What are we to make of our continued adulation of The Greatest Generation? The latest effort is Ken Burns 7-part PBS series The War.
It’s difficult for me to look at this subject objectively. My father was a member of that generation and served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific from 1943-1945. I’ve seen pictures of him taken when he was in a small group of islands off the coast of New Guinea not far from Truk, the center of Japanese Navy activity in the New Guinea area.
He was living in San Francisco when he was drafted into the Navy and sent to a Naval training center in Idaho. After his training, he was transferred to a Navy base in San Bruno where he waited for an overseas assignment. Six months after the war ended, he was returned to Camp Shoemaker (later Parks Air Force Base) near Pleasanton for discharge.
I learned all of this information not because he told me of his Navy service but because, many years after his death in Vallejo in 1980, I obtained a copy of his service records from a military personnel center in St. Louis. The records contained nothing that would suggest heroism. He had no decorations for gallantry in action, no commendations for service above and beyond the call of duty, nothing to mark his service as exemplary. In fact, the record was merely a sterile rendition of assignments and transfers.
Even so, I was surprised at some of the bits and pieces I found. In boot camp, he successfully completed the Navy’s swimming requirement. I couldn’t visualize him swimming. In the old photos in my collection, my mother and her friends appear often at Half Moon Bay and Lake Berryessa. He was never in any of those pictures.
I also learned the name of the ship he spent 45 days aboard as it made its zig-zag way from San Francisco to New Guinea to avoid Japanese submarines. And through the magic of the internet, I managed to locate a picture of the ship. The one fact that he revealed about his service was that he had never become seasick.
After his discharge, he worked briefly at the Rincon Annex Post Office and then became a merchant seaman, shipping out of San Francisco for lines as diverse as Standard Oil, the old American President’s Lines, and Matson Navigation Company. He always sent postcards but I have none of them now.
He passed away at the age of 73 in Vallejo, one member of millions of ordinary people who comprised The Greatest Generation. In my mind, he was not a hero. He didn’t look like one of those courageous, larger-than-life fighting men we see in an overabundance of movies being re-run almost daily on the History Channel and others, movies such as “Sands of Iwo Jima, Saving Private Ryan,” and “Tora, Tora, Tora.”
We can only begin to understand World War II and The Greatest Generation if we look at the subject from a different angle. The story of ordinary people like my dad is one angle. Another is a broad examination of timelines and ideas. The movers and shakers of World War II were men of the 19th Century. Eisenhower, Truman, Stalin, MacArthur and Churchill were men of the late 1850s. The 20th Century wasn’t represented at the apex of American political power until John Kennedy became president.
The concept of the Cold War and its strategies emanated from the 19th Century men I speak of here. Yet few discern a thread between the archaic strategies and tactics of 19th Century minds and our current leader, a man whose own ideas and actions are clearly 21st Century replications of the Cold War’s single-minded adherence to failed policies like the Domino Theory that drove the war in Vietnam for over ten years at a cost of more than 50,000 dead American soldiers.
The ordinary men and women of The Greatest Generation deserve respect and acknowledgement for their service. The dogmatic adherence to ancient ideas does not.
SF Bay Area 