Memories of World War II Must Be Preserved as a Generation Passes On

I keep thinking about an article from the Waco Tribune-Herald on the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor this past December 7. "Americans are coming to the sobering realization that the nation is rapidly losing members of what has become known as the greatest generation," the story began.

Of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II, 240,000 or so are left, with an average of 234 veterans of the conflict dying each day, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. "And with each death, another soul is lost who, along with fellow veterans, lived through a watershed period in this country's history and who helped shape the course of the nation," the Tribune-Herald's Rod Aydelotte wrote.

Aydelotte's right. With each passing death, the generation that fought that war will be gone. So too, many of us worry, will the memory of the war. The memory of America at its best. And at its best precisely when the civilized world needed us most. When the world needed the best of our industrial capacities, ingenuity, grit, work ethos, selflessness and courage. The best of our people—young and old, male and female, and every color and creed.

It's a subject that's close to me. I remember the story my mom told me about how she learned her brother was killed in the war. She reminded me that when the war began, no one knew how it would end. Or if they would ever see their loved ones again.

My mom grew up in West New York, New Jersey, a working-class city of 40,000 huddled between Jersey City and Hoboken. The neighborhood was teeming with first-generation immigrant families—Irish, Italian, Polish, German, Greek and Jewish families—crammed into one square mile of real estate filled with three- and four-story apartment buildings. My mother, her older sister and brother—along with her first-generation Italian parents—shared a two-bedroom apartment.

A dozen families also lived in the building, including several who had loved ones who volunteered to fight in the war. My mother's brother, John, was one of them: He signed up for the Army when he was 18.

On a sweltering fall day in 1944, just a few months after D-Day and a few months shy of my mother's 13th birthday, a black government car pulled up in front of her building. Two serious-looking men in uniform got out, walked up the stoop and entered the building. My mother, a young Catholic, told me she remembered praying hard that it would be someone else's apartment door those men would knock on. And that she felt terrible praying such a prayer.

She huddled outside the door of her family's apartment, listening to the footsteps as the two men walked up the stairs. "Please not our floor," she prayed. "God, please not our floor."

And then the worst thing that could have happened, happened. The men stopped on her floor. "It was John," she told me, crying. "I knew it was John." My mom rushed back into the apartment in tears. Within moments, the two men arrived at the door, followed by three knocks. She told me she never heard her mom cry so hard. "It wasn't a cry, it was more of a wail," my mom told me. "It was a sound I never heard before. Or again."

Her dad barely cried. But my mom would never see him enjoy his life again. He rarely smiled because he'd lost his only son. He'd lost the bloodline, a big deal for any man. But an especially big deal for a proud Italian man.

The Purple Heart her brother John was awarded, along with a picture of the American cemetery where he's buried in St. Laurent, France, hangs in my office, a reminder of the ultimate sacrifice my family—and 400,000 plus American families made—for the country they loved. It's an enduring memory of the uncle I never met.

Some years ago, my daughter asked me about the picture, and I told her the story my mother told me. The story of how that war was not mere history but real-life Americans fighting against Hitler's Nazi death cult. And imperial Japan's—and Emperor Hirohito's—warped ambitions for dominance in Asia.

One place that's keeping the memory of World War II alive is the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. The museum's ambitious design and remarkable exhibits merge the very best of old and new media. But most important, the museum is curated in a way that makes the war personal. You follow the journeys of soldiers, airmen and seamen through battles and campaigns. Of nurses and medics, privates and officers, generals and admirals too. All of it is designed for visitors to understand that it was real-life people who fought the war that liberated the world from tyranny.

I defy anyone to go through the 19,000-square-foot "Road to Tokyo" exhibit and not be awed by the efforts of our countrymen. And cry at the cost of it all. If you can't make it to the museum, the museum will come to you, with a state-of-the-art website that offers everything from guided tours to distance-learning resources for teachers and parents.

A particularly moving part of the museum's outreach includes letters from soldiers to their families, especially those written by soldiers to their children.

In a letter written by Lieutenant Leonard Isacks to his two sons, the soldier does his best to explain why he can't be with his boys to celebrate Christmas in 1944.

"I guess you often wonder why people have wars," he wrote. "That's a hard question to answer." He then did his best to answer it.

"I know that you certainly wouldn't like it if one of the boys in the neighborhood tried to tell you what church you should go to, what school you should go to, and particularly if that boy would always be trying to beat up some smaller or weaker boys," Isacks wrote. "The only way to make a person like that stop those sorts of things, or a country like Germany or Japan, is to fight them and beat them, and teach them that being a bully is not the way to live and that we can't put up with it."

Some of the letters were written as parental instructional missives. "You're practically on your own," chaplain Carroll Hamilton wrote to his son Rodney. "Save every penny you can, study hard, live clean and set a high goal for yourself. If you fail, we have both lost. If I don't come back, I'll live through you. If I do come back, it will be to help you and your sister carry on to do your best in a world that is not cursed with war."

American servicemen wrote about dreams of future happiness too. "Ah, the three of us shall always be happy through rain or shine because we shall always live in harmony and understanding," Lieutenant George Cermak wrote to his newborn son. "You bet son after the War, when we're all together in a better world at peace, you'll have brothers and sisters too, be it God's Will. And Son right here and now we seal an agreement to be pals together always. Your Dad, Your Pal."

Parents who served in World War II often referred to their children as the reason they were fighting. "I am so proud to know you are in this world, even though I wish it were a safer place to live right now," Lieutenant Shannon Estill wrote to his newborn daughter Sharon. "That is why I am away from you, my sweet girl. I want this to be the only war in your lifetime."

Then there were the letters soldiers wrote to their parents. They were far more blunt and sometimes stark. Thousands of Americans were captured during the Battle of the Bulge and ended up spending Christmas of 1944 as POWs. Lieutenant Carroll Sammetinger was one of them. His Christmas postcard to his parents had these words: "Am Safe, A Prisoner of War in Germany; do not worry. My address will follow shortly, then you can write me. Love you both. Pray." He was liberated in April 1945. The postcard is preserved for posterity.

In his last address to the American people, in 1989, President Ronald Reagan talked about the subject of World War II and memory.

"You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day," Reagan began, "I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who'd fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, 'We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.' Well, let's help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are."

Reagan wasn't finished, leaving the responsibility for preserving the memory of World War II where it belongs—with us. "All great change in America begins at the dinner table," he concluded. "So tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins."

Reagan was right. The kids and grandkids of the greatest generation have stories to tell. It's up to us to tell them to our kids and for our kids to tell them to theirs. Haul out the family archives. The pictures and the Purple Hearts and the letters from the war front. And the home front. When Band of Brothers comes on TV, watch it with the kids. Watch WWII in Color: Road to Victory on Netflix, and Schindler's List too. And take the family to New Orleans to visit the best museum in America. You won't be disappointed.

Historian David McCullough gave the very best reason to do all of these things in his book Brave Companions: Portraits in History. "How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?"