White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Remembering a Generation Defined by Duty

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Seventy years ago, we celebrated the end of World War II in Europe. That celebration is not the first memory of my childhood, but it is one of the clearest.

I was a five-year-old boy in Cape Town, South Africa, proudly displaying a paper Union Jack, the familiar British flag, and watching the victory parade. I often wonder where the flags came from – before offset printing and photocopying – in time for the parade. Someone knew victory was at hand.

There was a palpable, universal happiness – though more subdued, I am told, than the outbursts which greeted the end of World War I. For me, that was the best parade ever. It was wonderful to see people grabbing each other, doing little impulsive jigs in the street.

Marching in the parade was the handsomest man I had ever seen, or have seen since: my father in his best Royal South African Navy uniform of a chief petty officer, engine room. My father was a wonderful man in many ways. He was not lettered, but extremely kind and dutiful, and loved for those things — not for being handsome. But I tell you, that day he was handsome.

It was not until 1998 that Tom Brokaw called them “The Greatest Generation,” in a book of that name. Maybe all who go to war are the greatest generation. Maybe, every father who survives is unbearably handsome to someone.

Memorial Day is upon us and our veterans — maybe veterans everywhere — will be briefly remembered. The Greatest Generation was, perhaps, the last time a generation was defined by its sense of duty. That was true of the men and women who peopled my young life.

My father sold our home and few possessions, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, to serve. He was turned down for the British army in Rhodesia because an arm he had once broken had not mended properly. He had heard that the Royal South African Navy would be more tolerant. His acceptance by the navy was not a certainty, and we had no money. But we made the long, hot, six-day journey to South Africa by train to no known future; my father, mother, brother and myself, all going off to war because that is what was done. That is what the men of the Greatest Generation did because it was your duty to serve.

My father was not alone. I grew up hearing other stories of how people had gone to great lengths to serve and, having gotten into the armed services, how they did everything they could to get into the fight, not to serve at a distance in a British dominion, as South Africa then was. That is how South African pilots came to serve in the Battle of Britain.

In those days, patriotism was organic here in the United States and around the globe. Not every last man of military age was a patriot, but most were. It was the deep-seated culture.

When it was over, those who survived WWII were welcomed home with celebrations, appreciation and reverence. Alas the warriors from more recent wars, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and lesser conflicts, have come home to cold comfort. No parades, no five-year-olds with flags — and little place in the tapestry of the national memory. No recognition of their inalienable right to honor.

War is not everyone’s business anymore. Vietnam was the first war where patriotism was not part of the equation. Today, with a professional military, it is not the business of the armchair patriots with their slogans, urging others to take up arms.

When the World War II Memorial opened on the Mall in Washington in April 2004, I went there. I did not like it, architecturally; I was disappointed. But then men with canes and in wheelchairs began arriving, smiling and shedding occasional tears. It was important and moving to them, those handsome men. My father would have loved it; now, I like it well. Memorial Day weekend is at hand.

The Shadow of 1914

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The new year is beginning with the shadow of an old year flitting around the retina of our consciousness. That year is 1914; the year that Europe was convulsed in the world's worst war – 9 million dead.
 
It was also the war from which the world never fully recovered. In its destruction of the old order in Europe, World War I laid the blueprint for the rest of the century; its emancipations and its enslavements, its triumphs and its horrors.

The century following World War I has been a century in which blood and ideas have flowed freely. As a consequence of the war and the Treaty of Versailles which ended it:

1. The Russian Revolution ushered in communism, and later the Cold War.

2. Britain and France carved up the Middle East with boundaries that created new countries, such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, without regard to the promises that had been made to the Arabs during the war or regard for their sensibilities.

3. The Ottoman Empire fell, making way for modern Turkey.

4. The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell, changing the face of central and eastern Europe.

5. Monarchical rule ended in Europe.

6. Germany was so emasculated by the peace that the ascent of Adolf Hitler was possible.

7. Mechanized war was perfected with industrialized killing by gun, bomb and, for the first time, aircraft was unleashed.

8. The combatants lost the cream of their crop of young men, many of who would have risen to affect the 20th century after the war. The consequences of the loss of a generation of a young men can be speculated upon, but not calculated.

9. The stage was set for the United States — which played a decisive role in the war from the spring of 1917 on, but was not as deeply affected as the European powers — to become the dominant nation in the later part of the 20th century and to this day.

10. The social order throughout Europe began to liberalize. Its feudal underpinnings would remain until World War II, but there was a loosening of the old bonds of class across Europe.

11.  Women were beginning to share their gifts with society.

12. African colonies were taken from Germany and handed to Britain for a kind of safe-keeping, but not for the imperial expansion that Britain had been enjoying for two centuries. Britain, France, Portugal and Holland remained the colonial powers — Britain's possessions were many times greater than the rest put together.

13. Fury at the colonial system was building, especially against British control of what are now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The beginning of the end of the colonial concept had begun, but it had many hurdles and another world war to go before it all ended in an avalanche of independencies.

 
World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo. The Balkans were the tinder for the war, but the fuel was everywhere: it was the growth in nationalism and its arrogance; a lack of enough understanding of what a modern war would look like; militarism in many countries, and especially in Germany, where the high command found a fatal friend in Kaiser Wilhem II.
 
As tensions in Europe escalated, the players scrambled for allies and these alliances led to the broader war. For example, the German High Command did not think that Britain would join the war, despite Britain's commitments to France and Russia: It thought Britain could and would remain neutral.
 
The great myth of the time was that the European powers were so intertwined in their trading relationships that war would cost too much and so peace was secure. Yet all the ingredients of combustion were present in 1914, and they were abetted by a lack of great leaders in all the countries that would fling themselves at each other.
 
It was a time of crushing mediocrity in European governance. That may have been the real cause of the world's greatest, most terrible miscalculation, 100 years ago: a leadership vacuum. Beware. Happy New Year. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate