By Barry Stagg
June 1995
The Veterans
There are no sorrowful funerals or devastated homes prominent in the news this year: not in comparison to the state of life fifty years ago when a shattered but victorious Allied military machine completed the personal business of beating the Nazi monsters and their armies. What remains is still a somber and sober spectacle as we post-war children stand as witnesses to the elders of 1995 honouring their shattered youth. It does a person good to see the vain and arrogant of today humbled by the irrefutable fact that their old grandparents fought and won a world war of terrible proportions. It is a wonder in this age of mountains of electronic rubble that those who live so ignorantly, only in the present, are forced by the pure immensity of the war to acknowledge that those who went before did brave and vital things as a patriotic obligation.
What is to be made of a war that was over fifty years ago? Do we do the war effort and the war veterans justice as each anniversary piles up? I often feel as if too many of us are more concerned with the pageantry of today and not aware of the feelings of youngsters grown fifty years older after fighting a deadly battle to subdue the worst kind of racist criminals. Who among us can say that they pay full attention to the yearly monuments without a sharp push from the veterans themselves? We must accept our lack of military obligation as a gift from those who hobbled out of the war zone and made a life in Canada for a sheltered and pampered generation. We are that generation and until the last veteran has breathed that last sweet lungfull of air, we are fully obliged to honour that now aged armada as the source of the over abundance of comforts we enjoy today.
When some greedy sleaze cheats on his Workers Compensation claim or defrauds the Unemployment Insurance program I want him to know that he is dirtying the society that his grandparents shed blood to create. Let the lazy and the dishonest know that their comforts and their freedoms are directly linked to their honest ancestors. There are many academic pontifications about "Canada at war" floating in the glib media blitz of 1995. Plenty of learned men and women decry revisionist history and then go on to strike gentle blows against the Allied effort to subdue Germany and Japan.
While the shallow historical ignorance of a Terence McKenna documentary (The Valour and the Horror) can be neutralized by placing Allied action in a proper wartime context, the writings of conventional historians are harder to refute. When Desmond Morton writes of the bombing of Dresden and Hanover as an excess of war he falls into the trap of acknowledging these things out of context in the same unfortunate way as the revisionist apologists have done. Morton the historian is playing to the apologist bias which holds that certain Allied war efforts were acts of virtual criminal cruelty. It is as if the Germans and the Japanese should be absolved of true criminal blame for World War Two because we, as their opponents, waged war against German and Japanese civilians. The fact that war against the general population was a convention of that war and was vital to the actual defeat of the Axis countries is left out of contemporary analysis.
I like the attitude of that great, Canadian, maverick writer Mordecai Richler who writes a short commentary in the May edition of Saturday Night. Richler deplores the cowardly tendency in these sensitive times to apologize for winning the war. His feelings are summed up in this quote:
"As I remember the terror bombings of Coventry and London's East End, never mind Hitler's 'final solution', I do not feel obliged, as seems modish these days, to apologize for the firebombing of Dresden."
Perhaps Richler's thoughts delivered with literary passion transcend the dry sifting of history that reduces the war to a critique of military tactics. The defeat of the genocidal Hitler and his helpers was much more than that. The Nazi "final solution" was the murder of millions of Jews and no criticism of the policing tactics of the Allied war effort is ever in context until that fact is driven home along with every half-informed apology for fighting to win.
The youngsters who went overseas from 1939 to 1945 are now no longer young and they endure both indifference and ignorance as fifty years of peacetime insulate the progeny of that war generation from the brutalism of fighting for your life and the lives of your children.
If the cynical doubters of today need context let them go to a Holocaust memorial. Let them speak to some old Jewish survivor of Hitler's concentration camps. Let them ask about the murdered relatives gassed and burned in the monstrous German war effort. Then let them look once again on the old men who parade on V-E Day and D-Day memorials. These old men defeated that sick and eternally damned obscenity. They deserve our eternal respect.