Seventy-four years ago today, Gen. Alfred Jodl and two sidekicks crawled out of a hiding place somewhere and signed a complete and unconditional surrender of all of Nazi Germany’s armed forces everywhere.
There wasn’t much left to surrender. American, Soviet and British forces had already overrun most of Germany; the thousand-year-Reich was down to a chunk of Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, and a few patches of territory here and there. Hitler was dead, as were tens of millions of other Europeans.
The surrender didn’t take effect till the next day, and the war in the Pacific raged on for more than three months, till the dropping of the atom bomb.
World War II was one of the greatest catastrophes in human history, and its effects are with us still: Every year, unexploded bombs are discovered in places like Frankfort and London; sometimes they go off, killing people born decades after the war was formally over. Survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are still dying of radiation and other aftereffects of the atom bombs, and old Holocaust survivors still wake up screaming from nightmares.
The Second World War isn’t quite over, then, and more than 400,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in the military then are still alive.
But we’re getting very close to forgetting about it. Less than a fourth of my students at Wayne State University knew exactly when it was or what it was about; a full-time journalist at Michigan Radio once asked me which was the bloodier; World War II or George W. Bush’s war against Iraq.
And that’s a very dangerous thing. That’s how new wars get started. It may not be important to remember the names and dates of battles. But World War II, we ought to remember, happened because both because of an unfair settlement imposed on the losers in World War I – and because of a lack of a free press, and a leader who lied all the time in Germany.
Germans were told that they were actually about to win World War I, and had been stabbed in the back by a coalition of liberals and Jews.
We now have a President of the United States who is utterly ignorant of history, more so than any previous occupant of the office, and couldn’t care less.
Early this year, Donald Trump praised Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s, saying that they were going in to stop terrorists from going in to Russia, claiming, “they were right to be there.”
The usually conservative Wall Street Journal was horrified, saying “we cannot recall a more absurd misstatement of history by an American president.”
That wasn’t a fluke; this is a guy, remember, who thought Frederick Douglass was still alive. Ignorance, bluster, and lies are how wars get started, and our country is currently in the hands of someone famous for all three.
That’s not what more than 400,000 Americans, most of them young men, died for before most of us were born. Men like Senators Dan Inouye, a Democrat who lost an arm in that war, and Bob Dole, a Republican whose right arm was rendered forever useless, knew better.
But they are gone from power now. The number of history majors in this country is at a historic low. Everyone knows what Santayana said about what happens when you forget the past. It is up to us not to repeat it.
