A Digression
History can be boring. One of my high school teachers, a football coach, taught history off mimeographed sheets where we filled in the blanks as he talked. But generally speaking, I always thought history was a great story. As I moved from grade to grade, I couldn’t wait to hear what came next. I suppose it helps too if history feels real, and I suppose that’s what happened with me and the key was World War II. My father stayed in the service. So, the war was a living event, I saw real units who’d seen real combat and I wanted to know about them.
Of course, somewhere along the line I came to understand that history was written by the winners and sometimes things got left out. Take the Nuremberg War Trials. That was a big deal. Nazi’s were punished for crimes against humanity. We did the same in Japan. Tojo got what he deserved. But then we winked at Werner Von Braun the man who helped bomb England with V2 rockets and asked him to take us to the moon. And we let Japan keep it’s Emperor because the Japanese needed that godlike figure to go along with MacArthur’s plans for them. They call that Realpolitik.
I’m saying all this because I’ve been supplying links to some of the events I remembered about post war America as a child. I think it’s unlikely, however, people will click on those links. Partly because some people think history is boring, some people might already know about it, and some people have a different view of the story and don’t care to look at something that might call it into question. Take the UN. Certain segments hate it these days and view it as bad. But I still see it in the light of the post war world. We’d missed an opportunity to stop WWII by failing to join the League of Nations after WW I. But this is how history gets written and told. Things happen. Opinions change. Time moves on. And sometimes the blind lead the blind.
Part 4: Living in America, an old man’s journey into his past