I lived in Brooklyn for three years and, even there, May 8 was a pretty significant time of remembrance and reflection.īut it's certainly true that after every cataclysm people need to get on with it. Do you think there's either consciously or subconsciously a desire to just not talk about that part so much?Ītkinson: Obviously, for 75 years, there's been a fair amount of hoopla commemorating the war in one form or another and including the events leading up to VE day. There was an incredible amount of destruction in those few months and an immense amount of civilian casualties. : Sometimes at the end of a war, it seems like a culture makes a collective decision to ignore certain things as a way to move forward.
I've tried to do my part to educate people, but it's hard to break through, especially 75 years after the fact when you've now got three living generations who have no direct knowledge of the war and whose knowledge of the particulars is pretty sketchy. There were battles like the Hurtgen Forest that were as ugly as any fighting that occurred anywhere in the world during the war. Of course, things were a lot more difficult than that. But for the most part, they believe there was a glide path to victory. Many people know that the invasion occurred in June 1944 and then something nasty happened at the Battle of the Bulge that winter. The war was awful until the very end, virtually to the last gunshot. It's almost like there's a collective gap in the public mind between June 6, 1944, and the dropping of the atomic bomb in August 1945.Ītkinson: I think there were 10,400 Americans killed in action in Germany in April 1945, the last full month of the war in Europe, which has almost as many as were killed in June 1944, the month of invasion. : Of course, "The Guns at Last Light," the third book in your World War II trilogy, is an antidote to this, but it seems like people don't know much about the fighting that went on in the spring of 1945. I think it's because people are preoccupied. I don't think it's because people don't really care.
Of course, the end of the war is bifurcated with VJ day.I suspect that there are millions of people who don't know the difference between them. VE Day doesn't quite have the resonance for Americans that the invasion of Normandy does. Plus, there are diminishing returns on anniversary celebrations regardless of the event. I've written a piece for The Wall Street Journal, and I'm sure that there are others scribbling and opining and whatnot, but it's hard to break through the noise of COVID-19. I think that's entirely attributable to the pandemic. Atkinson: It's been completely overshadowed by current events.
0 kommentar(er)
