The glorification of "America's Greatest Generation" makes me sad. Not merely for pacifist reasons. Calling the generation who fought WWII the greatest, is a sentimentality that's difficult to reconcile with facts. My question: why do people who honor that generation not shower equal or greater praise on the generation of Germans who fought against them?
Soldiers aren't leaders or politicians. In our lifetimes, no soldier has ever played a part in deciding whether or not their country goes to war. Soldiers answer a call to duty. They go where their leaders point, and when they arrive they don't have the luxury of reflection. They kill or die.
Measurably, this is what the "greatest" generation did. The richest country in the world brought an end to a war in which every country but us absorbed unfathomable, horrific devastation.
The generation of Germans who fought that war almost conquered all of Europe and Russia. If you're not impressed, you don't understand how relatively small a country Germany was. The frontline soldiers didn't know about atrocities committed on Jews, Gypsies, and Poles. Inasmuch as they knew anything, they looked upon concentration camps just as our own brave boys looked upon Japanese internment camps. Perhaps unfortunate, but necessary. The Germans who fought the war simply answered the call to duty, as any soldier does, because they loved their families and their country. The idea that one army can be morally distinct from another is illusion. There's never been a noble gathering of killers.
As i write, there are seventeen global wars being fought. Since no one is suggesting that America's current warriors will ever become our greatest generation, my wish is that the other thirty-three living generations of soldiers be the last "greatest" generations this world ever knows.
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