World War II, the conflict that defined and shaped the world we baby boomers grew up in, is usually regarded as having started eighty years ago today, when Germany attacked Poland. Japan, however, had been fighting in China for years, and the war only gradually became a “world” one. England and France declared war on Germany two days later; the Soviet Union and the United States weren’t involved until 1941, and it just kept spreading.
It was, indeed, a war like no other. Sixteen million Americans served at one point or another; 406,000 died in combat or of illness.
Most of our daddies had served in the big one when I was in elementary school. We regarded them as having won the war. But what most of us didn’t know was that our country had gotten off more lightly than almost any other major warring nation.
The Soviet Union lost something like 27 million killed – nobody really knows how many. Germany lost 6 million; Japan 3 million; Poland 3 million or more than a tenth of their population.
Most European and Asian countries were badly damaged by the war; homes wiped out, thousands or millions of civilians killed. We lost nothing at home and nobody, except for six people in Oregon killed by secret Japanese “balloon bombs” late in the war.
When the war ended, America was strong, united, richer than ever, and economically dominant in a way it never has been before or since. Most of the rest of the industrial world, winners and losers, was somewhere between badly damaged and destroyed.
We grew up thinking our complete supremacy was the normal state of affairs. It wasn’t, and we were the beneficiary to a large degree of the rest of the world’s misfortune.
That’s something we need to know to understand the changing world today. Know, and not forget.
— Jack Lessenberry
