Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406270164
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By EUGENE L. MEYER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Born in 1942, I am a product of the wartime baby boom, not the postwar baby boom. I remember watching a V-E Day parade from my parents' New York apartment house. I sang songs like ``Bell Bottom Trousers'' because my Uncle Bernie was in the Navy in England. To me, ``the war'' means World War II and ``postwar'' the time after it.
As the D-Day commemoration approached, some of my younger colleagues wondered what all the fuss was about. I think perhaps they now know.
Hearing the veterans tell their stories, America's young have time and again expressed not only admiration but also something approaching shock, as if they hadn't had a clue. And indeed many hadn't.
A young colleague assigned to write stories about the D-Day commemorations told me her high school exposure to World War II had been limited to the Holocaust, the changing role of women and the internship of Japanese Americans. These are all important subjects, but why not also D-Day?
The answer is that the pedagogical emphasis had shifted from the memorization of ``dry facts'' to learning ``critical thinking'' (as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive). But thinking based on what? Opinions without facts are plentiful - and worthless.
In studying the importance of D-Day, the critical thinkers of the baby-boom generation, of Generation X and beyond could speculate on the consequences of a failed invasion. Consider the Holocaust. A prolonged war would have meant many fewer survivors - perhaps none to bear witness against the Holocaust deniers of today, who appear to thrive on the ignorance of others.
The failure of D-Day might also have bolstered the German armies in the East, slowing the Russian advance. While I suppose some anti-Communists might have applauded that, given what turned out to be the postwar Iron Curtain over Eastern Europe, it would have at least delayed the liberation from the murderous Nazis of many small towns.
Among them was Volozhin, in what is today the Republic of Belarus. There, almost all of my maternal European relatives perished before the Russians arrived in July 1944. It was only then that my cousin Simcha Perski and other partisans could safely emerge from the nearby forests into the ruins of the town to try to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.
Had the invasion failed, there might well have been the terrifying prospect of the Nazis getting the atomic bomb first, and using it. Hitler was already unleashing the first guided missiles, the V-1s and V-2s, that terrified England even as the German war machine was crumbling.
These are not irrelevant historical footnotes. They underscore the relevance for our lives today of important events of 50 years ago.
Blame the current generation's aversion to history, if you will, on the 1960s. Indeed, the baby boomers - President Clinton among them - seem to be coming late to the realization that history matters. There are objective facts, there are primary sources that cannot, must not be ignored.
The facts of history can surely be interpreted in different ways, but the lesson of the D-Day commemorations is that objective and irrefutable facts do exist - and matter, in very profound, important and lasting ways.
Eugene L. Meyer is a reporter on The Washington Post's Metro staff.
The Washington Post
by CNB