These men and the many others who made the trip were sons, brothers, cousins and sometimes fathers. They fought and many died to free strangers from tyranny. They were part of an amazing generation that too many of our younger generations never had the opportunity to meet. Today, very few are left. But if you happen to run into one, you’re having a brush with history.
D-Day + 81 Years
William Manchester’s “Good-Bye Darkness” is one of the finest combat memoirs of WW2 ever written. Manchester, who later achieved renown as an academic and author, served as a teenager in the Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater, and saw combat in a number of island-hopping campaigns – ultimately being wounded at Okinawa in 1945.
He did not serve in Europe, few Marines did – but his thoughts at the close of the book are worth recalling as they may speak for many war veterans of that time. Manchester says that he and other like him went off to war to protect/defend the United States of that time, the nation as it was before the war. None of them had any idea what was to come in terms of the revolutionary upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond. As Manchester says of what was to come, “We just didn’t know, we just didn’t…”
Those young men left to go to war – in many cases – as boys, as teenagers – but they came home as men ~ if they survived. Not just for what they had suffered and endured, but because war had stripped them of their illusions. Likewise, the nation they left was not the same as the one they found when they arrived home. It had shed its pre-war innocence for good, and it had acquired somewhat a hardened cynicism to go along with all of that traditional American optimism. In short, American grew up just as the fighting men did.