In Remembrance

[Spookymufu]

In remembrance of the brave men and women who fought and died at Pearl Harbor December 7th, 1941..........

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, that's a grim photo, isn't it?

I was hearing about Pearl Harbor on the news this morning. The commentator was explaining how many people died in WWII. It occurred to me that this war is fading from living memory now, since we are having to be reminded of how many died, etc. In my childhood, every adult man had fought in WW II. It was before my time, too, but I was surrounded by people for whom it had shaped their lives.

[adrian]

i know what you mean.. in matter of fact, i hate to say it, but i honestly know NOTHING of the war.. it wasn't taught that much in my high school. we may of went over a few dates here and there for the tests but it seems we were more worried about Basketball... i hate that too because now that i'm 22... i'm a stage in my life where i want to start learning. and our history is one thing i wish i had studied more.. but hey, its never too late

[Midnite Shadow]

Adrian, Do yourself a big favor and read or watch as many documentaries as you can and interviews about WWII and the people who fought that war. They are by far the best generation of Americans and some of the hardest and best we have ever had. They were a different breed of man and woman and it's amazing the stories and triumphs as well as the casualties and sacrifices that were made by Americans before, during and after that war. If you have a chance do some history and learning of that time and war...it's really humbling and incredible...

[adrian]

i'd love too!! in matter of fact they have some documentaries of it on netflix don't they? i'll ook it up soon

[Murfreesboro]

No, it's never too late. You could start by checking out books & videos from your public library.

My husband (who happens to be five years younger than I am) is a walking encyclopedia of WW II stuff, especially the European theater. I have learned a lot just from living with him. When I was first grown, I didn't know much, either. I used to tell him that we had always studied WW I & WW II at the end of the semester, and that I'd frantically study hand-outs for dates, etc., with the consequence that, for me, they were like one big war. Interestingly, he told me that historians are now beginning to view them that way--as one big conflict with an intermission of twenty years, while everyone waited for a new generation to grow up and fight again (WW I exhausted Europe). He told me that historians are starting to view that period from 1914-1945 as a period equivalent to the fall of the Roman Empire, because the two world wars together effectively ended 500 hundred years of European hegemony of the planet.


As I believe I've mentioned elsewhere, my husband was an officer in the Field Artillery when I married him. Military history is his passion. His undergraduate major was political science, but he has taken all the graduate course work for an M.A. in history (never wrote the thesis, though, so he can't claim the degree). He knows this stuff, though, better than anybody else I've ever met or heard tell of. He knows it so well that he is always pointing out errors to me in televised documentaries. Lots of times, the people who make those things "cheat" on the footage they show. They will be talking about one thing and showing another. My husband knows all the equipment that was used by various armies at different points in the war. Most of the documentary makers don't know this stuff as well as he does.

ETA: Midnite Shadow, you were posting as I was. I agree with you that the WWII generation--my parents' generation--was astonishing. I don't begrudge them the title of "The Greatest Generation," though I think they were great because they had to be. My mother used to say they graduated into Depression and then had to fight the biggest war the world had ever seen, that all her youth was taken up by it. She envied young people who had come after her time, who, she said, seemed to have more fun than she had ever had. Sometimes today I hear people speculate that we are too soft, that we could never do what previous generations have done. However, I think people generally do whatever they have to do. When times get tough, people get tough.

[Belladonna]

Thank you for posting this, Spooky.
I am so shocked that since I've been listening to the news show today, that they haven't mentioned this date once! That is just sad!!

[Spookymufu]

seems since 9/11 we kind of forgot the other attack against us.....

[Midnite Shadow]

Let me just give you an idea of the kind of men they were....when they stormed the beaches at Normandy they knew they were going to lose thousands of soldiers and American lives but they had to take that beach and they did it...in the pacific theater the battle for Iowa Jima they knew they were going to lose thousands and that the Japanese were entrenched in that island but they did it...amazing the breed of men that did those things and sacrificed so much...

[NeverMore]

i'd love too!! in matter of fact they have some documentaries of it on netflix don't they? i'll ook it up soon

Do yourself a favor. If you want to put yourself into the mindset of the people who lost
loved ones in that war, rent the movie 'The Majestic'. In fact, put it at the top of your
Netflix. Yeah, I know it stars Jim Carrey... but you have never, and probably will never,
see a better dramatic performance from that man. I super strongly recommend it.

[MacPhantom]

You know what is interesting? We are closer to 2041 than we are to 1941. I'm not in any way saying it's okay to forget, but hardly anyone still commemorates the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of July anymore, just because the most important battle of the American Civil War was fought 146 years ago.

Not stating an opinion here; just positing a question. When does it become acceptable, collectively, as a nation, to view an event as merely a historical event?

[Murfreesboro]

I would say that, for most people, living memory is the standard. The notion of a "golden age" is very common in literature (lit major here, major emphasis on classical antiquity through the 18th century). And what I have noticed is that, in pretty much every culture, the "golden age" is more or less their grandparents' generation.

Last night, my husband and I were watching the rebroadcast of Ken Burns's Civil War on PBS. It was the episode about Gettysburg, which ended the same day Vicksburg fell. We got to talking about that, because Shelby Foote said in the documentary that the South (or maybe just Mississippi) didn't celebrate the 4th of July until 80 years later. As a native Mississippian myself, I was well aware that, in my childhood, we were just as likely to shoot off fireworks at Christmas as the 4th of July. When I asked my mother, "Why fireworks at Christmas?" She said, "Because the fireworks manufacturers had to have some time to sell them, and for a long time after the Civil War, no one would shoot them off on the 4th." My 1960s childhood was transitional--people were doing both. Nowadays, I never hear fireworks on Christmas night anymore.

Anyway, my husband and I were figuring out that 80 years after the fall of Vicksburg was 1943. D-Day happened in June, 1944, and my husband said that Mississippi guard units were heavily involved in the D-Day invasion. He thinks "80 years" was approximate, and that Mississippians most likely started celebrating the 4th again after D-Day.

That may not answer your question, Mac, but it gives some idea of the way these things have worked in my neck of the woods.

By the way, the last Civil War veteran, a Confederate veteran, died in Mississippi in my childhood. My mother, as a teenager, once attended a reunion of Confederate veterans in the late 1920s. So the Civil War actually was living memory in my home region much longer than most people probably realize. After all, when you imagine the 1920s, do you think about Civil War veterans? But those people were still around then, in sufficient numbers to be holding renuions.

[MacPhantom]

Murfreesboro, your post really gets to the crux of the question I posited, and I agree with your conclusion completely. So long as there are those living who were alive for the event, we are connected. I couldn't believe it when my mother told me she remembered hearing about the death of the last Civil War veteran when she was a child. I do actually think of Civil War veterans when I think of the 20's, but I didn't imagine it possible that anyone who served could still be alive in the 50's.

I love the Ken Burns Civil War documentary.... I have it on dvd I like it so much. I only live about 45 minutes from Gettysburg, so I go up there several times a year. The concept of Americans fighting Americans is such a tragic part of our history. I guess sometimes it takes a horrible event, like a world war or 9/11, for us to focus on the common bonds that draw us together rather than the regional and social differences that too often separate us.

[Murfreesboro]

Beautiful post, Mac.

That last Civil War veteran had been a kid, maybe 14, at the end of the war when he fought enough to qualify as a veteran. Then, of course, he lived to be over 100, I guess. I've forgotten exactly what year he died--maybe 1959? I was born at Christmas of '54, so it must have been very late '50s, or I wouldn't remember it.

What's really wild to think of is how close together the Civil War and the Revolutionary War were. Robert E. Lee was the son of a Revolutionary War hero, which I guess most people do know, but I doubt many people really think what that means. In 1863, it was only "four score and seven years" after the Revolution. An extremely elderly person at the time of the Civil War might have had a few living memories of the Revolution.

We talk about purchasing the Ken Burns Civil War series, but so far haven't spent the $$ for it. My husband, in his boyhood, worked as a Park Ranger here in Murfreesboro at Stones River National Battlefield. He said again the other night that everyone overlooks how significant that battle was, fought over three days at New Year's of 1862/63. I believe he told me that it was the bloodiest battle of the entire war for the Union, and second only to Gettysburg for the Confederates. It was that battle that gave Lincoln the victory he needed to publish the Emancipation Proclamation. If the Union had lost it, the Confederates would have had nothing stopping them all the way to Chicago. They could have split the Union the way the Union did split the South six months later at Vicksburg. But its significance was obscured because the Union general, Rosecranz (sp?), was a lifelong political enemy of Grant's. When Grant gained political power after the war, he saw to it that the importance of Stones River was downplayed. Even Ken Burns ignores it.

What do you think of the movie Gettysburg? My husband and I love that one.

[MacPhantom]

Wikipedia lists Walter Williams of Mississippi or Texas as the last Civil War Veteran, who died in 1959. That is the name my Mum, who was born in '52, remembers. I know the media in the pre-24 hour cable news network days wasn't quite as repetitive as it is now, but it was a monumental event and must have gotten enough coverage that she remembers the name, in the same way that I'll never forget the name "Christa McAuliffe".

One of the great tragedies of the American Civil War is the way soldiers who had served together in the Mexican war ended up fighting against each other. I liked the movie Gettysburg very much, but even more I loved the book The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, on which the movie was based. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of the Gettysburg battlefield, but it wasn't until I read that book in my teens that I began to develop a true passion for and understanding of what actually happened there. The aspect that I found most poignant in the book, which was unfortunately understated in the movie, was the relationship between Winfield Scott Hancock and Lewis Armistead. Their friendship was divided at the start of the war, and they ended up on opposite sides at Cemetery Ridge at the climax of Pickett's Charge, where both were wounded, Armistead fatally. I can't visit the battlefield without stopping at the scroll-shaped monument marking approximately where he fell.

Have you read Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals, about the Lincoln administration? While it doesn't focus as much on the battles of the war, it gives a fascinating insight into the political backdrop of the war itself, and humanizes Lincoln in a way that belies the simplified view of him as the godlike figure which our collective reverence has bestowed on him.