was soon sent to the Philippines to destroy Japanese built railroads and rebuild them to an American gauge system. His Liberty ship was involved in the retaking of Luzon, and it was in those jungles that he had his closest brush with death. He still had the patch that was grazed by an enemy bullet. He had a trunk full of service records, a thank you note from a convent of nuns grateful for delivered food, ribald soldier jokes, and service medals.
My mother on the other hand had an entirely different take on the events leading up to the war. She had been a foreign exchange student from Wellesley sent to Munich in the mid 1930’s. Her stories were of the brown shirts in the streets, the ever present rallies, and once seeing Hitler and Goebbels in the Munich beer garden.
Thinking of these things reminds me of Francis Bacon’s famous quote about he who has wife and children gives hostages to fortune. My grandfather never got over Pearl Harbor, and that was what he talked about incessantly. He raised my father and his brothers in Roswell, New Mexico, and when I was very young they took me to the Trinity site at Alamogordo. They are all gone now. I’m getting tired of history, but we are thrown into worlds that are not of our own making. I suppose that is the lesson gained here.