THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 29, 1995 TAG: 9505260011
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 42 lines
Memorial Day 1945 fell between the Allies' crushing of Hitler's Third Reich and Japan's surrender.
American soldiers, sailors, Marines and aviators were pushing the Japanese forces in the Pacific back toward their island homeland. U.S. bombers were demolishing Japan's factories and incinincinerating its cities. Meanwhile, Europeans, Australians and Asians - civilian and military - were still perishing from hard labor, malnutrition, disease, torture and murder in Japanese camps.
World War II was, like all wars, a bloody business. Also like all wars, it was far bloodier and more terrible than any published reports or photographs of it.
Paul Fussell - college professor, literary and social critic, World War II combat veteran - noted in his book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford) that the homefront was shielded from the truth about battle, and that often angered men at the front:
What annoyed the troops and augmented their sardonic, contemptuous attitude toward those who viewed them from afar was in large part this public innocence about the bizarre damage suffered by the human body in modern war. The troops could not contemplate without anger the lack of public knowledge of the Graves Registration form used by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps with its space for indicating ``Members Missing.'' You would expect front-line soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends' bodies violently detached.
Some wars must be fought. None should be entered into lightly. And those who return from them, no less than those who do not, should be respected for enduring hardship and horror. by CNB