Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 29, 1995 TAG: 9506020013
SECTION: EDITORIALS PAGE: A-6 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The toll had been fearsome. True, the United States had been spared a massive slaughter of civilians, and had not suffered military casualties on the scale of, say, the Soviet Union. But just that winter and spring, the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, and the taking of Japanese-held islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the Pacific, had come at high cost. In all, World War II had claimed nearly 300,000 U.S. lives - and most Americans, unaware of the atomic secret, believed victory in the Pacific would cost thousands more U.S. lives in a hard-fought invasion of the Japanese homeland.
Memorial Day was not yet observed as a national holiday. For American troops abroad in 1945, and for their families and friends at home, it was still a state-by-state observance, begun after Appomattox to commemorate the Civil War dead and often called Decoration Day. The nation did have an official military holiday: Armistice Day (now called Veterans Day), held every Nov. 11 to commemorate the end of World War I.
Not until 1971 did Memorial Day become an official national holiday, a time to honor the fallen in all this country's wars. Among them are the tens of thousands killed since 1945, in conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.
But it is not unfitting, on Memorial Day 1995, to focus particularly on the sacrifices of the remarkable generation that fought and won World War II. Fiftieth anniversaries make convenient markers. More important, the World War II generation is fading from the scene - whatever the fate of Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole's bid for the presidency, he is almost certainly the last of the World War II generation to be a serious candidate for the office - and its achievements command respect and remembrance.
The children, now middle-aged, and the grandchildren, now young adults, of America's World War II generation complain these days of many things. Wages are stagnant. Crime rates are too high. The Soviet Union is gone, but world peace and harmony do not prevail. The government spends too much. The schools are mediocre. Welfare mothers are lazy. Why won't poverty, or at least poor people, go away? I'm a victim, too. Leave me alone.
Of course America today faces challenges, some daunting. But consider for a moment the era in which the World War II generation was reared.
A baby born in 1920 was 10 or 11 when the U.S. economy sank to the bottom of the worst depression in the nation's history; 17 when the economy took another nosedive to a level scarcely better than the previous nadir; 21 when America entered a war for which it was militarily unprepared and whose outcome was less certain than it became in retrospect; if a survivor of the war, 25 when peace of sorts came amid widespread predictions of another plunge in the economy.
Yet men and women of such an age - reared in hard times, their youth spent in the crucible of a world war to preserve democracy - now went to work fostering the establishment of stable democracies in the defeated powers; founding the United Nations; devising and carrying out a Marshall Plan to help reinvigorate the economies and societies of Western Europe; and containing and, eventually, outwaiting Soviet communism. Domestically, it was a generation that made home ownership and higher education accessible to average Americans, built schools and hospitals and superhighways and space satellites, and undertook a second Reconstruction for racial justice. They could have been whiners; instead, they were builders.
by CNB