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What is Lost When Veterans Pass?By Rick Atkinson | World War II | 4 comments | Print This Post | Email This Post .jpg) Germany, 1945 (National Archives). What does it mean for a nation to lose what has been deemed its greatest generation? Over the next 10 years, some 2 million veterans of World War II will die. With them will disappear their unique ability to bear witness, to remind us of the awful toll of all-out war—in this case, the deadliest war in modern history. But what, more precisely, will be lost once this generation of first-person witnesses is gone? In a special report in the November 2009 issue of World War II, a historian, a photographer, and several veterans themselves pose answers to that question. In the following essay, Rick Atkinson explores what happens to history when those who lived it can no longer tell their stories. Subscribe Today
The statistics are as stark as mortality itself: Of the 16,112,566 American veterans of the Second World War, fewer than 2.5 million remain alive. With another 311,000 projected to die this year, they are passing at the rate of 852 a day, or 35 an hour, or about one every two minutes. Sometime around Christmas 2014, the number will dip below one million, according to demographic tables compiled by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and a decade later, in 2024, fewer than 100,000 will remain. In 2036, the latest year for which figures have been calculated, the cohort that fought and won the most destructive war in human history will be reduced to 370 survivors, less than half the size of an infantry battalion. What is lost, in this slow march to the grave? What is lost to history, to historians, to our culture? If the private deprivation seems obvious—fathers and grandfathers gone, widows bereft of companionship—the public depletion is harder to assess. As we move toward the day when not a single participant remains alive to tell his tale, what does it mean for a nation to lose what has been deemed its greatest generation? Historians surely will soldier on without them. World War II may be mankind’s most documented event. The U.S. Army records alone—a mere slice of the global archive—weigh 17,120 tons, enough to fill 188 miles of filing cabinets set side by side. Vast caches of oral histories and personal reminiscences abound, including hundreds of nearly contemporaneous combat interviews at the U.S. National Archives, thousands of detailed veteran questionnaires collected by the U.S. Army Military History Institute, and tens of thousands of accounts accumulated in the Library of Congress, various university repositories, and the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Enduring military histories are often written without direct assistance from battlefield participants, such as James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and Hew Strachan’s monumental chronicle of World War I (not to mention Donald Kagan’s The Peloponnesian War). “Our understanding of any era continues to become richer and more complex over time because historians build upon the work of one another, allowing a fuller and more nuanced accounting with each decade that passes,” says Tami Davis Biddle, a professor at the U.S. Army War College. Future World War II historians may find themselves unshackled from sentiment, vainglory, and the war’s “Higher Disneyfication,” in the trenchant phrase of Paul Fussell, an army lieutenant in Europe in 1944 and 1945. Fussell, who recovered from grievous battle wounds to become an author and English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, complained that “the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty.” In a similar vein, the historian Sir Michael Howard, who also saw action as a young officer in Europe, observed that “the Second World War is ransacked to provide material for the glorification of our past.” Pages: 1 2 3Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to
            Tags: 20th - 21st Century, People, World War II
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4 Comments to “What is Lost When Veterans Pass?”
Each participant’s experience’s of WW II were unique, and significant in their own way: that has to be the first principle.
If the veteran does not wish to talk about them, even to his own family, this is a tragedy: his experiences will go to the grave with him, all that personal history will be lost.
This happened to me. My father was Polish officer, who spent the duration of the war as a German POW in various camps. In my entire life, I recall being able to goad him into talking (superficially) about this time, only once. Adult children move away, life goes on, but that time stands still in a way, unless there is an active, conscious effort to find out, as much as possible, before it is to late.
Family difficulty, personal reticence should not prevent a full attempt to be made to have these stories come to light, because they are history.
All that remains after these men die, if their stories went untold, is a blank page, a void, which can never really be filled.
By B. Kosmider on Oct 1, 2009 at 8:08 pm
As a 33-year old who had the pleasure of knowing war veterans from World War 2, Vietnam and 1st Desert Storm.. I completely agree. I have fired shots in anger, but never in battle.. and the feelings I had then as I pulled the trigger, knowing that this bullet will either kill or maim another like me.. is impossible to share with others who were not there, but automatically known by those who were.
I remember as a child hearing from my grandfathers and their friends the ferocity of combat with the Japanese Imperial Guard in the Malayan theater.. I remember these same old men recounting their experiences in the Malayan communist insurgency.. I even got to unite these old men (for the first and last time) with my American friends who served in Vietnam and 1st Desert Storm. And what stories they told!
I know that as I grow older, more of the truth will come out, and these men that I knew as a child will turn out to have human traits.. and had to do inhuman things in order to serve their country. But that will not change how I adore them.. and even we the young have a duty to pass this on to the next generation, in order to remind them that the price of freedom and liberty can be very high indeed.. payable by everyone to swears allegiance to their flag.
“Will you be able to pay that price.. when the time comes?”
By raz on Oct 3, 2009 at 10:04 pm
I say: yes, Americans will step and pay the price should that become necessary. They’re already doing it in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot but non-shooting zones such as Korea, Europe among others.
However, I see no possibility for a World War III on the scale of WWII. The Muslim world lacks the unanimity, Communist China has already realized the advantages of exploiting free enterprise and is unable to return to the brutal days of its dictatorship andRussia cannot afford to continue to make the kinds of mistakes its centralized planners have made in the last 80 years particularly in the event the West succeeds in throwing off the chains of addiction to foreign oil and adapts to nuclear power. (The hysteria about nuclear waste surely will succumb to technology’s victory over this problem at long last. The real problem with acceptance of nuclear power is that it works too well and solves all the problems of global warming leaving nothing for the aficionados of “Chicken Little” to cry about.)
By Donald E. Casey, Sr. JD/DFC on Oct 16, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I am a WW2 Veteran, 2806 Army Engineers, went to Japan in Mid 1945 until Dec. 10. 1946. I am looking for other Veterans that served during this same time. I am 85 years and is desparately looking for information.
I can be reached either by by above email or please feel free to call:
678-369-6235 Home Phone
Hope to hear from Veteran or family member(s).
Thank you,
Robert Walker
By Robert Walker, WW2 Veteran on Oct 25, 2009 at 9:32 pm