Common Valor

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 9, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

For the generation that came of age during the Depression and won World War II, the traditional values of duty, honor, patriotism and sacrifice were second nature.

For Americans, World War II always has been "the good war" a just war waged against two evil, implacable enemies -- Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. These were adversaries who deserved to be soundly defeated by the American soldiers who fought with great courage in faraway places with strange names while the women back home, in unprecedented numbers, worked in the factories that produced the weapons and ammunition that made victory possible.

The United States entered the war on Dec. 7, 1941, following Japan's attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, while the pallor of the Great Depression still hung over the country. By 1944, 12 million men and women were in uniform. War production made up 44 percent of the gross national product. Nearly 20 million more people were at work than had been five years earlier, and a little more than a third of them were women.

So enormous had the nation's wartime effort become that journalist Bruce Catton, in a 1948 book, compared the extent of late wartime production to "building two Panama Canals every month, with a fat surplus to boot."

No wonder that in 1945, at the war's end, British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill declared: "The United States stands at this moment at the summit of the world." And no wonder, too, that in a recent book, The Greatest Generation, NBC Nightly Nears anchorman Tom Brokaw called the men and women who came of age during the Depression and went on to fight World War II in the next decade "the greatest generation" this nation had ever seen.

It was "a generation of towering achievement and modest demeanor," Brokaw declared, a generation for which sacrifice was a key word, unquestioned and serious sacrifice of time and effort, of limb and sometimes even of life itself for virtues such as patriotism, honor, duty and responsibility. Nearly 292,000 Americans lost their lives in battle. There was a total of 1.7 minion injuries.

A second recent book, Stanford University history professor David M. Kennedy's Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, likewise underlines the contributions of the American generation of that time, though in less laudatory terms than Brokaw's. But for Kennedy, just as for Brokaw, America in the second half of the 20th century -- the era of the nation's climb to unprecedented affluence and its victory in the long Cold War -- is unthinkable without the foundation laid by the men and women of the 1930s and 1940s who endured America's deepest economic downturn and fought its most glorious war.

The praise for "the greatest generation" couldn't come at a better time. The Department of Veterans' Affairs estimates that 3,200 veterans of World War II die each month. Of the total of almost 17 million men and women in uniform between 1941 and 1945, fewer than 5 million still are alive.

What made these men and women so special that they merit the attention they've been getting? Nothing, really, Lyn Nofziger tells Insight. Nofziger, the veteran newspaperman and quintessential Reaganaut, served from November 1942 to November 1945 in an antiaircraft unit with the U.S. Army in Europe and, like many World War II veterans, is intensely uncomfortable at being singled out with questions he regards as romanticizing the war. "There were 10 million of us and really very few of us were acknowledged heroes like Audie Murphy or Colin Kelly," he says. "Most of us did what we were told to do, fought when we were told to fight and, in the process, helped win a war."

Other veterans are less reticent. "My generation understands one thing. One big thing" writes Albert B. Southwick in the May 1997 issue of The Bulge Bugle, the newsletter of veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, a 14,000-member organization based in Arlington, Va. "When Western civilization and its values hung in the balance, the United States and its allies stood firm against two monstrous foes, poured out their blood and treasure and ultimately prevailed."

Would other generations have done the same? "Oh, yes, I have no doubt that is true," says Dawn Seymour, who served as a pilot with the WASPs, the Women's Air Force Service Pilots, who handled domestic-flying duties in this country while male pilots flew overseas and in combat. "We flew at night, during the day, across the country. There is a great sense of accomplishment, motivated by the love of our country," that appeals to many, the unabashedly patriotic Seymour tells Insight.

And Bart McDowell, a retired editor at National Geographic magazine who was a communications officer with the U.S. Navy in World War II, believes it likely that other generations would rise to the occasion if the right crisis presented itself. But McDowell, who was in junior college in Texas when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, puts his finger on the factor he believes distinguishes the World War II generation: "We fought for victory. We saw ourselves as victors. At no time did we regard ourselves as victims. Never as victims."