Victory in Europe

When I was a kid, watching old movies every afternoon on Boston Movietime, my favorites were the World War II films. Purple Heart. Desperate Journey. Bataan. Guadcanal Diary. The Sullivans.

Most of these were clunkers, pure propaganda, overly romanticized, silly even.

One in particular I remember was about a German man who was used as a body double for Hitler. At the end of the movie, the man's wife tries to assassinate Hitler and ends up killing her husband.

Of course I loved it.

I also liked reading about the war. I loved Snow Treasure, a novel about some Norwegian children who smuggle the country's supply of gold bullion, using sleds, right under the Nazi noses and on to safety. And, of course, The Diary of Anne Frank.

The interest in World War II has been sustained throughout my adult life, with a particular focus on the European theater, and the Holocaust. I've read a ton - fiction and non-fiction, seen plenty of documentaries and movies, and visited some of the important sites (Omaha Beach, Dachau, Auschwitz, the Secret Annex - Anne Frank's home-in-hiding - in Amsterdam, the courtyard in Berlin where Claus von Stauffenberg and the other July plotters against Hitler were shot and killed).

It was such a terrible war, and - from our side - a necessary one.

So this, the 75th anniversary of VE-Day, is a big deal.

When I was a kid, World War II seemed so impossibly far in the past. Now I know better. I was born in December 1949. It was very, very, very close.

Almost every man I knew growing up was involved in that war. (And at least one woman: my mother's closest friend had been a WAVE. Ethel was a New Yorker who, like my mother, met her Worcester Irish boy during the war. Which is how those two big-city girls ended up in Worcester.)

My father's war was "easy" - if giving 4 years out of your life in service to your county is "easy". His most dangerous posting was in Trinidad. (Don't laugh! Trinidad was an oil producer, and a staging point for war efforts in Africa.) Getting there was what was most dangerous: the waters were full of U-Boats. And a captured U-Boat came into his base at one point. But he wasn't much in harm's way.

After Trinidad, he was stationed at Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. (Okay: now you can laugh.)

While in Chicago, he met my mother. Their dates included football games and big bands at nightclubs. War isn't hell for everyone.

But the fathers of many of my friends didn't experience such a charmed wartime.

I have friends whose fathers were at Guadalcanal. At Omaha Beach. The Battle of the Bulge.

My brother-in-law's father was doing scary and dangerous things in China.

My cousin Ellen's uncle was one of the GI's who liberated Dachau.

I have a friend whose uncle was a POW in a stalag. When the war was winding down and the German guards started fleeing, he picked up a discarded rifle and shot (and killed) one of those fleeing guards.

I've had friends who were Holocaust survivors.

Stories came out gradually, haltingly, over time...

Seventy-five years. A lifetime. A lifetime for us lucky ones.

The devastation of World War II is nearly unfathomable. The millions of soldiers killed. The millions of Jews, Gypsies, "undesirables" murdered. The millions of other innocents who died as collateral damage. The cities smashed to smithereens.

It's a tribute to humankind's abililty to learn, to choose the constructive path, to do the right thing, that Europe was rebuilt and has been mostly at peace during the past 75 years. Yes, there have been wars - the breakdown of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars there, the Baseque separatists, the mess in Northern Ireland, ISIS terrorism - but it's mostly been peaceful.

Here's to those who paid the ultimate price to rid Europe of fascism; to those who survived but saw and maybe even did terrible things; and to those who, like my father, just gave up 4 years of their lives to do their bit to win the war.

VE Day. Worth celebrating.