By Jen Hight
Online Editor
Seventy years is a life time. So many things can happen in that time span. The world grows and evolves, people change, and everything a person knows can be rewritten.
With that in mind, it’s hard to realize that today is the 70th anniversary of the United States of America entering the World War II.
In early 2013, it will be the anniversary of the beginning of the Final Solution, better known as the Holocaust. In 2013, the 70th anniversary for the U.S. claiming most of the Pacific Islands from Japan will happen. In 2014, it will be the anniversary for the Landing at Normandy, the largest aquatic invasion of all time. And 2015 will bring the anniversary for the end of the war in both fronts, along with the 70th anniversary of our bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two nuclear bombs.
The war seems like it happened forever ago, but in the course of history, 70 years isn’t all that long ago. It certainly doesn’t seem that long ago that WW II happened, especially with all of the living memories around us.
Whether it’s a grandmother telling her grandchildren about how they had to keep buckets of sand in each room of their house to put out incendiary bombs from the Japanese. Or the proud father who tells his son about his grandfather who went overseas to fight and defend their home country from the Nazi’s. Or even the child, who realizes one day that grandma and grandpa met in Manzanar when their government didn’t trust them. The memories of WW II are still all around us, even today.
The state of Israel was created after WW II for the Jew’s persecuted by Hitler during the Holocaust.
The Second World War changed the world. No one can deny that. Never before had a war been fought on that magnitude, both at home and abroad.
Everyone knows the enemies we fought abroad. The Nazi’s, who slaughtered millions of civilians because of their Final Solution and their incredible tactics that nearly conquered Europe. Our other enemy during the war, the Japanese, can be considered to be even more efficient murderers than the Nazi’s from the terror they unleashed on Korea and China. To this day, these two countries still hate the Japanese.
But our soldiers fought a war at home, a quiet war no one truly speaks of. The Tuskegee Airman showed the world that just because they weren’t white, didn’t make them less than any other fighter pilot. The Japanese 442 battalion chose to fight for their country after being thrown into what was basically a concentration camp created by our government. The Navajo Code Talkers cracked the Nazi’s codes and used their own language to save American lives.
These unsung heroes fought a two front war against the Axis powers and the racism of the American people. This part of the war would take another 20 to 30 years before finally ending.
Even our civilians fought on by rationing everything from gasoline to the aluminum foil from their chewing gum wrappers to give their soldiers a fighting chance. Women and men entered factories and worked to keep their soldiers well supplied with state-of-the-art weaponry of the time.
These men and women, soldier and civilian alike, make up the strongest generation in American history. They sacrificed everything to win a war against the world, with only France, China, England. and later the Soviet Union as allies when faced with the overwhelming power of the Axis.
So take a moment today to thank or think about the veterans of WW II for their service in one of the worst wars in all of human history.
To all the veterans, on both sides of the war, we salute you.
