At The Daily Dish, Conor Friedersdorf links to an Atlantic article about World War II…The Real War…

WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE SECOND WORLD War that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? What was it that made the Americans, especially, so fertile with insult and cynicism, calling women Marines BAMS (broad-assed Marines) and devising SNAFU, with its offspring TARFU (“Things are really fucked up”), FUBAR (“Fucked up beyond all recognition”), and the perhaps less satisfying FUBB (“Fucked up beyond belief”)? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable. They knew that in its representation to the laity, what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied.

Neither man, Disney or Rockwell, was, of course, a journalist.   Nor did either one make any such claim to be one.   They were artists.   I tire Very easily now, of the use of Rockwell and Disney’s names as synonymous with Phony.   These men were many things but phony was not one of them.   Neither one ever put anything before the public, I am absolutely certain, that they themselves did not believe.   Art, said Picasso, is a lie that makes us see the truth.   All artists are liars in one sense, but in that other sense, that soul speaking to soul sense, relentlessly truthful.   Both men spoke to us from their hearts, honestly and sincerely, and you can argue that life isn’t like that if you wish, but my reply to that is Yes, you’re right, it isn’t, but it ought to be.

It’s a different matter though with journalism.   Journalists need to tell the public the facts, or else we simply cannot function as a democracy.   And that is especially true in times of war.

That war, morally justified as it was, was also very heavily sanitized on the home front.   With the last of its soldiers passing away now, we are only beginning to see how nightmarishly savage it was.   The bloody slaughter of the American Civil War it seems, was merely prelude to the 20th century…

You would expect frontline soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends’ bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or Marine what hit him, you’d hardly be ready for the answer “My buddy’s head,” or his sergeant’s heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain’s severed hand. What drove the troops to fury was the complacent, unimaginative innocence of their home fronts and rear echelons about such an experience…

After one artillery exchange, two soldiers, Neil McCallum and his friend “S.” came upon the body of a man after a shell had landed at his feet…

“Good God,” said S., shocked, “here’s one of his fingers.” S. stubbed with his toe at the ground some feet from the corpse. There is more horror in a severed digit than in a man dying: it savors of mutilation. “Christ,” went on S. in a very low voice, “look, it’s not his finger.”

I got part way though the Atlantic article, when this passage struck me…

In the great war Wilfred Owen was driven very near to madness by having to remain for some time next to the scattered body pieces of one of his friends. He had numerous counterparts in the Second World War. At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore. One Marine battalion commander, badly wounded, climbed above the rising tide onto a pile of American bodies. Next afternoon he was found there, mad.

There’s a reason my generation are called the baby boomers. We are the generation born to the ones who fought that war, came home, and all at once returned to what would have been normal lives were it not for the war…which for heterosexuals (and homosexuals, because the closet was not an option but a necessary means of survival in those days…) meant getting married and having kids.   All at once.   It was literally a baby boom.   Housing was scarce for the new families for years.   Suburban Levittowns sprang up all over America.   Schools had to be built, many schools, many, Many schools, to handle the load…only to later be decommissioned as my old high school eventually was, after the last of the boom had graduated. We are a massive bulge in the population, and that is because there was a war.   A very big, catastrophic, savage and bloody war…that changed so much…so very very much…

Mom told me often about the sailor she dated during WWII. When she got started, I could see that look of remembrance of first love in her eyes, hear it in her voice, still, so many years later.   So many little things about him she remembered vividly.   So many stories about the times they had together…about waiting patiently for his letters from overseas during the war…about how her father disliked Jews, but came to see them as fellow neighbors in life by coming to know the Jewish man she loved.   She loved him, probably to her dying day.

When I asked her once why she married Dad instead, she said her sailor was on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended, and that his ship became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it.   She said the sight of it had driven him mad.

…and all these years I wondered, never doubting that he’d gone mad as mom had said, if that bodies trapping a big U.S. navy ship part of the story could possibly be true.   Really?   Perhaps he’d seen lots of bodies certainly…but so many they trapped a huge Navy ship?   Madness if it will strike, strikes young men around the age he was, so perhaps it would have happened to him anyway.

Or…not…

At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore…

It wasn’t an a-bomb that did that either.   So just imagine the aftermath of the first plutonium bomb, small as they say that one was, compared to what nuclear weapons can do nowadays.   Reading this Atlantic article I see now it probably was exactly as mom had said.   So her sailor boyfriend became lost in madness. So some years later on the pier at Avalon she met my dad and they married.   So now here I am, writing this.

So many people died in that war…many from the two atomic bomb blasts alone.   Every year they toll the bells in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the a-bomb dead.   And every year it’s been in the back of my thoughts always to wonder if I was born because of one of those atomic bombs.   But that war violently changed a great many lives, and I am certainly not the only war baby ever born, who but for war would not be.