Some lucky family has a treasure in this photo. This and all pics in this post are from the Battle of the Bulge, the source of most of my father's war stories. These were morbidly gruesome and spare of detail. One, which clearly weighed on him, was about how he had assisted a medic in the field conducting some unknown number of euthenasias by morphine.
Another, meant to instill some message about not being a complainer, involved sitting on half-frozen corpses at mealtime to avoid the wet ground.
Which isn't, with my ironic tone, to downplay what my father went through. The hardships these soldiers faced, mental and physical, do indeed put any complaining on my part to shame. The eccentric old crab I never once considered calling by his first name was, at the time, Wally, 23, some unimaginably youthful, immature version of the former. What did he want out of life?
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Great pictures. I'm reading a book now about WWII—kind of a general overview which, as usual with those sorts of books, is too focused on the merely military aspect of the event(s)—and I'm struck (as I always am) by the unimaginable devastation and suffering that war produced. One of the most amazing things to me is that millions and millions of men—on all sides—fought and suffered so willingly, it seemed, for their countries. The Nazi regime is now a cliche for evil, yet the vast majority of Germans followed Hitler off the cliff and fought tooth and nail to win. Considering our fear of pain and death and our natural aversion to violence, it amazes me that human beings will organize and set about slaughtering each other in vast numbers. It makes me think some kind of fatalistic violence-/ danger-enabling herd-tribe instinct kicks in. (Though training, attachment to comrades, a sense of honor/fear of shame, the belief that you're defending yourself and your family, etc. clearly play a role, too.)
How much more do you know about your father's service?
It seems to me most people go to war out of some half-believed ideals, or a stupid curiosity, or because they are compelled to by law and custom (that last one covers a lot of human history). I think most people fight hard once they get there because the alternative is death, for themselves or their comrades-in-arms. Acts of "heroism" are rare because war does not make people value their own lives less - on the contrary.
I don't know an awful lot about my father's service, other than what appears on his honorable discharge. He said he was a "forward observer," which he said made him responsible for sighting the enemy and calculating trajectories for the big guns. I know he landed late on D-Day, served in the Battle of the Bulge, was in Germany for the surrender and was in Italy after liberation, where he apparently helped organize some of the cultural-exchange concerts our relatively civilized government thought would heal wounds.
He told me preparations were under way to send his unit/battalion/whatever on to Japan when the A-bomb ended the war.
We often asked him for war stories, and he always promised to tell us about the war one day before he died. Such promises generally come to naught, what with death not waiting for their fulfillment.
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