They saved the world; Now they are going away

By Murray Montgomery

murray.montgomery@lavacacountytoday.com

I have been thinking about writing this column for a long time. Possibly, the delay has been because I was not sure that I could communicate the importance of this subject to some in the younger generation who may take their liberty for granted.

You see, I am proud to be a son of what has long been labeled as “The Greatest Generation,” and there is no group in our nation’s history that deserves that title more than they – yes, they literally saved the world. The freedom that we enjoy today would have never been possible if not for them.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged America into a war that our government was trying real hard to avoid. Germany had been invading countries in Europe since 1939, and its leader Adolph Hitler, in command of the brutal Nazi government, was determined to rule the world, with Japan and Italy by his side.

The American people were just beginning to recover from a great depression, and I imagine that fighting a war was the farthest thing from their minds – they had been busy just trying to survive and feed their families. But as is the case with most patriots, when your country is attacked and your fellow citizens are murdered, there will be a deadly response – Germany and Japan found that out after four long years of war where millions died; many of them being civilians.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense: World War II involved combatants from most of the world’s nations and was considered the deadliest war in history. Around 85 million military and civilians died as a result. The end finally came on Sept. 2, 1945, when Japanese officials signed the surrender documents aboard the battleship USS Missouri at Tokyo Bay, Japan.

The determination by Hitler and his Nazi regime to exterminate the Jews and Japan’s equal brutality to people in the places it invaded are testament to why it was so important for that generation of liberty-seeking people to come forward and do what had to be done. That includes the greatest generation of people in England, France, and all the others who fought and died for freedom.

More information on the disgusting acts by the enemy in this horrific war are well documented by The National WWII Museum in New Orleans – I am including some of its data here in quotation marks: “Swept up in the vortex of destruction were Mischlinge, the Nazi term for the “mixed” children of Jewish and non-Jewish parents, who had largely been left alone by the regime. In those cases, the administrators at Hadamar [a small town in Germany] did not even bother to put up the façade that these were people with disabilities. They murdered these individuals because their very existence violated Nazism’s perverse racial norms.”

The museum data also includes the following about Japan: “Japanese occupation in most of Asia was brutal across their period of rule. In 1937 the Japanese took the Chinese capital of Nanjing, and in 1945 they retreated from the Filipino capital of Manila. In both cases, Japanese troops massacred many thousands of civilians.”

I included this data to give the younger reader some idea of why it is so important that they realize just how their ancestors did indeed save the world and it was their sacrifices, as well as, those patriotic individuals in all the conflicts, before and after World War II, that have come forward to defend our great country.

If you are fortunate enough to know men and women who served in that war, tell their story because they are rapidly leaving us – only 119,550 remain and when they are gone, another piece of our history goes with them.