Page.5 “For the
typical American soldier, despite the perverted film sermons, it wasn’t
‘getting another Jap’ or ‘getting another Nazi’ that impelled him up
front. ‘The reason you storm the beaches
is not patriotism or bravery’, reflects the tall rifleman. ‘It’s that sense of not wanting to fail your
buddies. There’s a special sense of
kinship’… You had 15 guys who for the
first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We were in a tribal sort of situation, where
we could help each other without fear. I
realized it was the absence of phoney standards that created the thing I loved
about the army.”
P.13 (Quoting an
ex-admiral): “WW2 has warped our view of
how we look at things today. We see
things in terms of that war, which in a sense was a good war. But the twisted memory of it encourages the
men of my generation to be willing, almost eager, to use military force
anywhere in
the world.
P.39 “The reason you
storm the beaches is not patriotism or bravery.
It’s that sense of not wanting to fail your buddies. Having to leave that group when I had the flu
may have saved my life. (Many of his
friends were killed while he was sick.)
Yet to me, that kid, it was a disaster.”
P.44 “It was
sunshine and quiet. We were passing the
Germans we killed. Looking at the
individual German dead, each took on a personality. They were no longer the Germans of the
brutish faces and the helmets we saw in the newsreels. They were exactly our age… boys like us… What I remember of that day is not so much
the sense of loss at our two dead but a realisation of how you’ve been
conditioned. At that stage we didn’t
hate the Germans just for evil the country represented, their militarism, but
right down to each individual German.
Once the helmet is off you’re looking at a teen-ager…” 19-year-old GI.
P.47 “The Germans
were willing to lose millions of men.
And they did. Every German house
we went to, there would be black-bordered pictures of sons and relatives. You could tell that most of them died on the
eastern front. And the Russians lost
twenty million.
P. 175 (U.S. Marine) “These people, they really put
you in your place. That’s a polite way
of sayin’ it. They humiliate ya. They make ya do things that you don’t think
are physically possible. At the same
time they’re makin’ you feel you’re something.
That you’re part of something.
when you’re there and you need somebody, you got somebody. It was the high point of my life..”
.P.178 “The last
image that comes to my mind is what we were taught about the Japanese. The Marine Corps taught us that too. That the Japs are lousy, sneaky, treacherous
– watch out for them. Well, my God…who’s
brainwashing you on all this? I’ve been
married for 24 years to Satsuko – Sats (he indicates his wife who has just
entered the room) – Miss America here, that’s a super person. She’s the best thing ever happened to me.”
P.191 “Our military
runs our foreign policy. The State
Department simply goes around and tidies up the messes the military makes. The State Department has become the lackey of
the Pentagon. Before WW2 that never
happened…. I think the United States has
changed. It got away from the idea of
trying to settle differences by peaceful means.
Since WW2 we began to use force to get what we wanted in the world… Not long ago the Pentagon proudly announced
that the U.S. had used military force 215 times to achieve its international
goals sinceWW2. The Pentagon likes
that…” Admiral Gene Larocque.
P.209 “All of war is
cruel and unnecessary, but the bombings made this one especially so. The destruction of Dresden was
unforgivable. It was done very late in
the war, as part of a military dynamic which was out of control and had no
relationship to any military needs.”
J.K.Galbraith
P.329 “The single
most important legacy of the war is what Eisenhower warned us about in his
farewell speech: the military-industrial complex. In the past there were business representatives
in Washington, but now they are Washington. And with the military build-up beyond all our
imaginations, we have a new fusion of power.
It has become a permanent feature of American life.”
P.439 (In Poland in
1946.) “The first (Jewish) child I saw
in three months in Europe was a little girl named Ruthie. Her father was killed and her mother hid her
with a Polish family. She was stunted,
paper-thin. She’d been hidden in cellars
and attics. I asked her what she
wanted. Her exact words were, “I am ten
years old. I never went to school. help me go to school.’” We found 100s of youngsters who’d been hidden
by Christian families, living in monasteries and elsewhere.”
P.454 (A Russian
Stalingrad veteran) “We had been very
excited when the combats were actually taking place. But now we saw these German prisoners walking
by in such a pitiful way, you felt a sort of pity for them. We understood that these were people who had
some families, relations who had been deceived by Hitler. When I visited West Germany for the first
time in 1965, I’ll never forget the welcome given us by these former
prisoners-of-war. It was a visit of the
Stalingrad veterans. Our hosts explained
simply: ‘You fed us when you had nothing to eat yourselves. You saved our lives.’”
P.458 (A Russian
veteran soldier) “Eight from my family
went to the front. Three came back. We were a lucky family… It was miraculous,
wonderful, how brave we were then, how close together we were. (But) It is not a worthy occupation for a human
being. Of my generation, out of 100 who
went to fight, three came back. Three
per cent. One should not ask those of us
who remained what war means to them. I
look at my children and my grandchildren and I think: only centimetres decided
whether they should be on this earth or not.
Whether the bullet went that way or this way. But I lived and they happened. They can’t understand that.”
P.464 (U.S.
prosecuter at Nurenberg trials) “Why did
they do these things? Because it had
become the thing to do. People most of
them were followers. Moral standards are
easily obliterated….They so very easily fall into the pattern that their
superiors set up for them, because that’s the safe way. They may be loving husbands, nice to their
children, fond of music. They have
become accustomed to moral standards prescribed from above by an authoritarian
regime. The safe way to be comfortable
in life is that way: following orders.
If our general population was subjected to the same trends and pressures
that the Germans were, a great many of us would do the same.”
P.534 (Father George
Zabelka – U.S. military chaplain) “When
the news of Hiroshima hit me, my reaction was a split one. Gosh, it’s horrible, but gosh, it’s going to
end the war. Finally the boys will get
home. This was going to save millions of
lives…. But, as a priest, I should have considered: We’re killing little kids,
old men and old women, burning them to death. I don’t recall any feeling of guilt
at the time. (Later) In Kyushu, I met some sisters and
missionaries who had come from Hiroshima.
I had already visited Nagasaki and talked to some of the survivors. Thousands had what they called the A-bomb sickness. This was the first time, I think, that it
really began to come through to me. Here
were these little kids, who didn’t have anything to do with the war, and they
were dying, many of them very quiet, very silent. They were just quiet, just dying. The worm started squirming….. Along comes Vietnam The mad bombings. I’m recalling Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There’s Martin Luther King. I’m now with the blacks, the poor, the
militants…”
P.573 “The war was
fun for America – if you’ll pardon my bitterness. I’m not talking about the poor souls who lost
sons and daughters in the war. For the
rest of us, the war was a hell of a good time.
Farmers in South Dakota that I administered relief to, and gave ‘em
bully beef and four dollars a week to feed their families, when I came home
were worth a quarter-million dollars. True all over America. Mass travel, mass vacations, everything else came out of
it. And the rest of the world was
bleeding. World War Two? It’s a
war I still would go to.”
The Good War to me put a lot of things in perspective Mr. Terkel talked to so many who were still around. and by far took me out of the Hollywood fantasy of war and presented the beginning of an unraveling of truth and fact.
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